Started this morning on You Like It Darker, the new story collection by Stephen King. I’m only 37 pages in, not through the first story yet, but it’s perfect.
A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare Diana Preston
The emergence of three new technologies - chemical weapons, aerial bombing of cities, and submarine attacks on merchant shipping - during World War I.
Pretty interesting.
While volunteering in my high school’s library, I processed a new book by stamping the school’s address on an inside page with an excerpt from Have Space Suit–Will Travel. It including the lines "Go ahead! We’ll make a star!" Wow! I remember thinking. Gotta read that. I’ve been a fan of SF ever since.
Finished The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization, by Roland Ennos, which is very interesting. Recommended for anyone interested in biology or history.
Now I’m reading Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention, by Kathryn D. Sullivan.
That’s cool, DD! Thanks.
I recommend The Face of Battle by John Keegan - a bit dry, but pretty good. It’s about how warfare affects the common soldier, with case studies of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme.
Thanks, that sounds intriguing. I’ll add it to my long to-read list.
I just finished The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years.
This isn’t my usual read – a multi-family tale of generational trauma – but the sweetener of a bit of magical realism drew me in. It’s beautifully written, a slow burn of a book, and if the climactic scene was predictable, well, it wasn’t trying to be a twist. Very glad I read it.
I hated to do it because it’s actually a good book, but I can’t finish Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars by Kliph Nesteroff. As the book progresses closer to the present my blood gets angried up more and more. I’m getting so pissed off seeing how these conservative assholes have been building up the foundation for the shitshow we currently inhabit for the last fifty years I’m turning into Mrs. White in Clue. And that sucks because, as I said, it’s a really good book. If I didn’t live in a dystopia where I have no bodily autonomy I might be able to finish it but I don’t and I can’t.
If you’d like a hug, I offer one. Today I know just how you feel.
Finished Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention, by Kathryn D. Sullivan, which was very interesting.
Read Weird Medieval Guys: How to live, laugh, love (and die) in dark times, by Olivia M. Swarthout, which was a lot of fun.
Now I’m reading Halting State by Charles Stross.
Just started on Mystic River by Dennis Lehane.
Finished Clive Cussler’s Shock Wave, one of the pre-2000 Dirk Pitt novels that Cussler wrote all by his lonesome.
I also quickly devoured Catherine L. Moore’s Scarlet Dream, a collection of Northwest Smith stories. The thing is, I’d read them several times before, and don’t remember them. Of course, I’ve read Shambleau more times than I can count – it’s in a stack of anthologies, including the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Besides which, I had to cite it in my own book on Medusa. But I have most of these stories in two other anthologies that I read – Scarlet Dream and Black Gods and Northwest of Earth. The first is, I now realize, two anthologies smooshed together and taking the names of both. The latter is a pretty clever title (I have always been convinced, since I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time back in 1981 that George Lucas or Steven Spielberg was inspired to name Indiana Jones that because of Northwest Smith – (Geographical name) plus (One of the most typical, common surnames in the US). Moore herself supposedly came up with the name when, as a secretary, she saw the name “N.W. Smith” on the return address on an envelope), I have no idea why I keep forgetting these stories. The illustrations in this 1981 edition make Smith look a lot like Han Solo, which is oddly appropriate. Also, the stories are monotonously similar. Smith encounters an alien but very humanly sexy Damsel in Distress from an ineffable menace with an alien name who wants to devour their essence like a psychic vampire and is able to get away by Dumb Luck or by shooting everything in sight. I know she could write other stories, but restricts Smith to this narrow sub-genre.
I also finished up The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (she of the Bechdel test). The title is taken from ads that appeared on comic books, and it’s really an autobiography, mixed with thoughts on her intellectual forbears (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Margaret Fuller) and on her various forms of exercise and working out.
Now I’m on to The Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak, which I picked up at Boskone.
On audio I’ve been re-listening to some Clive Cussler novels and things from my collection. I’ve got to find a new audiobook.
Project Hail Mary Andy Weir
A man wakes up in a strange room with no memory of how he got there or why. As his memory slowly returns, he realizes that he and he alone can save the world.
A lot more speculative than Weir’s other books, The Martian and Artemis, but still a lot of specific and careful science behind the action. And a lot of fun to read.
The Stone Sky N.K. Jemison
The conclusion of the shattered Earth trilogy, about a world where some people have the magical ability to start or stop earthquakes, and a lot of other stuff too.
It was nicely written, although there were parts where I wasn’t sure what was going on, beyond “powerful magical stuff happening”.
Finished Stephen King’s latest collection, You Like It Darker. I really enjoyed it. His “voice” was familiar and good, he stayed away from some previous pitfalls in his writing (male gaze, being overly political). I did catch a couple of errors, I think. They were things like, “He put the beer in the fridge” and then a few paragraphs later, “he took a sip of beer”. He does still have editors, right? Anyway, Two Talented Bastids, Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, and The Answer Man were my favorites. Least favorite: Rattlesnakes. The main character of that one is Vic Trenton, the father from Cujo. I don’t think that connection helped the story, and also, Cujo is a bucketload of human misery. I don’t revisit it.
I re-read this and it sounds like a lot of bitching, but I don’t mean it to be. I’ve been very happy the last few days to find that King still has the gift.
I just finished Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones.
It’s the second book I read by him, and I can only really talk about it in comparison to the first. I’ll try to avoid obvious spoilers, but just in case, I’ll put my comments in spoiler tags.
Horror novels generally have happy endings or unhappy endings. I thought I’d predicted which way it was going to end, but then the book surprised me by ending the other way. But then I thought more about the main characters, and realized that in broad strokes, it had ended the way I’d predicted at first.
It’s not as gut-punching a book as Jones’s The Only Good Indian, but I’m just fine with that. It was a great werewolf novel, one of the best I’ve ever read.
Finished it. The other chapters were on Washington and foreign policy, and on Madison’s adroit politicking both before and after the Constitutional Convention. The latter was particularly good; I learned a lot. Not Ellis’s best (that’s still his Pulitzer-winning Founding Brothers), but worth a read.
Over the weekend I zipped through Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built, an upbeat, feel-good sf novel set on a human-settled, habitable, heavily-forested moon orbiting a gas giant. It’s about a vaguely-discontented tea monk who encounters a nature-loving robot out in the woods, and the offbeat friendship that results. It’s jussssst a little bit twee, but I liked it.
Next up: Eager by Ben Goldfarb, nonfiction about beavers’ amazing comeback from the devastation of the fur trade, and exploring all that they now have to offer a climate-changing world. Remarkable critters (and cute, too, unless they’re chewing down your favorite tree).
Started today on Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. It’s a novel about a Stepford-wife-like robot whose ability to learn makes her question her role.
New thread: Oh boy warm weather!
Finished Halting State by Charles Stross, which was excellent–one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and definitely the best SF one.
Now I’m reading The Thousand Dollar Dinner: America’s First Great Cookery Challenge, by Becky Libourel Diamond.