Well, volume 4, The Long Utopia, which I believe is the last in the series, finishes with a dreadful pun which I suspect was in Pratchett’s mind since the very beginning…
Just started Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, set aboard a generation starship as it nears it’s destination. Good so far, but I’m only 30 pages in to it.
I finished reading The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A book of short stories that doesn’t contain any duds is a rare thing to encounter, so I was suitably impressed. That’s more than I can say about any collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance.
I finished The Fifth Witness byMichael Connelly and enjoyed it a lot buuuuut I think he’s in serious danger of being a One Trick Pony with the way he twists the Mickey Haller endings
Mickey get them off on the crime he is defending but gets them ON the hooks for an earlier crime. Or the other twist seems to be as success in in his sights another person blows the defendant away.
I am now about halfway throughHoliday in Death by JD Robb aka Norah Roberts. One of the better ones… not that the bar there is set tremendously high 
I read A God in Ruins, a companion book to Kate Atkinson’s fascinating novel Life After Life, where we watched Ursula Todd live her life over and over again. If you’ve read it, you’ll remember that in most of her timelines her brother Teddy is killed in WWII. This book is about Teddy, set in one of Ursula’s lives in which he survives the war and lives to be a very old man.
It’s a really good book, but it’s a pretty straightforward story about Teddy and his family. I was a little disappointed that there’s no looping through time, except for Atkinson’s usual way of telling a story in non-chronological order. Ursula only appears in this occasionally, mostly in Teddy’s memories of her, and there’s no hint of anything special about her or this particular timeline - except Teddy’s statistically unlikely survival as an RAF bomber. (Well, Atkinson tries to blow your mind at the very end, but I don’t think it counts.)
I read a very funny book by Julie Schumacher called Dear Committee Members. It’s a short novel composed entirely of Letters of Recommendation (“LORs”) written by a world-weary English professor at a small midwestern college. The letters are exquisitely written, and recommend students for everything from admittance to law school to a job at a paintball emporium. My favorite is the one brazenly solicited by a former student who failed his creative writing class for plagiarizing an entire short story: “It always startles me anew - though I have nabbed dozens of plagiarists - to realize that the student cheater is amazed at my powers of discernment, my uncanny ability to detect a difference in quality between his or her own work and, for example, Proust’s.” The only real plot concerns the professor’s increasingly desperate attempts to obtain funding for one of his graduate students who is trying to finish a novel.
I just finished Naomi Novik’s new novel Uprooted, and it was lovely. As much as I like Novik’s Temeraire books, I was not at all sure I would like this one. It’s fairytale-ish, and young adult-ish (at least in the beginning) and it’s chock full of earth-shattering magic, and none of those qualities are pluses for me. Actually I’m usually bored to tears by the kind of magic described in this book - but this had me enthralled. I’m very impressed by how well it’s written.
I just finished North River by Pete Hamill. Loved it. Wonderfully in vocative of Depression-era NYC, and a great love story.
I just finished Wit’s End by Karen Joy Fowler. I liked it; it felt very visual for me. (All the little dollhouses were a neat touch!) But it never really jelled. I know I’ve read her other book, and I must’ve liked it enough to remember I read it, but I don’t remember it. (Just googled it, okay, yeah, it was cute.)
I’m now reading The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman. I like it so far, but someone asked me what it was about and I had to answer, “I’m not sure yet.” But I’m only about 25 pages in.
While we were out of town, I splurged on stuff for my Kindle (did I mention that I am cheap?) And got Old Man’s War the first book in the series by John Scalzi. I loved it so much that I got the next two and read them and now I’m on Zoe’s War which I’m not loving as much, so it’s languishing until the next time I need more easily portable reading material.
Ugggh, the Long Earth series. That first book was so dry I needed to chug Gatorade. Baxter is NOT a good mix with Pratchett. I read some other book of Baxter’s (Flood, I think? And it was sooo meh.) Gaiman was a good mix. Baxter isn’t.
