Be Excellent To Each Other

That was Billy Idol!

Forgive him, he lacks our level of culture and sophistication.

Has anyone read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson? I was having a wee look there for a good book and noticed this one. I've also noticed the film seems to be getting quite a lot of attention so decided I would give the book a read. I've ordered the trilogy from amazon for just over a tenner so even if it's rubbish it's not a big deal.

Apparently if you can make it past the first 150 pages of turgid shite that are of limited importance anyway, then it's a good thriller in the Dan Brown style.

I, sadly, could not make it past the first 150 pages of turgid shite.

Thanks for the warning! I'll report back with how I get on.

In fairness, most people seem to get through the start, and few dislike it as much as me, but pretty much everyone says it starts veeerrryyy slowly.

That said, the girl who plays said Girl is quite hot.

As if something like that was the trigger for me wanting to read it!
Hopefully I can get past the boring start then, I have after all managed to read one and a half Dan Brown books. If i'm going to watch the film of this then I'd rather read the book first.

"The Scottish girl looked at the boring book."

"her eyes as brown as some stewing steak that had been quickly sealed in a hot pan for 3-5 minutes"

*snort*

"Dimrill had eyes too."

(based on http://favstar.fm/users/hotdogsladies/status/4013804410)

"So did Dr. Gaywood... have eyes, that is"

(based on: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6134&p=441444#p441444)

Are there any decent books in the "free" section on iBooks? Something modern, light, easy to read and yet well written and not rubbish. Please.

I do not like iBooks. It seems very hard to browse around and find something that you might like.

The store is shit, but the reader is okay.

I have bought this. I haven't read it yet.



I have bought this also. It is very, very good so far. Well written and a great insight into the sort of area of life I know little about. Cheers for the recommendation, chap.

'Young Stalin' by Simon Montefiore is an astoundingly good read. It details Stalin's upbringing and adult life prior to coming to power (a lot more interesting than it sounds). I can't recommend it highly enough.

If you like history books, 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor is pretty good, as is the "sequel", Berlin. Son of the Morning Star (about Custer and the battle of Little Bighorn) is also excellent.

If you're a film buff, check out 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls' - it's a fascinating insight into the 1970s Hollywood movie industry. The chapters about George Lucas/Star Wars are especially interesting.

If you like crime books, read 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher' by Kate Summerscale. It's about a real-life murder case that happened in Victorian England when police detection was a new and largely untrusted profession. It reads like a cracking mystery novel (a child was savagely murdered inside a locked mansion - the killer can only be a family member or one of the staff, with plenty of likely suspects).

Oh, ace, I'll have a look into those. Cheers.

He he...the title reminded me of this piece from The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/its-no ... ome,11028/

Just finished reading my second ever dose of HP Lovecraft: At The Mountains Of Madness. I enjoyed it well enough, but fuck me was it a slog to get through. Almost overly-descriptive, to the point that I kept having to re-read bits in case I'd missed something.

The only other thing of his I've read so far was the short-story Call Of Cthulhu, and I found that a lot easier to digest.

Still, I'm thinking I might have a crack at The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Dunwich Horror next, unless any of our resident Lovecraft fans would like to recommend me something else?

Buy the Necronomicon and save a fortune.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Necronomicon-We ... pd_sim_b_7

Fack it's only £11 quid now!

And only £19 for the Kindle version

I wonder how much Crasters Porkcyclopaedia would be on Kindle then?

Well, I've already got an el cheapo collection of his stuff on my iPad (I don't think I paid more than a couple of quid for it) and it's got the stories I mentioned plus quite a few others.


That Necronomicon does look nice though.

Nice Free kindle book, The First Completely Electronic Robot and Science Fiction Limerick Book

A hot little androidal miss
Who jets off her steam with a hiss
Is made out of junk
And is very steam punk
So she’s much too risky to kiss

Are there any crime-thriller books written from the point of view of the antagonist?

I could recommend a really interesting one told by a serial killer, but unfortunately before it was finished, its author was beaten to death by some racists.

Um. I'm helping, right?

American Psycho IIRC, but it was shit.

You're the new Mr Chris - American Psycho is a wonderfully funny book!

It had it's moments, but it was a slog to get to them.

