Had to quit Daniel R Kern's Hero.

Could not stand it any further. About a quarter of a way through I just had it. It's not even a jaunty sy fy adventure (Honor Harrington ahem) its just some half assed space shoot em up mixed with the most dim witted cultural/species clash that is the crux of the book. Glad I only paid 2 bucks for it.

Hawking & Black Holes by Paul Strathern

I'm not really even sure how this wound up on my bookshelf - maybe Half Price Books, probably several decades ago. The publisher didn't even price it in USD, just AUD & pounds. :)

Junk book. Part of a series that also includes Einstein, Newton, Crick & Watson, Pythagoras, Turing, Oppenheimer, Galileo, and Archimedes. Mostly biography. The science was explained without math jumping from Heisenberg to evaporating black holes in less than 3 pages.

But I decided to give it a read before taking it to Goodwill. I knew almost all of it except brief bits of biography. It wasn't even well written.

I loved both books in the Stormlight Archive. I also enjoyed Etlantis. I read the Reckoners series too, the final book came out this month. The first two were fabulous, the ending was a bit lacking.

Chapterhouse:Dune - finishing up Frank Herbert's Dune series. I was toying with delving into the next two that supposedly wrap it up, written by his son and Kevin J. Anderson, but have instead moved into Neal Stephenson's The Confusion.

The Da Vinci Code

This is kinda like "the" novel, not "a" novel. The novel. In bestseller, light reading terms. Robert Langdon has to be one of my favorite fictional characters. Symbologist / Super spy.

Ken Follett's"Fall of Giants" .

Can't seem to gain anything from reading this: No lesson, no harsh truth or any surprise, just plain narrative of plain events. It was dense to read and although it made a decent job at trying to show the sides of the major conflict that the book revolves around (WWI) I think I simply finished it because it's the only book on my shelves that I didn't read until now.

If I can muster the courage to gather them and start reading them, I'll throw myself into Dragonlance books next.

I think Dan Brown is a hack, but I quite enjoyed this one. A well paced, fun read, IMO. After that I turned to Angels and Demons. Tried three times and just couldn't finish it. Bloody terrible book.

I lucky skipped Angels and Demons because I've seen the movie, it's also is very religious which is not interesting me. So I went straight to The Lost Symbol and Inferno, they are great. Also Digital Fortress and some other one of his is good. I don't think he's a hack at all, his books are very well researched I think, he's just a good thriller / bestseller writer.

Listened to the auidobook Salmon of Doubt by Douglass Adams.

Narrated by the fellow who played Arthure Dent in the BBC Radio Prog. It is excellent, if you like anything DA you will love this.

The Sicilian by Mario Puzo

MGF /TF Restoration manual

My two first books finished this year (easier to complete than games):

*** Toyo Ito: "ano hi kara no kenchiuku" (translated in French as "The architecture of the day after") ***

"The day after" of the title is a reference to the aftermaths of Fukushima.Toyo Ito is an international architect who tried to help rebuilding an area which got it by the tsunami. The first part of the book tells how the essence of his work as an architect was challenged by the reality of the events and how he tried to reconciliate the local population, its model of architectures and the surrounding nature. The focal point of this particular work was the "home-for-all" which served as a kind of small community center where the now-homeless locals could gather instead of staying reclused in their temporary housings.

The second part of the book is more like some kind of essay where he tells his inner struggle as an architect between art-for-the-sake-of-art and how architecture as to find its place and be accepeted by local communities. He uses some of his past project and put them in perspective to its "change of mind" over the years. It's quite an interesting book if you're kind of sceptic against some local architecture work who feels completely "out of place". The book isn't translated in English but I found this article:
http://de.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2013/september/03/toyo-ito-on-how-to-fix-japan/
ISBN-10: 2874491985
ISBN-13: 978-2874491986

*** Solange : "Solange Te Parle" ***

With the inevitable rise of Internet, I already ended up reading some books written by bloggers but in this case, it's my first book written by a youtuber. The author is a Romanian French-Canadian living in Paris making videos about nothing... Well, nothing meaning various subjects in a surreal hipster/artsier-than-thou fashion and not caring about common expectations (she even made a video peeing in nature....). And so, this book is a kind of written compilation of some scripts of her videos. They sometimes have been rewritten for this book and there are some exclusive texts. Without the videos, it kind of reads like the intimate journal of a teenage girl (even if she's 30) but it keeps the overall artsy weirdness tone. Fast to read as the "chapters" are between 2-6 pages long.
The only video of her in English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ook4rLYlJzE
ISBN-10: 2874491985
ISBN-13: 978-2874491986

Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weinthrub

I've had some time to do some reading for the first time in a while!

Just finished Destination: Void by Frank Herbert.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The characters were likeable and there was a lot of suspense and mystery with some interesting twists. Moving on to the sequel The Jesus Incident now. It's very different and I wasn't sure if I would like it as much, but for some reason I can't help but smile as I read it.

I've only read the first couple Dune books also from Herbert, but I'm enjoying this series a lot more so far. GR00T is inspiring me to finish the Dune series, though, I'll probably get on that after I finish this series.

From the Ocean to the Sky by Edmund Hillary

It's about a 1977 jetboat expedition by Hillary up the Ganga river when he was 58. The original plan was to go up the river as far as they could, and then summit one of the lower Himalayan peaks: Nar Parbat. Most of the book covers the jetboat part, and the numerous stops along the way. It quickly becomes clear that he was something of a major celebrity in India back then, with major crowds greeting him wherever he went.
Eventually they reached a waterfall that forced them to ditch the boats and continue on foot. Sadly, here the the book ends on a downer with Hillary having to give up on the final leg of the expedition after getting in trouble with altitude sickness close to the mountain they wanted to climb. He had to be evacuated from the mountain by helicopter. Luckily he quickly recovered and his son Peter, along with a few other members from the expedition, climbed the mountain during Hillary's subsequent 2 day absence.

Most of the book is fascinating, but the last couple of pages made me a bit sad. You wonder whether or not Hillary realized at that point that his big mountain climbing days were over. He doesn't touch on the subject at all, and ends the book with a collection of diary entries from the expedition members who did manage to climb the mountain they originally set out to climb. The last 2 pages is from his own diary, and it ends with what seemed to me like a pretty generic praise of the expedition. It's almost as if he's refusing to admit defeat while being somewhat bitter that he couldn't truly finish the expedition. I read elsewhere that he did have one more crack at the Himalayas a few years later, but altitude sickness again forced him turn back.