I just read a book and a selection of short articles by Jon Krakauer . Man, that dude can write! Also, he could depress a hyena.
Finished Kolymsky Heights, by Lionel Davidson. Not recommended. It was a big disappointment; I’d read some glowing reviews but it was tedious, the one thing a thriller must not be. Also read The Other Girl, a memoir by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. This was excellent; it was about how her childhood was affected by discovering (at age ten) that her older sister had died before she was born.
Next up: The Eyes of the Amaryllis, by Natalie Babbitt; and Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak.
I finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. This is a book I so wanted to give five stars. I adored the ending. It made me cry. I still tear up when I think about it. What a great story.
There were just too many “come on!” moments for me to give it five stars. Not to mention all the missed opportunities for exploring character with some major complex emotional issues that were just glossed over. It could have been a better story, exploring the mind of a man facing his own mortality, his separation from earth, and his moral failures. But the narrative wasn’t really interested in any of that, not even in passing.
I suspect the movie will fix a lot of these issues. I have not been this excited about seeing a film for a long time.
Next up might be 11/22/63 by Stephen King. I don’t know much about that era but people seem to have a high regard for the book. And I am a long-time King fan so I doubt I’ll be disappointed.
I’m still reading genre by day and classic literature by night. Still reading Howard’s End. It’s good. I’m still processing my thoughts about it. It’s definitely from an era with completely different gender politics which makes it challenging at times. I don’t even mean I’m offended - I mean that there are a lot of historical subtleties probably lost on me. The main character is arguably a feminist, but she is also sort of deliberately submissive in her relationships. It’s a nuanced character for sure, in a context I don’t fully understand. I plan to do all that research after I finish it.
But that was not the kind of book Hail Mary or The Martian are, these are “Human vs the Environment” kind of books, they may brush on these matters and have more or less realized characters, but the central point is not to explore feelings but to surmount obstacles.
Then why include them at all? What is the point?
The biggest creative risk this book took was a revelation that had absolutely no bearing on anything that happened. I thought the revelation was cool, from a creative perspective. Raised all sorts of interesting questions. I just don’t understand why the author bothered to include it if he wasn’t going to engage with it.
Weir is just not a very good narrative writer. The story was great, the elements of it are great, deeply creative, fantastic science fiction, but the prose was pedestrian at best. I almost stopped reading at the 25% mark. I’m glad I finished - I loved the direction it went - but the repetitive, hamfisted narration nearly put me off completely. It got more bearable as plot started happening.
I think The Martian worked better because astronauts are in fact superhuman, emotionally detached in the face of crisis, and trend toward a positive disposition. They are selected to be that way. But Grace was just a guy. So I would expect more psychological vulnerability from him throughout the entire narrative. This was where I had difficulty suspending my disbelief.
When it comes to this author, I just have mixed feelings. I wish I could wholeheartedly love but I cannot. And it’s frustrating because there’s a lot to love in his work.
I finished the Asmiov’s Science Fiction edition I was reading. Even though I’m falling “behind” on reading the magazines, I switched over to On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. The main character is stuck in a Groundhog’s Day-style day (although the “rules” of what is happening to her differ from the movie, so it doesn’t seem TOO familiar). Although I like it, I’m not sure yet that I’ll read the next book in the series. I’m a little worried the ending will be a little too much of a downer, after not much has happened throughout the novel. We’ll see.
Which revelation? I read this a few months ago for a book club, and wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise. It was a lot of fun, but I also found it pretty shallow in the ways that I most like science fiction, i.e., interesting societies and plausible, compelling human reactions to strange science. If Le Guin is a 9 course meal, this was a cheeseburger.
Because it’s good to add some complexity to the characters, but if you want to write traditional hard sci fi you don’t make that kind of thing the focus of the book.
You allude to them, use them to flesh things out a bit and make us empathize with the character and see him as a human being and not a cardboard cutout.
But ultimately the reader is supposed to be reading the book to see how the character surmounts the obstacle, not to explore the human soul.
I finished A Load of Old Balls: The QI History of Sport by James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski – a great and surprisingly fast read. I’m not even a sports fan, but this is more a “QI” book than a “sports trivia” book, and there’s plenty for the non-fan to gorge on here.
Now I’m reading New England Sweets: Doughnuts, Bonbons, and Whoopie Pies by Susan Mara Bregman. We’re supposed to be giving book presentations at the same time in a local bookstore, and I wanted to see what she’d be doing. I suggested that we find some common bond between the books – I’m doing Lost Wonderland: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Boston’s Million Dollar Amusement Park, and suggested that I bring a reproduction of the Wonderland Souvenir books, which are filled with ads for the Boston-area candy companies (most of them long gone) that she wrote about in her book.
The book, by the way, is well-researched but short.
Next up: Ken Follett’s Circle of Days, which does for Stonehenge what his earlier Pillars of the Earth did for medieval cathedrals. It’s likely to be interesting, because I’d read another “building of Stonehenge” novel several years ago, Stonehenge by Harry Harrison and Leon Stover. They made some wild assumption, but I suspect that Follett’s novel probably takes advantage of more recent archaeolgical work, an presents a ore likely scenario.
