OOO! I once read a children’s book, I was searching for a specific book and this was one I read in that quest (Spolier: it wasn’t the one I wanted) where EVERY sentence where a period should be, in 150 pages, was puntuated with an ellipse! It was the most exhausting read I’ve ever done, including my college chemistry book!
I finished Network Effect by Martha Wells yesterday. I still think it meanders a bit in the middle but I love the beginning and end.
I am 11% into Blitz by Daniel O’Malley, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s page 78. But it rest nicely on the recliner arm while I hang out and the hubby sleeps after his PT.
Finished Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. I read it because it’s supposed to be one of the best, if not the best, comic novels of the twentieth century. Not even remotely. One tip off that it’s not is that after something supposedly amusing (to the author, I guess) happens, one or more characters either burst into laughter or have trouble not not doing so. Wodehouse and Douglas Adams don’t do that. They trust their readers. Also finished Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, by Karen G. Lloyd. Much of it was quite interesting, and I recommend it to people interested in biology and/or geology.
Next up: science fiction by Anastacia-Renee’ called Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, and The Kid Stays in the Picture, by Robert Evans.
I agree: he writes aliens really, really well, but sometimes his super alien aliens aren’t alien to one another.
By the third in the series, I was exhausted by the novels’ use of exposition over scenes. It’s a deliberate choice that I can respect, but it was a struggle to finish.
Which is very unlike How to Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix, a very funny, very gory haunted house novel set in a South Carolina family that reads so, so real to me, Christian puppet ministry and all. There were a few missteps, maybe, in some of the scarier scenes, but all in all I enjoyed it a lot and stayed up too late last night finishing it.
Because the day of a time change is difficult for all of us, I shall brighten your sleepy eyes with a preview of my rant about The Quincunx before it goes up on my blog in a couple of weeks.
My mom read this shortly after it was published. I remember she brought it on a beach vacation because she would have time to sit down and get through a good chunk of it’s 700+ pages. I, in my youthful innocence, was interested in it because of the neat cover design and the weird word in the title. Later, after she returned the book to the library, I asked Mom what she thought about the book. “It wasn’t that great,” she said.
Let it be known I am my mother’s daughter because I, too, think this book isn’t that great. Let it also be known that previous sentence was an understatement worthy of the most British British person who ever Britished. The more I think about how much time this doorstop wasted, the angrier I get.
The basic story is this: John lives in a rural English village with his widowed mother, Mary. Mary is on the run from unspecified enemies bent on gaining a codicil her father entrusted her with. This codicil would change the ownership of the nearby estate that used to belong to her family. A vast conspiracy surrounds this estate and its owners due to the original owner, Jeoffrey Huffam, changing his mind several times about his heir and writing different wills leaving his property to different people. The families involved chase Mary and John all over London until the final will is found and the true heir is revealed who is, unsurprisingly, John.
The story takes entirely too long to both get going and wrap up because Palliser wanted to write every single Dickens novel at once. Unfortunately he did not have Dickens sense of humor or sense of what his audience wanted because fifties of pages pass where nothing happens at all. Instead of ramping up the tension about Our Hero’s plight, stupidity is ramped up instead until suddenly all hell breaks loose and the entire plot happens in the last 100 pages (of what I remind you is a 700+ page doorstop) because Palliser was too busy making sure John experienced every single kind of grinding poverty available in early nineteenth-century London, a place that never ran short of different types of grinding poverty.
It’s not helped by the fact that Mary is the dumbest idiot who ever drew fictional breath. I have met cabbages with more sense than Mary. If there’s a terrible decision to be made she will make it, then look around with wide eyes wondering how she got into this fine mess. To quote the noted philosopher Thomas Sirveaux, if Mary picked her nose for half an hour—nay, five minutes—her head would cave in. If it was revealed she had two brain cells to rub together I would have to retreat to my fainting couch to get over the shock. But take heart, gentle reader, for she eventually dies from her own stupidity and the book improves. And by “improves” I mean you can read it without curling your punching fist.
Then you get to the ending which is the biggest let-down this side of gravity. I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you because I value your time more than the book does. Eventually John gets his hands on Jeoffrey’s final will making him the true heir along with his distant cousin and love interest Henrietta Palphramond. Then a young lawyer that John thought was his friend is proved to be a cad and a bounder when he (the lawyer) kidnaps Henrietta, intending to marry her to get the estate for himself. John and his friend Digweed chase after the miscreant and his fair prisoner, catching up to them at the altar during the wedding ceremony. The wicked lawyer is killed in front of Henrietta who dashes off to the contested estate to hide. John and Digweed go back to London.
So now John files the will with Chancery and claims his inheritance, right? Nope, he goes right back to his impoverished life because his true inheritance is a good dollop of his mother’s stupidity. Eventually he goes back to the estate where he discovers Henrietta has decided to become Miss Havisham. John returns to London and files the will, but the estate has turned into Jarndyce & Jarndyce so there’s no point to it.