Please post about the Kim Stanley Robinson! I loved his Mars books but haven’t been able to get into any of his other stuff.
I thought Zoe’s Tale was nothing more than a less interesting retelling of The Last Colony. It would have done better as a short story focusing only on Zoe’s fateful war-ending voyage. The next book after that, The Human Division, is much, much better.
I just “finished” The Confessions of Nat Turner. This is the review I just put up on Goodreads:
I highly recommend the 1967 hardcover edition of this book. Once you remove the paper dust jacket you will find sturdy cardboard covered with slightly rough matte black fabric, ideal for use as a mouse pad.
Sadly the pages inside this cover are not nearly so useful. This is one of the most racist books I’ve ever read. The narrative voice is completely unbelievable, sounding more like a Harvard graduate from the 1950s than a Virginia slave in the 1830s. For some unknown reason Styron has chosen to make Nat Turner more sympathetic towards the slave owners rather than the slaves itself, a curious decision considering Turner led the only successful slave rebellion in the United States. How this discrepancy is resolved shall forever remain a mystery to me because I could only take about two hundred pages of this absolute balderdash.
But I did need a new mouse pad, so this book was not a complete waste of my time.
For those of you keeping score, this is the third book I’ve read that was so bad that I’ve actively destroyed it. The other two were Colleen McCollough’s The Ladies of Missalonghi (driven over for several months until my roommates threw it away when I wasn’t home) and Angela Carter’s *Heroes and Villains *(dropped down a storm drain).
In the middle of The War against the Jews, The Oregon Experiment, and Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century.
Baxter can be good on his own; my favourites are probably the ‘alternate geography’ series that starts with Stone Spring. Six thousand years ago the North Sea is still low-lying land although the tides keep rising, but what can you do? Answer - build a wall!
I hope you’re enjoying the Jon Fasman book; I read it when it came out and really enjoyed it. Having the reporter stuck in a small town and not go galivanting around the world after clues makes a change from most other ‘ancient artifact’ thrillers…
Aurora by KSR is pretty good so far (about 1/4 through) but not especially ground-breaking. Lots to think about though, about closed systems and politics, etc. The spaceship nears the destination but the very act of slowing down is putting all sorts of strains on the already aging technology and systems. Several generations after leaving Earth, people with the knowledge to fix things are becoming scarce.
The lead character, daughter of the chief engineer, has been on a typical Robinson journey visiting all the different ecologies of the ship but is now back home…
It seems to be broadly compatible with 2312 and the Mars series although as it’s set 12 light years away and well into the future, I doubt it’ll affect the plot much. I’d guess it’s set in around 2650, with quite a wide margin for error.
If you liked the Mars trilogy, you could either try 2312 (which is broadly compatible with it) or maybe Antarctica.
I’m currently reading The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman, recommended last month by delphica. It’s really good, now that I’ve gotten the hang of the lingo!
I was too. And without using any spoiler boxes, I wasn’t sure how Novik would resolve matters with the encroachment of the Wood but was very satisfied with how she did it. I particularly appreciated the effort to keep all endings within the believability of the characters she created. An interesting premise executed with fine skill.
I read thru the Kindle version of The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time by Jeff Deck & Benjamin D. Herson courtesy of the local library.
I kind of knew what to expect going in (thanks to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s GoodReads review), but I think I enjoyed the book a bit more than she did. For me, the florid, somewhat pompous writing style contrasted nicely with the triviality of their actual quest - finding and fixing typos, misspellings and other crimes against language across the country. It seemed as much an excuse for a road trip as fulfilling a Greater Purpose… the combination of which seems part and parcel of being a certain type of twentysomething, I suppose. And I must admit to feeling the urge to correct typos on signage on many occasions myself - apostrophe errors make my teeth itch!
Maybe reading this so soon after Travels with Charley and Dogging Steinbeck gave me a bit more tolerance for the self-indulgent aspects of this book. I enjoyed reading about the authors’ interactions with the locals; and hope Jeff and Benjamin and their compatriots learned something more about the U.S. than the current state of orthography. I found the repercussions of the Grand Canyon typo fix rather fascinating - feeling a mix of schadenfreude and sympathy on their part.
