I don't know what the heck to call this thread!

[Slam_Bradley]

Yeah, that's a great one. Is it just me though,or have his more recent novels not quite been up to snuff?

I don't know. I've been slowly working my way through his stuff. So haven't tried anything new yet.

[Moriarty]

The First World War by John Keegan. only about 70-80 pages into this but its very interesting. sometimes the facts are so dense it can be hard to get through a chapter. i love history but the first World War isn't something i know a lot about so i'm enjoying it.

[Deathstroke]

I finished Robert K. Tanenbaum's novel Capture yesterday.

[CaptainCanada]

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

This is the Richard Pevear translation (available in Canada in a deluxe edition with illustrations by the artist who did the graphic novel autobiography of Louis Riel, for some reason), and he's evidently as good with French as he is with Russian (though he needs his wife for that; here he's working solo). This is one of those stories that has been adapted up the wazoo for as long as there have been media for it to be adapted into (I fondly recall the Albert the Fifth Musketeer animated show when I was a kid), but most of them don't include a good amount of it (though there's not nearly so much unadapted material as there was in, say, The Count of Monte Cristo). One can see why this is often held up as the greatest adventure novel ever written.

[CaptainCanada]

The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings by Octavio Paz (Nobel Laureate #54; halfway there!)

Finished the other half of this after finishing that book. Paz was a Mexican essayist and poet -- this is a collection of his most famous non-fiction work (The Labyrinth of Solitude, which takes up slightly more than half of the book's 400 pages) and various followups and related pieces he wrote in the following thirty years. Actually, some of the followups (most notably "The Other Mexico" and "Mexico and the United States") I found to be more interesting than the main work, though one suspects it would be of more interest to an actual Mexican, or at least someone with more experience with the country. Anyway, Paz talks about a range of aspects of Mexican cultural development and identity, and larger themes of Western civilization's development. Interesting stuff.

[Slam_Bradley]

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

This one jumps right up there among my favorite Discworld books. Probably not quite on par with Small Gods, but in the neighborhood. I like the growth of Vimes and Carrot. The general skewering of police procedurals. The use of the various lance-constables. Fun stuff.

Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich.

I'm of two minds about this one. On the one hand...it's perilously close to the same plot as The Bride Wore Black. On the other hand it was written later in Woolrich's career and he was a better writer. Generally considered near the top of his oeuvre, it's generally stronger than most of the other books of his that I've read.

[Karl O'Neill]

I read Foe by J.M Coetzee.

A brilliaint re-telling of Robinson Crusoe, also a nice piece on the nature of storytelling, the power of language and is written in typically lucid Coetzee prose.

Give this man more prizes!

[Deathstroke]

I finished Michael Connelly's The Drop today.

[Moriarty]

Black Hills by Dan Simmons.

[Slam_Bradley]

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen.

Good popular history book about the first circumnavigation. I really didn't know much about Magellan other than what little I gleaned from a Western Civ class. This seemed like a reasonably complete account of the voyage which apparently had access to some previously untranslated material. Quite well written and reasonably balanced account.

[Castel]

Mort, Terry Pratchett.

Short but pleasant. Honestly, that could make one hell of a good movie with a decent director cause there is some really, really good scenes in that book.

Like for example the scene with Mort and the old witch, or the first long talk between Ysabell and Mort or again the final showdown with Death.

That's good stuff, real good stuff.

[CaptainCanada]

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Not quite what I was expecting, in many ways. Given Dostoyevsky's reputation, the last thing I imagined was a redemptive ending. Anyway, this is one of those novels where you can immediately see why it became a classic. It also, interestingly, deconstructs Nietzche decades before he even started publishing his theories. The plot is becomes a little Dickens-style contrived in places, but that's the 19th century novel for you.

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The third of Singer's novels that I've read, and perhaps The Slave (the first) set a particularly high bar, but neither of the next two really measured up to that or to the short story collection that I've read by him. This isn't a bad story by any means, and has some very tense scenes, but I've seen this listed as one of his best works, and I don't think I'd quite put it up there.

New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) by Czeslaw Milosz

I've been picking my way through this over the last month or so; there's only so much of one man's poetry that you can read at a time, and this thing is 750 pages. Huge poetry collections like this are a bit hard to rate; there's a lot of five-star material here, and long sections of poems (and some prose; there's a great piece on the death of Christopher Robin Milne) that didn't especially interest me. I thought the best work were from the first two post-World War II collections (the scraps of material from the 1930s are pretty unremarkable) and toward the end, where he becomes especially fixated on his own mortality (and rivers). I'd previously read his non-fiction The Captive Mind.

[Moriarty]

Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire.

[Ilash]

Oh yeah, I finished Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a little while back and I thought it was pretty much a masterpiece. And the film's fantastic too.

Up next: Going South by Robert McCammon.

[Roquefort Raider]

Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire.

I quite liked his Wicked novel; how is Out of Oz?