I just finished **The Affinity Bridge **by George Mann, my first real dip into steampunk, and I was very satisfied. London, 1901; low-flying airships, steam-powered busses, automata doing menial and not-so-menial tasks, Queen Victoria supported by bizzarre life support sistems, plus airship crashes, zombies, the plague and “glowing bobbies”. What’s not to like?
Why is Queen Victoria on life support? She died in 1901 IRL.
I finished it last evening, and would recommend it highly. It’s not dry at all, it’s written with a very direct and almost conversational style so it’s a quick and easy read about a fascinating topic. This is the review I read that sold me on it, I think it describes the tone of the book very well.
Guess someone finally pulled the plug.
Halfway through Truman, by David McCullough, and enjoying it immensely.
I’m glad!
If you ever have the chance to see the HBO miniseries John Adams, based on McCullough’s book, check out one of the DVD extras, a half-hour bio of McCullough. Charming and informative.
I just read through this month’s thread and usually people are reading very different books from me, but I’ve recently read a number of those mentioned.
I tried a sample of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and found the writing style as annoying as I had with Case Histories when I read that. I should like this author, but I don’t. Oh well.
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The Rook* was one of my favourites from last year and I really enjoyed A Town Called Alice when I read it earlier this year. Both kept me up way past my bedtime.
I just started Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, partly because I’ve heard good things about it and partly because I have audiobooks of Blackout and All Clear and want to get to those. I struggled a bit at the beginning of The Doomsday Book with how slowly it got going, so I’m really hoping these jump right in, or should I say, jump right back in time.
For variety this month I mixed in a YA and a non-fiction. I highly recommend The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a YA that tackles the serious topic of living with cancer in a very approachable way. Wonderful story. The non-fiction was The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. I suppose there aren’t a lot of contemporary materials from end of the Middle Ages for documentation, but I was still disappointed with how superficial the research in the book seemed.
Then back to my favourite genre, mysteries, with Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood, the first Phyrne Fisher book. Witty and light, I’ll be reading more of these. Another first in a series I enjoyed was Mark de Castrique’s Blackman’s Coffin.
I’ve read John Adams, and we’ve seen the miniseries, but it was borrowed, so we don’t have it anymore. I don’t recall any extras on that version, and we always check out the extras if any are contained.
I love David McCullough. I know it’s a cliche, but he really does “bring history to life.” All of his works that I’ve read, they read like novels and just pull you in. After Truman, I’m going to look up his history of the Brooklyn Bridge, since the wife and I walked across it twice last year.
He walks across the Brooklyn Bridge, and talks about his enduring love of it, in the film bio.
I just finished Pandora’s Clock, by John Nance. His specialty is thrillers involving commercial aviation, a field about which he knows his stuff. Recommended.
I was given a copy of Joe Muto’s An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media for Father’s Day, because they saw me gazing longingly at it. I devoured it in two days. A Very interesting book, but I think Muto was, well, kinda dumb in what he did and how he went about it. Still, a fascinating look into the world of Fox News.
** The Collected Works of Hal Clement, Volumes II and III** – I got copies of these volumes from NESFA Press for free, and have been waiting for a chance to finally read them. There are several stories in the second volume that haven’t been collected elsewhere, and the third volume 9which collects all the mterial omn Mesklin, starting with Mission of Gravity contains two short stories I hadn’t even known about. It’s also got the essay “Whirlagig World”, which I hadn’t read in ages. I highly rcommend it all (I didn’t get a got of Vol. I, but I already have the novels that make it up). I don’t see anything for Clement’s in print anymore, and he’s one of the best hard science fiction writers. If you haven’t read Mission of Gravity, or Needle (from which they practically stole the plot of the film The Hidden), they’re worth a read.
I’m currently reading Marooned on Eden by Robert L. Forward and his wife, Margaret Dodson Forward. It’s the second sequel to Forward’s Flight of the Dragonfly/Rocheworld series (although chronologically after the next volume written). I hadn’t read the sequels when they came out twenty years ago, and am catching up. More hard core SF. Forward wrote the sequels in collaboration with his daughter and his wife, which is interesting.