Worth a library read for those with language maven/grammar Nazi tendencies and an interest in travelogues.
I just finished my reread of The Cruel Sea, a fine 1951 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, about British corvette sailors fighting Nazi U-boats. A thrilling, sometimes tragic, always engrossing war story that was just as good as I remembered, with an interesting mix of patriotism and cynicism that I’d kind of missed the first time 'round. There’s also more on the British class system of the World War II era than I remembered.
Also zipped through The Genius of George Washington by Edmund Morgan, a slim volume about Washington’s skilful use of both political and military power. Didn’t really break any new ground.
Taking a break from Joseph Anton and McTeague. Next up: a reread of John Scalzi’s funny, very readable military-sf novel Old Man’s War.
I just finished and enjoyed Alan Furst’s Midnight in Europe,and am looking forward to two other Furst novels on my to-be-read bookshelf.
This one is set in the immediate period before WW2, as Spain endures the final convulsions of its civil war and Germany eyes Czechoslovakia hungrily. Very well-drawn characters and the feeling of “being there” as France is facing The Inevitable and Nazi Germany is starting to shed any pretense of peaceful intentions.
I’m reading Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon as my non-fiction pick in preparation for my upcoming trip to the Grand Canyon. It’s about all the deaths in the national park, what caused them and how they could have been prevented. It’s engaging in a similar way to true crime books: you know something horrible is going to happen, and you just can’t turn away until that horrible thing has actually happened. I’d recommend it to anyone taking a trip there, but I’d recommend reading it concurrently with another book. It’s kind of long, and there’s only so many stories about people dying or almost dying I can read before I feel in the mood for some lighter reading.
The book I’m staggering it with is The Tenth Gift, which is one of those books where a woman in modern times finds the diary of a woman from the past, and the book ends up being part historical fiction and part modern fiction. It’s all right. I’ve thought about abandoning it, but I haven’t yet. I’m not a big fan of the author’s writing style, she seems very inclined towards fitting in as many metaphors and creative phrasing as she can, rather than telling a coherent and engaging story.
finished holiday in Death by JD Robb. well written potato chip mystery won’t really fill you up but you’ll enjoy it anyway. The end wasn’t overly dramatic but nicely done nevertheless.
Sounds very interesting. How many deaths, over what timespan, does it discuss? How many deaths are there in the Grand Canyon in the average year?
I’m immersed in two books at present: Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome and Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie. I’ll try not to gush, but I’m loving both of these books.
I don’t know if I grew up under a rock or what, but I never read Swallows as a kid. Part of me is sad about that; part of me is glad I saved it for now. I would have been pea-green with envy as a child that I couldn’t sail to a little wooded island like the Walkers and set up camp for the summer. As an adult, I’m enchanted with their adventures and a little envious of their freedom. I only discovered this book from its place on the BBC Top 100 list, and I’m glad I did.
I’m only about 1/3 of the way through Best Served Cold, but thus far it matches the high standard of all of Abercrombie’s stuff. IMHO he’s one of the best authors writing in fantasy today. No Mary Sues here: every one of his characters has limitations, often serious ones, and everyone seems to have both a likeable and unlikeable side. Fantasy with moral ambiguity feels much more compelling to me than the ‘pure, noble’ variety, and Abercrombie knows how to spin interesting plots, too. If I’m tracking things correctly, everything of his is set in the same world, just different areas and characters each time, and the world he builds is a fascinating one.
Finished The Fall of Cthulhu, picked up a stack of books at ReaderCon, and am starting with Lin Carter’s The Dark Star.1970s fantasy set in Atlantis. The book looks like it was delivered fresh from 1973 via time machine – there’s no yellowing or aging present.
On audio, finished King’s * Full Dark, No Stars* and am reading Polard’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.