I finished Robots of Gotham, and recommend it way more than I ever thought I’d recommend a book about giant robots duking it out in the streets of Chicago.
First, the bad: it’s very episodic, to the degree that it almost feels like a season of a TV show. After awhile I was like, “Oh boy, here goes the hero on another excursion adventure!” Also, there’s a helluva lot of exposition early in the book, character sitting around chatting about the setting’s history (“Do you remember in 2062, when Dr. Smith invented the MacGuffin? As I recall, she was funded by a consortium of Latin American governments…” for pages)
But the good is way better than the bad. The cohort of main characters are fun, the action is great, and the author’s wry, taking-the-piss-out-of-himself humor is really appealing. It’s like 600 pages long, and I finished it in a week, which is pretty rare for me. Not deep reading, but excellent summer reading.
Next up: Scalzi’s Head On, which has a great opening sentence:
Left Hand, I finished Head On a few weeks back and liked it. Not Scalzi’s best, but definitely worth a read. Hope you like it, too.
Just finished it. A pretty good detective book, although there’s 'waaaay too much relationship-chat between Spenser and his true love Susan Silverman. The ending was a bit abrupt, too, now that I think about it - but still a good read, all in all.
I’ve started Elmore Leonard’s 1980 novel City Primeval, set in Detroit, about a homicide detective, a bad judge and a worse criminal.
Also reading James L. Swanson’s Manhunt, nonfiction about the Lincoln assassination and the Federal pursuit of John Wilkes Booth and the other conspirators.
Just started into the massive tome that is The Food Lab, by Kenji Lopez-Alt. Even though I can skim or skip portions of it, and there are photos taking up some space, at 915 pages, this will take awhile.
I finished reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. I thought the autobiographical parts were among the best writing I’ve ever seen from him – in turn funny, impressive and tragic, and he really got me interested in the business of steamboat piloting. The later travelogue parts were pretty good, but didn’t have the same spirit of excitement.
Timewasting at Washington Post, I saw a story titled, “Tech leaders: Killer robots would be ‘dangerously destabilizing’ force in the world.” Thought of this novel, clicked the link.
Okay, I’m nearing the end of the 4th book of this series and have to say that it is one of the best-written, funniest and entertaining work of fiction I’ve read in a long time. Can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone looking for a fun summer read. You may have to bone up on your Irish slang though, ye feckin’ gobshites.
Just finished it. Man, can Scalzi ever write a popcorn novel. I enjoy nearly everything I read by him and can’t remember any emotional beats in any of his works a day later. But he sure does fun ideas.
This book has two pretty cool ideas. The book is a sequel to Lock In, so it’s got the cool idea from that book: when a plague strikes humanity and renders 1% of the population completely paralyzed, a massive scientific push results in “neural nets” allowing the victims of the disease to use C-3PO - like androids (nicknamed “Threeps”) to get around. Threeps have full sensory input, but the person remains in a medical bed somewhere while they pilot the threep around.
The second cool idea is that if you’re piloting a body whose destruction doesn’t actually hurt you, the sport possibilities are pretty fun.
I’ll remember the sport long after I’ve forgotten who the characters were or why we cared about any deaths. Which is absolutely fine for a popcorn book.
George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream is a very good vampire book set along the Mississippi River before the Civil War, and, as it happens, also has a lot of fascinating detail on piloting and the business of steamboating.
Finished The Big Chunk of Ice: The Last Known Adventure of the Mad Scientists’ Club, by Bertrand R. Brinley. Uneven. Parts of it were as good as the best of the short stories, but on the whole, the book went on too long. (The other Mad Scientists’ Club novel, The Big Kerplop, is much better.)
Also finished* Fat Girl on a Plane*, by Kelly deVos. Also uneven. Also, I wish there’d been more about the protagonist’s fashion work, since that was my favorite part.
Started Prayers the Devil Answers: A Novel, by Sharyn McCrumb.
