I just read Behind the Throne, by K. B. Wagers. It was sci-fi-ish, in the sense that the throne in question rules a multi-planet empire, but mostly it was about who was killing off the royal family and how could the heir ascend to the throne and what is the long-standing enemy up to anyway? It was fun to read.
Started American Gods by Neil Gaiman, about a fifth of the way into it. Definitely worth continuing, I like the weirdness and the characters. And it appears they’re making it into a TV series later this year…
I’ve begun an audiobook of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. It’s a little repetitive, and the narrator often sounds like a cranky little old Jewish lady, but it’s mostly worthwhile.
I’m also reading W.J. Stuart’s novelization of the 1956 sf epic Forbidden Planet, which I saw not long ago. The book has some significant differences with the movie, and there’s also some interesting background details on the characters’ interstellar society.
Coincidentally, I just finished The Deadhouse Gates, the second fantasy novel in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. These novels have been incredibly complex. There are a few likable characters, but there’s no hero or hero’s journey. Just a series of interweaving plotlines involving fascinating characters in this bizarre world.
A couple of trashy romances not worth mentioning.
A book called The Internet of Risky Things - O’Reilly had the not-fully-edited version of it for half off back in December and so I bought it for Typo Knig (and myself). Fascinating (for people who care about such things). I’m half afraid to leave the house and it actually influenced our recent washer-buying decision.
I just finished listening to (and finally reading the rest of on the Kindle) American Gods by Neal Gaiman; of note, I heard they’re actually working on a TV miniseries based on it. That should be fun. (on preview, I see Max Torque is also reading it now). I’d actually read it a few years ago, so it’s a reread.
And listening to (but not reading, as I don’t have it on Kindle) Anansi Boys, also by Gaiman; it’s got one character borrowed from American Gods: Mister Nancy, but is in no way a sequel to AG.
I’ll frequently read bits of any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan or Sharing Knife books, though I first read all of them years / decades ago so I don’t think they count :). I do have the next novella in her Penric and Desdemona series queued up.
For Gaiman fans (which I evidently am, as half my Audible collection is Gaiman books): last year I chewed through The Graveyard Book. I’d actually gotten the audiobook a few years ago but somehow never bothered. The only thing I’ll spoiler is that the ending is very bittersweet - I mean, I actually got sniffly over it and a bit pissed at Gaiman.
I finished Two Necromancers,an Army of Golems and a Demon Lord by L.G. Estrella this morning. Every bit as fun and snarky as the first book, it has some fabulous satire of high fantasy tropes in it that had me laughing all the way through it.
I finished reading Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black”. I thought the first volume (an ambitious peasant has a bumbling affair with his boss’s wife) was an entertaining satire, but the second volume (he uses his pickup artist skillz to seduce his new boss’s aristocratic daughter) left me kind of cold. The ending was certainly not what I anticipated, however.
I finished The North Water: A Novel by Ian McGuire. Whaling ships and skulduggery.
I’m now reading The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party, Kelly Tyler-Lewis; a well researched book about the other disaster on that exploration.
I finished a couple of books over Christmas. Perhaps the most interesting was N.K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season. It’s a fantasy novel of sorts (there’s electricity and showers, so it’s not your usual fantasy), where we follow a couple of “orogenes,” characters capable of interacting with and controlling stone, in a world where periodical geological upheavals called “Seasons” tend to destroy entire civilizations. It’s the first in a series, and so a bit unsatisfying at the end, but it holds no punches and is very, very well written.
I also finished James S.A. Corey’s latest installment in the Exanse series, Babylon’s Ashes. I won’t still it for readers who’ve not read the first couple, but it was a thoroughly workable installment. I’d have prefered more sense of the series’s endgame, but maybe they don’t have one…
And Ben Aaronovitch’s The Hanging Tree, which answered no questions (almost literally) and advanced the series’s plot arc not one iota. A bit of a disappointment. Fun to read–but hey, really, please, why not make the book a one-off without all the main antagonists if nothing comes of having them there anyway?
I’m currently reading Adam Hochschild’s often-here-praised King Leopold’s Ghost, on the Belgian King’s Congo colonies. It’s harrowing, fascinating, well written, and well worth every minute. I could have done without his desire to find sources for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which, as he realizes, needs to end with “we’ll never know”), but that’s such a minor issue…
I’m also currently reading Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism, which essayistically lays out Eagleton’s argument for more hope and less optimism…(in a nutshell). It’s a mixed experience. Eagleton’s a great essayist, and his take down of Matt Ridley is well worth the price of admittance (though an odd obsession to spent 20 pages on), but at the same time, he does not get Ernst Bloch, and is a bit too cavalier about theology at times.
