I read it, and the sequel The Boy on the Bridge and very much liked them both. I thought the premise carried through just fine. For the record, they made a movie of The Girl With all the Gifts and that’s worth seeing as well.
I liked The Girl With All the Gifts a lot, book and movie both. I didn’t know about the sequel - thanks, Athena!
Brust didn’t let me down: the book wasn’t especially good, but it also wasn’t especially grim, so it fit the bill just right. And the moral quandary at its center was quietly subtler than I was expecting.
I just started Six Wakes. It’s a Hugo/Nebula-nominated locked-room murder mystery, except (and this is all clear within the first few pages):
-the locked room is an interstellar spaceship;
-every main character is murdered before the book begins; and
-the murders are being investigated by the clones of the victims.
We’re talking some high-concept shenanigans here. It’s pretty fun so far.
I finished reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The only things I knew about were what I picked up here and there, like the scene from “The King and I” where they put on a play. So I knew there was a cruel guy named Simon Legree and a woman running to safety across ice floes and a saintly slave named Uncle Tom.
I kind of figured that it would be a sappy sentimental story about saintly slaves and cruel masters. There was certainly some of that, but I was a bit surprised that the book spent so much time bending over backwards to show that some slave owners are kind and generous, to the point where it almost seemed a defense of slavery. I was less surprised by the horrible, paternalistic, creepy racial stereotypes that were used (although I thought the digression on the hotness of quadroon women seemed a bit out of place). There seemed to be a lot of emphasis on how black the skin was on the “comedy relief” slaves and how light the skin was on the sympathetic slaves.
Some parts I thought were actually quite good (like wry comments on the hypocrisy of humans) but mostly it was a mix of racist, corny and outdated views on slavery.
Started today on a nice quick read to finish up the week, Dead People Suck: a guide for survivors of the newly departed, by Laurie Kilmartin. Pretty funny, especially since I haven’t actually lost any loved ones lately.
Sounds like a book for the characters in the book I just finished!
I finished Dangerous Spirits by Jordan L Hawk minutes ago… The book is a page turning ride from start to finish. The action swift and smooth, the characters nicely developed and the plot interesting. The past is examined from angles the characters hadn’t thought to look at before as Lizzie and Vincent come to terms with their loss while learning about the loss and anger of the spirit Rosanna.
Hawk does a fabulous job of ramping up the characters suspicions or each other and of the haunting., making the reader feel as uncomfortable and uncertain of whom to trust as the lead characters.
Starting today on Black Ajax by George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels. This book is a fictionalized tale of a real person, boxer Tom Molineaux.
I’m about halfway through Keegan’s The Face of Battle. He’s now discussing the Battle of Waterloo and the psychology of infantry standing up to (or not) direct musket fire, cannon barrages and charging cavalry. Pretty interesting, and with plenty of quotations from those who survived the battle.
A Man With One of Those Faces, Caimh McDonnell. A very funny mystery caper set in Dublin, part of a supposed trilogy that already has four books.
You might like the book I am reading now, The Thin Light Of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America by Edward Ayers.
It focuses primarily on the latter portion of the Civil War during the Virginia Valley campaign and shows the swapping loyalties of border towns like Staunton, the burning of towns like Chambersburg, the plight of “freed” slaves and meticulous details about the military operations, supply problems, communication issues, etc.
It’s well researched and annotated and has a lot of press quotations from both sides of the aisle, so to speak, especially as it pertains to the upcoming Presidential election in the fall of 1864. Man, the Democratic press was harsh on Lincoln. I guess I knew that but I never realized how harsh, or just how adherent the Democrats were to basically capitulating to the Rebels in order to just restore the Union as it was before the war, after so many tens of thousands had been killed!
It’s a good book.
