I finished The Brothers Cabal, which was a very good installment in the series, even if or perhaps because it centered largely on Johannes’s brother, Horst. We meet daring entomopter pilots, zombies, werethings, and plenty of good fun. I would recommend it. Reading it led me to my two most recent reads, thanks to Goodreads recommendation of more like it.
The first, Mark Hodder’s first installment in the Burton & Swinburne series, gets some credit for being quite an interesting premise. We are in an altered steampunk past, in which the assassination of Queen Victoria leads to major changes, many of them quite good fun. But it lacks humor, and I am not sure the plot of this first one, which is essentially the backstory of the assassination, could not have been much clearer. Okay, but not a series I will continue.
By contrast, Charles Stross’s Laundry Files, of which I have read the first, The Atrocity Archives, will be continued. I was a bit surprised that this first volume was essentially two standalone novellas, which could easily have been sold separately, but the premise–essentially, maths is magic, and opens portals to other dimensions–is fun, the writing is good, and the characters are likeable.
Finally, I opened James Holland’s The War in the West: Germany Ascendant. First thirty pages only, but well written and carefully evaluative already.
I finished Arthur C. Clarke’s 1957 short-story collection Tales from the White Hart. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a big Clarke fan.
Still enjoying The Kennedy Wit, ed. by Bill Adler, and the audiobook of Collision 2012 by Dan Balz (now about a quarter of the way through). I’ve also started HMS Leviathan by John Winton, a 1967 novel about a troubled Royal Navy aircraft carrier and its new commanding officer.
I finished the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography Henry Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist. It’s a good read, meticulously researched, and tries to give a sense of the era as well. The title is an obvious poke at all those who pigeonholed Kissinger as a Pragmatist. He makes his case at considerable length, but I think more people would say that they thought of Kissinger as a pragmatist based on what he did * after becoming National Security Advisor (and later Secretary of State). The biggest problem I had with the book was when the clearly conservative Mr. Fergusen stated something that he evidently took as obvious, but which was not so to me. He obviously doesn’t much care for Christopher Hitchens and William Shawcross – both wrote books portraying Kissinger as the author of multiple evils, which Ferguson obviously does not. But when he says that Tom Lehrer is an obscure songwriter and that he’s better known for his line “Irony died the day that Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize”, I know it’s his bias acting up. He seems similarly bewildered that left-leaning critics of the Vietnam War didn’t understand the actions of the administrations, and tasks them for political naivete. I think he believes in the Domino Theory. I’ll be interested to read the next volume, and then read Hitchens and Shawcross for comparison.
(He mentions at one point that Kissinger was on a committee with Paul Myron Linebarger – which made my heart skip a beat – and then went on to say that Linebarger was a science fiction writer. He was, indeed, under the name Cordwainer Smith. But I suspect that Fergusen never read any of Cordwainer Smith’s works, or he’d have mentioned that this certainly was science fiction written by a diplomat, and was weird by comparison with other writers in that weird profession. An ordinary reader, coming upon this in Fergusen’s book, might get the impression that Linebarger was writing Flash Gordon stuff.)
Speaking of weird science fiction, I finished reading Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I have trouble calling it a “novel” – it has no real characters or plot, unless you view the human race as the main character and its fate over a great length of time as the plot. This book was widely read and very influential, mainly because of Stapledon’s creativity and imagination.His Martians are a very alien race, and in Earth’s encounters with the inhabitants of Venus, it is the Earthmen who play the part of Aliens Invading Because Their Homeworld is Dying.
It’s hard not to point out quotes to others, or to see possible influences on later authors. For instance, this bit about America after a major European War (set about the time of WWII):
As accurate a summing up of Keeping up with the Kardasians as I’ve ever seen.
Seriously, I could swear I’ve read similar diatribes about American pop culture in real life.
On a completely different note, have a look at the description of the first Martian invasion:
The cloud passes through a village and its effects are felt. Later, some investigated the cloud and are torn apart by what seem to be tentacles.
If you’re of my age, you can’t help but be reminded of the 1950s film The Crawling Eye (originally The Trollenberg Terror), which started out as a British TV serial. In the manner of many of these, it got remade as a movie, starring Forrest Tuicker (who was kind of the 1950s British SF movie go-to tough American), featuring Humans Possesed by Aliens (another british 1950s TV SciFi staple – but not in Stapledon’s book), and fgeaturing Really Ooky sorta octapoid tentacle monsters (also not in Stapledon)*
Finally, the Eighteenth Men near the end remind me irrersistably of Heinlein’s “Old Ones” Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land. They’re not “dead”, but they do live for extremely long periods of time, and don’t hurry, There is a culture of the Young that is tolerated and appreciated for what it is, but the Older Ones have their own culture and arts. They don’t really have a word for “religion”. They lead Spartan lives of contemplation, with few ornaments., but they compose art works that combine feelings telepathically. They are in telepathic communication with each other. They live on a different planet than Earth, they die when they decide to, and then their friends and family consume the body.
