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Post by Jolyma on Sept 11, 2013 18:57:24 GMT -8
Am I the only one who hides on social media while insomniated so she's not caught?
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Post by firebolt153 on Sept 11, 2013 19:03:23 GMT -8
Pfft I post all the time on Twitter at like 4 in the morning that I'm probably going to see the sun rise.
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Post by DementedDuck on Sept 12, 2013 1:12:17 GMT -8
I constantly hide on social media regardless of the time of day because if I don't, people will talk to me, and that's gross.
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Post by wrecker15 on Sept 16, 2013 6:49:43 GMT -8
I don't hide on social media, but I've only got Facebook and I'm not on it all that often. I should possibly hide on Skype because I'm on it all the time, but that is more for convenience than anything else
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Post by Jolyma on Sept 16, 2013 19:50:44 GMT -8
Is it October 1 yet, because the Iris Johansen trilogy is KILLING me! I have to know what happens! Aughhhhhhhhhhhh
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Post by firebolt153 on Sept 16, 2013 22:02:17 GMT -8
I was poking around her books yesterday at work. What is this trilogy about?
I too am waiting extremely impatiently for October--new Percy Jackson, new Pokemon, third Divergent (and in that order, too).
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Leif
Senior Chatterbox
Posts: 600
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Post by Leif on Sept 17, 2013 6:42:54 GMT -8
I'm about to make another library trip, and need to restrain my borrowing. I got too many last time.
For the Non-Fiction reader, "Spoken Here" is a pretty interesting book. The author travels and interviews speakers of dying languages. We learn about Mati Ke, an aboriginal Australian language, Yuchi and Mohawk, native North American languages, Yiddish, Provencal, Manx, and Welsh. These segments are very interesting, detailing what makes languages unique, how they say things, why they are fading (Hint: The British and/or Colonialism gets 5 of them), and efforts to preserve the language. Welsh is held up as a success story, though not without it's future challenges. Typically he visits a community event, a couple teachers, and a couple of elder speakers. In between these is some pontificating on languages, ranging from the unique words of Boro to preservation efforts in Polish, French and Russian. These are interesting. When he dives into Sapir-Whorf, I cringe a bit. An informative book, though some of the theoretical underpinnings are strained. It's kind of a sad book.
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Post by wrecker15 on Sept 17, 2013 7:26:27 GMT -8
New Pokemon? I lost track after Season... 6?
In other news, I read Have A Little Faith by Mitch Albom on the plane home today and cried a river. I think I saw someone staring weirdly at me. Ooops.
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Post by firebolt153 on Sept 17, 2013 8:29:28 GMT -8
My book pile is back up, and this is compounded by the fact that I can borrow 1 book at a time from work (yay for working at a bookstore!)
Try reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Wrecker. I like to say I have a heart of ice and stone and feel no emotions when I read/watch things but I definitely had Feels reading that.
New Pokemon=new game generation. I haven't watched the show in...I don't even know, all I know is that they were in the Orange Islands and they never existed in the games and that irritated me.
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Post by wrecker15 on Sept 17, 2013 21:19:40 GMT -8
What? Latest is Black and White, right? I've pretty much given up on the 'Go to eight gyms, earn badges, challenge Elite Four' thing. Have turned to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon just because I love the stories. They're all really cliched, but they're always sweet and make me cry.
I did actually read The Five People You Meet In Heaven. It made me think a lot, but I didn't feel as emotionally involved with that as I did with Have A Little Faith. I also want to read Tuesdays With Morrie, but that's going to have to wait for a bit.
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Post by firebolt153 on Sept 17, 2013 22:29:12 GMT -8
Tuesdays with Morrie destroyed me. I can't read Mitch Albom anymore, he gives me too many Feels. This includes a play I once did the sound for that he wrote.
This gen coming up is X/Y. After Black/White was, creatively, Black 2 and White 2. I like the Mystery Dungeons too, but I was disappointed in the latest one. Storyline was too short, I thought.
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Post by Jolyma on Sept 18, 2013 3:19:34 GMT -8
Newest Percy Jackson and the third Divergent are must haves in this house too, but I may not be first in line for those ones unless I'm sneaky and buy them before the kids are home from school those days.