You could try 'Kill your friends' by john niven. it's sort of a brit american psycho but with added britpop/humour, and i preferred it.

There is also the Dexter series of books, i've not read them though.

Complicity by Iain Banks has the murders from the killer's point of view. (In fact they are in second-person).

Is there any particular Neil Gaiman book I should read first? Or is he overrated? I feel he's someone I've should of read but haven't got round to yet and after the Doctor Who episode I really should make the effort.

Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is quite excellent.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graveyard-Book ... 483&sr=8-1

Of his novels, 'American Gods' is geenrally considered to be the best one.

Avoid like the plague. They start bad and get very, very awful indeed. In book three;



Spoiler doesn't affect the TV show at all, which ignores the books beyond the premise, so feel free to read if you're not going to read the books.

I thought the first couple of Dexter books were good, and though the third does dive completely off the deep end, it was still fairly entertaining. My wife said the 4th was more of a return to form, but it didn't grab me enough to finish.

Why England lose is an economist and statistician's analysis of the state of football. It's an interesting read, discussing which teams are punching over their weight in the achievement stakes, and who underperform. It looks at the management side of things, which players are bought and why, too. It's decent enough and I'll probably return to it.

The Forever War is a trilogy of books, two seem connected, the third not so much. The first is the best, covering the oddities of fighting a war over relativistic distances, and returning home hundreds if years later to find things have changed. It's somewhat if an allegory of Vietnam, apparently. The second deals with the afterwards. Some of it is quite good, but the ending was dire. The third is pretty good, but peters out somewhat, and the narrative style is confused.

I'm currently reading Flowers for Algenon, a book about a man with an IQ of 70 who undergoes a treatment to make him cleverer. It's really good 100 pages in so far, albeit with a dawning sense of pathos.

Are you just going through the SF Masterworks series?



Flowers for Algernon is something of a classic.

My favourite of the (many) 'smartening' books that have been written was definitely Thomas M Disch's 'Camp Concentration'. Quite hard to find though, not sure if it was ever published over here.

Heh, my friend tried to lend me The forever war, but i left it at his house and bought my own copy. but, yes, it seems so.





I'll look out for that, thanks.

I've finished the first three books in Jack Camovell's [I]Lost Fleet[/] series. Briefly put, in the future there are two sides at war. One of the sides tries to end it by making a decisive strike. It doesn't end well, and Jack Geary, a captain only just rescued from a century in an escape pod, finds himself on charge of the survivors. He vows to get them back home, but first he must win over the captains and commanders of the other ships.

The books are pretty much standard spaceship sagas: big battles, light speeds and so on. Geary as the main protagonist appears to be likeable enough. The main problem is that each of the books is the same. Go somewhere, have a fight, go somewhere, have a fight, fix ships, go somewhere, have a fight. It also suffers from the Hari Sheldon problem: bad things happen, but the the solution presents itself by natural turns if events. No one is leaning heavily on the rudder to ship. The interactive with the other commanders are I triguing, as with his ship's captain and the Co-President acting as a sounding board is good. It struggles when it tries to impose its military mantras on to the reader, and Geary's self doubt and introspection can be irritating. Overall, it's an honest book, enjoyable enough to read, but don't expect to be surprised by it.

is that not BSG?

It pretty much is BSG.

The Big …Silly (?) Giant?

There's a man around here that looks just like Quentin Blake's illustrations of The BFG, I always give him a smile as I imagine him bottling up dreams. He has gigantic ears.

God dammit. I've downloaded about 10 books in the 3 weeks I've had my Kindle, *checks Kindle app* to be precise, it's actually 15. Maybe 3 of those were free.

The thing is, I now want hardcopies of the ones I like so far. I used to wait until there was a decent sale on somewhere and buy 6 or so books at a time, or more depending on the offer. I have a nice collection on a small bookshelf but the Kindle has got me reading stuff I'd never buy hardcopies of.

Reading for fun is a costly habit...And I blame beex.

Battlestar Galactica. And yes, the book is quite similar.

Why?

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Some kind of irrational need to have them on the shelf. Sometimes you just want the solid 'thing', maybe...I don't know. I just do, right!?

Oh, I finished Ex-Heroes. Pretty good
I have now moved onto Book 10 of the Wild Cards series.