Strange, my review of The Body Farm seems to have disappeared from GOG! Not a real problem, after all, since it is not a good book... ^_^

I've just finished Mr Mercedes by Stephen King.
One of his most recent works, it tells us the fight between Bill Hodges, a retired police officer, and a mysterious killer who ran over people waiting for a job fair.

As usual, it's written with a knife. Meaning that it's constituted of punchy sentences, designed to hook you. And it works. Once again, I couldn't leave the book before finishing it. What's interesting is that King always mixes his stories with elements of our world, which makes them even more believable. Not very scary, not really gory, Mr Mercedes is more a thriller than a scary story, but still, King's style made me hold my breath more than once!

Maybe not his best work (more "classic" than many of his older works), but still very work a read!

So far in 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2019/post10

The Lady of the Lake

As I was saying about The Tower of the Swallow as well, The Lady of the Lake is often confusing, flitting between a patchwork of times and places, switching points of view, not giving the characters room and sometimes leaving the reader with something of a puzzle to put together. However, though there’s something to be said about the nice feast scene and the great sex scene that follows, perhaps the best example of this patchwork, Ciri hopping through worlds and times, is also where the book seems to really get going, being confusing and yet somehow right, and including emotionally intense moments.
The chapter about the Battle of Brenna was also quite impressive, though not for the depiction of the battle itself, and perhaps mainly for that bit at the end about the future of the healers. What follows, Stygga Castle, is a much smaller battle but better presented, more thrilling, and if you make some allowances for the bad guys exhibiting the sort of typical behavior that offers the heroes a chance to defeat them that they shouldn’t have, what I hoped to find in this book. And the aftermath can pack quite a punch. Then it’s back to jumping between times and places, yet it all paints a picture if you put it together… A desolate, depressing picture, which only gets worse in the final chapter.
Sapkowski mercilessly destroys his characters, those who die earlier being perhaps the lucky ones, and the survivors the most unfortunate. The world depicted sadly continues to accurately mirror our own, the way it turns out despite all the characters’ efforts, shunning and punishing them after all they have sacrificed, Evil that has rights and is taken into account in treaties, “progress” that is anything but, not because of conspiracies or secret plots, but because of the rotten, “simple and indeed universal traits” of people… There’s no place left for the heroes, they’re forced into lives that are not their own, leaving them disheartened, broken, mentally and physically, more or less lost… And then, of course, there’s the manner of death…

Rating: 4/5 (grudgingly)

Now I'm depressed... More so than usual, I mean. SO didn't want to read this... Or at least not finish it... But... Ah well...

Finders Keepers - Stephen King

Second volume of the "Bill Hodges" trilogy, after Mr Mercedes. This time, it's about a murdered author and a deranged fan. Thightly written, once again couldn't let the book go before finishing it.

Bill Hodges is not really the main character here, and that makes it interesting, because he is involved (more and more during the story) but he also deals with the aftermaths of Mr. Mercedes, which is also interesting because it gives that sense of continuity that King knows how to create and maintain.

Another good read and I'm now in the third and last book of the trilogy

So far in 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2019/post10

★★★ Dark Eden / Chris Beckett
★★☆ Mother of Eden / Chris Beckett

It was definitely the kind of sci fi I love. Distant world, intriguing and epic story, great characters and fantastic author's imagination. Like good old science fiction from Golden Age. Worth reading, definitely. The second part is somewhat different, focused on characters and not on world-building, but still interesting enough and full of surprises.

List of all books read in 2019.

★★☆ Syberiada polska / Zbigniew Domino

Interesting book telling the story of Polish sent to Sybir during World War II, showing absurds of war, communist state and people's fate. Nothing special as a literature, but worth reading for the sake of historical context.

★★☆ Profesor Andrews w Warszawie. Wyspa / Olga Tokarczuk

Small book containing 2 short stories of very popular Polish writer. I didn't like the longer one (The Island), but Professor Andrews in Warsaw was just great!

List of all books read in 2019.

Aaaannnd... The Bill Hodges trilogy is over!

End of Watch is the last installment of the series by Stephen King. If you look at my "did read list", you'll see that I've read the three novels in a row. Yeah, that's how good it is.

This last book is hard to talk about, since it would be a spoiler fest. Let's just say that a former character is back with a kind of a paranormal twist, but that this twist is, well, after all, plausible. And that's for me the magic of Stephen King. Just the right dose of strangeness, the right building of characters, a pinch of gore sometimes, but not gratuitous gore.

So yeah, the whole trilogy is worth a read, in my opinion.

So far in 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2019/post10

Beren and Luthien by JRR Tolkien. I certainly enjoyed this although it's not something I would casually recommend because instead of offering a complete story, it's a collection of incomplete versions of the same story presented so you can see how that story evolved throughout Tolkien's life. For instance, in the earliest version, the role played by Sauron in the last version is played by Tevildo, the Prince of Cats. Then Tevildo turns into a Thu, which is more or less Sauron by a previous name. Some versions are done in prose, others are done in verse. It's all very interesting, especially if you already know the overall story published in The Silmarillion.

