Terribly behind in reviews - maybe I should start with what I’m actually reading right now and work my way backwards:
Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie. A memoir that focuses on the 9 year fatwa and his experience with living in hiding and in fear. I’ve read his “lighter” novels (Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life), as well as his collection of non-fiction Step Across this Line - and enjoyed them all (I’d LOVE to get my hands on the audiobook version of *Haroun *that Rushdie himself narrated - borrowed it from the library & now it’s lost) - but am finding Joseph Anton tough to get through - not only is it pretty damned depressing to see how little support he got, but he expresses the tedium of living through such a situation almost too well. I actually had to stop midway (the Kindle copy I borrowed from the library expired) and I’m not 100% sure I’ll make the effort to finish.
I’m on my second Ian Fleming James Bond audiobook - Live and Let Die. I’m relatively familiar with the movies (my husband is a huge Bond fan) and it’s interesting to see how the films differ from the original novels. Even more interesting is the … well, sexism and racism aren’t quite the right words, but Bond’s/Fleming’s attitudes towards women and “Negroes” are definitely from the 1950’s. Simon Vance is the narrator and I really enjoy his work overall - though his attempts at an Black accent are kinda dreadful (tho Fleming’s attempt at the dialect is just as awful in print).
I took the local library’s “Blind Date with a Book” challenge - they wrapped books in brown paper and wrote a 2-3 sentence blurb on each. The one I picked said “Ghosts, London, New York in the 1920’s” - turned out to be Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl - I am SO not a chick-lit reader, but am about 40 pages in and it’s… OK … so far. The ghost character has me intrigued, much more so than the actual protagonist. I’ll give it another 50 pages or so before I decide.
Just finished Divergent, by Veronica Roth. My daughter recommended it, and she (and I) liked The Hunger Games series, and this one was very much like it. Overall, not too bad, and I am tackling Insurgent tonight. Mostly it is something to talk about with my daughter.
I finally finished The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius, which satisfied my low-class taste for gossip books.
I may tackle J.K.Rowling’s latest non-Potter book next, if I can get it from the library. See if she is any good apart from school stories about wizardry. Anyone read it? Is it worth the effort?
I finished An Unholy Alliance by Susanna Gregory today. It is the second in her Matthew Bartholomew medieval mystery series and while nothing to cheer about from the rooftops, it is engaging and after the first 50 or 60 pages of scene setting moves along quite well. I think the book could have been about 20 pages shorter without hurting it and the mystry was a tad convoluted but her real forte is in characterizations. I think, for me, this will be one of those “Sit down with and old friend and catch up” series.
Polished off Redshirts this evening. Good read; not as funny as I had been expecting, but satisfying. The codas were sort of meh–I would’ve rather had another fifty pages of meta-meta exploring the notion that the entire thing wasn’t actually about the tv series, but was rather about a novel about the tv series.
Next up is The Rook, which I’ve decided to try based on the mention of it on The Incomparable podcast. I can’t actually listen to the podcast, because they have no concept of the idea of spoilers, but I heard enough of it to pique my interest, so that’s what I’m reading now.
I just finished a very satisfying WWII novel; Warning of War, by James Brady.
Weeks before Pearl Harbor the 4th Marine regiment is hurriedly shifted from its bases in China to the Philippines, but a small group is left behind to try to round up Marines in back-country bases and get them out of China before the inevitable beginning of war with Japan.
My last post in the February thread was a lie. I ended up returning all those books to the library unread. What I’m actually reading will be Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett, The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, and Ulysses by James Joyce. I always love returning to Discworld. I’ve read and enjoyed Snow Crash, and Crypto is supposed to be even better except for the ending. I’ve read the Odyssey twice, a prose translation back in HS and Robert Fagles’ as a grown-up. I hope they help me with difficult Ulysses.
None of these are library books. Since I won’t have to return them, I’m confident I’ll actually read these.
Be aware that there’s at least one person on this earth who did not much care for Cryptonomicon. (Technically two, as my friend also disliked it, but he’s not in this thread, so never mind him.) I had also read and loved Snow Crash, and thought, “Yay! The last novel I read by this guy was awesome, so this one will be awesome too!” And then I slogged through nine-fucking-hundred pages, waiting for the awesome to happen, and it never did. And then it ended. And I was like, “Where the fuck was my awesome?” And I’ve never read another goddamn Neal Stephenson book again, because fuck that. My theory has always been that you have to be a huge computer and/or encryption geek to like the book, and since that’s most of Neal Stephenson’s audience, all you hear is praise.
Long story short: That’s a whole lotta book you got there, and if you don’t like it, you’re going to be mighty pissed that you just wasted all that time on it.
I’m about a third of the way through 1493 by Charles Mann, about the rise in global exchange of information and goods after Columbus’s trips to the New World. Not quite as captivating as his previous book, 1491, but still pretty interesting.
I’m also reading At the Mountains of Madness from an H.P. Lovecraft collection. I’ve never read it before, and it’s pretty good.
Naw, you can also be a history geek and like it. Same as with the Baroque Cycle, which is IMO even better (and of course three times as long! ).
I know next to nothing about crypto or computers. The simple fact is that Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are science fiction, and Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle are historical fiction - and damn good historical fiction. If you want science fiction, obviously, they are not the books to read, because they are a whole different genre.
However, I highly dispute that they are any less awesome. They are different, granted. Some things in Cryptonomicon are hysterically funny if you have had the right experiences (the “darfting of the business plan” part is one of the funniest things I’ve read - having had to do that task myself more than once :D). Others are quite thought provoking. What he excells at is giving the feeling of the times and places he is depicting, even when the action is outrageous. Want to know why the Axis lost WW2? Want to know why the West rose relative to the rest of the world in the 17th century? These books provide thought-provoking answers, even if you don’t fully agree - while at the same time being funny and entertaining.
You’ll see in the Wiki article that Guillermo del Toro has been trying for years to make a movie adaptation. It’s too bad he hasn’t been making much headway. I think it could make an awesome film - a horror-tinged Indiana Jones-style arctic adventure. Brrrr.
I read this ATMM graphic novel not long ago - it’s pretty good: Amazon.com
Fair play to Guillermo for trying. But while it’s been years since I’ve read ATMoM, Lovecraft tends not to adapt well to the screen. His work relies too much on the reader–he sketches the outlines and then lets your brain do the heavy lifting. Movies have to show you something–though as I recall, the best Lovecraftian film I’ve seen–In the Mouth of Madness–tended to keep stuff out of the corner of the eye, so to speak.
I previewed that graphic novel through the link–it looks good. Going on the list, thanks.
And I did see that del Toro was trying to get a film made, but now thinks it unlikely due to the similarities with Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. As if I needed another reason to dislike that movie.
).