Yay! Another monthly Chat! At the moment I am rereading "A Wizard of Earthsea", and it's better than I remember. I've also been having lots  of thoughts about "closing the window of windows", but my current laptop's warranty (life time!) will be voided if I change the OS. Darn it!

I have never seen Attack on Titan, but I have heard good things about it.

Hi.
Seems as if this topic faded away a little, so hopefully I can bring it back.
I just finished an annotated bibliography and a literature review for a long assignment that has to be handed in this year. This is the first time I've to take on a project this large, but at least I'm interested in the topic so that helps.
We currently have a two week break for Autumn/Easter.
I really need to pick up something to read again, haven't done that in a long while.
And currently I'm addicted to Lords and Knights. I picked the game up back in 2013, then quickly lost interest. But three months ago some friends tried it, so I joined them. I currently have 12 castles on the one server!

Glad people remembered this topic, even if soon we're going to be needing another one.

@Mirage, Ray Bradberry is awsome! one of the few people I know who can show the best and worst of humanity equally well. ironically, I don't think Farrenheight 451 is his best novel sinse it is a little slow in places and hard to grasp, personally I love his connected short story collections like Martian chronicles and The Illustrated man. I also didn't know there was a film of the maze runner, I enjoyed the book and the series, though sinse what I enjoyed was the unexpected plot and the wel done characters I'm not sure how much would translate.

The principle reason I've not been around here much (or for that matter on Clok mud), is that for the last almost two weeks I've had the most god awful case of the flue! It's been a real pest, particularly sinse my throat has been so sore I literally have not been able to speak, let alone practice my singing or do any voice recordings for Steampunk Neverlan, and even online I've barely been able to check my mail and kick out the spam.

Today I am feeling a little more human so hopefully finally things are improving.

About all I have done is read a huge tonne of books. Terry Pratchett's gnomes series, (which I had a mind to write reviews for), Tad Williams Bobby Dollar trilogy, and the novelization of Doctor Who deadly assassin, and I've just finished the first of Richard Cardry's Sandman Slim novels.

Bobby dollar was interesting, being as it's Williams' attempt at an urban fantasy, harry dresden type series, featuring an advocate angel who gets called out to the sites of recently dead to argue the case for their souls against a demon prossicuter. I'm not sure whether it's that that genre doesn't appeal to me as much or whether I was too enflunerated to appreciate these but they didn't seem up to williams usual standard, ---- well accept for the second book.

The main character was the usual hard drinking bastard type, but that really didn't do much for me, and though the central conflict of the books, about a group trying to setup a third alternative to heaven or hell was an interesting one it didn't get explored in as much detail as it should've done, the romance also seemed really superficial being as basically Bobby and his girlfriend just meet, do the horizontal tango (in more detail than I would've liked), and then he's madly in love for some odd reason.

On the plus side, the descriptions and ideas surrounding heaven and hell were great, and the reason the second book was my favourite is basically it's just a long trudge through hell, which Williams depicts in amazingly disturbing ways particularly with what gets done to bobby Dollar in the process, actually the third book was a bit of a let down after that .

I also liked the idea that heaven was static, because joy was something that needed to continue, but hell was constantly changing so that the various sinners didn't get used to the way things were (and things are pretty grotty).

Sandman slim is about what I expected, it sort of reminds me of that old film "the crow" it's about a nearly invulnerable bastard who kills monsters and demons in terribly nasty and action orientated ways with zero anxt, (one better than that winy wizard Dresden), not much description, actually it sort of reminded me of a written commic.

Not exactly astounding writing quality, but good fun and about the level of concentration I want when I can't stand up streight (I do have some more intelligent stuff on my victor, but my brain just isn't up to it right now).

I had a funny experience recently, sinse I heard the bbc radio play of Farrenheight 451 and had the distinctly off experience of missing American actors, sinse for some reason the bbc cast it all with English actors even though Bradberry's phrasing and grammar are definitely American.
the dramatization was there, the acting was great (they had the awsome Peter Miles as Beetee the fire captain who definitely makes a good wordy psychopath), but I just didn't feel a lot of the phrases came out correctly from English characters.
The reason I say this is odd is that usually I have the reverse experience, finding an American (usually in a fantasy novel), using English phrasing and expecting it to come out sounding the same but it just sounding wrong to me.

At least when I read farrenheight 451 the reader (I believe it was Bruce Montigue), did use a passable American accent.

Getting back to books though, I actually think Bradberry was better at short stories than with novels generally precisely for the reasons you describe. MArtian chronicles is definitely worth reading, though annoyingly apparently in some more modern editions they substitute some stories and even remove the story "way in the middle of the air" which is all about black segrigation and was written in America in the fifties, because "it's no longer relevant" which is pretty rubbish sinse it's a wonderfully written story and you don't need to have been around at the time of Martin Lutha King to appreciate it.

I'd also really! recommend the Illustrated man, sinse that has some of bradberries best stuff, including "last night of the world" which is probably my single favourite end of the world story ever written.

As to pratchett well there is a lot to choose and a lot to say. I will say his stuff is very unique, though not always perhaps best in plot or characters, though can be disturbing and surprising at points. 

Most people start with Colour of magic, though in a lot of ways both that book and it's sequel are a little rough around the edges, indeed of the early discworld books Mort and Weerd sisters are imho the best.

Who is the www trilogy bye? is that Robert Sawyer? It's not one I've heard of though the character you describe rather reminds me of Martine derubanne (which I'm probably horribly misspelling), from Tad williams' otherland series.
There, when you first meet her on the multi sensory net she comes across as quite mysterious sinse she doesn't use any sort of approximation of herself, just a globe of light and later the Mona lisa, and has some very odd knolidge about the otherland network. Then, when she and various other people wind up trapped in Otherland, a virtual reality network so complete it's indistinguishable from reality you find out she's actually blind, and while at first she's overwhelmed by the amount of information from the network being transfered to her brain through whatever access system she's using (williams never makes it clearn exactly what), later she begins to find that she can discover other bits of information about the world in the network such as where portal doors are.

A really interesting character I thought, particularly with how her blindness was worked into her back story and how you found out why she was exactly how she was, one of the few occasions when the "blind =  super sensory" trope hasn't bothered me because Williams explores it in very complete detail and you understand both the good and bad points and also because Martine is a lot more than just her blindness, ---- for example she keeps a diary and provides the only first person narration in the book, (though sinse Otherland experiments with all sorts of narration and genre styles that isn't too surprising).