TLC Forum

Alright started Cytonic by Branderson and it is good. If someone finished it no spoilers please.

A friend gave me the first book in the Murderbot series because she said the main character reminded her of me, so I'm looking forward to reading that.

I read Fahrenheit 451 yesterday (warning for language, particularly abuses of God’s name). The book is over half a century old and yet it doesn’t feel it because it feels like the near future.

Finished The Boy Who Lost Fairyland. Most of it was really lovely (if at times intensely bittersweet) for me, the wrap-up left me feeling kind of confused and wondering if it had been too long since I read other books in the series and I had forgotten something.

I read A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Laconte over the last three days. I’d expected a sort of broad biography of Lewis and Tolkien with an emphasis on their war experience, but found that there was more to it than that. The ideologies both preceding and following the war were included, because that set the stage for the state of society that both men then had to wrestle with before they penned the tales for which they’re best known.

Recently also read George Orwell’s Animal Farm and another book I won’t name because of content issues.

Never expected to read anything "gothic" or "horror" before, but I've recently completed Jekyll & Hyde and Frankenstein. Neither are "horror" in the way the genre is nowadays, and both pose moral/philosophical questions about man and his nature. I've grown to like that sort of storytelling and can enjoy (as much as one can) bummer stories that have a point for it, but acknowledge it's not everybody's cup of tea.

...Some horror still poses philosophical questions, although even those pieces can be rather messy these days.

I still haven't read Jekyll, but I did enjoy Frankenstein. Both the philosophical angle, and the richness of the language.

Rich! That’s a good way to describe the writing! It was that as much as it was emotive.

I recently finished a Christian cozy mystery the by title of Brought to Book. There was much eye-rolling and sighing on my part as the character meanders through too many too-obvious thematic threads (with low payoff, might I add) to pad out the story's runtime. I only forced myself through because it had been a gift from a friend. Hopefully I learn from the mistakes made by the author and don't repeat them myself 'cause that's all I got out of it....
Currently partway into Robert Louis Stevenson's The Merry Men, which has nothing to do with Robin Hood, but has held my interest enough thus far.

I have finished some of my previously listed books and added:

A poetry book focused on imperial China with... good writing but a lot of looking at messy human behavior.

A middle-grade dystopian fiction, interesting and thoughtful although with the usual darkness expected of the genre.

A Supergirl comic.