What a Catch-22. If you don’t already know how to read a book, how can you read one telling you how to do it!? 
I read two or three of the Thomas Covenant books and found them to be pretty hard to get through as well. Even as a fan of LotR (middling though I may be).
Absolutely worth the money 
. Nothing world shattering but just lovely.
Recently read the latest Dresden Files novel, Twelve Months and thoroughly enjoyed it. Hopefully the next one in the series doesn’t take six years to come out.
Now reading Batman: Revolution by John Jackson Miller, the sequel to Batman: Resurrection, both of which are continuations of Tim Burton’s Batman films, though they take place between the original and Batman Returns. Enjoying it so far.
I mean it doesn’t help at all that Thomas Covenant’s pov is miserable to read. And he is acting so badly (partly because he thinks this world is just a dream).
Just a question I am wondering because I won’t continue and you read more books than I did: (Trigger warning) He just rapes this girl at the beginning of book 1 and while it is obviously a big topic with her mother, afterwards it doesn’t matter at all anymore. Is that just brushed aside or will they get back to it later on?
To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember.
Ah well not that important, maybe I google it.
On a different note: I didn’t realize the latest Dresden novel took so long to be published. I am on book 7 I believe. Good to know that I can easily catch up :-).
I do think a child resulted from the rape, but again, my memory of the books is fuzzy, they just didn’t stick with me very much as the protagonist is an unlikable git. I think I must have only read the two and then abandoned the series.
Ha! I actually was betting on that as a possibility.
I’d like to see the photos if you can find them.
I’ve gone with a strategy for avoiding duplicates :).
Beatrix Potter
Dr. Seuss
Enid Blyton
Roald Dahl
Susan Cooper
Blasted through Heir to the Empire and finished Dark Force Rising last night.
Was a bit surprised by the ending to the second book as my ebook had the starting chapter of half a dozen or so different Star Wars novels tacked on the end.
On to The Last Command now.
This is something my Mum hates, especially if it’s a book she’s enjoying. Gets to 90% of the way to the end and it finishes. She feels like she’s been cheated out of 10% more story.
I’ve had similar surprises when there’s a large appendix/index/reference section that I wasn’t expecting :).
I guess the silver lining to a novel doing that to you is that you won’t be thinking “well clearly this storyline has to be wrapped up in the next few pages” and getting ahead of yourself with predictions…
Could be worse …
(Fortunately, it’s in the public domain, so it’s easy to get hold of the last few pages)
In high school my american lit class had this massive paperback text, which was the scarlet Letter, Moby_Dick, the red badge of courage, some other novel, plus a bunch of short stories and excerpts. I discovered that the last several chapters of Moby Dick were not present. There were pages there, but they were signatures from other parts of the book, upside down. I discovered this at about 10pm the night I needed to write a paper about it. Fortunately, my mother was an English teacher, and we had a copy. Of course, the page numbers were wrong. So I turned the book in with the paper, and showed the teacher my text book.
The other novel may have been Last of the mohicans. That book was the thickest mas market paperback i’ver ever seen.
It clearly tells you that The End is page 237, so it looks like you got a bonus 15 pages!
I had a copy of Allies and Aliens by Roger MacBride Allen, a compilation book containing The Torch of Honor and Rogue Powers. I was near the end of the first book when I turned the page and found myself in a completely different scene. As I examined it further, I realized I was back in an earlier section of the book!
Somehow this particular copy had most of the first novel and then got bound with another large portion of the first novel. I went and exchanged it at the bookstore I purchased it from, ensuring the replacement copy had both books in it before leaving.
When I first got the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide, it was a cheap second hand copy from UK Games Expo.
Reading through it, I realised why it was cheap: about 16 pages were missing, with 16 earlier pages from the book repeated instead. Notably, the section that was missing was almost the entire bit about building adventures, etc. Possibly the most important part of the book.
I had a similar thing happen when I bought a signed copy of Erinsaga from Jim Fitzpatrick. So I now have two copies: one misprinted and signed by Jim and one second hand from eBay so I could actually read it.
The 5x5 had me wondering who was the single author I’ve read the most books by, ever. (I then decided I needed to break it down by age group, because I wasn’t going to make it past my childhood otherwise! :).
As a child it’s surely Enid Blyton. I don’t remember them all, but there were multiple series with lots of books in each, and Wikipedia says she wrote a ridiculous 762 books?! I realise most of them probably weren’t very challenging to write, but that’s still crazy. I did not read 762 Enid Blyton books, but I expect I read more than I did any other author, and that this would be my single/lifetime answer.
As a teenager, it was probably Alistair McLean. My parents had what I always imagined must be a complete collection of his novels (it probably wasn’t, but there were a lot), and I’m pretty sure that teenage me devoured them all. This quote from Wikipedia made me laugh:
Writer Algis Budrys described MacLean’s writing style as - “hit 'em with everything but the kitchen sink, then give 'em the sink, and when they raise their heads, drop the plumber on 'em”.
As an adult, I’m thinking it’s Iain Banks.
I’m sure for a lot of people it must be Terry Pratchett with his 41 Discworld novels, but I never got hooked on those. Of the authors I’ve read lots of as an adult, none of them produced anything like that number of books.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read more Michael Moorcock books than I have any other author, having read nearly all of what he’d then written in the early 1980s.