The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston. I’m struggling to think of how to describe this book. If you’re the sort of person who is into literary nonfiction, you will love this book. If you’re into nonfiction that gets to the point a little more, then it’s still a good book, but you’ll need to skip over some passages to stay with the exciting, meaty part of the story. It reminded me a lot of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lackes, if you’ve ever read that. In both books, there’s an insanely interesting and exciting story, but the authors also feel the need to describe what each interview subject decided to wear to the interview, and what their getting-ready routine is in the morning, and what sort of car they drive to work, and all sorts of details like that which aren’t too relevant to the exciting story.
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum. I was disappointed at how much of the book was specifically about black/white relations in the U.S., it was really mainly about the experience of being a black person in the United States. Doesn’t make it a bad book, but it did make it different from my expectations. Before reading this book, I had thought that a lot of “racial disadvantage” was more properly attributed to economic disadvantage, and that being poor in America greatly reduced your opportunities for advancement. This book included some convincing studies and statistics about how black people were discriminated against even when you controlled for variables like education level and economic status.
Recent fiction picks:
The Wishing Thread by Lisa Van Allen. I’m putting this one first since it’s the only one I whole-heartedly recommend. It’s about three sisters who have a knitting business in the family, but the business is threatened by land developers. There’s a bit of magical realism in the book, since the sisters knit spells into their creations, but it takes place in our world, not some magical kingdom. It gave me the warm and fuzzies, and it was a cozy and charming read that I absolutely adored. (It always rather annoys me when I discover a great book that wasn’t particularly well received on Goodreads. The other two books I read recently higher ratings, a lot more ratings, and more award nominations. It makes me wonder how much I should trust the opinions of the anonymous masses, because I do think there’s some correlation between a book being well-rated and how good it is – but sometimes the correlation isn’t as strong as I wish it were, and I’m disappointed by books I thought would be wonderful.)
Mariana by Susanna Kearsley. It’s a book on time travel, where a woman in modern day England (sort of – the book was written in the nineties) can go back to seventeenth century England. And that’s really the whole plot. I DNFed at 200 pages in, because there was no excitement, no mystery, and while each chapter was pleasant enough on its own, I had absolutely no desire to find out what happened next.
The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware, which suffered from precisely the opposite problem. There was an intriguing mystery, and I very much wanted to know what happened next. But then I’d have to struggle through a lot of chapters with way too many characters and very little plot advancement to get to the next exciting part of the story. There is a good story buried within the filler, though, and I did approve of the ultimate resolution to the story, so it does have that going for it.
I’m nearly finished with George MacDonald Fraser’s The Reavers. This is a comedic novel which he admits he wrote just for fun. Words like “rollicking” and “jolly” come to mind. It’s awesomely well done; I’m mostly turning the pages and thinking, “Damn, that dude could write.” At the same time, I’m coming to the realization that I don’t really enjoy humor as a writing genre, and I’m going to stop picking up things like this in future.
Finished Prayers the Devil Answers: A Novel, by Sharyn McCrumb. There’s a very good short story here buried inside 325 pages of padding. Also, the ending really bugged me. Not recommended.
Now I’m reading Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire.
It’s been a while since I’ve popped into one of these threads. (Summer = business development season. It’s the worst.) Anyway, here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently:
The Essex Serpent, set in England in the late 19th century. I wanted to love it, and the characters were interesting, but the story just didn’t do it for me.
The Power, by Naomi Alderman. This was interesting. It is the story of the origin of a large cultural shift caused by women developing the ability to biologically generate electrical shocks.
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic, by Emily Croy Barker. The protagonist is a modern American woman who gets kidnapped by fairies and rescued by a magician. It’s fun.
I’ve looked at this one half a dozen times at the library. It seems like there’s a handful of recent books in which all women suddenly develop some supernatural power (this, Stephen King’s Sleeping Beauties, and I think at least one or two more). Would you say this one is worth reading?
Finished Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval, about an aw-shucks thief and killer from Oklahoma and the Jack Webb-esque homicide cop who tries to take him down. Great title, but a so-so book. It sort of has two endings, and I think Leonard ought to have stuck with the first. Not his best.
Now I’ve returned to an audiobook of John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, about the impact of combat on the common soldier. I’ve heard his chapters on Agincourt and Waterloo, and now he’s discussing trench warfare at the Somme during WWI. Some pretty horrific stuff about wounds.