Author Topic: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?  (Read 189754 times)

Offline JediJman

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #405 on: May 18, 2008, 11:56 AM »
I just burned through this one in three hours today. I read it several times as a kid but I wanted to reread it before I see the film.

Three hours!?  How many pages is this?  I read this series like 20 years ago, but they sure seemed like longer stories back then...Or maybe you're just a speed reader!  ;)
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Offline Phrubruh

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #406 on: May 18, 2008, 06:07 PM »
It's a fairly short book. My wife did it in about three hours.
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Offline Phrubruh

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #407 on: May 18, 2008, 06:21 PM »
Just starting The Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra.



Destiny propels an agnostic journalist to rediscover his faith in this intriguing paranormal puzzler about a mysterious bilocating lady in blue from bestseller Sierra (The Secret Supper). In 1629, Sister María Jesús de Ágreda appeared more than 500 times to the Jumano Indians of New Mexico and converted them to Christianity—without ever leaving her monastery in Spain. (The Inquisition suspected her of witchcraft.) In 1991, Spanish journalist Carlos Albert interviews Giuseppe Baldi, a Benedictine priest and musicologist about his 1972 Chronovision machine reported to recapture sounds as well as images from the past. (The Vatican censured Baldi.) Albert later stumbles on Ágreda's monastery in Spain, while in Los Angeles, Jennifer Narody, a former U.S. intelligence agent working on a secret project for the Vatican, deals with unusual dreams and receives a startling stolen religious text. Sierra's heady tale about a true flying nun should entertain Christian paranormal buffs, though some readers might have welcomed more about that Chronovision time machine
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Offline Nathan

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #408 on: May 18, 2008, 11:20 PM »
Three hours!?  How many pages is this?  I read this series like 20 years ago, but they sure seemed like longer stories back then...Or maybe you're just a speed reader!  ;)

My edition was 223 pages, but in about a 12-point font and there are illustrations. There's not much to it, especially compared to the dense tomes I'm used to slogging through.

though some readers might have welcomed more about that Chronovision time machine

That's actually based on a "real" Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti and his Chronovisor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronovisor
http://bn.lithium.com/bn/board/message?board.id=jslb&thread.id=9
http://www.theladyinblue.net/chronovisiorproject.php
http://www.newpara.com/Vatican_Time.htm
« Last Edit: May 18, 2008, 11:23 PM by Nathan »
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Offline Phrubruh

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #409 on: May 19, 2008, 10:21 AM »
Cool. I really eat this stuff up. It sounds a lot more fun than "The Last Templar" that I read a few months back about the journal or gospel that Jesus kept.
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Offline Nathan

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #410 on: May 29, 2008, 02:57 AM »


Mix the post-apocalyptic and steampunk genres, Alexander the Great, World War One, neo-Victorian British colonialism, and Kevin Costner's The Postman, and you have this.

(Anybody remember The Postman? Take all the electronics out of the equation, change the ending so that Will Patton's general character wins instead, project a few more centuries into the future and you basically have the society in this novel.)

Structurally, it is a little weird to get one's brain around since it is cast as an annotated memoir looking back from even further in the future. I shamelessly steal Wikipedia's description:

Quote
The novel takes the form of an autobiography by a twenty-fifth century soldier, Brigadier General Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce, of the Yukon Confederacy, as edited by a prudish, bigoted academian of the twenty-sixth century, Professor Roland Modesty Van Buren. Bruce's story chronicles (and criticizes) the career of Lord Isaac Prophet Fitzpatrick, a consul of the fictional Yukon Confederacy whose life closely parallels that of Alexander the Great. This unique style allows the reader to simultaneously learn the "official history" of Fitzpatrick as well as the revisionist version of Bruce's purported work.

