Did you get an assignment, lose a bet, or something? ;-)

I inherited a box full of crumbling old pulp magazines, so I figured I should get around to reading them before they totally disintegrate :)

I hope that box contains more old issues of Astounding than of Amazing. I've been reading lots of old SF magazines myself in recent years, but mostly in digital format, and Astounding was easily the quality SF magazine of the 1940's.

My dad has a small collection of old SF magazines, which I started reading many years ago, and I quickly learnt that Fantastic Universe was mostly SF stories "in disguise"; western, crime or contemporary stories with some SF trappings. But I also learnt that Galaxy, Analog (formerly Astounding) and F&SF were of better quality.

Yeah, there's a good mix that I got. Amazing, Startling, Astounding, Planet Stories, I think some Fantastic and some others I don't recall at the moment. We'll see how it goes - I'm not a huge sci-fi guy, or at least the writers I like most aren't the ones that get talked up the most (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke wouldn't be my "Big 3"...).

I'm now a bit over halfway in the fourth Foundation series novel by Isaac Asimov (Foundation's Edge), and really enjoying it, and are almost prepared to say it is the best one yet.

I got off to a slow start, especially with other projects etc occupying my mind and time.

I certainly feel the writing is better and his style improved.

My reading list for 2020

★★☆ The Hunger / Alma Katsu

Quite nice reading. As a movie I would probably switch it off after a quarter of an hour, but as a book and with all reader's imagination it's a nice entertainment. Good reading, especially in the first part, where the source of the threat has not yet been revealed and the characters' dilemmas bring to mind the atmosphere of genius Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

List of all books read in 2020.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Yes, it's a classic, belonging to a different age... And showing once again why I stay away from them. What pretentious, convoluted, drawn out, pointless prose. What overly theatrical speech and behaviors. What obvious plots that all, as in the hero at first and the villains later, never suspect and unerringly fall for. For that matter, what dastardly, irredeemable villains, and what a hero whose only flaw at first is being too good, too noble, thinking too well of others. And what an almost complete lack of information about how it was all achieved, the time in between the escape and the plan actually being set in motion. That would have been much more interesting, but its place is taken by a sizable portion during which the book seems to just drift off.
Maybe those with a keen interest in the Parisian high society of the period would enjoy the style and all the exhaustive descriptions that overshadow and cast aside everything else. Those with a similar interest in that of Rome may even enjoy the part I see as taking all the book's flaws to an even higher level. Harder to see who might enjoy the talks between Valentine and Maximilian but, in general, some of those who know why the book was written may be willing to pardon the author for a lot, including for simply wanting to show off his interests and preferences. I, however, don't.
I recognize some objective literary value, can also appreciate that the hero loses that initial naivety and gains the necessary ruthlessness but also falls into the clutches of pride and vanity, no longer being flawless, and can find some enjoyable parts, and that the book as a whole does seem to get better after the "nocturnal interview", but don't care to look away even from something like the lack of explanations, or at least translations, for the occasional Latin sayings, much less all the major flaws making me lose track of these relatively rare relevant parts among all the filler. Or, to put it bluntly, the bullshit ending.

Note: Think I read this before, likely in my early teens, but I'm not sure how well I understood it back then if so and not much seemed familiar now. The fact that it would have been translated in Romanian then and it was translated in English now might have also prevented some mental links from forming but, either way, it's pretty much as if I read it the first time.

Rating: 3/5

Well each to their own I guess. I have very fond memories of reading The Count Of Monte Cristo, which was admittedly a long time ago. I class it a classic and perhaps the best Historical Romance I have ever read, full of great intrigue.

I read an English translation ... don't recall which one. In my experience, a translation can make or break a good story.

One also has to factor in the time and location of when the story was written and set, and so you really cannot compare to a modern historical romance. Back when I read it, I was big into that genre, reading quite a few by various authors. I don't think going from something very different to that would do it any favors in this day and age. So for me to read it again, I would want to immerse myself in that genre for a while first, with something written in that period. Not sure if you did that, or went in cold turkey.

finished " The demon Lord of Karanda " at least that is how the exactly translated title would sound, not sure if this is the exact wording the book is known in english. Its the 3d part of the mallorean chronicles written by david eddings.

Our group of adventures made a discovery of world shaking proportion. Imagine to suddenly discover the enemy to be actually a blood relative of a friend, son born out of a friendship that never should have been, a disgruntled lonely queen married to a mad king suddenly founds love and warmth by an emissary hands

anyway, lots going on, the use of nowadays antic feeling wordings does inspire to consciously read the text. Not a bad thing but it does reveal here and there the standard man women cliché used to often... not to mention the cycle of life funnies that somehow both provide for and work against

still the story remains far from boring

will wait a few before starting with the next book in the series.... and to finally try and get in touch with Kobo about retrieving my password which is impossible through regular means, it is somehow a bit off putting the've only provided for live contact which only will be offered if you stare at their chat bot for some minutes

Just finished Different Seasons by Stephen King. I read it when it first came out, and re-reading it all these years later just confirmed for me what a great storyteller he is. Perhaps the best of the last century. Not the best prose stylist, of course -- he doesn't aim to be. But when it comes to the natural gift of creating tension and conjuring up characters in broad strokes that are mostly compelling...I'm not sure there's any other writer that has done it so successfully and consistently over the course of such a huge body of work.

