Yes, I agree.
Just finished the short story collection Machine of Death, as I mentioned earlier. It was pretty good overall; I’d give it a B, maybe a B-.
Still enjoying Cloud Atlas, and about a fifth of the way through (now in the Sonmi section, which is quite a bit different from the movie).
Next up: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon, a selection of one of my book clubs. It’s huge; to start, I may just read the chapters on subjects that interest me (autism, criminality and children conceived by rape, in particular).
I’ve had that book on my Kindle for a long time, but I find the length daunting (“huge” is a good word). Someday I need to ignore that part and just start reading.
I’m almost finished with On the Road. I find myself wanting to punch Dean Moriarty repeatedly. Not at all surprised to find out his real-life counterpart, Neal Cassady, ended up dead in a ditch.
I’ve been rereading the Honor Harrington series, currently near the end of Echoes of Honor. I may not finish the series, I recall being disappointed with the next couple of books when I first read them. After a fairly tight sequence to this point Weber seemed to dither around creating new side plots rather than bringing the main thread of the series to a conclusion.
I just finished another Excellent Martin Cruz Smith book, December 6. The hero, if he can be called that, is an American expat barkeeper and all-around rascal (Yes, I thought about Rick Blaine and his Cafe Americain) in Tokyo literally on the eve of war. Fascinating pictures of life in Tokyo in its more raffish districts in the days before the balloon went up.
I read Douglas Adams & Mark Cawardine’sLast Chance to See which is about their expeditions around the world to find some of the most endangered animals in the late 80s/early 90s. I was worried about the kakapountil I looked it up on Wikipedia and saw that it’s coming back–over 100 birds versus the 40 that existed when they went to New Zealand.
It also made me really miss Douglas Adams. We lost him too soon.
I loved that book! I thought the funniest part was where he went out of his way not to acknowledge that his humorless, very well-organized and punctual travel companions on one leg of the journey were not Germans (although they really were) - so he said they were Latvians.
Good news about the kakapo.
I stopped at At All Costs. I have a copy of Mission of Honor, but so far I can’t motivate myself to read it. I was annoyed when Weber began merging the Wages of Sin companion series into this one. I haven’t read those books so there were elements introduced which didn’t make sense to me.
I ended up liking The Book Thief more than I expected to. The narration from “death” never really worked for me, but I liked the rest of the prose pretty well. The movie is much weaker - it has an excellent cast, but it took all the sharp edges off the story and left only the treacle.
The second book in Robin Hobb’s Solder Son trilogy was very odd. The protagonist, an aspiring military cadet, starts getting really fat, not because he’s overeating, but for magical reasons. Nobody much believes this, and most of the book is about how badly he is treated by everybody for being fat. As strange as this aspect was, I enjoyed the prosaic parts of the book more than the actual plot about the magical forest people who are pissed off about a road being built through their land.
I just started The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker. It’s about… a golem and a jinni, who are cast adrift in New York City in 1899, just two more immigrants adjusting to the challenges of a new life in a new country. I was a bit dubious about his one, but so far it’s charming. I like the characterizations very much.
I really wanted to love the Honor Harrington series, but Honor is SUCH a Mary Sue characters that I couldn’t finish. It’s a shame, because the stories are otherwise pretty well written.
The characterization of the missiles is certainly spot-on.
That and the part where they were trying to buy condoms in China.
They wanted to get some underwater recordings of the Yangtze River to show what kind of environment the river dolphins were enduring. They didn’t have an underwater microphone, so the sound guy from the BBC suggested they put a condom over their mike to protect it. They went all over town trying to find a place that sold condoms, but everyone kept trying to give them birth control pills instead. The sound guy finally said, “Just tell them that you want to fuck someone and can’t wait!”
Heheh. I’d forgotten that. I would’ve traveled anywhere with him.
After Gabriel Garcia Marquez died I couldn’t take the embarrassment anymore and I finally read 100 Years of Solitude, and it was incredible.
It may seem odd, but I had never run across the label “Mary Sue” character before. But with a little googling I can see why you used it. Yeah, I get that Honor seems a bit too ridiculously good at everything. The series is to a large degree an homage to Hornblower, but while Hornblower is a rather unrealistically gifted naval officer, at least he isn’t tall, super strong and an expert at seemingly every form of hand to hand combat known to man.
“Otherwise pretty well written”. Words that have possibly never before been applied to a David Weber book. Look, I admit the guy can write space opera. Once the missiles start flying, he’s great. The problem is, he doesn’t realize that this is all he’s good at. So he filled the later books of the series with dreary, dry as dust political scheming and, god help us, romance, and relegated the big space battles to ten or twenty pages near the end of the book. The result was massive tomes that made George R. R. Martin’s most recent Game of Thrones entries look toned and sleek by comparison.
Curiously, I’m having much the same problem with the third book of the Alan Lewrie series that I mentioned a few posts back. The book continues the saga of a young rake hell in the King’s Navy. But I’m 3/4 of the way in and virtually nothing has happened except that the hero has gotten into trouble for not keeping his trousers buttoned up – a predicament that was predictable but not very interesting because Lambdin doesn’t have the writing chops to carry off the characterizations of the parties involved and frankly, we, the reader, don’t really care much about the young lout in question.
But while Lambdin is enthralling us with young Lewrie’s training as a newly minted lieutenant, thiswas happening elsewhere in the Caribbean. In the Battle of the Saintes, the French lost several ships and any hope of invading Jamaica. Our hero hears about this when he sails into harbor and sees the captured Ville de Paris at anchor.
I could admire the author’s decision to not have our hero present except that it begs the question, “Why write an action series set in the British Navy if you’re going to skip the action?”
There really is a noticeable difference between the earlier Honor Harrington books and the later ones, with the latter characterized, as Finagle said, by more dry political maneuvering and less action. I have wondered why that happened, and it seems to me Weber is a bit of a victim of his own success. Earlier on, when his sales figures weren’t as impressive, I suspect he paid more attention to editorial advice, which largely kept his long-winded tendencies in check. I see much the same thing in Tom Clancy’s work, with the earlier novels much shorter and tighter than his later ones.
Ahh, SpazCat, this is one of my favorite books of all time! So glad you enjoyed it. 
The BBC is doing a follow-up TV series - just now I believe - that has Stephen Fry and yes, Mark Carwardine going around to view the species that Douglas Adams first visited. At least, that’s what the promos suggested would happen.
I heard that Mark Cawardine was working on a follow-up. I’ll have to check it out when it airs, or rather when I can get my hands on it across the pond over here.
The follow up tv series came out in the UK five years ago!
Stephen Fry banged on about twitter and missing his gadgets far too much (especially in the first couple of episodes) but it had it’s moments…
Meanwhile, I’ve started The Martian by Andy Weir.