The half a star in the rating is for the fact that the book ended. The full point is because the hardcover edition makes an unparalleled tofu press. I was tempted to keep this heavy waste of time just for that purpose, but a quick perusal of my bookshelves revealed a hardbound copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl which is also a great tofu press. Now I can return The Quincunx to the library bookstore where some other unsuspecting soul will pick it up. I hope it’s someone I don’t like.
Oh yeah, that’s the kind of book review I like! Thanks for sharing! 
It makes me feel a lot better that I once tried and failed to read The Quincunx. Truly it is a deceptively attractive book.
I wish you were here, I have a friend who delights in filling her Wee Free Library with “radical” ie NON-LDS literature and absolute drek. So far the drek appears to be winning.
I started Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. So far it’s another feel-good science fiction adventure that involves solving problems via physics. Its foray into exobiology delights me. The storytelling is great. The writing itself, solidly average. There are some things about the plot that bother me, but what I find most irritating is that it lacks pathos. You don’t feel the emotional weight of any of it.
I am enjoying it though.
Started The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass and The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman this weekend.
The Deserters is, as its title implies, an account of some Americans and Britons who deserted in the European theater during WWII. The Sun and the Moon is a history of an 1835 newspaper hoax in which it was claimed intelligent beings had been observed via telescope living on the moon and the public response to this story.
Both have started out strong. I’m giving priority to The Sun and the Moon because I borrowed that one from the library.
Yeah–I read this and Embassytown around the same time. Project Hail Mary was way more fun, but full of “aw, c’mon” moments. Embassytown was agonizingly slow in its depiction of human-alien contact, but so deeply interesting. For a good time, PHM; for a brilliant and lovely meditation on language and thought and a whole bunch of other stuff, Embassytown.
Meanwhile I finished the ~100 page novella Comfort Me With Apples, by Cathrynne Valente, last night. Brr. Valente’s writing is as gorgeous as always, in a mythopoetic horror story that I absolutely did not see where it was going.
Started this morning on Nowhere Burning, by Catriona Ward.
I’ve heard great things, and I really enjoyed Kraken, but yeah, Mieville is never a breezy read.
I’ve been dividing my time between genre fiction and classic literature lately. Genre fiction during the day and classic literature/lit fic right before bed. Because when I read genre fiction at night, I stay up too late reading. Not really an issue with Howard’s End. I’m enjoying the book but I wouldn’t exactly call it a page-turner.
I finished Parker Pyne, Detective by Dame Agatha Christie. For the most part I enjoyed it, some of the stories didn’t quite stick the landing and the ones in the Middle East were the better stories by far. However, I was so tired of hearing the titular character refered to by both names through the whole narrative.
Finished Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere by Anastasia-Renee’. It was supposed to be SF but it seemed like fantasy to me. Definitely experimental, and I didn’t particularly care for it, although some of the language usage was striking. Also finished The Kid Stays in the Picture, by Robert Evans. I enjoyed the parts about movies and his acting career in general, but I didn’t care for the stuff about his private life.
Next up: Crime Through Time III, edited by Sharan Newman, which is a collection of historical mysteries; and Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers, by John Sutherland.
I finished Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher today while waiting for new brakes for my car. It was a fun as hell read, just what I needed right now. The characters were fabulous, especially the bear. Wish there had been more Weasel though.
Yes, it was a joy, wasn’t it? I wish they could all be like that.
Speaking of which, I had to ditch Nowhere Burning. It wasn’t plausible, it wouldn’t jell, and I didn’t look forward to picking it up again.
Started this morning on This House Will Feed by Maria Tureaud.
I really don’t know how to feel about Project Hail Mary. I nearly quit reading around the 25% mark because of the repetitive internal monologue and things that just didn’t make sense about the events that took place. There is so much scientific exposition that it strains credulity. It’s very “As you know, Bob” about science, only the guy is just talking to himself most of the time so it’s like why are you explaining science to yourself?
But it got interesting and cool enough to keep me reading. I think the whole idea of it is just lovely. And the science is fun, and the way science is used to tell the story is wonderful. Great story, I just kind of wish someone else was writing it.
I feel the same way - there’s just a lot of crazy Mary Sue nonsense about it that made it hard to love the story. I really really liked it, and as you say - the idea of it is wonderful.
Meanwhile, I’m 40% of the way through the audiobook of Neuromancer. I am utterly and completely lost. I’ve read some brief reviews of it (it’s popped up on a couple “Top 10 SF stories of the last 50 years” type articles), so I understand both the overlying structure of it, as well as the fact that the narrative is essentially as fractured as Case’s mind and body - but that doesn’t make it any easier to follow along. Someone hype me up about finishing this please - I haven’t checked into it in several days.
It’s kind of funny that your post comes right after the Project Hail Mary comments, because Gibson’s writing is in some ways the opposite of those complaints: he drops you into worlds with little to no explanation and you have to figure it out slowly as you go along. I personally love that style - his dialogue in particular feels much more realistic to me than a lot of other sci-fi. But it does take a lot of paying attention and making connections in your own mind. He doesn’t usually spell it all out.
All that said, I read Neuromancer decades ago, so I don’t specifically remember how worth it it is, sorry 