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Leif
Senior Chatterbox
Posts: 600
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Post by Leif on Sept 18, 2013 6:15:14 GMT -8
I'm on the waiting list for The Shining Girls at the library. Lauren Beukes writes some interesting stuff.
Zoo City is really good. In a near future South Africa, people who are responsible for a death acquire animals through sort of an involuntary bond. Naturally they're somewhat ostracized. Zinzi has a sloth, and a gift for finding things. She is hired to find the missing member of a popular brother and sister pop duo. Is this the case that could provide the means to escape the slums known as Zoo City?
Moxyland is also good. It's set in a sort of cyberpunk Cape Town. It focuses on an artist, a blogger, a radical, and a corporate drone. The stories intertwine in a look at corporatism and social control. I liked this one.
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Post by Luvessy on Sept 20, 2013 18:28:52 GMT -8
I read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" and "Divergent". I'm excited for reading the next divergent book, even though my review isn't the most positive on the first. I'm working on "The Cult of Pythagoras" which is non-fiction and harder to read because of it for me. Probably not up to it tonight. I'm trying to find divergent 1.5 because I read a few pages that I did find and I want more.
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Post by firebolt153 on Sept 20, 2013 20:16:29 GMT -8
Luv if you want to read Divergent 1.5, which I think is what Goodreads called "Free Four," lurk in your local bookstore and read it in the back of the collector's edition of Insurgent. Though I think in...February or March, they're going to release all 5 of the shorts from Four's perspective as a regular book. This did not stop me from buying the first ebook ("The Transfer"), because Four lol.
Someone needs to give me a reason or five to keep pushing through Cloud Atlas. It's making me crazy that there doesn't seem to be an actual defined plot.
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Post by firebolt153 on Sept 22, 2013 9:55:34 GMT -8
Finished reading 172 Hours on the Moon. I had so many questions that I think that I will write my first review, and it will be all these questions. The first one: "How did this book receive a prestigious literary award in its native Norway?"
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Leif
Senior Chatterbox
Posts: 600
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Post by Leif on Sept 25, 2013 6:16:45 GMT -8
If you haven't read it, Bridge of Birds is really good. An adventure-mystery-fable set in ancient China.
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Post by Jolyma on Sept 25, 2013 18:43:53 GMT -8
We had a book swap at the elementary school today, and people donate books every once in a while. Someone donated half a box full of Mercedes Lackey books. So now I have them, since I don't put out books that I know have a target audience of adults, just to be on the safe side. I've never read much of her, so I am hoping I'm pleasantly surprised, and not horribly depressed by her.
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Post by wrecker15 on Sept 26, 2013 8:08:10 GMT -8
I actually love Mercedes Lackey books, but I think that's because I have a thing for cliched fantasies.
Are the books you've got the Valdemar series, or the ones outside of it?
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Post by Jolyma on Sept 26, 2013 13:57:00 GMT -8
I haven't looked closely. I know that some of them say The Bard Book (whatever) on them, I just haven't had the time to sort through them yet. There's probably 20 books here.
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Post by DementedDuck on Oct 2, 2013 8:07:20 GMT -8
I picked up The Long Walk a few weeks ago at Goodwood Revival (I guess it was a prop? I was freezing so I camped in the room for a while next to the heater) and got pretty into it. So I googled it the other day to check the author's name and realised as I read the synopsis it was really familiar to me. The 2010 film The Way Back was based on it, and I saw that film with my dad. I read a little more and it's supposedly based on a true story of a group of prisoners of war who escaped a Siberian camp and walked all the way to the Himalayas, losing a few people on the way. It's pretty heavily disputed as far as being a true story goes, but I was reading it as a work of fiction anyway. So I went to the shop today and picked up a copy and I'm quite excited to read it. :3
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Post by Jolyma on Oct 2, 2013 19:57:32 GMT -8
Ok I'm glad I pulled the Mercedes Lackey books. I started reading the Bardic Voices books, which aren't bad, and in the first one, quite a bit of time is spent in a house of ill repute. It was not R rated or anything, but not exactly elementary school material.
