@MightyDemon82 Do you know if the NJO series is canon and if it has anything at all to do with the next Rey movie (which is called New Jedi Order, as far as I can tell)?
Just now finished Neuromancer (Goodreads page), the OG cyberpunk novel by William Gibson and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Having read it as a teen, the only thing about that experience I remember is that I was disappointed by it. I think that may have been due to the fact that I wasn't sufficiently proficient in the language at the time (I guess that goes as much for the tech language as well as the English language) to get a good enough grasp on it. Not a problem this time around, as both the novel and I have aged a bit since then I guess you can consider it retro-cyberpunk these days, in all the best ways! And I was stunned to find that my favourite bad-but-excellent movie, "Johnny Mnemonic", takes place in the same universe (the movie is, of course, based on a short-story by Gibson with the same name) and referenced in this very book. Brilliant! Looking forward to reading more stories from The Sprawl in the future.
But before I get to that, I'm continuing with the "John Cleaver" series by Dan Wells, with the second novel in the series, Mr. Monster (Goodreads page). I quite enjoyed the first in the series (though the movie was dull as dishwater) so here's hoping this one is equally good.
@FuriousMachine It was considered cannon, up until Disney bought Starwars. They just cherry pick elements from the expanded universe (EU) like Thrawn, I'll probably just read these and then close the book on Starwars. Unless I hear they have knocked it out of the park with future instalments!
@MightyDemon82 Yeah, right. I knew Disney trimmed a lot of the EU stuff and have been bringing some of it back piecemeal, but I wasn't sure about this one. Doesn't really matter if things are canon or not, but it's helpful to know in order to avoid confusion (I'm not ready to give up on SW just yet, though I'm not especially enthused about any of the upcoming projects save Andor S2)
"All Iâm saying is that everything here is either boring or somebody dies. Thereâs either nothing going on, or thereâs a dead body in the lake."
Such is teenage life in the small town of Clayton, situated "in the middle of Nowhere, USA", as they say. John Wayne Cleaver is almost sixteen, lives with his mother in an apartment over the town mortuary, which is also the family business, and is obsessed with serial killers. He is also a sociopath and knows he is one slip away from becoming a killer himself, so he has invented a strict set of rules he needs to follow in order to keep his dangerous side under control. The part of him he calls "Mr. Monster". When he had to tangle with a real serial killer, he found he had to bend and break many of those rules and the question now becomes: Can he still manage to keep Mr. Monster in check or have the chains been broken for good? Especially now that bodies are starting to pop up in this sleepy town once again?
"I always called corpses âit,â because . . . well, obviously. Theyâre dead. But apparently that kind of thing really bothered normal humans. It was just so hard for me to remember."
Mr. Monster (Goodreads page) is the second book in the John Cleaver series by Dan Wells and this was even better than the first one! As with the first one, this novel maintains tension from two angles: An external threat as well as John's internal struggle to remain a "normal human" and avoid hurting anyone. Gripping, disturbing and peppered with dark humour, this novel moves at a clip; I finished it in just three sittings. Five stars, easy!
Next up is the second novel in William Gibson's "The Sprawl" trilogy, Count Zero (Goodreads page)
Finished The Castle of Crossed Destinies ,a story told entirely through the presentation and interpretation of tarot cards by Italo Calvio, it was good, but not a profound literary masterpiece like The Plague was, still highly enjoyable, nonetheless.
"(Music is) a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life" (paraphrased) - John Cage
@MightyDemon82 Will do! I think the setting is pretty much the only connective tissue in the trilogy, with maybe some characters recurring here and there, if I'm not mistaken, so it will be interesting to see if the upcoming series will weave all the narratives together or if it will focus exclusively on the first novel. Either way, I'm eager to get through all the books before the series drops (maybe next year?) as I prefer experiencing a story for the first time through reading it before seeing the adaptation. I also learned the hard way, with Lord of the Rings, that you should always read all the books before seeing an adaptation based on one of them, if you don't want the adaptation to spoil one of the books
@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN Sounds like an interesting read. Will add it to my constantly growing list.
