I just learned there’s a Murderbot TV series! I know the books have some fans here. What do you think of the show?
I didn’t like The Player of Games either. It was a definite disappointment after Consider Phlebas, the first book I read in the Culture series, and I haven’t read any others. (Anyone read another book in that series you think is better?)
Finished Expect Great things! How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women, by Vanda Krefft, which was interesting–for example, the creator of Wonder Woman turned over the character to his Gibbs-trained secretary, who wrote the next 70 stories; and Rockin’ Around the Chickadee, by Donna Andrews. Meh. Her books haven’t really been that great lately, but I can’t get out of the habit of reading them, mostly because of their awesome cover art.
Next up: Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History, by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson, and Love You a Latke, by Amanda Elliot.
Haven’t watched it yet, I plan to over Christmas. I’m told they kept well to the books with some fleshing out of side characters. I am much more interested in the next season when ART joins the cast.
I’m looking forward to hearing about the Wiswell piece. For some reason that I cannot recall, I have his name down as someone I want to read more of. I must have read one of his short stories in a magazine or something, and jotted his name down…
I finished A Talent for War, by Jack McDevitt. I read the 3rd in the series a while back, and this is the first. There were a lot of similarities in the pacing and format of the story - I think as long as I space out reading of the rest of the series, it’ll stay interesting - I like what I’ve read so far.
Next up for me is the current edition of Asmiov. The cover art is spooky - I think I should have read it closer to Halloween… 
I like those books, but they have a niggling problem that really irks me: After the events of the first book the protagonist should be Galaxy-wide famous, and yet nobody seems to know who he is.
2025 Hugo winner The Tainted Cup and its follow up A Drop of Corruption
Excellent world building ..very innovative.
Reminds me of China Mielville and Peridido Station which gave both my dottor and I nightmares.
Finished Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell. His first book, published in 1933. An account of when he was hard up and roughing it in those two cities. A short but fascinating read. Orwell famously died from TB contracted in a hospital in Spain in 1937 while he was there fighting in the Spanish Civil War, but it is amazing he did not contract it during this time.
Next up is a volume of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, entitled simply Collected Short Stories, Volume 1. I’ll be taking my time with this one, as the wife and I are shortly to depart Bangkok for a survey trip to the seaside resort town we’ll be moving to about the middle of next year. We’ve been in Bangkok three months now, and this will be our first foray out of it. Should be fun, and we already have some ideas about exactly where to look for a place. We figure on a couple more trips there in the first half of 2026 before making a final decision on where to hang our hats for good.
I suppose Trump is still president over there? He simply does not figure in the news here.
Lucky you.
Finished Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History, by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson. Do you have a book challenge in which you need to read something that uses the term “intertextuality” dozens of times? If so, this is your book. Otherwise, not recommended. Also finished Love You a Latke, by Amanda Elliot, which was okay.
Next up: A Different Kind of Christmas, by Alex Haley, and Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos.
André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, 1967. Gorz was a friend of Sartre and Ivan Illich and later an important theorist of ecology.
Also the latest Spenser, Showdown, by Mike Lupica. It’s okay but it doesn’t sound like Spenser. And working through Ross Thomas for the third or fourth (okay, fifth!) time
We had a 104 post thread on it:
Still reading John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which is wonderfully off-the-wall story told from the point of view of the monster being hunted. It’s set in an indeterminate time setting that seems quasi-medieval until someone speaks in what seems way too modern an idiom or about too modern a concept. But that’s probably the satiric intent. It lead to one of my favorite lines so far. Three highway robbers declare their names to be Aristocracy, Plutocracy, and Kleptocracy. The monster, Shesheshen, who is in disguise, ponders whether to take them out.
“[If she stabbed him], Plutocracy would bleed out before he could define his form of government.”
On audio, I picked up a collection of Edgar Allen Poe stories and poems and Stephen King’s Never Flinch. I;m going with Poe first. Unfortunately, the narrator seems, from his voice, to be a twenty something, and with Poe, that just doesn’t work. I’ve listened to Poe read by Vincent Price, Paul Scofield, Basil Rathbone, and Christopher Lee – dark and serious older voices all. This guy sounds like a Boy Scout Tenderfoot reading from The Big Book of POe around a campfire, with a flashlight shining up into his face to Look Scary. It’s not effective, especially when he stumbles over the pronunciation of words like “accessibility”, let alone “phthysis”.
Oh, interesting! I hated that book, precisely because the inhuman monster who was supposed to be baffled by human interactions talked like a Tiktok-addicted Zoomer, all judgy adolescent therapy speak. It didn’t occur to me to regard it as satire.
I just finished Dark Maestro, a crime novel about a Black cello prodigy raised in inner-city DC by a low-level drug dealer. If that sounds a bit precious, well, I excused it because the author is a Black music teacher who lives in DC, and I figured if anyone could do the concept justice it’d be him. And if that’s true, then nobody can do the concept justice, because the book was a mess. There were some interesting ideas in it, but they were executed in a ham-handed way that took all the joy out of them. And at the end of the book:
A tied-up villain manages to slash a protagonist with a poisoned blade. After they wrestle the blade away from the protagonist, the villain gloats: “The blade is poisoned, and I have the antidote here in my house, but I won’t tell you where it is, and you’ll be dead in 20 minutes.” So, pause for a second. If the villain tells you that, what do you do? If you answered “I slash the villain with his own poisoned blade, so he has to tell me where the antidote is,” you’re smarter than our protagonist, who just goes on a shooting spree and murders all the villains before dying of the poison. Author, how do you miss such an obvious trick? Gah!
Oof. I would be tempted to write to the author with that question!
I guess I’m not reading this week, I’m just picking things up and putting them down again. I’m not sure if it’s my brain or I’ve hit a streak of bad books. Fortunately, I have more in the pile!
I tried to read his previous novel The Violin Conspiracy and it was just as bad.
I mean RIGHT??!!! Of course you slash him back, if for no other reason than taking him with you.
Oh, he definitely takes the villain with him, no doubt. But it’s really unsatisfying, both for the reason I spoilered, and because the whole book has set up an interrogation scene that just doesn’t happen.
I had a similar thought, but regarding money (and whether that would be a motivation for them ever again). Hopefully I can forget all that when I get around to trying another from the series.
I found this at a used bookstore, so I snapped it up and read it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/973392.The_People_of_the_Peacock
It confirms my desire to read more of Hoch, but I don’t often see him at used bookstores. I might have to (gasp) actually buy a book new one of these days.
Now, back to my issue of Asimov magazine…
That too!.
GASP!! No not that!!!
Try online used outlets: Used Hoch books on Abebooks