Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic 50-Book Challenge 2009

Updating with:

#35 Daniel Easterman - The Judas Testament

I picked this up on the basis that it seemed to be in The De Vinci Code territory. As it turned out, it had those elements and was a pretty darn good thriller, to boot. I'd read more from this author and I'm keen to read his horror novels, under another pen-name now.

#36 Peter Straub - Floating Dragon

I swear that I have an unconscious desire, going back many, many years, to succeed in getting all the way through a Straub novel before I die. I've tried over the years, I really have, but I've never gotten beyond the first few chapters. Finally! I did it! Yay me! This wasn't the best horror novel I've read, but it was free of the irritations that normally vex me in a Straub novel to ensure I made it to the end. I enjoyed it.

#37 Dean Koontz - The Taking

Koontz has usually served me well over the years (I still say Watchers is one of THE best horror novels out there) but he does come up with a clunker or two, now and then. This wasn't exactly one of them, but it wasn't his best either. Firstly it had very odd pacing - the first third was taken up with the two main characters driving into town, during which journey not a lot happened. Secondly, I had problems with the main premise which involved me having to accept that 99% of the world's population are bad/evil people. I think most people are just ordinary - neither very good nor very evil - so I couldn't really buy into it.

#38 Stephen King - Cell

I haven't really enjoyed King's novel for over a decade now, but the blurb on this one looked interesting, so I decided to give it a go. I enjoyed it - in many ways it was a harking back to his earlier works. Not terrific, not his best, but a good story all the same.

#39 Brian Keene - The Rising

I bought this on the basis of several reviewers of Cell on Amazon saying it was a better novel covering the same premise/plot. Plus, by that point I was in the mood for a really good zombie apocolypse novel. And, boy, did I get it! This is the best horror novel I've read in years. A real harking back to the best of King and McCammon. Any book that gives you a zombie fish and a zombie baby has to be doing it with style. You can kill as many people as you like, including zombie babies, but don't touch the dog.

#42 Katherine Kerr - A Time Of War

I forgot to add this one in earlier. Let's see...I read it last week and can't for the life of me remember a single, solitary thing about the plot. Which probably tells you everything you need to know.

Having a bit of a mini heatwave here today, so I'm off to have a lovely salad, a long cool glass of Pepsi and settle down with the rest of the new batch of reading I got today. Yay!


LabRat

Updating with:

#43 Elizabeth Haydon - Rhapsody

I bought this one on the strength of reading the first few chapters of the first book in the second trilogy in the series. Sadly, it proved a disappointment. I really liked the main characters, but the writing style and plot were plodding and boring. I found myself quickly skimming over each new interminable section of exposition. An author who needs to learn the golden rule - show, don't tell. Too much of this one was people sitting around talking.

#44 Brian Keene - City of the Dead

I was somewhat disappointed with this sequel, too. The flaws that were evident in the first book but which I was prepared to ignore because it was such a fun read, just irritated in the main, here. The new characters were bland and most of all I was depressed by the totally bleak ending, which was unexpected. I know it's a zombie horror romp, but even so... although I've enjoyed his work, in the main, I doubt I'll be able to read many more of his novels if they all end so depressingly.

#45 Bernard Cornwell - Fallen Angels

I'd never heard of this one from one of my favourite authors, so it was a delight to pick up in the charity shop. Thoroughly enjoyed it, too.

#46 Lisa Gardner - Hide

One of the pleasures in raiding charity shops for books is finding new authors you might otherwise never know. Gardner definitely comes into that catagory. I loved the originality of the plot in this one. Coupled with interesting characters and a mild romantic subplot, it was easy reading.

#47 Sidney Sheldon - Are You Afraid of the Dark?

I went through a kick of reading Sheldon when I was a teen, but can't remember much about them. So this had a tinge of nostalgia to it. An undemanding plot of the kind that requires movie-of-the-week thriller-type huge coincidences and implausibilities to work, but that's part of the fun.

#48 Mary Higgins Clark - The Cradle Will Fall

Clark is in the same category as Sheldon. An author whose books I read in my teen years. This was a standard thriller - the author is definitely on my C list - but, again, the huge plot holes you can drive a tractor through and the coincidences and implausibilities didn't detract from it being a few hours enjoyable reading.

#49 Michael Moore - Stupid White Men

Self-explanatory. You either love him or hate him or...actually, I'm fairly ambiguous. I've read funnier ways to point to the hypocrites in our world. But didn't disappoint - at least with Moore you get what it says on the tin.

#50 Dean Koontz - The Face

After the disappointments of the last Koontz book I read, this was a return to the master of the genre I know and love. Absolutely wonderful psychological thriller with a genuinely creepy villain and two central characters you really wanted to win through. Nice twist at the end, too.