I class it a classic too, as I said, but for me that's a really bad thing for a book, the writing style of the "classics", their characters, the way the settings are used...
Really wouldn't call it a romance though.
And cold turkey, and highly doubt I'd have put up with more than one book of the sort in a short amount of time.

Well, as I have found over the years, some books are hard to read, especially ones written more than a century ago, and especially many of the Classics. To counter that, you really need to immerse yourself in that world, and the first book you read is likely to to be some kind of disappointment until you get into the right mode of mind. I am a huge fan of Rafael Sabatini, who along with Georgette Heyer and Jefferey Farnol wrote somewhat in the vein of Alexandre Dumas, though they were writing many decades later. They were also influenced by the likes of Stanley John Weyman and Mary Johnston, who bridged the gap of years since Alexandre Dumas. You really have to be in the right mood and mindset to read any of them these days. Luckily for me, it is just a matter of getting back into that frame of mind, which is not necessarily easy, but having been there a few times, I know the resulting joy if done right.

I freely admit, it is a wrench after reading modern writers, to get the full joy of reading older works ... even those from 3 or 4 decades ago. It is a similar thing with watching old movies or playing old games ... even older music at times.

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I have finished Foundation's Edge, and it was thoroughly enjoyable, and in my view the best of the series so far. Going by Isaac Asimov's notes at the end of the novel, I should now read some of his other related novels, two of which I already own (The Stars, Like Dust and The End OF Eternity) and two I don't (The Currents Of Space and Pebble In The Sky). A few others I do have and have read, and some are part of the same hardcover omnibus that contains The Foundation Trilogy, as well as The Stars, Like Dust. Those others are Robot stories ... short stories and novels.

As much as I have been enjoying the Foundation novels, I do have regrets that I didn't read them at least 20+ years earlier, where certainly the original Trilogy would likely have made a bigger impact on me. Other novels and stories I have read over the years, by other authors, would also undoubtedly have influenced me, in regard to Space Opera and Galactic notions especially.

Those other authors, would be the likes of Piers Anthony, E.E. Doc Smith, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen Donaldson, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock etc for series and Robert E. Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Barrington J. Bayley, Robert Silverberg and countless others with individual novels. And of course, some of the Robot short stories and novels I have read by Isaac Asimov, were written after the Foundation Trilogy ... so in a sense I have read some of his stories out of order ... something I try not to do, but depends on how or why I start reading an author in the first place. Sometimes, when I have grown to really like an author, I belatedly read their works in the order they wrote them ... or at least the ones i have missed up to that point.

My reading list for 2020

Regarding the classics, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and David Copperfield (but not Pickwick Papers), Tolstoi's War and Peace and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility are still quite readable IMO, with W&P having the most interesting subject matter and S&S easily the least interesting.

Much harder to read is stuff like Ivanhoe and The Worm Ouroboros due to the archaic language being used, but being Norwegian I didn't personally have much problems since olde English is closer to Norwegian than modern English is, so I found these two books very enjoyable.

I found Moby Dick vastly overrated, since 2/3 of the book are like essays about whales and whaling and the first person narrator Ishmael after the first chapters kind of disappears as a character.

As for The Count of Monte Cristo I think I read an abridged and simplified version when I was a kid (as with Ivanhoe), so I watched the 1975 movie instead before reading Alfred Bester's SF version The Stars My Destination.

Overall I've found the old mainstream classics, and also the works by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen, to be quite enjoyable.

Read Ivanhoe 2.5 years ago, in English, and yep, classics, had similar things to say about it: "characters lack depth, to the point that plenty may be best referred to as caricatures. [...] There are frequent lengthy and particularly convoluted descriptions and explanations, likely to bore and even confuse. Speech is particularly forced and theatrical. For that matter, I guess the whole thing can be seen more as a play..." Of course, at a third the size of The Count of Monte Cristo, there was much less of that.
That'd probably be my tolerance for classics, one every couple of years, and if it has at least adventure elements at that. Though now I'm considering grabbing another from the library (and translated in Romanian too), which is likely to turn out badly if I'll actually do it.

Ohhhhhh, i know Learning Jupyter / Dan Toomey. Not a bad book, I was advised at work. They said it was worth reading. But I liked the book better eLearning Solutions on a Shoestring: Help for the Chronically Underfunded Trainer.