I finished Whispers Underground by Be Aaronovitch yesterday. I think he’s finally got the hang of ending instead of just stopping.
Started The Underground Room ( seeing a theme here? 
) by John Bellairs today. This is the last Johnny Dixon book actually written by Bellairs and it shows. A few too many deus ex machina moments and not as much atmosphere as in previous books, but still a pleasant way to kill an afternoon.
Talk about being late to the party. But I envy you the experience of reading the series afresh. I would advise you to read the series quickly before someone spoils the ending for you. There’s an extra book coming out this summer, I think based on a play.
Correct: We're Getting a New Harry Potter Book, Based on the Play | WIRED
Just read a bunch of John Scalzi short e-stories, not available in dead-tree editions AFAICT. “Unlocked” (2014) is a prequel to his book Lock In, giving the background - told as a faux oral history - to the novel, about a near-future pandemic which leaves a large percentage of the world population “locked in,” and the technological and medical response to the crisis. Pretty interesting. “The Tale of the Wicked” (2009) is about a military starship which develops artificial intelligence, learns about Asimov’s Three Laws and then has some peculiar ideas of its own. Good stuff. “Questions for a Soldier” (2005) is a Q&A on a colony world with John Perry, hero of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. It was all right but not great. “Muse of Fire” (2012) is about a plasma scientist with a possibly-hallucinatory relationship with a fiery woman. Meh - a definite disappointment. Finally, “An Election” (2012) is a political spoof about a human running for city council in a majority-alien district. This was very funny and I liked it a lot.
I just finished Breakout by Martin Russ, about the First Marine Division and its fight to break out of the encirclement by 60,000 Chinese troops in the Chosin Reservoir area of North Korea in the freezing winter of 1951.
A masterful story of courage and determination written by the author of **The Last Parallel,**when he was a 21-year-old Marine in the last year of the Korean War.
Both books are highly recommended.
Re dead-tree editions […]
This paper-book-lover would like to respectfully remind everyone to support the growth of industrial hemp. One acre of industrial hemp will produce as much paper as two acres of trees. While it takes years for trees to grow until they can be harvested for paper or wood, hemp is ready to harvest only 120 days after it is planted.
Can you smoke the book after you read it?
Just finished The Magician, by Raymond Feist. I have…mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the story is very well paced. Every book has its slow sections but Feist neatly balances them with more action-packed sequences so the pace never flags for long. The story has lots of twists and turns and the two worlds of Midkemia and the Tsuranuranni Empire are reasonably well-developed.
On the other hand, the quality of the prose is competent at best, and is frequently downright hokey. This is especially true of the dialogue which, at times, reads like bad Tolkien parody. Worse, the characters (with a couple of exceptions) are pretty thinly drawn. Minor characters are frequently introduced in a single sentence and disappear, only to reappear a couple of hundred pages later with little or nothing by way of re-introduction, and many of the books major characters (especially the few female characters who are never anything more than trophy love interests) are disappointingly one-note.
My biggest complaint, however, is that the rules of magic in Feist’s universe are never very well explained. In his defence, it’s repeatedly made clear that even the greatest magicians don’t really know all that much about how it works, and ‘The Magician’ is only the first book in a trilogy so these rules may well be fleshed out later. However, because Feist is so vague about how magic actually works, and what magicians can and can’t do, some of the book’s most action-packed sequences are sadly lacking in suspense. If there’s a magician nearby, odds are he’ll do some magic and that’ll be that.
On balance, I’d give the book 3 stars out of five. For all its faults, it’s still a fun book that’s frequently gripping (although not as often as it could be) and full of invention. I’m not a huge fan of High Fantasy and I still found it enjoyable enough. If you are a fan of the genre, you’ll probably get quite a lot out of it.
Next up - Revival by Stephen King, and Dickens’ Bleak House.
P.S. - Just for clarity, in the UK, ‘The Magician: Apprentice’ and ‘The Magician: Master’ are published as one volume so I’m talking about both of them.
If only. 
I finished reading Silas Marner by George Eliot. I quite liked it; I kept thinking that there would be more conflict introduced for the sake of maximizing the drama, but I was happy to be proven wrong.
*Sailor and Fiddler *by 100yo Herman Wouk
Finished it. You can tell the author wants the lead character to seem gutsy and heroic, but eyyyech. He’s not just a snob and a jerk - he has a hair-trigger temper and is borderline paranoid. He could almost be an anti-hero, he’s so deeply flawed. Time and again I thought, why did you do that? His own worst enemy. Hard to see how he’d rise to become second-in-command of a supercarrier. Dropping the N-word (just once, and granted, this is the Royal Navy in 1967, but still) was the last straw. He indeed deserved his downfall.
Still enjoying Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and just started J.R. Pournelle’s (Jerry’s daughter) Outies, a 2010 authorized sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand.
