I just finished reading " The Watchmen".

yeah, yeah, wayyyyy behind. But man, it was soooo goood! My jaw dropped last night when.. well.. stuff happened and pretty much stayed open for the next several pages.. and then a nice lil " Omg" at the last page.

If they can pull the movie off, it will be amazing.

Are you talking about The Watchmen, Stu? It's a great book. Moore is a genius.

...

Also, I've just finished (finally) Maus after three years on and off. What a brilliant story, can't believe it took me this long to get into.

Another one I finished recently was The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. A great, intelligent vampire novel, with excellent historical detail/ research and a brilliant sense of dread, horror and fascination throughout, without ever being too explicitly violent or obscene. Loved it.

I just finished reading Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy, which I'd been eagerly anticipating reading for some time.  And I'm not sure if I like the ending or not- it's got more in common with her Tawny Man books than the Farseer series (and spoilers for the wicked) the actual climax occurs around three-quarters of the way through, and the rest of the story basically sets up the happy ending.  I eventually realised that the entire point of including Orandula at all was that Nevare would have a reason to be separated from Soldier's Boy and marry his woman at the end.  The fact that his father doesn't remember how he treated him when he was fat seems a bit like a copout, although the strength of Hobb's writing and character is such that I did tear up a bit when Nevare got that last letter.  Anyway, Nevare pretty much gets what he always wanted handed to him.  I much preferred the end of the Farseer trilogy, where Fitz is left with nothing and has to make his own ending out of what he can find.  Still, knowing Robin Hobb, this may not be the last we've heard of Nevare Burvelle, though it seems it's her new thing to spend the last 150 pages making sure the hero is comfortable.

Also, they're some of the weirdest fantasy I've ever read.  What the eff.

One of my favorites. It probably made you sad because Holden is easy to relate to, especially for people with depression. Personally I see a lot of my own thoughts and mannerisms in Holden.

Disco Stu is going to burst through the wall next to where you're sitting and just start punching you and punching you.

The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer. I don't think I will ever complain about anything bad happening to me ever again. Seriously. Jesus.

The last one I finished was a hilarious contemporary romance novel, but there's too must smirking testosterone in here to mention that one even though it was really good and really, really funny.

Before that it was my ARC of David Carr's "The Night of the Gun", which was a memoir about how fun it is to do coke until responsibilities get in the way and it's not fun anymore. I think. Anyway, it was really good! I highly recommend it to all, especially journalists and/or coke/crack fiends.

I'm almost done with the third Harper Connelly book by Charlaine Harris- "An Ice Cold Grave". The murder mystery in this is even darker than the past ones and the crimes are actually pretty painful to read about- but dammit she writes so well I can't put it down easily.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire.

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love the central conceit, namely, an attempt to flesh out the backstory of the Witch and try to explain what made her the way she was when Dorothy finally met her. I love that sort of stuff, that examining of old stories in a new light, and the book is all about challenging the notions of Good and Evil. Why is the Wicked Witch Wicked? Who says so? We already know the Wizard was a charlatan and a liar, so why should we belive anything he says about the Witch? Wicked allows us to find out for ourselves.

Except it kind of doesn't. Maguire (and this is the first book by him that I've read) struck me in this as being quite willing to push his inventive and interesting story aside to conduct a series of lectures. The narrative will come to a screaming halt, and we'll spend the next few pages being lectured to about the Nature of Evil, and how it affects Society and on and on, in a very jarring way. All of those themes could have been integrated into the narrative itself but he doesn't seem to want to let his story get in the way of his themes.

In one particular scene which took me right out of the book, Elphaba (the Witch's name, made by stringing the initials of original Oz writer L Frank Baum together) does something fairly terrible, and then proceeds to attend a high society dinner party which allows everyone there to have a discussion on the nature of Evil. Remember, she's fleeing the authorities at this point, and confesses who she is, but instead of becoming frightened, they conduct what reads like a graduate thesis on Evil and its role in society and religion. They do this by at least two pages of unattributed dialogue, intended to represent the guests at the party conducting a lively debate. It's juvenile.

Overall I was disappointed, and not just because I'm a fan of the musical they made from this, which distills the themes and characters down brilliantly and delivers them in a way which is both heart wrenching and hilarious. I love the idea behind this but I think Maguire was a little too clever for his own good. He got in the way and bogged down what would have been an instant classic if he had acheived everything he set out to do. As it is, it's an interesting and not unenjoyable read, and if you like that sort of thing you should check it out. But ultimately I was left disappointed.

Just finished Dante's Inferno and am halfway through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Been having a bit of an old-school bug going.