h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Actually.....yes.
Not Stardust yet, though. Should get that, as Neverwhere was such a wonderful book.

So...Minette Walters, hey? The Alienist is a very good book.
You went book shopping with no discount? Dear oh dear.

You must be the only one here who has not read Lord of the RIngs ten thousand times over (think Rob. Or try not to think Rob).
And Good Omens. I hear that's very good too. But I can't seem to find my copy....

I think I might know where your copy is

wow .. its certainly quiet since we've been slogging away at the column -- but its almost done (Im so exited)

~Beeblefish

I think part of the quiet comes from so many people gone for the Hols. I have no worries that we will get back to our old styles ... even if we have to find people and forcefully drag them here

Courtesy

Gemma, I think there are a couple of copies of the Ring on the shelves in here -- look in Courtesy's corner!

I think traffic will increase in the next couple of days... the
students are trickling back now.

Beeble & Courtesy, did you get the Dune jpg? Does it need to be
smallerized? Would you prefer something different? How many moons
does Arrakis have anyhow?

Making my way through Hogfather quite happily, and Enders War
arrived in the mail yesterday, being the first two books in the
series. I have a thing about reading books in order, even when the
author tries to make each member of a series reasonably self-
contained. I have ordered a book with the first two Discworld
books anthologized.

So see, I'm listening to youse guys!

Lil

hi there,
err....if i can be so bold as to put my five top book type choices down, i would have to go for....(where did i put that drum roll?)
...in reverse order....
No5. The Illiad By Homer
No4. Otherland Part 1,2 & 3 By Tad Williams
No3. Snow Crash By Neil Stephenson
No2. Neuromancer By William Gibson
And No1. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (better known as Bladerunner) By Phillip K. Dick
There you go, please say someone has read these masterpieces?
Snot easy doing a fav. list!

I own both the Hobbit & Lord o' the rings but i havent read them.But one comment on the back of Lord of the rings that will always stick in my head is this "The English speaking world is divided into two halves, those who have read LOTR and those who have not" nice eh?
but i think it should be "The English speaking world is divided in to two halves those who have read LOTR and those who claim to have read it"....yep thats about hthe size of it

Hallo Eulogy, drag up a bean bag -- coffee and donuts are just
through that wormhole in the lobby.

5. Iliad. What translation? It just happens (thwere is no such thing as coincidence) that I was talking about the Stanley Lombardo translation on another list

3. Snow Crash -- I know several Stephenson disciples here at h2g2.
Talk to Marvin the Grate, Archbisop of the Church of the True Brownie about Stephenson.

The only author I don't recognize is Tad Williams. Tell us more!

Lil

I'm one of Courtesy's introductees to this forum - thanks for the tip-off friend. Any chance of a mug of coffee while I get myself settled in on the sofa?
I'm reading something called 'The Sparrow' by Mary Doria Russell at the moment. A nice new take on the human-alien first contact theme, that nobody else I know seems to have come across yet. Any comments?

the translation of the Iliad is by Robert Fagels, it's the ONLY one to buy, i feel muchas pity for anyone that reads anything else it's the one with the intro by Bernard Knox (top bloke).

Tad Williams is an author who has relesed about 4/5 books about medievil type storys i havent read them as they dont look like my bag. check out amazon for them, BUT Otherland is amazing. it's kind of a cross between cyberpunk and sci-fi(if in fact they happen not to be the same thing) and is actually amazingly difficult to catorgarise. the story is basicly about a group of people stuck in a computer simulation called Otherland. they are all drawn into the system by different things (this is this worst discription ever), inside the system they visit lots of different worlds (inside the simulation), and there trying to defeat the people behind the simulation, Called the Grail Brotherhood (mental note to self - never got a job where i need to describe things), and thats about it there is four books all about 900 or so pages long, although only 3 so far have been released. go to a book shop and look in the sci fi section you really cant miss them !, not that you will on the strength of that discription

http://www.tadwilliams.com if you feel the need

MC *blush* you are more than welcome. This is a great group we have here *hugs and all around*

First contact stories are great, have you read The Mote in Gods Eye by Larry Niven? If not you should, great first contact story.

Williams is great and Nuromancer (I know I blew the spelling ) is great, however I prefer Count Zero.

Courtesy

Hallo Metal Chicken! I shall be off to your Home Page shortly to learn more. For coffee, you just reach through the wormhole in the lobby...

Meanwhile, I must design Eulogy a beanbag full of punctuation marks! That was a splendid piece of stream-of-consciousness, actually, and the one Tad Williams book does sound interesting.

And Courtesy, I've read The Mote in Gods Eye, it is a great contact story, could maybe have had the length edited down. Neuromancer is just excellent.

Lil

Still haven't read any Pratchett's but I found this one today:
http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~gidnsuzi/pyramids.html
Thought I should share it with the fans.
-
And yes, I was wondering: Is molished the opposite of demolished?
Just asking...
-B-

Thanks Beebs!!
Sorry I don't get here much lately, busy busy busy.....
I would however be glad to recommend a few mystery authors whom I feel are quiter good.
Tony Hillerman; writes a series of novels that take place on the Checkerboard Reservation in New Mexico and Arizona.
Stuart M Kaminsky; the only ones of his I have read are the Porfiri Rostnikov series. They are very well done and set in Russia before and after the fall of Communism.
P.N. Elrod; I'm not sure if her Vampire Files can be considered mystery or not but they are very good, I have just recently finished her latest in the series.
John Sandford; writes a series called the Prey novels about a cop in Minneapolis. get quite graphic with the gore but excellent novels.
James Patterson; Wrote the novel Kiss the Girls. trust me the book is much better than the movie.