Fairly sure you mean John *Winton, *not Lawton. I’ve read a couple of his books but not that one.
I don’t think I’ve commented here this month so far, so, in order:
Will McIntosh - Burning Midnight good Y.A. novel in which alien spheres appear everywhere which can do all sorts of thing for you - better vision, ability to sing, higher IQ, etc. - you need 2 the same colour and they’re useless afterwards. A couple of quibbles towards the end, but otherwise a fun read.
Arcady & Boris Strugatsky - Definitely Maybe dense little novel about mathematicians and physicists drinking and discussing whether there’s been an alien invasion or not!
Claudio Saunt - West of the Revolution interesting book about what was happening on the rest of North America in 1776. Interesting stuff, although I’m only 1/2 way through.
Rob Bufford - Tracer non-stop, page-turning action on a failing space habitat orbiting a ruined Earth. Several generation on, it’s not a pleasant place to live!
Matt Hill - Graft in an anarchic near future Manchester (England) a car-jacker finds a three armed woman tied up in the boot of his latest acquisition… Quite seedy and violent setting for a strange story I’m only 1/2 way though…
Matt Ruff - Lovecraft Country The best book I’ve read this year. Set in 1954, it’s a series of stories building to a complete whole, each about a separate encounter by one or more of a group of African Americans with racist Lovecraftian-style Lodges and cults who have grand, ulterior plans for them!
It’s a very good read and the racist aspect of 50s America (and Lovecraft) is presented starkly.
Finally, zooming through Simon Morden’s Down Station about several people who escape certain death somehow and find themselves in a strange, almost uninhabited world. I’m sure it’s meant to be adult, but it reads more like a Y.A. novel to me.
Picked up a LOT of books at Boskone 53, including Alexei and Cory Panshin’s SF in Dimension, which I devoured overr the weekend, notwithstanding its length.
I’m debating which to read next, although I’ve been nibbling at all of them. I’ve taken the biggest bites out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Mastermind of Mars, which I haven’t re-read in about 40 years.
For my current fiction pick, I’m reading Something Blue, Emily Giffin’s sequel to Something Borrowed. It’s a strange book, in that the author seems to have deliberately made the protagonist as unlikable as possible. Despite that, the book holds my interest and I would recommend it to people who have read and enjoyed Something Borrowed.
For my non-fiction pick, I’m reading Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? Fitness Myths, Training Truths, and Other Surprising Discoveries From the Science of Exercise by Alex Hutchison. I am enjoying the book and would recommend it, though I must warn you that the format of the book seems meant for either (a) a coffee table book, (b) a blog, or (c) someone with a really short attention span. The entire book is formatted as a series of Q&As, which each answer taking up maybe three pages or so. Then the end of every chapter has a cheat sheet, in case you’ve already forgotten what you just learned ten pages ago. I’m not really a fan of getting my info in such short bursts, but despite that, the book does have a lot of interesting, well-researched information.
Oooof. The Thing Itselfis the most daunting, best book I’ve read since Foucault’s Pendulum.
Right you are - thanks.
Heh. See post 71.
Ha! Maybe it’s not as strange as I thought it was.
I just finished Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act. I’ll state outright that I disliked this greatly. Yourgrau struggles with whether he’s a hoarder or simply a ‘clutterer.’ I read reviews that characterized his writing as funny, but I mostly found it self-indulgent and neurotic. Yourgrau chronicles his continual failure to focus / stay on task, and that’s true of his writing as well as his clean-up efforts. I found this a frustrating meander of a read.
On the other hand, my fiction pick has been great so far. I’m about 5/7 of the way through Black Wolves by Kate Elliot. This richly-drawn fantasy in an Asian-esque worldscape has me fascinated. Lots of characters, but even the minor ones are well-drawn and not always as you expect. The plot is too BIG for me to describe accurately, but it includes struggles over kingly succession, demons, betrayals, lost princesses, and flying on / under giant eagles, to name a few key points. One caveat: If you like your fantasy morally ambiguous, this isn’t it. There are clear Good Guys and Bad Guys, at least so far, and no confusion about which is which. Still, it’s well-written and absorbing. It’s the first of a projected trilogy if I remember correctly, so lots of fantasy goodness to come if you like this.
I’ve just finished ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark. Although it’s a short book, and written in very simple (but exceptionally elegant) prose, it’s quite deep and multi-layered. I’ll have to read it at least once more to have a chance of really getting to grips with it. I very much enjoyed it, though, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it at some point in the future.
I was going to read Dickens’ Bleak House, but I’m afraid I’ve got to put that on hold. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban arrived today!
I just finished this…well, actually I let myself off the hook with only one story left to go. I think I’ve lost my taste for these anthologies. There are always one or two gems, but I have to shovel through so much sludge to get them that I’m exhausted by the end of it and feel that it wasn’t worth the time and effort.