Theatre Board Book Group

zsazsa I love the idea of this thread. Thank you for starting it. I've been looking at New York in bookshops for a while and you may have nudged me towards it.

I'm currently reading He Said She Said by Erin Kelly which I am finding gripping. She's been too long doing Broadchurch and I've missed her books. I'm half way through and still waiting for her trademark killer twist....

I read a lot of crime and any recommendations would be gratefully received as I've read everything by Mark Billingham (the king) Jane Casey and Sarah Hilary (the queens) to name but 3.  I'm also going to be a named character in a best-selling author's next book (not telling!) from an auction I won on Ebay for Clic Sargent last year.

Viserys, if you like historical fiction (and musicals) try Gore Vidal's brilliant novel, Burr - the other side of the Alexander Hamilton saga.

I'm a geek, so tend to read sci-fi and fantasy and a bit of so-called 'urban fantasy', but I like a bit of historical fiction/fantasy too. I tend to get hooked on a particular author at a time. Long-time favourites are Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, Naomi Novik, Patrick O'Brien, Bernard Cornwell (though he does also annoy me at times). I'm a sucker for an ongoing series so managed to stick with Robert Jordan right to the end and have made it through George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) books so far - though he is also stretching my patience.

At the moment I am finishing up a re-read Patricia Briggs' werewolf series.

Not very high-brow, I'm afraid, but I did my degree in English Lit, so feel I've served by time with the classics.

You could try Sabine Durrant and Nicci French. Nicci French's Frieda Klein books are good as are What to Do When Someone Dies and Until it's Over. 

OMG, I love me some Pratchett. Not so keen on Bernard Cornwell, I liked the Sharpe TV adaptation, but the books annoyed me somehow - the eternally cool hero who has a damsel in distress swooning at his feet in every book. I'm presently wondering if I should give The Last Kingdom books a go. The story seems interesting enough but I can't cope with the pretty boy-guyliner bloke they cast as Uthred in the TV version.

As for GRRM, I love the TV version Game of Thrones as you can probably tell from my screen name here, but the books are incredibly verbose and long-winded. Found myself skipping through parts of the last book. I still appreciate him for writing interesting three-dimensional female characters though and will read the last books (if they ever come out), especially now that the TV version has veered wildly off on its own trajectory.

I've heard good stuff of McMaster Bujold, is there a book you'd recommend "for beginners" ?



Okay - I've put it on my Amazon wish list (aka "books I need to remember to buy at some point") and will read it later in the year before I se the show. Thanks!

I'm about to start reading the new Bernie Gunther thriller Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr, one of my favourite series, among the Harry Bosch series from Michael Connelly, the David Baldacci thrillers and the Jack Reacher books from Lee Child. Other favourite authors are Ian Rankin, Peter James, Nelson DeMille, Tess Gerritsen and Glenn Meade. Oh, and I'm really looking forward to reading the new Ken Follett novel that'll be released this September.

Currently, there are eight books in my shelf waiting to be read, and quite a few are pre-ordered on Amazon.

Currently reading Junky by William S Burroughs and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson.

I wonder if the S's stand for Sodomy?

viserys Yes, the amount of rape and sexual assault in Bernard Cornwell is really annoying. People tend to plead 'historical accuracy' when you complain about it but when an author features in it in almost every book I think it's less historical accuracy and more lazy plot device. The Last Kingdom books I have stuck with purely because I have an interest in the era (did a lot of Anglo-Saxon at uni) and think it's a fascinating and little-known story. Annoyingly Cornwall doesn't capture the difference in attitudes to women pre-Norman conquest - there's evidence that aristocratic women had more power and authority than he allows them, but he seems to think that women in ye olden days always had the same downtrodden and abused status even when they end up as the acknowledged ruler of a kingdom, There's considerably less guy-liner in the books than the TV show and a lot more swearing and violence.

Bujold is great! She writes both fantasy and sci-fi, with her sci-fi series being the better-known. I started with the fantasy - I picked up Curse of Chalion in the library to read on the bus and was so absorbed in it I missed my stop. That's the first of her 'Five Gods' fantasy series. The sci-fi series - the Vorkosigan saga - actually has multiple potential starting points and is written to be new-reader friendly at any point - each novel is a standalone story, though there are mini-sequences that link up. She basically jumped around in her characters' timelines as she wrote, so publication order isn't necessarily chronological order. She started out writing about two characters from different planets meeting in the middle of a conflict and then jumped to writing about their son - most of the books are from his POV but the most recent one circled back around to his mother. I started with Cordelia's Honor (which is 2 books combined - Barrayar and Shards of Honor) which is the parents' story - but many people start with The Warrior's Apprentice - about their son, Miles. Bujold was inspired by the Hornblower series and follows Miles throughout his career - doing some genre-mixing as he encounters different situations. So there are some books that are space opera and some that are more detective stories, and one or two romantic comedies in there too.

Didn't mean that we all read the same book. Just an opportunity to share our thoughts on our current/latest reads.

'Pretty boy guyliner bloke' is OK by me as Uhtred, though all those 'oops I've forgotten to put my shirt on again' scenes are perhaps starting to stretch credibility. ;-)

I got the first of the Last Kingdom books as an offer on my Kindle. Enjoyed it fine (had already seen the TV series by then) but after a while it did start to feel a bit, 'they have this battle and then something personal happens and then they have yet another battle'.

I believe she makes it all up as she goes along, so she probably doesn't want to box herself in by revealing too much until she needs them. Though she does say, about the various inconsistencies that have cropped up over the series, 'the author reserves the right to have A Better Idea'. She seems fascinated by demographics and reproduction/children, though - I could see her writing more about Cetaganda as a society where the older generation are very long-lived, power and money resides with them, and the young feel the system isn't offering much for them at the moment and they will have to wait an awfully long time for their elders to retire. But that sounds like A Serious Novel and she is semi-retired now and mainly writing lighter stuff.

I really liked his Century trilogy.

Biggest problem with the third novel of the Knightsbridge series will be that I don't remember much about the first two books anymore, and I must admit that I'm not too keen on re-reading 2x1200 pages. But I guess I'm not the only one, so hopefully it won't require too much background knowledge.