Metal Reviews

my sister had to go to the mall to get her watch fixed or something, so i tagged along and bought "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton. i bought it based pretty much entirely on the mad praise it got on amazon, hope i don't regret it.

"Dune" was there, but some dude on the back cover compared it to LOTR, which i admit i'm not much a fan of. i'm much more into intrigue and the like than massive world building. i'll at least try to have a look though it when i have more time, though.

my "to read" list just keeps getting bigger and bigger:
Arturo Perez-Reverte – Captain Alatriste
Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Club Dumas
Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Fencing Master
Chuck Palahniuk – Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk – Haunted
Chuck Palahniuk – Lullaby
Chuck Palahniuk – Survivor
Chuck Palahniuk – Choke
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy – No Country for Old Men
Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett – Red Harvest
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Frank Herbert – Dune
George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
George R.R. Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire
H.P. Lovecraft – compilação
Hunter S. Thompson - Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs
Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary
Jack Kerouac – On the Road
Jack Kerouac – The Dharma Bums
Jack London – The Sea-Wolf
Jack London – The Iron Heel
James Hilton – Lost Horizon
John Fowls – The Magus
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut – Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
Louis-Ferdinand Celine – Journey to the End of the Night (Translated by Ralph Manheim)
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Melvin Burgess - Bloodtide
Neil Gaiman - Stardust
Neil Gaiman – American Gods
Orhan Pamuk – My Name is Red
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass
Richard Zimler - Guardian of the Dawn
Richard Zimler - The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
Robert Wilson – A Small Death in Lisbon
Roger Zelazny – Lord of Light
Steven Pressfield - Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
T.H. White – The Once and Future King
Wilbur Smith – River God
Wilbur Smith – The Seventh Scroll
Wilbur Smith – Warlock
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling - The Difference Engine
Xenophon – The Persian Expedition

yes, i actually keep a word file of that, and i even carry around a piece of paper with the ones i'm more eager to read, in case i happen to find them for sale.
if you've read any of them please comment..

George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Kurt Vonnegut – Breakfast of Champions
Cormac McCarthy – No Country for Old Men

those are the only three from your list that I've read but all 3 of them kick major ass.

Everything is compared to Tolkien, so you don't need to worry about that- I'd say Dune is more akin to ASoIaF than Tolkien, due to the prevalence of politics, religion and competing nobles (and sand worms). As for the other books on your list- read Orwell, Vonnegut, Xenophon and of course, Martin.

I've actually owned Dune for a while but never read it, so after seeing this thread I decided to put The Fellowship of the Ring on hold and read that...and so far it's awesome. It doesn't help that nothing has happened in the first 130 pages or so of TFotR.

yeah, i remember you really liked "the persian expedition". and i really want to read the next ASoIaF book, but i'll have to order it from Fnac, right now the stores are only carrying "A Feast for Crows".

Bilbo turns 111!

Damn non Lord of the Rings lovers.. which reminds me that I should do a reread.. been about a year now.

That's a pretty cool 'to read' list, although I'd probably just read one of the Palahniuk books if I were you. I actually went through the painful task of reading about three before I realised they are all EXACTLY the same. Nice to see Hammett on there, you read any Raymond Chandler by any chance?

I keep a .txt file on my jump drive of my book list. Sadly, mine is separated in 'to buy' and 'to check out for future buying'. (I'm super anal.)

If you end up liking Palahniuk once, I highly recommend Welsh's Filth over any of Palahniuk's others because they are all basically the same. Filth is along the same vein but different.

oh yeah, whenever i can i read like 50 pages of a book before buying. i guess that's more a of a "check out" list.

This book is huge... 900 pages in trade paperback form.. that means it'll be around 1300 in mass market paperback. And this is book 7 of a 10 book series.. good times ahead.

IT. Haha.

Finished "How Soccer Explains the World" (I learned about globalisation AND soccer culture at the same time, huzzah!)... now I'm reading "The Crossing" by Cormac McCarthy

finished Michael Crichton's "State of Fear". didn't like it much. it was predictable, the characters were bad (especially Bradley and that other environmentalist bitch) and the writing was pretty poor. it'd make a decent movie, but it didn't make for a good book..

Crichton can't write characters or dialogue for shit.

judging by SoF, he can't write a plot either.

the only "smart" thing about this book is the amount of facts he throws at you.

Judging by Jurassic Park and Congo, he can write a plot....not!

Just finished Donaldson's The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story. Very interesting due to superb characterization and him subverting the typical "maiden captured by villain and rescued by hero" into something very twisted and different. The sci fi stuff is kind of boring, however.

Now reading Egil's Saga, possibly by Snorri Sturluson. If anyone else loves Vikings and more particularly, Vikings who annihalate their enemies, live for revenge and then write poetry about it, read this saga.

Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn trilogy, and a little book on the history of Germany from Arminius to Nazism by I-don't-know-who. Yeah, all at once.

My Year In Iraq by Paul Bremer

Interesting to see how carefully it's written, and the vast amount of anti-commie stuff thrown in.

Is filling a book with anti communist rhetoric really serving a purpose into this day and age?