Sitting here listening to fireworks as my city celebrates the beginning of the Christmas season, and wondering just where did this year go?! Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were complaining about the heat? Well two weeks ago, since this month started amazingly, and frighteningly, warm in the low 70s. Sspoiler: November in the Rockies should be mid 50s tops more like upper 40s) Anyway, the fireworks have ended so MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY HANNUKAH, HAPPY KWANZAA, HAPPY EID and if I’ve missed a holiday, I apologize.
So what are we reading as we bid adieu to 2025?
In print: Murder on the Orient Express by Dame Agatha Christie. I read this over 40 years ago and barring a bit of casual racism and one slur, it still holds up at nearly 100 years old. The impossible nature of the crime is really well thought out and brain breaky.
On Kindle: The Maid’s Secret by Emily Organ. Murder and shenanigans in 1880s London.
Audio: Spooky Business by S. E Harmon, the 3rd in her series about a ghost whisperer and a cold case unit in south Florida.
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I finished The Mapmaker’s Apprentice by C. J. Archer yesterday. It’s the second in her Glass and Steele series, a precocious apprentice goes missing , some things get found, matchmaking was attempted and the last 25 to 30 pages were read as fast as my Kindle could turn them.
Finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, about an unwilling astronaut from Earth who makes first contact with a resourceful alien; both work together to save their respective homeworlds. I liked it, but not quite as much as the author’s The Martian. There’ll be a movie with Ryan Gosling and Sandra Huller coming out in March.
I’m just a chapter into It’s Only Drowning by David Litt, nonfiction by a former Obama speechwriter who turns to surfing, of all things, to deal with his stress over Trump and COVID. Hasn’t wowed me so far.
I couldn’t sleep last night, so sat up and read Cinder House in one go. It’s a retelling of Cinderella in which the main character is a dead bisexual house. Okay, I’m oversimplifying that, but not lying. It was decent. The author is Freya Marske, check it out.
I just finished The Player of Games, by Ian Banks. It’s a 1988 SF semi-classic (as in, not really known outside the field but pretty well known within the field), and given its age, I’m gonna discuss it in a spoilery way; you’ve been warned.
The prose is lovely. Banks has a way with a turn of phrase.
The main character is loathsome. I know I was supposed to find him flawed, but I hated him throughout the book, to the extent that it made the book unpleasant to read. He’s in a post-scarcity utopia in which gender-bending is ubiquitous and in which there are no formal hierarchies, but he’s achieved fame by being the best games-player in all the known worlds. Cool! And he’s constantly pursuing younger women for sex, and never changing his own gender, and cheats at a game with a teenage girl because he’s so threatened by her genius, and treats everyone around him like absolute garbage. It felt like the author couldn’t imagine a future without creepy arrogant professors.
The game itself is essentially a board game, which feels really time-specific. While we’ve had Chess and Go around for awhile, the book is set something like ten thousand years in the future, and it’s a little hidebound to think that the game they play would be so similar to late-twentieth-century nerd games. One key component of the game–devised by an alien civilization far removed from Earth–is a board on which earth, air, fire, and water are the main powers. Yep: aliens came up with the classical elements, not of ancient China, or various Native American groups, or sub-Saharan African nations, but the classical elements of ancient Greece.
I appreciate what the author was going for. The book starts off Ender’s Game and ends up The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which is very cool. But I found it fell short in several key ways of its ambitions.
I read it a few years ago and although I liked it, all in all, I haven’t felt compelled to go on to read any of his other books about the Culture (it’s “Iain,” BTW).
Finished 1984, by George Orwell. You know the story unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere. A reread after first reading it 41 years ago in 1984, when we thought Reagan was the worst it could get. We were very naive and had no clue that this Hitleresque piece of utter shit in the White House today was coming. Makes me wonder if someone even worse may come along 30 or 40 years from now. Okay with me if he does, I’m done with America anyway.
Have started another Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London.
Went down a You Tube rabbit hole on movie vehicles/props. Watched an interesting one about the weird 12-wheeled overland monster used in “Damnation Alley”. Then ended up reading about Roger Zelazny’s distaste for the movie and how it completely missed the point of his book.
So I just started Zelanzny’s “Damnation Alley” yesterday. So far it’s pretty interesting. This is the first book of his I’ve read - maybe I’ve found a new (to me) author. Next up I’ll try the movie, just out of curiosity.
His stuff is … different. I really knew I’d love him when his protagonist in Doorways in the Sand was thrown out of Australian for climbing the Sydney Opera House.
Most of his books can be read in any order but both Amber Series have to be read in publication order… a couple books end in the middle of a conversation and the next book pick up right after.
I finished Murder on the Orient Express by Dame Agatha Christie. I had some difficulty at first since the tone was very different from her earlier books, I’m guessing this was the point where her writing gelled into the voice and style we are most used to reading. I read this 40+ years ago when I was a teen, I don’t remember if I knew the twist then but reading it this time, I very much enjoyed how she made it so clear what the solution was but still managed to make it a surprise at the end.
Next up: The Floating World by Axie Oh, which my sister bought me for my birthday back in April and
The Maid’s Secret by Emily Organ (on Kindle which is easier to read in the car on dark winter mornings while waiting for my passenger to come out to the car)
Okay, I’m oversimplifying that, but not lying. It was decent. The author is Freya Marske, check it out.