Hadn’t heard of that one - thanks. If you want to learn more about the election of 1864, I highly recommend John C. Waugh’s Reelecting Lincoln - a deep, fascinating dive into the politics of the day. And yes, the newspapers back then were very partisan - really little more than propaganda organs for the political parties. Democratic ones rarely had anything good to say about Lincoln; Republican ones rarely anything bad. The New York Times’s publisher was even Lincoln’s reelection chair, something that would be unimaginable today.
I read Martin Kemp’s Living with Leonardo over the weekend. Kemp, a retired Oxford professor, is one of the foremost experts on Leonardo da Vinci, and this book is kind of a catch-all volume where he recounts his experiences in studying, authenticating artworks, and organizing exhibitions related to Leonardo over the last 50 years. He touches on almost all of the artist’s work to one degree or another, so it’s a must-read for Leonardo fans. The parts about his recent involvement in authenticating Salvatore Mundi and La Bella Principessa are probably the most interesting reading (although I’m really not convinced that either is a genuine Leonardo). But towards the end where Kemp gives a blow-by-blow account of all the art exhibitions he’s curated, it gets a little tedious.
Just finished Harry Turtledove’s A World of Difference. It was okay, and had some interesting aliens.
Just started* Sourdough* by Robin Sloan.
I finished The Getaway God by Richard Kadrey… why is the unkillable villian a thing outside of comic books? Is it lack of being able to create new characters? Laziness? Other than that I enjoyed the book a hella lot.
I’m taking a break from Keegan’s The Face of Battle and am now reading Robert Parker’s 1976 Spenser novel, Promised Land. Spenser is hired by a Cape Cod businessman to find the man’s wife, who has disappeared - perhaps with a lover, perhaps not. I’m enjoying it. I have to say, the descriptions of mid-Seventies clothes (leisure suits! long collars! polyester!), worded in such a way as to make clear that whoever’s wearing it thinks they look great, always make me laugh.
Second book finished today!
A Gentleman Never Keeps Score is the second book in Cat Sebastian’s Seducing the Sedgwicks series. I really love the way this woman’s characters interact, it’s sweet without cloying, and tough and her characters occasionally fight but then they make up. This is the best portrayal of the issues a mixed race couple in early nineteenth century, above and beyond the homosexual issue, that I’ve read yet.
Still on Dickens’ Great Expectations and enjoying it. But we’re going to be busy with friends coming in from Thailand for a couple weeks, and I don’t know if I can finish it before they arrive. We’ll be running around Oahu and going to another island, so I’ll probably be off board until early August. If I disappear in the next couple of weeks, that’s why, and it won’t be for long.
Finished Sourdough by Robin Sloan. Outstanding, one of the best books I’ve read this year. Original, fascinating ideas. Highly recommended.
Now I’m reading The Russian Endgame by Allan Topol.
I’m halfway through “Grant Takes Command” by Bruce Catton. He examines Grant’s service and leadership from just after Vicksburg through the Civil War’s end.
I’m still reading the Tomb of Dracula comic books by Marvel. Marv Wolfman did some brilliant work on this series.
Finished it, and it stayed pretty fun, but never got much beyond that.
Also read Raven Stratagem, the sequel to Ninefox Gambit. This one’s a lot stronger IMO, space opera with insane mathematical underpinnings. I enjoyed both of them a lot and am excited for the end of the trilogy.
I started The Census but didn’t get too far. It’s written by an author whose brother with Downs Syndrome died in his early 20s, and the book is about a father of a man with Downs Syndrome, and it just felt far too enlightening for my tastes or something.
Now I’m reading the enormous Robots of Gotham, the first post-singularity book I remember reading. The book opens with a battle royale between a sentient bipedal Venezuelan tank and an American-piloted battlemech in the streets of Chicago. The narrator has just been evacuated from his hotel and has a coffeemaker in his hands. The author has a keen sense of scale, juxtaposing strange little details like the coffeemaker with the rock-em-sock-em robots, and it makes the book feel airy and informal and not nearly as self-important and portentious as battling robot books tend to get. So far so good.