LabRat

I like to read series. Or a lot of books by the same author. I'm up to 100 books for the year so far, oh course, laying in bed for months helped with that. A couple authors I've been reading lately are:

Jennifer Chiaverini - she has written a dozen or so books with a quilting theme.

Debbie Macomber - I have read a couple of her series. The Dakota series I really liked. About a town that was dying and how they bought it back. And she has a knitting series I enjoyed.

I'll throw in a Nora Roberts every once in a while, she has written so many you can't keep track of them. I've gotten away from the mysteries for a while.

I just finished the last Janet Evanovich book. I think she needs to end the Stephanie Plum stuff and get on with something else.

Sue

And we think we're doing well.... From the BBC News website:

Although, is it just my cynical nature to wonder if she actually reads them all or just leaves them lying on the hall table and then remembers to return them before the due date....?

LabRat

LOL! I bet she reads them. I've known people that are that voracious a reader.

I've been a little lax. I went through a few weeks where I'd pick up a book, read a few chapters, then decided I wasn't in the mood for it and went for another book. Several books went through this process.


36. Turn Coat - Jim Butcher
37. Voyage of the Jerle Shannara: Isle Witch - Terry Brooks
38. Voyage of the Jerle Shannara: Antrax - Terry Brooks
39. Voyage of the Jerle Shannara: Morgawr - Terry Brooks
40. Anyone But You - Jennifer Crusie
41. Wolfsbane and Mistletoe - e. by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner
42. Catch and Keep - Hannah Bernard / The Maid of Dishonor - Tanya Michaels (Duets)
43. If the Shoe Fits - Samantha Connolly / Designs on Jake - Dorien Kelly
44. Sweet Talk - Susan Mallery
45. Sweet Spot - Susan Mallery
46. Sweet Trouble - Susan Mallery
47. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
48. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
49. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
50. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
51. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Yes, I'm re-reading the series. Meant to have HBP done in time for the movie, but it didn't work out that way. It's okay, though. 42 and 43 are Harlequin Duets. I didn't think they should count as separate books.

These are actually part of the last update.

Lisa Gardner - Three Great Novels:

#51 The Perfect Husband
#52 The Other Daughter
#53 The Third Victim

Having been so impressed by Gardner's Hide, I snapped up this three books in one package secondhand on Amazon.

I didn't actually enjoy The Perfect Husband. Although it had some nice moments, the plot was pedestrian and I found the central characters hard to like. I'm sure that Gardner believed she was writing scenes of sizzling UST, but all I could think of was that any guy who acts like a sexual predator, threatening repeatedly to sexually assault a woman (this passing for flirting), whom he knows is hiding out from an abusive husband, and aggressively and repeatedly invading her personal space because he fancies her is just a jerk. For me, not one of her best.

The Other Daughter and The Third Victim were much more in sync with Hide - original plots with lots of twists, great characters, a smattering of romance and all in all a great read. The main premise of the plot in The Third Victim was a bit hard to swallow and some suspension of belief was necessary, but what the heck, that's par for the course with this type of thriller and no bar to the fun so long as the author does it with flair as Gardner tends to.

#54 Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

This isn't the type of novel I'd normally pick up. But when I saw it in my charity shop I'd just read a review of the movie and so curiosity won out. And I have to say that I did thoroughly enjoy it. The writing style was easy to get into and I liked the device of switching between the characters and their viewpoints. Nor was it overly sentimental or mushy.

My only issue with it would be the ending, which was just a smidgen too convenient for me. Yet, having said that, it didn't spoil the novel for me and it was handled as skilfully as the rest of the book. Moving without being mawkish, this has to be one of my favourite reads this year.

I enjoyed it so much in fact, that I've put several more of Picoult's novels on my wish list.

LabRat

I read the Tales of Beedle the Bard, but I'm not putting it on my list, since it's not novel-length. I also read a couple of comic books, but they're not really prose.

Anyway, here's my update:

39. Mind Meld (Star Trek: The Original Series #82) by John Vornholt
40. GURPS Discworld (RPG manual) by Phil Masters
41. The Ashes of Eden (another Star Trek novel) by William Shatner (technically not finished yet, but getting there)

I'm getting pretty close here. I expect to be going to the library a lot in the next few months (at least until next April, when my car is paid off), now that I'm on such a strict budget and can't actually afford to buy any books or other frivolities whatsoever.

Anyway, my list update. All of these three books are from The Belgariad, a series by David Eddings. I got the first book as a birthday present from the GM of an RPG I've been playing on Thursday nights for the last few months, and as soon as I finished it, I went and got the next two from the library. I'm almost finished book three (which is on the list below), so I'm going back to the library on Monday.

