June 2014 Reading List

I am late this month in getting this out -- books read this past June:

1. Wool (Omnibus Edition) by Hugh Howey
2. The Fracking King by James Browning
3. Misquoting Jesus by Bart D Ehrman
4. Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson
5. A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin
6. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

 When it comes to Wool, I was a little behind the 8 ball.  Howey self published his book and Amazon were offering it up really cheap to begin with.  But with new authors its really hard to know whether something is good or not.  Well it wasn't until this book was picked up by a publisher that I thought there must be something to it.  So with that said I have to admit that Wool is fantastic!  From the end of the first short "book" I was stunned and hooked.  I devoured the rest as quickly as time permitted me.  The silo world that Howey creates is unique and a fresh spin on the usual apocalyptic genre.  I will be reading more by him in future including some of the other books about the Silo.

The Fracking King was a quick read bringing together two subjects that I would never have guessed at -- scrabble and fracking.  There's plenty to learn about both and so this novel has a good message to bring to the fore.  But I found myself getting lost at times in the narrative and just wanted to get to the end.

I've written before about my fascination with how Christianity came about from an historical perspective.  Ehrman is one of my favorite authors in this area and Misquoting is, I think, an essential book to read to understand how historical researchers establish their findings from ancient manuscripts.  It is amazing to learn how the modern Bible came about and surprising at how the faithful take for granted so many mistakes as truth.  I respect all people's faiths but I think that anyone that takes this type of research seriously, even Christians, will challenge their faith as Ehrman did and come to some unsettling conclusions.

With the release of Wilson's second robot apocalypse novel I decided it was probably time I read the first one.  The premise started off well but I quickly became disappointed with learning how the story was going to unfold.  I couldn't help but think that the mostly first person narrative was a little melodramatic.  That perhaps I was visualizing a video game where your objective was to be the various characters and take out Archos.  I removed the second book in the series from my wishlist.

What can be said about Game of Thrones that hasn't already been said?  I've been chugging through Dance for several months now (I always read more than one book at a time) and this month I finally finished it.  When I first started it I had no idea it was contemporaneous with Book 4 so I was confused until I read online about it -- then all made sense.  I enjoyed Book 5 so much more than 4 though and am anxious to get on with Book 6 now.  I read recently that HBO plans to finish the Series with 3 more seasons.  That means that they must cover Books 4 and 5 and two more unpublished books to do so.  Obviously that will be without the last two books coming out first.  This explains much of what I observed in Season 4 where aspects of the plot were coming forward in time, out of sequence with the other pieces of Book 3's plot.  I therefore now have different expectations of the tv series than the books but still enjoy both.

I was after a few quick reads this month and Reluctant Fundamentalist was in my sights.  Especially since a movie version was released recently and I was interested to watch it.  I didn't know quite what expect but this story was not it. Especially the ending. I thought the protagonist was overly hung up on his girlfriend but perhaps his nationalistic pride would come out in any of us. The end though was out of sorts with the deeds. So it was just ok for me.