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TM's books in 2012


Time to start my annual book review thread! Feel free to comment about any of the books posted here. I read a lot of fiction and this is a good place for me to just put up a quick review. If it's a book that I think deserves some serious discussion or I just really want to highlight it, I will make a new thread about it.

If you are an avid reader too, feel free to start a book review thread too! Some years I just read too many to make a separate post for each and every one. Don't want to get too cluttered!

Feel free to comment or ask questions about any of the books here!

Each post will have the book title, author, publication date and the format I read the book (audio, paper, electronic). Sometimes the format can really affect my opinion...

Last edited by TexasMadness, 1/30/2012, 5:08 pm
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Re: TM's books in 2012


A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, 1996 (audio)

Yeah! Awesome fantasy novel. It was made into an HBO TV series during 2011 and hubby and I watched it. I thought was incredible and my brother mentioned the reason it was so good was that it closely follows the books and they are even better. So I finally got around to reading it.

It's a medieval fantasy world (knights, kings, etc). The known world consists of the Seven Kingdoms - long ago united into being ruled by a single king - and a continent of free cities and vast plains ruled by a nomadic people that practically live on horseback (a neat non-fantastical version of Centaurs). As the title suggests, the great family houses in the kingdom are at constant tension to rule the lands.

I like how this book isn't the typical "good vs. evil" of a lot of fantasy novels, or even having just a few main characters. The novel changes perspective between 8 characters and gives you a rich background for all the action in the book. The people are real - having both a good and bad side and acting like real humans. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

It's the first book in a currently 5 book, planned to be 7 book series. Not sure if HBO is going to follow it all, but the first season is for the first book and I believe the second season will be the second book. It will air in April I think. I'm starting the second soon!

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Re: TM's books in 2012


Oh...this sounds like a series I would enjoy! I will have to look into this.



---
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Re: TM's books in 2012


It's a pretty "serious" fantasy story. I mean, there's people you care about getting killed or hurt. Some fairly explicit violence described. And more sexuality than I'm usually comfortable with in a novel. I actually didn't notice it that much until it was pointed out to me as being "over the top". I actually thought it fit in so well with the characters (it's almost always between the same two characters) that it didn't seem out of place. It's just who they are.

Anyway, it's certainly not for everyone. I think Firle started it but didn't like it. So far, 4 of my family members have read it and all have loved it. My dad and I were reading at the same time. He would call me up every few days and say "have you gotten to the part...." and want to talk about what a scoundrel so-and-so was or something like that. It was fun!
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The violence stuff doesn't really bother me when I know it's not real.....the sex stuff, I tend to just skip over the 'in-detail' parts, unless it's not overly explicit, and then I may read it to help solidify a character in my mind. usually, if it repeats throughout, I'll find myself skipping on to less intimate stuff. Just not big into all the sex in so many books these days.

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Re: TM's books in 2012


Physics of Stellar Evolution and Cosmology by Howard Goldberg and Michael Scardron, 1981 (paper)

I don't usually post books that I've read for work on here, but this one took up a lot of my non-work time this last week! Not only was I trying to hurry along my research, but the book is simply fascinating and I couldn't put it down.

The book covers the complete evolution of a star, from the tiny particles called Interstellar Matter, to a young hydrogen burning star like our own, big red giants, tiny white dwarfs and finally various forms of supernovae, neutron stars and even black holes.

The book was quite heavy on math, but the prose was exceptionally well written for an actual textbook. It's rare to find a "good read" in a textbook - usually you have to turn to science writers who write for layman but then you miss a lot of important technical details. But these authors were writing to a science audience, including all the nitty gritty (and sometimes scary!) math and just made it entertaining.

I learned an incredible amount from the book, and honestly I wasn't really expecting to. I thought I "got" how stars were formed but there were incredible details that really changed my perception of the whole thing.

I'm actually more in awe now of the universe before I read the book. You'd think that gaining concrete knowledge would make the subject seem more mundane, but it truly is fascinating, magical even, how everything around us has come to be. Wow!
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Re: TM's books in 2012


Boy, I'm plodding through books this year! Of course, I read The Biology of Belief and that wasn't posted...but still, I'm up to four books - in three months!

Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin, 1999 (audio)

Sequel to Game of Thrones. The story just keeps getting better! Some series books are entirely separate stories themselves, but these books are simply 'episodes' in the whole story. So when the first one ended, NOTHING was resolved - in fact, things were just heating up...the Game of Thrones was just beginning. Now, there are nearly half a dozen claims to the throne and lots of fighting and intrigue. Great story lines and some new point-of-view characters as well.

I started the third one minutes after I finished this. I had planned on taking a break and reading something else but I couldn't wait to keep the story going!

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I'm gonna have to see if they have this availablef or Kindle, and if so, how much the e-edition is. I still think this is a series I'd enjoy.

---
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Re: TM's books in 2012


*writes note to self to send Saijen CDs of the audio books!*
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Re: TM's books in 2012


LOL... the trip is sneaking up on me!!! YIKES!

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~~@Saijen@~~
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