42. Pawn of Prophecy
43. Queen of Sorcery
44. Magician's Gambit

Only 6 to go! I haven't gotten so close to 50 books for a single year since a year or two before I started doing these challenges. Whee!

45. Castle of Wizardry
46. Enchanter's Endgame

Glad to hear you're enjoying The Belgariad, Darcy. It's one of my all-time favourite fantasy series. The sequel set - The Mallorean - isn't quite as good imo, but still good reading and has been read more than once and still has some fine moments.

Strangely, I was never able to get into Eddings' other big series - The Elenium. Not really sure why. And some of the other sequels using the Belgariad characters were very repetitive to my mind, covering ground already well covered in the other books.

But you've got me in the mind to go revisit some old friends now...

LabRat

Updating with:

#55 Robert Goddard - Closed Circle

This is a re-read for me. One of my favourite novels from this author. Reminiscent of a Hitchcock movie. As the blurb from The Independent on the back cover puts it: "A splendidly old-fashioned affair, full of thuggery and skullduggery, cross and double-cross, plot and counter-plot." Which sums it up perfectly. Wonderful.

Terry Goodkind - Sword of Truth series

#56. Wizard's First Rule
#57 Stone of Tears
#58 Blood of the Fold
#59 Temple of the Winds

I currently have a real love/hate relationship with these novels. I am irritated by the fact that a large amount of characterisation and plot are so closely modelled on the works of other authors (mostly from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, but there are others. Like the character of Samuel, who has more or less been lifted wholesale from Smeagal in LotR). And by the fact that despite this copycatting and the fact that they are highly derivative, the good man himself and many of his more intense fans constantly claim that these books are the most original fantasy books to emerge for decades.

So, that bugs me. Secondly, I find a lot of the writing, in plot and especially in dialogue, to be trite, clunky or melodramatic - a lot of the dialogue makes me wince to read it.

And yet.... So far I've enjoyed them. To the extent that - for the moment - I'm continuing to buy and read them. Perhaps it's because they are so close to Jordan at times that I almost feel that I'm reading a new novel by him.

Whatever the reason, despite their flaws and the fact that, contrary to Mr. Goodkind's ego he is outclassed and outwritten by peers like Eddings, Hobb, Martin, Jordan and many others, I'm finding these a decent enough place-holder to read until Martin comes up with A Dance of Dragons (FINALLY!) or one of my other favourite authors brings out something new.

LabRat

You've hit the nail on the head with that series, Labby. There are a lot of comparisons in my little group between Jordan and Goodkind, and the Wheel of Time series and the Sword of Truth series. The problem with both is that they borrow so heavily on other genre-building books such as LotR, and also on historical storytelling such as King Arthur. The one thing I can say about Goodkind is that he's not *quite* as verbose as Jordan was, with the books a bit shorter, and the series actually finished in 11 books. My husband's currently reading the SoT series, and he's gotten further through that than he ever did with WoT.

I really did enjoy the Belgariad, Labby.

I meant to start on the Mallorean once I finished the Belgariad, but before I could get back to the library, my sister lent me a book from the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels (the series that the True Blood television show is based off of), and I got sucked into the series. I'm on book three right now, but once I finish this series, I might check out the Mallorean.

The following novels are all by Charlaine Harris, and are part of the same series.

47. Dead Until Dark
48. Living Dead in Dallas
49. Club Dead

Only one more to go! Of course, I'm not going to stop there, since that'll be smack in the middle of the series, but hey--it's the first year I've done this challenge (out of the three that I've done it so far) that I've actually reached 50 before New Year's!

Ooh, another goodie. I picked up Definitely Dead a bit back from the charity shop and really enjoyed it. It was a bit far into the series, though, which means it had spoilers for quite a few of the earlier ones. Still, wouldn't mind reading more in the future.

LabRat

50. Dead to the World

51. Dead as a Doornail
52. Definitely Dead
53. All Together Dead

Once I finish All Together Dead, I only have two left in the series. Then, I'm thinking I might try watching the show.

Hope you have better luck than me there, Darcy. I was really looking forward to it, but tuned out after two episodes. Thanks mostly to the - as I see it - totally superfluous and quite unnecessary soft porn sex scenes they kept dropping in. I don't mind such scenes, if they add something to the plot, but I do get irked by them if they seem to just be a ploy to boost ratings among teen males and have no other merit to them than that.

There was also the fact that neither leads appealed to me at all and there's this weird thing they keep doing when Sookie reads minds, a vocal distortion, which, coupled with an already hard-for-the-Scottish-ear-to-decipher Louisiana accent, made those portions of the dialogue almost impossible to make out. I had to go searching for transcripts online to find out what had been said.