*I’ve long had the feeling that the overwhelminmgly icky 1950s British monsters were disliked not because they wrre icky, but because they weren’t British. I observe that the British TV science fiction alien that wasn’t icky or disliked, and who appeared in the early 1960s, was Doctor Who, who undoubtedly, despite being an alien, was British.
Quite a bit. Ferguson spends a lot of time working to show that the allegations of Kissinger leaking details to the other side, as Hitchens and Hersh claim, has little to support it, and much against it. I’m not familiar with the arguments of the anti-Kissinger side, so I can’t comment on the controversy in any detail, but Ferguson makes a good argument.
Just started reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Not sure it’s my kind of book but it was recommended to me, so I’m giving it a go.
I have been embarrassingly bad at finding time to read lately. Been on The Sot-Weed Factor for months, but I do love the book.
Loved that book, and actually really liked the movie, too. The book really picks up and starts to make a lot more sense in the 2nd half. Very creatively structured.
I missed last month’s thread, but wow, it’s been 3 years since Khadaji passed away? Doesn’t seem like it. Thanks for keeping this thread going.
Those of you who like Cloud Atlas may wish to check out Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.
According to the author, Cloud Atlas was, at least in part, his response to the Calvino classic - the odd structure (in which each section is later completed) in part a reaction to Calvino’s book, in which there are multiple sections that are not completed.
Calvino’s one of my favorites from way back - particularly If on a winter’s night a traveler and Invisible Cities.
Some stories in the complete classic 1001 Nights are written in the form of nested stories, up to seven “levels” deep.
In his masterful Godel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter writes a chapter in this way, deliberately not “completing” the last level, so the chapter ends up not on the level it started at.
Heh, I just last month gave a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach to my kid’s piano teacher.
She was telling me offhand at a party after a recital how she loved both Bach and Escher, and how she was interested in the science of consciousness, but had never even heard of this book!
I finally finished A Confederacy of Dunces. I find the reviews more interesting than the book, in no small part since much is made of the originality of the characters and the true-to-life dialogue. I don’t know if it’s the gap between its publication and today, but I didn’t find the dialogue extraordinary. Perhaps written dialogue in novels has simply gotten more realistic generally since the early 1960s when this was written? Nor did I find the characters all that original; Ignatius and Myrna Minkoff, in particular, felt like compilations of a few people I knew from grad school in English. Lots of comments in reviews, professional and amateur, make much of how laugh-out-loud funny this book is. Maybe it’s because Ignatius and Myrna reminded me too forcibly about wankers in grad school, but again, didn’t even chuckle, let alone laugh aloud.
I did enjoy the feel of the French Quarter, which Toole seemed to capture well. It seems to me like the Quarter generates larger-than-life personalities and nurtures eccentricity, from what little contact I’ve had with it, and that was all abundantly drawn here. So THAT, at least, I could appreciate.
Finished Kon-Tiki, which was a good read. I’ve now started A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, by Andre Resendez, which was recommended by another Doper. So far, it’s grabbed me; but I’m a fan of books about exploration and survival, so no surprise there.
Finished Wizard and Glass, by Stephen King, volume IV in his Dark Tower series. Very good. More of a story within a story as we learn more of Roland’s beginnings. That finishes the four-volume set the wife gave me for my birthday last year, but there are still three more volumes in the series. Our library not having those, I’ve gone ahead and bought them in a bookstore. But I think I’ll take a short break from the series and read something else first.
So next up is The Murder of King Tut: The Plot to Kill the Child King, by James Patterson and Martin Dugard. I found it in my library’s Nonfiction section. It’s a “nonfiction thriller.” The authors have compiled the evidence and wrote a story around what is known of King tut’s life and death.
On a side note, I recently learned King’s 11/22/63 has been made into a miniseries in the US. Not sure if it’s aired yet.
I finally finished Cloud Atlas and thought it was pretty good. Just reading all the reviews about how wonderfully clever and complicated it was scared me away from it for a long time, but I found it very engrossing and not at all difficult. Out of the six stories, I liked Luisa Rey’s the least. Sonmi, Zachry, and Frobisher’s sections are in a three-way tie for my favorite. Guess I will go now and look for The Thousand Autumns…
In the meantime, I’m starting on the long-awaited Honky Tonk Samurai by Joe Lansdale. So far, I’m underwhelmed. The writing is stilted and I have yet to get a laugh out of it. Well, hell, I love ya anyway, Joe.
I’m rereading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to see who is right, Ridley Scott or my sketchy memory. I’ve read the book a couple of times over the years and I admit, I’m not always the most attentive reader, but if Philip K. Dick suggested in the book that Deckard was a replicant, I totally missed it. Either way, I’m enjoying the ride.