The books aren't bad, and the flow goes along fairly well, then it gets a little bogged down with descriptions here and there. And the typoes..oh my, the typos. The title of Book III is The Eagle and the Nightingales...problem is, Nightingale is a woman, and there is only one of her. You'll read a sentence, and an important word will have been dropped; that happens a lot. Not too much in the way of spelling errors, but the missing words are off putting. I'm hoping that since these appear to be earlier in her career, she afforded better editors later on.
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Post by firebolt153 on Oct 2, 2013 20:12:36 GMT -8
Lol "house of ill repute."
I just finished reading "City of Dark Magic" by Magnus Flyte. It's mostly set in Prague, which I feel like is the new hot spot for books to be set. The Daughter of Smoke and Bone books are based there, and another book that I read recently that I can't recall but had to do with the golem legend in the New-Old Synagogue. It caught my eye at work because the main character is a music grad student whose particular area of study is Beethoven, and plus the cover looked really cool. There's history, and alchemy, and lost treasure troves (think stuff "liberated" by the Nazis and then during the Communist regime in the Czech Republic), and lots of mention of Beethoven works.
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Post by Jolyma on Oct 2, 2013 21:16:01 GMT -8
I thought that might not be quite as crude as other terms out there.
I just bought (and finished) Silencing Eve today. It was a great way to wrap up the trilogy. I cried like a baby for many reasons. Johansen is an amazing author, and she sucks you into the world of her characters. If you ever start reading her Eve Duncan books, you may want to start at the beginning, just so you have a feel for everything she and her family have been through. (Not the trilogy, all of her Eve Duncan books) Now for the thrid Divergent (I need to borrow 1 and 2 from my daughter and reread them though) and the next Rick Riordan book this month and I'm a happy Joly.
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Leif
Senior Chatterbox
Posts: 600
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Post by Leif on Oct 3, 2013 6:18:06 GMT -8
Theodore Sturgeon's "More than Human" is, unsurprisingly, a really good book. Set in the sort of an Anytown, USA at a time that could be today (except for a conspicuous absence of cell phones, mostly it seems like the recent past) the next stage of human evolution takes it's tentative first steps. How are they treated? How do they treat people? A very interesting take that's substantially different from similar books in the past.
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Post by firebolt153 on Oct 3, 2013 10:46:47 GMT -8
Our store got some promotional Allegiant materials, including some previously unreleased quotes, and that totally made my week last week.
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Post by Luvessy on Oct 7, 2013 4:08:17 GMT -8
The library says there's a copy of Insurgent checked in, but I think the library lies.
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Leif
Senior Chatterbox
Posts: 600
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Post by Leif on Oct 7, 2013 6:41:51 GMT -8
Alif the Unseen is an interesting modern fantasy. Alif is the handle of a gray hat hacker who provides anonymity for dissidents in a modern Arab nation. Recently, a something has changed and a new presence, nicknamed The Hand of God, is hunting down hackers. As Alif tries to avoid the Hand, he finds himself dealing with shadowy djinns in the realm of the unseen. Does the djinn book Alf Yeom, the Thousand and One Days, provide insight into a new way of computing? Is the ancient secret of the Philosopher's Stone going to change information systems forever? And how will that impact a nation increasingly oppressed by the emirate? This book reminds me somewhat of the Matrix. Except Morpheus and them are genies. And Agent Smith and them are also genies. And it happens during/around Arab Spring. This was a good book. I really enjoyed it. The Author, G. Willow Wilson is a convert to Islam who moved to Cairo and wrote for a opposition magazine. She has a page about why she wrote the book that I found really interesting. It provides some insight to the book, and you can really see how it was born from her religion, political beliefs and geek culture.
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Post by firebolt153 on Oct 7, 2013 9:36:44 GMT -8
I would totally lend you my copy, Luv, if I could.
Joly--I found the House of Hades books in the stock room last night and they are beautiful. And I peeked at the back to see what the fifth book's title is :-p
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Post by Jolyma on Oct 7, 2013 9:54:48 GMT -8
I am SOOOO jealous! I'd never leave the stock room if I worked in a book store.
Also, I'm thinking of asking for a Nook for Christmas. I already have an account with books bought for Nook for PC, and I rather like it. It's easy to use. I don't need the apps and games and videos, I just want a reader, but I want it to be big enough to be comfortable to see. I'm hoping this is possible...
I love my books, but, ebooks are cheaper, and well, I'm out of room.
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