On audio, I just finished reading a Christmas present, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It’s read by the same guy who read Starship Troopers for Blackstone audio, but in very different “voice”. I’m re0reading some Nero Wolfe on audio, but I have to find another book to read. I might re-read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Yeah–the book club I’m in has made me realize that this is a full subgenre, just not one I seek out. About half of our members love the “Smart Man Save World” approach, and that’s what they choose; the other half goes for the “Society is complicated and weird” approach.
I think the book club is on the verge of falling apart (of the latest read, Dawn, I think I was the only one to finish it on time, and the meeting is delayed indefinitely), and that disparity may be why.
My own preference is for the “Smart Man Person Save World” approach, for “everyday” reading, and more complex approaches from time to time.
Both are hard to do well, but I have more tolerance for workmanlike examples of the first approach than the second.
Also the first approach is “comfort food” for the mind for me.
Okay. I’ll acknowledge this is very much not my genre. I’m more of a space opera person.
But it’s more for me about how those moments hit. Case in point, one genre I like a fair amount is noir. Hardboiled stuff. Noir is not about exploring feelings. But when there is feeling, it hits hard. There’s a scene in, I believe, The Big Sleep where the protagonist kicks a woman out of bed. It’s just a moment, but it’s an impactful one. You understand a lot about that character from that one, short scene. It’s this undercurrent that drives the story.
I think there are a lot of moments that could have hit hard like that in Project Hail Mary. Then there would be something underneath everything else, and that something is what makes good literature great.
The revelation that Grace had to be forcibly confined and drugged and shot into space against his will to save his own species.
That’s big. It’s risky. I love it! I don’t know why anyone would write something like that unless they had a specific intention.
I’ve read through the reviews online and the two main camps seem to be the 80% who love it unreservedly and the 20% who love it with reservations. I’m just in the latter camp. This is a great book with a lot of heart.
I finished Howard’s End, which had quite the climax. I don’t know if it’s worth getting into all my thoughts about it when I’m not sure it’s a popularly read novel. But I related a lot to the protagonist, Margaret. I imagine I would be a lot like her if I were in my 30s in 1910. Kind but principled and assertive when necessary. There’s a whole lot of thematic content in there related to class and gender, and some beautiful prose, and I really enjoyed it. It’s nice to slow down once and a while and just let a story unfold.
Not everybody can be Bujold, unfortunately 
Well I for one am glad there wasn’t a load of navel-gazing and philosophising bollocks in my epic space adventure. I loved it for being the best buddy cop movie/book I’ve seen in a long time. I’m also a fan of the underdog hero.
Hands down my favorite King. The wife is reading it now.
Finished Mr Norris Changes Trains, by Christopher Isherwood. First published in 1933. The US version carried the title The Last of Mr Norris. This and his later work, Goodbye to Berlin, evoke the rise of the Nazis in Berlin in the early 1930s as seen through the eyes of a young British English teacher. The latter work was made into the musical Cabaret, and reading it, while not like reading the movie’s script, was definitely like reading the story in the movie. All the same characters and many of the same scenes, with the Michael York character standing in for Isherwood. In this earlier book, Mr Norris Changes Trains, we have another young British English teacher, this time named William Bradshaw, who lives in the same boarding house that is in the later work and Cabaret and with the same landlady. But there the crossover ends. At the start of the story, Bradshaw meets the mysterious, older Englishman Arthur Norris on a train while traveling from the Netherlands to Berlin, and they strike up a friendship. Norris is a man of contradictions – lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant (he enjoys some wicked whip sessions with the skilled dominatrix Anni and oversized Olga), and just what is it he does for a living in Berlin anyway? In the background are the Nazis vying with the Communists for ultimate control. A very interesting read. Recommended. I learn from Wikipedia that Norris was based on Isherwood’s friend Gerald Hamilton, who was known back in the day as “the wickedest man in Europe.”
Next up: The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I’m going to see the Project Hail Mary movie tomorrow and I cannot handle my excitement.
Speaking of Bujold, I’m trying to get into her fantasy. I’ve read a couple of the Penric books and I’m currently reading Penric’s Fox. It’s a bit… boring.
I don’t know if her fantasy just isn’t working for me or if I just need to read from the beginning of the series.
Didn’t work for me either, I liked the first book (Curse of Chalion) but didn’t love it.
And the rest are, as you put it rather boring, there is a lack of stakes nothing feels dangerous, nor particularly hard to solve.
And worse, is that is not really fantasy to me, magic is just a kind of technology, is talked about in technological terms (“there was an imbalance”) and works in quite regular and predictable way.
Finished The Eyes of the Amaryllis, by Natalie Babbitt, which got off to a slow start, but had a very well-written ending. Also finished Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak, which I enjoyed a lot.
Next up: Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way), by Sue Macy; and Telling the Map, a story collection by Christopher Rowe.
I finished The ABC Murders by Dame Agatha Christie. I enjoyed it quite well, I suspect the twist was new then but has been used quite frequently since 1936, nevertheless, I did enjoy it.
Also finished Constituent Service By John Scalzi, fresh out of college young women becomes a civil servant in an area full of humans and alien species. Very silly and a lot of fun, typical Scalzi hijinks and characters but it was nice way to pass a couple of hours. (Mostly doing dishes since the dishwasher broke last month)