Trail of Lightning.

I'm sorry for the delay, I had very busy week and coudn't visit forum for a few days.
Welcome on board and good luck with your resolution! :)

Mighty Thor Omnibus vol. 3. I feel like I'm cheating by listing a comic but it is a book that I read :) This volume collects issues 153 to 194, which covers the end of Jack Kirby's run, a short story drawn by Neal Adams, and then the beginning of John Buscema's run. Stan Lee scripts every issue except the last two, which are by Gerry Conway.

The Kirby stories are mostly excellent, with particular highlights being the Mangog story, a story in which Galactus tries to eat Ego the Living Planet, and the origins of Galactus. IMO the only thing that keeps this era of Thor from being as highly ranked as the Lee/Kirby FF is simply that Vince Colletta's inks really dampen Kirby's art. Thankfully, Bill Everett does come on as an inker later and is much better.

After making his debut in FF, Him returns for a couple of issues to fight Thor. The FF story is probably most notable for being the point when Kirby realized he had irreconcilable creatives differences with Stan and pretty much went into "fulfilling contractual obligations" mode for the remainder of his Marvel term. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like Stan was generally better behaved on this storyline and did a better job of honoring the anti-Objectivist themes behind the Him character.

Kirby leaves and Neal Adams comes on, but unfortunately the story is mostly earthbound aside from a weird detour to Mephisto's Hell. Adams draws the characters well but I wanted to see him do some crazy Asgardian landscapes, not a fight in the freaking U.N. building. His style doesn't mesh well with Joe Sinnott's inks, either.

John Buscema enters and does about as well as anyone could in being a full-time Kirby replacement. Stan's big post-Kirby story is an over-stretched epic that goes on for about 8 issues, and then he moves on to a stupid story that rehashes an earlier Kirby plot in which Loki gets to rule Asgard by stealing Odin's "Odin-ring". Then Stan quits mid-storyline to hand things off to Conway and the already drifting book pretty much dies in one issue. Everyone turns into a whiny, judgmental prick like what always happens in Conway stories. If I get more Thor reprints of these later stories, they won't be in a nice, expensive format like this.

One odd thing I noticed late in the book - Sif was crying in every single issue. I went to double-check the Kirby issues and, sure enough, Sif never cries. The moment Kirby leaves, though, she's weeping all the time and almost never doing any real fighting. They apparently subjected her to the same spine-removing process that they used on Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man.

★☆☆ Mastering Exploratory Analysis with pandas / Harish Garg

Some of Packt books are great. And some of them are crap. I'm sorry, but this one is not worth a minute of your time.

★☆☆ The Chaos Imperative / Ori Brafman
★★☆ Gar’Ingawi. Wyspa szczęśliwa. Tom I / Anna Borkowska
★☆☆ Traktat o łuskaniu fasoli / Wiesław Myśliwski

List of all books read in 2019.

Some catch-up to do, here !

Laboratoire de catastrophe générale - Maurice G. Dantec

The second volume of the "Théâtre des opérations", about which I wrote last year, I think. It's not a novel, more like a diary where Dantec writes freely about many things, amongst them politics, science, religion, etc... It's impossible to classify and to most of people it won't be much more than the elucubrations of far-left, ultra christian drug-addict lunatic. And in some parts, this could even be true. But it's also a very interesting window opened on the mind of a writer and if you read/have read his books, an interesting insight on the genesis of some of his books. Disturbing, somewhat infuriating, sometimes utterly incomprehensible, it's an UFO of a book.

The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay

I hadn't read anything by Guy Gavriel Kay before that book. It didn't click with me. But here I have some explanation to do. If it didn't click with me, it was certainly not because of Guy Gavriel Kay's skill as a novelist. It was really well written, with interesting characters and everything that makes a good book. And I'm convinced it's a good book. But it was just not for me. He decided to write about an era, themes, regions that were at the heart of my studies and my PhD when I was in university, but changed many of the names to make it sound different and exotic. It was well made, but I got everything very quickly and, well, that was a real turn off, because the names were not really well chosen, to my opinion. But frankly, try to book: if you're not a specialist, you will certainly like it much more than what I could...

The Crime of Inspector Maigret - Georges Simenon.

Le pendu de Saint-Pholien is the original french title. Paradoxically, the english title sounds a bit better to me! ^_^ It's true that, because of a strange impulsion, Maigret is responsible for the death of a man, through suicide. But Maigret will want to know why that man commited suicide, and will unearth a sordid crime. Once again, the social depiction by Simenon is really interesting, while quite depressing. Very interesting book.

So far in 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2019/post10

"Counterpoint" by Walter Piston.

Thanks for the opinion!
This Saturday we've made some reorganization in out home library and I've found a few books of GGK bought years ago. I've never read anything written by the author, but heard a lot of good opinions. Perhaps it's a good moment to finally try it. I'm not a specialist, so it should not be a problem ;)