I've finished Life of Pi, I'm surprised how little I remembered from the movie. There is a lot in the book that I can imagine wasn't in the movie, to keep the age rating down.
Next up Recursion. I loved Upgrade and Dark Matter, so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in!
@MightyDemon82 I like it so far, it is definitely an interesting read. The protagonist is some type of geologist who gets emboiled in some kind of consider-all-of-life's-mysteries=type-adventure. That's my assessment, compiled together with info from Goodreads anyway. Hope you enjoy!
I've finished Recursion. Another great one from Blake crouch. I'm not sure what to read next but leaning towards Kenzaburo Oe's Death by Water. I may read the first volume of Usagi Yojimbo first though!
@MightyDemon82 Glad you enjoyed "Recursion", it's one of my favourite Crouch novels.
I'm curious about "Death by Water", but I worry that it might be a bit on the "heavy" side, for me. Would love to hear your take when you're done with it
"Heâd used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasnât space, mankindâs unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline."
Bobby, aka "Count Zero", is a young and inexperienced deck jockey who's given a new piece of software to try out, but almost as soon as he jacks in, he is killed by intrusion countermeasures. He hears an angelic voice and then he is resurrected and ejected from the matrix. And this is only the start of his problems.
Meanwhile, Turner, a professional headhunter, is contracted to extract the top biosoft researcher from his contract with one of the largest and most powerful biotech companies, and Marly, a disgraced former gallery owner, is hired by the world's wealthiest entity to locate the creator of a particularly strange piece of art.
"Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didnât quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous."
Count Zero (Goodreads page) is the second novel in William Gibson's "The Sprawl" trilogy and weaves together three loosely connected narratives that all ultimately end up in the same place. I didn't enjoy this quite as much as I enjoyed "Neuromancer", but it wasn't bad. It took too long to get going and I wasn't really engaged with any of the stories until well into the book. At a certain point the stories picked up pace and things got more interesting, so it went from an initial two-star tale to a final three stars for me.
Next, I'm going to check back in with Harry Bosch, first with the short story Switchblade (Goodreads page), followed by the full length novel The Burning Room (Goodreads page)
Still reading through Telephone by Everett. I don't like some of the "tough talking" in it so much, but there's not so much of that, and i like the more philosophical portions of the novel, I'm about halfway through it so far, seems like a good book, but I think I prefer the Western European classics to the contermporary American Fiction genre.
"(Music is) a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life" (paraphrased) - John Cage
"If nothing else, Bosch was confident in himself as an investigator and believed he observed things others did not. He knew this was egotistical, but a healthy ego was a requirement of the job. You had to believe you were smarter, tougher, braver, and more resilient than the unknown person you were looking for. And working cold cases, you had to believe the same thing about the detectives who had worked the case before you."
Harry Bosch is in the final stretch of his career in the LAPD as his deferred retirement looms, when a mariachi player finally succumbs to a gunshot wound he suffered many years earlier. The case is marked as homicide and handed to the Open- Unsolved Unit with Bosch as the lead investigator. Along for the ride is his new partner, "Lucky Lucy" Soto, a young up-and-comer eager to seek justice not only on this case, but also one that ties back to her childhood.
"The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever.
Next up is the final entry in William Gibson's "The Sprawl", Mona Lisa Overdrive (Goodreads page). The second novel in the series was a step down from the first one, IMO, so here's hoping this is a step back up.
@FuriousMachine I finished Death by Water, this morning. I resonated with the protagonist a lot. Like him I lost my father when I was very young so always looking to find out who he was as a person. At times it was a heavy read but inspired me to look more into who my own dad was as a person!
Next up, I'm jumping back into Malazan with The God is Not Willing. It's been sat on my shelf for almost 2 years, I wanted to read something special, as I'm onto my 50th book of the year. Hopefully it's not a disappointment!
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