Read any good books lately? Rate them here

[Ravenshire]

Ok, got started on yet another Urban Fantasy series:


The first of the Mercedes "Mercy" Thompson series. Mercy is a skin walker who can change into a coyote, but not a lycanthrope or "werecoyote" who lives in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state.

Mercy must rescue the Alpha of the local werewolf pack and his young daughter, after they are taken by a band of humans and werewolves who are testing new medical drugs on werewolves. While helping Adam she must ask the Marrok, the leader of all North American werewolves, for help and encounters an old flame, Samuel Cornick, who decides to move back to the Tri-Cities with Mercy in an effort to win her back.

Source

Fun read and will probably be liked by fans of the "Hollows" series by Kim Harrison or the "Dresden Files" by Jim Butcher.

I'd give this one a solid 7/10. Lays out the ground rules for how her version of werewolves, vampires, fey folk, etc... function and introduces the main characters nicely. A little lacking in story development, but it's obvious it's the beginning of a series and some of what's presented is foreshadowing for future story arcs.

[c172]

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Carl...1578067367

Conversations with Carl Sagan. Pretty good thus far.

[Rev. Rye]

The Collected Works of Nathanael West.



Nathanael West has been one of my favourite authors since I picked up the paperback editions of his four novellas in my senior year of high school.

The Four Novellas:

• The Dream Life of Balso Snell: A poet hides out in the colon of the Trojan Horse and wanders around and meets several strange characters. Easily the weakest of the four novellas.
  
• Miss Lonelyhearts: A novel about a young man with a Christ complex getting a job as an agony aunt. He is a Christ figure, and gets all the rejection that entails. He doesn't even have real apostles.
  
• A Cool Million: Lemuel Pitkin's family needs to pay their mortgage, and, on the advice from ex-president Shagpoke Whipple, he sets out into the world to make a fortune in a parody of the novels of Horatio Alger. He fails miserably. Reading this, and seeing how much Whipple reminds me of him makes me wish he hooked up with W.C. Fields during his time in Hollywood...
  
• The Day of the Locust: A longitudinal look at people on the fringes of Hollywood in the 1930s.
  

I got a First Edition of a "Collected Novels" edition from the 1950s as a present for my graduation from Columbia, and more recently, I found an edition of his complete works, including all four novellas, some nonfiction, a few unpublished short stories, plays, and even a couple letters.

10/10.

[Clueless Morgan]

Now for the "or worse" part. He almost always tends to over-value religious positions I suppose in the interest of "fairness."

It's not an issue of fairness. His rationale for being overly generous to the religious argument is saying that even if we grant them their best case scenario, we can still demonstrate their evidence is bad, their justifications fallacious and their arguments invalid, so any refinement of the probabilities he assigns to their arguments will only make their position weaker and the mythicist position stronger.

(The rationale for the a fortiori argument technique he uses was outlined in Proving History.)

CM, what is a YA book?

Young Adult

Twilight, Harry Potter, Divergent, Ender's Game, basically think of all the recent movie franchises based on books and they're probably adaptations of young adult books.

[Norman Humann]

I finished Cujo by Stephen King a couple of weeks ago.



Loved it. 8/10.

[Ravenshire]

Young Adult

Twilight, Harry Potter, Divergent, Ender's Game, basically think of all the recent movie franchises based on books and they're probably adaptations of young adult books.

Honestly, it's hard to find movies that aren't adapted from books. It's not just the latest crop of YA titles.

[Clueless Morgan]

Honestly, it's hard to find movies that aren't adapted from books. It's not just the latest crop of YA titles.

I'm not talking about just any book to movie adaption, I'm specifically talking about multi-book, multi-movie franchises. The recent blockbuster franchises based on books tend toward being based on YA books:

Harry Potter
Twilight
Hunger Games
Divergent
Narnia

Others that don't seem as big but are book to movie adaptations that were probably seen as potential franchises by the studios include:

Percy Jackson
Ender's Game
The Maze Runner
Eragon

[Ravenshire]

I'm not talking about just any book to movie adaption, I'm specifically talking about multi-book, multi-movie franchises.  The recent blockbuster franchises based on books tend toward being based on YA books:

Harry Potter
Twilight
Hunger Games
Divergent
Narnia

Others that don't seem as big but are book to movie adaptations that were probably seen as potential franchises by the studios include:

Percy Jackson
Ender's Game
The Maze Runner
Eragon

Ok, I see what you meant.