Just finished A Woman’s Job is Never Done, by M. Phyllis Lose and Deborah Fritz. It’s a sequel to No Job for a Lady, Lose’s memoir of becoming one of the first American women to be a large animal vet. The first book was excellent, but the second focuses just on her work for the Philadelphia Mounted Police, is not. Few interesting cases, most of which are reprinted from the first book. Also, there are far too many exclamation points.
I’ve just started Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett, which I’m reading for the first time.
Still listening to the first. Now on a chapter about how hurried and slapdash battlefield burials often were, when they were done at all - a Federal burial detail at Antietam, for instance, dumped almost 60 Confederate corpses down the well of an abandoned farmhouse. Ugh.
Finished the second, and it was OK. Typical '50s sf. Surprised to see that Cmdr. Adams (Leslie Neilsen’s character) is a lot more curt, short-tempered and profane than in the movie.
I’m now about halfway through June Thomson’s The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes, a great 1990 collection of Holmes pastiches. She “gets” Conan Doyle’s style and is equally inventive with plots. Very talented. If you gave someone who’d never read a Sherlock Holmes story three of Conan Doyle’s and three of Thomson’s, omitting the author names, I bet he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Continuing the Steampunk theme, I started The Clockwork Scarab by Colleen Gleason this morning. Basic premise is the daughter of Mycroft Holmes and sister of Bram Stoker teamup with Irene Adler for queen and country… so far it has my interest.
Has anyone here read Ken Liu? What’s a good book to start with?
Finished The Crossing, by Michael Connelly. Harry Bosch, now not-so-voluntarily retired from the LAPD, and Mickey Haller team up to prove the latter’s client innocent of the horrific murder he’s accused of. One of Connelly’s best in a while. I finished the book itself and am now reading an excerpt in the back, an excerpt of his latest, which is still only in hardback, called The Wrong Side of Goodbye.
After that, next up is The Moon and Sixpence, by W Somerset Maugham.
And just mention on that excerpt, it’s the longest I’ve ever seen. Connelly shows the first 60 pages.
I like his stuff pretty well: he’s not a life-changing author, but he’s solid epic fantasy. He only has two full-length novels (and I do mean full-length). They’re in a trilogy; the first is Grace of Kings, and is well worth reading. Closest author to his sensibilities, I think, is Guy Gavriel Kay. I suspect most people will like or dislike them similarly.
I’ve read Kay, though I’m not much on so called “high fantasy” these days. Seems lke nearly everything I’ve read and enjoyd recently has been Steampunk.
I will check those out, Thanks!
I put aside the anthology I was reading because I had an opportunity to get The Nix, thereby skipping a long wait list at the library. It’s a novel about a man’s relationship with his mother, who abandoned him when he was young. That sounds so dramatic and depressing, but it’s really very funny. I sense that it’s going to make me cry as well, but too late…I’m hooked.
I’m always more interested in the people working the case than in the mystery. As far as I’m concerned, the mystery is just there to give the main characters something to worry about.
As for In the Woods: I like French’s writing very much, and I loved the first half of the book. In the second half I was frustrated with one of the detectives, but the author didn’t go in the direction I was most worried about. There were so many references to lying and psychopaths, and I peeked ahead to the blurb of the next book and saw that Rob wasn’t a main character, so I thought for a while she was going to make him the murderer, either for the new murder or one of the old ones. I’m glad she didn’t, but I was still irritated by his stupid infatuation with the murder victim’s sister, who I thought was rather obviously guilty of something. Overall I liked it and I look forward to the next book.
I’m in the middle of Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly. This is the book that inspired the new movie of the same name, about “the black female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program”. I hope the movie is better. While the subject matter is fascinating, the narrative style of the book is weak, and its structure does not serve the story well. Also I’m halfway through and the author is only up to 1952, and so hasn’t even reached the space program.
Isn’t this disappointing? So much potential in the material. I’m planning to see the movie this weekend and my fingers are crossed that it does a better job telling the story.
I’m currently reading Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth. I’m three chapters in and I can’t say it’s grabbed me, but I’ve loved other books by her so I will keep going.
Reportback please,people who see Hidden Figures! I DO want to see it,but I know how Hollywood mucks up the biopic genre.