But it's apparently a top rater in the US, so with luck you'll be with the majority and not me.

Karen - somehow managed to miss your post last time I was in here! I definitely agree that Goodkind's series is easier reading than Jordan's. Goodkind's plot is much simpler and the fantasy world his characters inhabit much less complex.

And there's that weird thing going on with him finishing the plotlines in one book and then starting fresh almost in the next, which always leaves me wondering when I pick up the next book in the series how on earth he's going to find enough plot to fill another. And I'm only on book five! How he's done 12 is currently a mystery to me.

But...I have to say, so far, he seem to manage it. Just. I'm just about to start book five, and once again I'm wondering if this will be the one where I give up. <g> But, still looking forward to it.

LabRat

54. From Dead to Worse
55. Dead and Gone (last one in the series so far--the copyright inside the book says May 2009--then I can start in on the T.V. show, after I've finished catching up on N.C.I.S. with my sister first, of course)

An incomplete list based on the later stuff added to my book database that I know I've read. It misses rereads of stuff I already own.

Wes Boyd
Alone Together
Blue Beauty

David Weber
Mutineers' Moon
The Armageddon Inheritance
Heirs of Empire

John Birmingham
Weapons of Choice

Donna Andrews
Swan for the Money
Six Geese A-Slaying

Wen Spencer
Endless Blue

Rachel Caine
Ill Wind

Gurps Powers, Fourth Edition
GURPS The Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game
Eberron Players Book

Joanne Fluke
Key Lime Pie Murder
Lemon Meringue Pie Murder
Fudge Cupcake Murder

These four books are all in the same series by Anne McCaffrey.

56. Freedom's Landing
57. Freedom's Choice
58. Freedom's Challenge
59. Freedom's Ransom

Updating with:

#60 Robert Goddard - Dying To Tell
#61 Robert Goddard - Set In Stone

The first, Goddard's usual blend of twists and turns in an oddly old-fashioned thriller reminiscent of the best of Hitchock, I thoroughly enjoyed.

The second, I was curious about as Amazon's reviews had revealed its not a fan favourite. As it had a supernatural plot element to it I was intrigued though and decided to give it a go. I can see why his fans have problems with this one as it was an oddly unbalanced book. The supernatural elements to the plot - along with some characters connected with it - seemed to be entirely irrelevant to the main plot. In fact it seemed to me you could pretty much have excised that entire strand and it would have made no difference to the story at all. Not entirely a dub, but definitely not one of this author's best.

#62 Brian Keene - Dead Sea

Having enjoyed the author's two zombie schlock novels, I was very disappointed with this one. The plot was non-existent - even for this kind of book - the characters so thinly drawn that when they died you couldn't feel much empathy or sympathy as you didn't know enough about them to care.

#63 Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
#64 Terry Pratchett - Night Watch

It's been a while since I've read anything from Pratchett, so I took the chance to check out two books featuring some of my favourite characters. I found the first a little disappointing to be honest, but really loved Night Watch.

#65 Terry Goodkind - Soul of the Fire

Continuing my confusing journey with this series. It followed the usual path - I was bored rigid for the first one hundred pages or so then, just as I was starting to think about giving up, Goodkind introduced something that perked up my interested and I enjoyed it.

#66 Bernard Cornwall - A Crowning Mercy

I was looking forward to this prequel/companion piece to Fallen Angels, which I'd enjoyed hugely. Wasn't disappointed. Great characters and sense of period.

#67 Harlan Coben - Hold Tight
#68 Harlan Coben - Long Lost

It's been a while since I've read anything by Coben. I was delighted to find that Long Lost was another outing for Myron, Win and Co. as I'd thought that Coben had given up writing with those characters. Didn't disappoint.

#69 Richard Montanari - Play Dead
#70 Richard Montanari - The Skin Gods
#71 Richard Montanari - The Devil's Garden

The first two were the usual fare, featuring his detective duo and I enjoyed those. I enjoyed the last a little less. A stand-alone novel with a slightly different slant to his usual fare, which didn't really work for me. It was just missing a spark somehow and never really achieved a sense of tension.

#72 Michael Marshall - The Intruders

Something slightly different from this author, a thriller with a supernatural undertone. I enjoyed it, although it wasn't as good as his other novels for me.

I still have a ton of books to read. I've been treated recently to some cash to run amok in Amazon with. As a result my wish list has been decimated and I have a shelf full of my favourite authors to visit. I need to slow down though! I've been reading a book a day in the past few days - they won't last long at that rate!

LabRat