Borders dubbed it "a future-fiction alternative history" and posted an essay by the author explaining the story and concept.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2008, 03:05 AM by Nathan »
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Offline Phrubruh

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #411 on: May 29, 2008, 10:06 AM »
Now I'm onto Prey by Michael Crichton. So far so good except for the parts about programmers working 18 hour days in silicon valley. That doesn't happen anymore because under California law, if your not a manager your paid hourly expectally in the IT departments. Our bank got slapped with a lawsuit from the IT department against these kind of work schedules. Now I've got to keep a time sheet.  :(



In Prey, bestselling author Michael Crichton introduces bad guys that are too small to be seen with the naked eye but no less deadly or intriguing than the runaway dinosaurs that made 1990's Jurassic Park such a blockbuster success.
High-tech whistle-blower Jack Forman used to specialize in programming computers to solve problems by mimicking the behavior of efficient wild animals--swarming bees or hunting hyena packs, for example. Now he's unemployed and is finally starting to enjoy his new role as stay-at-home dad. All would be domestic bliss if it were not for Jack's suspicions that his wife, who's been behaving strangely and working long hours at the top-secret research labs of Xymos Technology, is having an affair. When he's called in to help with her hush-hush project, it seems like the perfect opportunity to see what his wife's been doing, but Jack quickly finds there's a lot more going on in the lab than an illicit affair. Within hours of his arrival at the remote testing center, Jack discovers his wife's firm has created self-replicating nanotechnology--a literal swarm of microscopic machines. Originally meant to serve as a military eye in the sky, the swarm has now escaped into the environment and is seemingly intent on killing the scientists trapped in the facility. The reader realizes early, however, that Jack, his wife, and fellow scientists have more to fear from the hidden dangers within the lab than from the predators without.

The monsters may be smaller in this book, but Crichton's skill for suspense has grown, making Prey a scary read that's hard to set aside, though not without its minor flaws. The science in this novel requires more explanation than did the cloning of dinosaurs, leading to lengthy and sometimes dry academic lessons. And while the coincidence of Xymos's new technology running on the same program Jack created at his previous job keeps the plot moving, it may be more than some readers can swallow. But, thanks in part to a sobering foreword in which Crichton warns of the real dangers of technology that continues to evolve more quickly than common sense, Prey succeeds in gripping readers with a tense and frightening tale of scientific suspense. --Benjamin Reese --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.







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Offline jjks

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #412 on: May 29, 2008, 12:15 PM »


Not getting the best of reviews, but it's Chuck so I have to check it out.

Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #413 on: May 29, 2008, 09:47 PM »
Just finished up A Journey Long And Strange... great book.

Now reading The Eaters of the Dead.

Offline JediJman

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #414 on: May 29, 2008, 11:52 PM »
Now reading The Eaters of the Dead.

Yikes.  100 word or less synopsis?  Is it about Zombies?
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Offline Phrubruh

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #415 on: May 30, 2008, 09:47 AM »
Eaters of the Dead is a Michael Crichton book about Vikings.



The year is A.D. 922. A refined Arab courtier, representative of the powerful Caliph of Bagdad, encounters a party of Viking warriors who are journeying to the barbaric North. He is appalled by their Viking customs -- the wanton sexuality of their pale, angular women, their disregard for cleanliness . . .

their cold-blooded human sacrifices. But it is not until they reach the depths of the Northland that the courtier learns the horrifying and inescapable truth: He has been enlisted by these savage, inscrutable warriors to help combat a terror that plagues them -- a monstrosity that emerges under cover of night to slaughter the Vikings and devour their flesh . . .
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Offline JediJman

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #416 on: May 30, 2008, 09:34 PM »
Yet another reason to cheer for the Packers over the Vikings. Blech.
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Offline Scott

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #417 on: May 30, 2008, 09:46 PM »
Yet another reason to cheer for the Packers over the Vikings. Blech.
::)


Offline Nathan

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #418 on: May 30, 2008, 10:50 PM »
Justin, it is also the book that was the basis of the Antonio Banderas movie The Thirteenth Warrior.

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Offline JediJman

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #419 on: May 30, 2008, 11:18 PM »
Yet another reason to cheer for the Packers over the Vikings. Blech.
::)



Nice try Scotty, but we all know you can't read.    ;D

Justin, it is also the book that was the basis of the Antonio Banderas movie The Thirteenth Warrior.

Ooo...okay, I actually liked that movie.  Okay, I take it back.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2008, 11:19 PM by JediJman »
Climbed a mountain & never came back. I will not quit & I always fight back 
From this moment for all my life. What could I say? Was born to be this way. And what could I say?  Just livin' for today