Percy Jackson actually got a second movie despite the first one sucking soooo bad and "The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" is in production as we "speak" despite how bad it sucked. I'm not so sure they considered "Ender's Game" a franchise starter, unless they were going to continue with the "Shadow" books. The Ender sequels would not do well in the same target crowd as "Ender's Game." Ender went and got all grown up.

---

My most recent:

Mercy has to deal with a new threat in the Tri Cities. A recently turned vampire who is also demon possessed. 7.5/10.

I'm hoping Ms. Briggs will bring better game to the following books. More of the same just ain't gonna do it.

My current read:

I got this one on the strength of her first book "The Book of Unholy Mischief" aka "The Chef's Apprentice." Big disappointment. Unholy Mischief, based in 1498 Venice was an irreverent romp through the eyes of an apprentice chef. This one, split between the 1850s and 1940s rural India, does not measure up.

1947. India is rife with violence surrounding Britain’s imminent departure. Yet Evie Mitchell is eager to start a new life there with her husband, Martin, a troubled anthropologist, and their young son. It is in their colonial bungalow, hidden behind a brick wall, that Evie makes a startling discovery. Evie finds a packet of old letters that tell a strange and compelling story of love and war involving two young Englishwomen who lived in the same house in 1857...

Source


I'm really hoping Ms. Newmark's next effort is better than this one. If I weren't close to finishing it already, I probably wouldn't bother. I'll give it a 5/10 since I will finish it...

[Iroscato]

In honour of the passing of the mighty Sir Terry Pratchett, I finally downloaded the Colour of Magic, and absolutely fell in love. Oh my, what a read. I'm fairly inexperienced with fantasy fiction so don't get all the jokes and references, but I still devoured it, and as soon as I get my filthy little paws on some cash I'm downloading the shit outta the rest of his work

[Alex K]

Yeah, this Bayes theorem shit is probably interesting to a math geek but it is in essence a comparison of probabilities.  That is fine but then Carrier frequently seems totally arbitrary (or worse ) in the assignment of numerical values to those probabilities.  Now for the "or worse" part.  He almost always tends to over-value religious positions I suppose in the interest of "fairness."  It is not necessary.  The story is bullshit and he knows it from the beginning and all of this alleged mathematical proof is a distraction from the narrative.

The fact that jesus is nothing special within the literature of the time is sufficient.

I'm halfway through Proving History and I thought it was very thought provoking so far. Then again, I would probably qualify as a math geek. Initially I also had serious problems with the act of assigning probabilities to all these historical things which can be educated guesses at best, most of the time. But there are two arguments that convinced me that there may be something to his approach.

First of all, as he himself says, when one does history the old-fashioned way, one also weighs things against one another, implicitly giving them a numerical weight even if one doesn't state it. So all he does, he says, is doing the same thing that is already done anyways, but more transparently and rigorously.

The second point was that one doesn't always have to put fixed numbers - one can instead use upper or lower bounds for probabilities and then obtain bounds for the probability of the conclusion.  He calls it arguing a forteriori or some such. This to me seems to be a good way to obtain more reliable conclusions. One can say, ok, I don't know exactly how probable it is that the lights went out in galilee for a few hours and no historian wrote it down... but let's give it a "less than one in a hundred" to be on the conservative side. And so on. If you then disagree with my conclusion you can point exactly to my choices of numbers and state which ones you would choose differently to get a different outcome. Based on this transparency in assumptions, a much more meaningful discussion can be had.

---

Young Adult

Twilight, Harry Potter, Divergent, Ender's Game, basically think of all the recent movie franchises based on books and they're probably adaptations of young adult books.

Honestly, it's hard to find movies that aren't adapted from books. It's not just the latest crop of YA titles.

Battleship was adapted from a board game. And what a glorious movie it was.