Demon Lord of Karanda
I needed something to cheer me up after the previous sucky book. This one did the trick. Again its pretty standard Fantasy stuff, and there were no surprises, but its fun to read. [isbn: 0345363310]
I needed something to cheer me up after the previous sucky book. This one did the trick. Again its pretty standard Fantasy stuff, and there were no surprises, but its fun to read. [isbn: 0345363310]
This book is a solid zero stars in my mind. I got to page 372, but simply couldn't wade through the chore any longer. The plot meanders, and its not clear to me where the story is going. Worse still, basically nothing has happened yet. I am a little surprised, given the generally positive LibraryThing reviews. I should have read the Amazon reviews instead. Some examples: Normally, I do a lot of my reading on the train (BART for those of you familiar with San Francisco), getting to and from work. An engrossing book keeps me awake and I read it relatively quickly. "Foundation's Fear", especially the first half of it, set a record for putting me to sleep. There were days in when I only managed to read a couple of pages. A paragraph or two and I'd be out, even before the train started moving. As others here have pointed out, there is a lot of boring dialogue and description and much of it focuses around the Voltaire and Joan of Arc artificial entities. Hundreds of pages of philosophical noodling and descriptions of imaginary scenes conjured up in cyberspace become numbing. And another: This book is not good,…
This is the second book I have got from the LibraryThing early reviewer program (the previous book was The Spy Within). I'm going to have to be honest with this book and say that I haven't read all of it yet. Its basically a dictionary and I don't tend to read those cover to cover. On the other hand, I have read about 10% of this book so far, and do intend to read it all. This book is great. The content is interesting, well laid out, and excellently written. That's probably made a lot easier by how interesting the content is -- the stories behind various works tend to be short and novel, which is fun. The book is also useful -- it's already ended an office debate over the origin of the word "hooker". [isbn: 9781846033001]
I am starting to think that there is something missing in the Foundation trilogy. Specifically, there isn't much action. Most of it is just people talking at each other -- with pages and pages of dialog. This makes these three books much harder to read (and therefore less compelling) than those elsewhere in the extended Foundation Series. I did enjoy this book, I just feel that I could have done with some more action to make it less hard work. [isbn: 0345336291;0345309014]
This is book two of the Malloreon, the sequel series to the Belgariad. Some people complain that this series is just a repeat of the previous series with some of the names changed, and I certainly used to think that myself. Now that I've read this book again I think that's unfair -- the story line is actually quite different, and the characters are generally older and wiser (which makes them feel more developed). I enjoyed this book, probably more than I did Guardians of the West. [isbn: 0345358805]
I need a break from all this serious reading, and the Stainless Steel Rat books are always amusing. In fact, this book was much better than the previous two I have read (The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World and The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You) as it didn't suffer from the incredibly weak plot lines that books involving time travel seem to cause for Harrison. This book is back to the classic rat -- a simple criminal romp through an unsuspecting society, his hottie wife in tow, and with his two now grown kids along for the fun. I enjoyed this book a lot. [isbn: 0553227599]
I only just realized that the links to LibraryThing that I automatically insert into book posts only work if you have a LibraryThing account. I've now fixed that so that there is a link to a public page, as well as a link to your personal library if you use LibraryThing and also have a book that I mention.
I read this book as a child, and must admit I didn't like it. That's interesting to me, because it quite liked it this time. Its not the greatest literature ever written, but it is a good read. You need to have read the Belgariad first though, because this book (the first of the Mallorean) reuses the characters without spending a lot of time introducing them to you. I think I prefer it that way because it would be annoying to have to go through all that character development again as someone who has read the first series. [isbn: 0345352661]
This is the second book in the original foundation trilogy, which I am reading as part of the the extended Foundation series that I am working my way slowly though. This book contains two stories -- both of them Seldon crises, although one of them unpredicted by Hari. As Hari had always said in the series -- his techniques can only predict broad social trends, and the not the work on individuals. What happens if a single person who could not be predicted appears? This story covers that scenario. I found this book harder to read than the previous one, but that might have been because I've had a pretty distracted week. Once I actually sat down to read without too many interruptions, I enjoyed it. The comments from others on LibraryThing are fair though -- the character names are odd, and the writing does feel a little awkward. [isbn: 0553293370] [award: winner hugo 1946] (LibraryThing for some reason gets the ISBN mapping for this book wrong. The above link's ISBN is right, but this link goes to the right place).
Foundation is an interesting book, as its quite old and was originally written as a series of short stories (as much early science fiction was). Because I am reading the books of the extended Foundation series in the order that Asimov recommended towards the end of his life, I have read the two prequels to Foundation (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) before Foundation itself. This means that the time line is a little inconsistent, specifically about how the Foundation project ends up on Terminus (Was it lobbying or exile? Did Hari go or not?). That's not too bad though, and the book is very good. [isbn: 0586010807]