Alazzar > Recent Status Updates

Knight of Shadows took me way too long to read; I've just been busy lately. But it's done now.

Unfortunately, breaking the book up so much and reading in such small amounts may have negatively affected my enjoyment of it. D'oh.

Finished with Sign of Chaos. Not sure if it was better or worse than Blood of Amber, but it certainly beats Trumps of Doom. I REALLY liked the final third or so, and am very excited to continue on to Knight of Shadows!

Blood of Amber: done! What a huge jump in quality from the last book; Trumps appears to be some sort of Amber anomaly.

Trumps of Doom is done. Overall, I wasn't terribly entertained with it; sad.

Just finished The Courts of Chaos. While it remains my least favorite of the Corwin series, I have to admit, that final battle is *epic.*

Finished The Hand of Oberon last night. Definitely an exciting book (especially in the latter half), but I still think I prefer Sign of the Unicorn and Nine Princes in Amber. (But if you were to ask me which of those two is my favorite, I wouldn't be able to answer.)

Also of note: I enjoyed the hellride in this book much more than the one in The Guns of Avalon.

Just finished Sign of the Unicorn: the book of intrigue and increasing mystery. This one may still be my favorite in the series, but we'll soon see what kind of competition the Hand of Oberon can provide.

Finished Guns of Avalon last night. It was better than I remembered it being, but still not as good as 9PiA.

I haven't read anything from this in several weeks. For a while it was my bathroom book, but the story of Aladdin's Lamp is SO BORING that I just can't seem to make myself continue, even only for a few pages at a time. (Which is a shame, because I love the Disney movie so much.) Blech.

Finished Nine Princes today. God, that book is exciting.

06/30/2013: Time to knock out another three chapters, which should take me to the end of the book. Should be interesting to see how much skimming I'll do this time around.

06/16/2013: Read my three chapters, but unfortunately I'm just not into the subject anymore. With the first three chapters, I did sample problems as I went along and some of the stuff at the end of each chapter. In chapters 4-6, I cut out the stuff at the end of the chapter. Now I'm not even doing the samples, nor am I really retaining what I'm reading.

I am a terrible wannabe science enthusiast.

06/15/2013: Resuming at the beginning of chapter 7!

05/12/2013: Knocked out another three chapters. I've reached a point where I'm not terribly concerned with memorizing facts (it's not like I'm studying for a class or test, here), and am instead mostly just doing problems out of the book because they're fun. (Chemistry, I've decided, is the "mathy" science, which is exactly the type of science I like.) Will resume later!

05/08/2013: I'm back to the "academic" portion of my reading cycle again, so here come some more chemistry chapters. Woohoo!

Taking a break from this at the end of chapter 3 because there's no way I can read an entire textbook before switching back to fiction. I am enjoying what I've read so far, though, and I look forward to resuming later!

Picked up a copy of this textbook's 7th edition paperback at a used bookstore; according to the introduction, the paperback format is a two-volume thing, but they didn't have the other at the store. Oh well--I'm just glad to have a chance to re-learn the stuff I've completely forgotten since getting a C in high school chemistry.

I'm not actually reading Uncanny X-men #1, but I'm reading a string of Uncanny X-men issues (starting with #305) that don't have a Goodreads entry, so this will have to do.

Been reading this one casually since December 13th; just a few pages a week, and I'm not reading the stories in any order. Fun stuff!

This year (2012), I'm gonna do what a lot of Zelazny fans have done in the past: read a chapter of Lonesome October each day in October! FANTASTIC!

Zelazny supposedly read up to 15 books at a time—science, mythology, classic fiction, etc. He did this to strengthen his own writing, and said there's a cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when reading multiple subjects at once. I'm going to try a similar thing, even though I hate reading more than one book at a time: I'm hoping to read an article from both The Science Book and A Field Guide to Demons every night.

Zelazny supposedly read up to 15 books at a time—science, mythology, classic fiction, etc. He did this to strengthen his own writing, and said there's a cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when reading multiple subjects at once. I'm going to try a similar thing, even though I hate reading more than one book at a time: I'm hoping to read an article from both The Science Book and A Field Guide to Demons every night.

Okay, so I'm not actually reading the "Absolute Sandman" edition of the first 20 comics, but I've got them in a collection of 4 smaller volumes, and listing those as individual books seemed like a lame way to pad my 2012 Reading Challenge stats. =P

I love that I could tell the exact moment where Dick left off and Zelazny picked up the reins. (Page 64, in my edition.) I was quite enjoying the book when Dick was writing, but now that it's in Zelazny's hands, I'm downright loving it.

They didn't have this book at my local library, so I'm actually reading it the way it was originally published: serialized in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, from 1971. (That was the greatest Ebay lot I ever purchased.)

I'd been reading a lot on my Kindle lately, and realized that it had been over a month since I'd read a Zelazny book. BLASPHEMY. Time to fix things, Eye-o'-Cat-style.