I am reading The Confessions Of Al Capone by Loren Estleman and I must say it’s very well done. It’s a piece of historical fiction based around Al’s years after he got out of prison and moved to Palm Island. A low-level Italian FBI agent (and seminary school dropout) who’s father used to work for The Outfit as a truck driver is summoned by J Hoover to assume the identity of a priest and befriend the Capone family in Florida as a means of possibly collecting information from the increasingly mentally unstable Capone (neuro syphilis) in order to pursue prosecution of other gang members that are still operating in Chicago and elsewhere.
It’s a really good read.
Orb seem to have an omnibus of the Mesklin stories available called Heavy Planet: The Classic Mesklin Stories. And I see Wildside have a book called Hal’s Worlds: Stories and Essays in Memory of Hal Clement (ISBN 0809550733) which looks interesting. It seems to be print on demand and claims to have a previously uncollected Hal Clement short story, but I guess it may well be in the NESFA editions. Mentioning the book just in case you haven’t come across it.
I finished The Quarry by Iain Banks, which was good, and a suitable final novel although not a great one. The new Graham Joyce, The Year of the Ladybird was quite short and very readable but not up to his previous Some Kind of Fairy Tale. It’s set in an English holiday camp in 1976 during the heatwave and was an interesting reminder of the times but the story felt a bit slight.
Currently reading Abaddon’s Gate, the 3rd in the big sf series by James s. A. Corey. It hasn’t really grabbed me yet, but my reading’s been awfully bitty recently.
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute was good, but I had forgotten just how racist parts of Australia appear to have been back then.
Finished NOS4A2 and Life As We Knew It. The latter is interesting: told in the form of diary entries by a 16-year-old girl, the story covers the aftermath of a planetary disaster: an asteroid strikes the moon, changing its orbit and distance from the Earth and setting off a cascade of natural disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic activity, and other insane weather. The story is about one family surviving in the aftermath. A post-apocalyptic book without zombies!
While I’m waiting for the next in the series to be returned, I’m not sure what I’m going to start. I snapped up a bunch of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books during a recent Kindle Daily Deal, so I might start Casino Royale.
One of Our Thursdays is Missing, by Jasper Fforde. It’s in the Thursday Next series. So far, it’s not as good as the first three and the fifth, unfortunately.
Finished The Shining Girls by Lauren Buekes. It’s about a serial killer who travels through time, from 1931 to 1993. One of his victims survives and tracks him down. The killings are described in clinical detail, without prurience. Reading about the murders was almost like reading a medical record.
If you like serial killer novels, you’ll like this one. There could be a sequel, if I’m understanding the ending correctly. I’m not sure I did.
Next up, if it comes in the mail today, is Home From the Hill by William Humphrey. I watched the 1960 movie earlier this week and have some questions.
Twilight of the Bombs, by Richard Rhodes. Fourth in his history of nuclear weapons (the first of which won the Pulitzer Prize.) Interesting if you like to read about political machinations and powerful people trying to coerce and deceive. Rhodes also has a very specific take on what caused the Iraq war.
This month I’ve read The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. Good, not great, story about time-traveling serial killer. I tend to conflate it with NOS4A2 by Stephen King, which I read in May.
I listened to Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik. Rabies fascinates and terrifies me. This one was a little lighter on the scary bits than I thought it might be, but maybe that’s a GOOD thing.
And I just finished Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey. I’m a big fan of Daniel Abraham (half of James S.A. Corey), and these stories just don’t disappoint. Big sprawling space opera set within the confines of the solar system. Mostly. 
This book had characters that I kinda didn’t expect, and went off in a direction that kinda surprised me. But I still liked it. I like his characters a lot.
It came in the mail. Spent most of the day reading, on a couch on the front porch, windows open, nice breeze, few interruptions.
As (almost) always, the book was better than the movie, and the changes made no sense.
The characters are Wade, a hunter and serial philanderer; Hannah, his wife, the ultimate martyr; Theron, their son, indulged by both parents but not spoiled (he’s a good kid); and Libby, the young woman Theron falls in love with. Theron and Libby fall in love but Libby’s father wants her to have nothing to do with Theron, fearing that he’s just like his father.
I liked the book a lot. It’s set in Texas but it’s an accurate of small town life and morals anywhere in the 40’s and 50’s. A lot of the “action” is internal, which is hard to transfer to the screen, but the moviemakers didn’t even try. They turned a character study into a soap opera.
The July thread is up and running - it can be found here.