Welcome to Gaia! ::

For anyone interested in sci-fi books, the Nights Dawn book series is really good. It's written by Peter F. Hamilton and comprises of these books:

• The Reality Dysfunction
  
• The Neutronium Alchemist
  
• The Naked God
  
• A Second Chance at Eden (just a collection of short stories in the Nights Dawn universe)
  

whee

Alright, so I might as well get it out of the way now and recommend my favorite books series...The Hitchhiker's Guide "Trilogy" by Douglas Adams.

Consists of:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless

...and possibly Salmon of Doubt, which is a collection of other such things by Adams that could have gone into a sixth book before he died.

If you don't know what the series is about, then you may have been living under a rock...but basically it's a sci-fi comedy about a simple ape-descendant named Arthur who finds himself traveling the galaxy after the Earth gets blown up to make way for a hyperspatial express route.


If you don't like the thought of reading 5 books (or at least checking out the radio series!) or going for the obvious Adams books, then I recommend Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, both of which are also highly enjoyable and about a strange detective who solves cases with the belief in the interconnectivity of all things.

xd

Douglas Adams is so very quotable~

Indeed, the books are very short and are very easy to read. The only problem I have is that I keep rereading passages over and over because I love them so much.

I read the Hitchhiker's Guide and the Restaurant, but I'm sorry to say I don't remember much of either. I'll have to look into those. Perhaps the base library has them. I do remember them being quite off the wall. 3nodding

And yes, Thal, I think I heard about him sometime last year. My Honors Lit. teacher was the most well-read person I knew at the time, and she spoke briefly about him. Unfortunately, memory fails me miserably, and I can't remember what all she was talking about. It's pretty cool that you went to school with a [famous] writer.

I'm currently hosting a contest in the ATG clan...

So Colfer is picking up the series? That makes me curious enough to want to read that series now.

...The prize is 5k. Why not swing by and check it out?

I highly recommend The Last Aprrentice by Joseph Delaney. It's a series of five books at the moment, and is my absolute favorite thing to read. It's about this guy named Tom who is apprenticed to the local Spook, who's job it is to rid the area of creepy-crawlies. The most interesting feature of the books is the continuing sub-plot about Tom's friend Alice. It's very well-written.

The Moonstone
By Wilkie Collins

Considered to be the first English mystery novel, the Moonstone is an epistolary novel concerning the disappearance of a precious Indian gem -- called the Moonstone -- from the hands of its current owner, a young Miss Rachel Verinder, who received the stone (possibly with the mere motive of aggravating the young miss's mother) from a family friend on Miss Verinder's date of birth. Mysteriously, the stone disappears from Miss Verinder's possession and the entire family and guests of the estate charge themselves to finding the whereabouts of the stone. The novel ends in a very strange twist involving the use of Opium, which was common during the time in which this book was written.

As Tsuji-kun has mentioned in the Phunkeh Thread many nights past, the book is quite dry and quite saturated in British lexicon and mannerisms. I pray, no, beg you to consider reading it regardless; I promise an amusing storyline with love, murder, and unexpected happiness intermingled in the words and the letters of each person writing in the book (yes, the book is a collection of letters, diary entries, and other accounts written by the other characters).

Each character, I believe, under all the stuffiness of Romantic-Era English, is wonderfully entrenched in qualities that make them all equally lovable, and equally capable of being the victim in the story. I imagine people sympathising with the feelings of Miss Rachel Verinder; Mr. Franklin Blake, her love; Rosanna Spearman, a lame servant with an infatuation for Mr. Blake; Gabriel Betteredge, the family's head servant; Miss Drusilla Clack, a "Jehova's Witness" kind of person; and all the others that appear in the story.

So. Yeah. Read. Enjoy. It's a public domain work, so I guarantee that it will be freely found somewhere on the Internet -- most likely Project Gutenberg. But there's nothing like having the physical book in your hands.

When We Were Orphans
石黒 一雄（カズオ・イシグロ） -- Kazuo Ishiguro

If you haven't noticed by that first review, I'm a bit of a Mystery Novel nut. I've read the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes when I was but a wee child, and it's something that has always interested me. I will regret, however, that I read When We Were Orphans as a requirement for a class rather than for my own enjoyment. However, after returning to it, with the eyes of reading for reading's sake, I found it to be an excellent novel concerning one man's desire to be reunited once more to his parents.

Christopher Banks was separated, at a young age, from his parents in China. At a young age he could not comprehend exactly why his parents disappeared, but he made it a goal to eventually find them. Many many years pass, and Banks is now an adult and a detective working in England. One day he finds information that could lead him, finally, toward the whereabouts of his parents.

This is less of a mystery novel, I own, than the Moonstone, but an aire of mystery still surrounds it. Instead, I found much revelry in Christopher Bank's collection of the events of his childhood, and how his character develops as a child to an adult. It felt so incredibly human to read the events as Banks narrated it; one could almost feel pity for the man when he loses some control of his high-British-bred logic near the climax of the story.

Again, an excellent read -- especially for the people who would prefer a more contemporary novel rather than the stuffy classic that is The Moonstone.

So I just finished Virtual Light by William Gibson. Chevette Washington (a bike messenger) and Berry Rydell (an ex-cop turned private security officer) end up at the wrong end of pursuit when Chevette steals a seemingly innocuous pair of dark-rimmed glasses... It was enjoyable, but I wouldn't recommend it to a first time Gibson reader. I think Pattern Recognition (Cayce Pollard, an advertising consultant, is contracted to find the source of a series of mysterious viral videos that have been popping up around the web), or what he's best known for, Neuromancer.

Anyway, I'm also reading American Lion by Jon Meacham (a biography about Andrew Jackson), Getting Things Done by David Allen, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. At this point I cannot recommend One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at all, as I have been struggling to finish it for about a year and a half now simply as a matter of principle.