Hope that gives you some to look for Beebs.
Joker

Hey look -- people!

Welcome back/welcome everyone!

Thanks for the mystery stuff JF!

Um ... what other things did I want to reply too?

Oh, I have read Neuromancer too -- excellent book -- and I own the two sequals Virtual Light and Idoru (sp?), but havent read themyet -- are they worth a read?

~Beeblefish

Hi all,
I was going to try and pick out a few good books but making decisions about what to pick and what to leave out looks impossible. So I'm going to try to catagorize and name authors and one or two representative books from each , alot of this is from my steel sieve of a memory so please bear with the inevitable errors . My list will be heavely wieghted towards SF as that is most of my reading.

First humour ; Douglas Adams ( H2G2 ), Terry Pratchett ( Good Omens , is great and of course the diskworld series ) , Robert Aspirn ( Another Fine Myth ) , Harry Harrison ( Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers ) , Stanislaw Lem ( The Cyberiad ) , Spider Robinson ( Callahans's Crosstime Saloon )

Historical fiction SF; Harry Turtledove ( his worldwar series is a real treat if you like alien invaders and are a second world war buff )

Classic hard SF ; Roger Zelazny ( Doorways in the Sand , This Immortal and of course the Amber series ) , James P Hogan ( Inherit the Stars ) , Frederik Pohl ( Gateway ) , Robert L Forward ( Dragon's Egg ) , Alfred Bester ( The Stars My Destination ) , Charles Sheffield , Timothy Zahn ( Spinerette ) , Robert A Heinlien ( Stranger in a Strange Land ) , Larry Niven ( Ring World ) , Jerry Pournelle ( The Mote in God's Eye (( with Larry Niven )) ) , H. Beam Piper ( Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen ) , Gordon R. Dickson ( the DORSAI series ) , Issac Asimov ( The Foundation series ) , Hal Clement ( Cycle of Fire , Mission of Gravity )

Non-Fiction ; Richard Rhodes ( The Making of the Atom Bomb )

I'd better stop before I get carried away. I haven't listed anything that I wouldn't consider a must read and almost anything written by most of these authors is great.

Good Omens Who Hoo!!

Okay -- the diffinitive question (it seems to follow us around)

I cant even ask -- its too cheezy

Form a sentence from the following words:

You 10 island take can books stranded they are on desert a and are what?

~Beeblefish

Hmmm... *thinks very very hard*

OK here goes:

Luminous by Greg Egan

Cannery Row & Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

The Stand by Stephen King

The Lord of the Rings (3 parts = counts as only one book, right?)

Mothertime by Gillian White

H2G2, all of them

Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie

God Knows by Joseph Heller

The World According to Garp by John Irving

This list is subject to change without notice

Uncrosses eyes and tries to make decision.....

Here we go Beebs;
1-4) Tolkien -- "Hobbit" through LOTR

5-7) Donaldson -- The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Unbeliever (i.e. "Lord Fouls Bane" - "White Gold Weilder")
His best as far as I have read.

8) Zora Neale Hurston -- "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (Classic)

9) Dee Brown -- "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee"

10) (This even surprised me when I thought about it) Rick Bragg -- "All Over But the Shoutin' " : The story of how his mother gave up everything short of her life so that her children could make something of themselves.

I'm going to restrict myself even further and list books that
I haven't read yet!!! But I know they are waiting for me and I
know they're good.

1. Enders Game and the sequel-- just got this two-in-one from
the sf book club. by OS Card
2. Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon
3. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
5. Colour of Magic and sequel -- also one book, on order from Amazon. by T Pratchett
6. Sherlock Holmes by A Conan-Doyle.
7. Hawaii by James Michener

I give up. Now I need a couple of favorites.
8. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
9. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
10. The collected works of Jane Austen -- yes, there is an anothology book with all 5 novels in it.

whew!
Lil

I'm going to choose books that I know I can read more than once, along with several I have wanted to read ...

1. Ender's Game
2. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
3. Dune
4. God Emperor of Dune
5. The Lord of the Rings
6. Stranger in a Strange Land
7. The Illuminatus (sp?)
8. The Three Pillars of Zen
9. Oxford English Dictionary
10. The Bible

Courtesy

Read these books B4 you die.....please

1. "The Black Spring" Henry Miller
2. "What the budda taught" err...i forgot
3. "The Dimond age" Neil Stephensoooonnn
4. "Sirens of Titan" Kurt Vonnegut
5. "The Illiad" Homer
6. "Catcher in the rye" J.D. Salinger
7. "Red Dwarf" (all books) Grant/Naylor
8. "Walden" David Henry Therou (sic)
9. "Bart Prince - A Pragmatics of Place" err...i forgot
10. "Testiment" Frank Lloyd Wright

Read them Now!!!!!....what cha waiting 4?!?