Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' thread -- June 2017 Edition

Cafe Society
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It’s summer up here in the Northern Hemisphere after a wet cold spring. Flowers everywhere, green grass and magpies all over the place. We had a windstorm a week or so ago and it tumbled a baby 'pie out of his nest. Mama and Papa have been so diligent in defending it I suspect my cat may not go outside all summer :smiley: Even with having to fetch him out of my washer one morning, he has grown enough to move into the tree tops!

In related news, I started Conspiracy by Lindsay Buroker and am still plugging along with the half dozen or so I started this year. I have to go to get brakes done on my truck today…what to take?

Khadaji was one of the earlier members of the SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, and he started these monthly book threads. Sadly, he passed away in January 2013, and we decided to rename these monthly threads in his honor.

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Sayonara May, The West is looking forward to being DRY again: Last month’s thread

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Just started The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer, his first novel. Very good so far.

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Dancehall - Bernard F. Conners. A cheesy 80’s horror novel.

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Finished the books from last month. The Nepal Chronicles was fascinating – Newspaper editor marries a Nepalese woman in Kathmandu, and for their honeymoon the climb to the Everest Base camp and a small mountain nearby. Fascinating stuff. And the guy is also the editor of an anthology I’m in.
Now I’m re-reading Robert H. van Gulik’s Murder in Canton, chronologically the last of the Judge Dee series. I found a copy in the same printed series as my other Dee books (when I first read it, I’d borrowed it from a library).

I’ve also located the copy of the original edition of L. Sprague de Camp’s the Science Fiction Writer’s Handbook, which was buried. I’m reading it side-by-side with the Revised edition that I bought years ago (and got autographed by de Camp and his wife, Catherine Crook de Camp, who’s listed as co-author for the revision). I’ve been curious about the original edition, because all the comments and reviews I read about the Revised edition that I have owned for so long have complained about how gutted it was. So I ordered the original edition from a used book supplier. I was surprised at the heft of the old version. There certainly was a huge amount cut.

when I started reading, I could see what was cut, and why. The original edition was part of a series, while the revised edition was a stand-alone. It seems certain that McGraw-Hill insisted on a much shorter edition if it was going to publish it at all, so de Camp took an axe to the original edition and pared it down to publishable length. In the process, he took out a lot of now-obsolete material about publishers and markets, and didn’t replace most of it. He excised the descriptions of leading SF writers of the day. Most were still active, but new ones (including Arthur C. Clarke(!), who was too new to make the cut for a top sf writer in the original edition) had come into the field, and he didn’t want to write new bios, especially when it was more reasonable to cut them all. When all that wasn’t enough, he cut out a lot of the asides and personal recollections. and when that wasn’t enough, he pared down his prose to a utilitarian minimum that doesn’t read as well or as smoothly as what he originally wrote.

But the end result was that McGraw-Hill published this stripped-down version, so it got into the hands of eager young writers (me!) and arguably did some good. If he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read the book at all. Given the choice, I’d rather have read the old edition, with its slicker prose and the historical info on 1953 markets as well as de Camp’s evaluations of 1953 Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, et al.
On audio, I’ve found a new source. I’m reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, one of my favorites when I originally read it in print, but that was many years ago. It’s read by Michael Pritchard, who’s read many audiobooks I’ve listened to, including most of the Nero Wolfe novels I’ve heard on audio.

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I recently finished Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire, which was OK. It felt more like it was setting up a series than a book that stands on it’s own.

I also read Jim Butcher’s Fool Moon, the second in the Dresden Files series. I find Harry a little tedious, but I keep hearing that the series picks up around book 3, so maybe I’ll try one more.

Finally, I read Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter. I read this in one sitting and enjoyed it.

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I read a good bit of The Library at Mount Char. From what I can tell, it’s a good book. It’s about gods living among us, who have strange powers and are battling for ascendancy in the mysterious absence of their Father. I’m going to set this aside, because I don’t have the time or concentration to devote to this right now, and hope I will read it someday.

So this morning I started on News of the World, a novel set in the late 1800’s about an old man who must deliver an unwilling little girl to her faraway relatives. It’s not as compelling as I expected, but passes the time. I’ll continue because it’s too late to start another book this week. (I only read on weekdays).

I’m on a real book-ditching streak lately.

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I just finished Joe Haldeman’s latest novel, Work Done For Hire, about a struggling writer hired to write the novelization of an as-yet-unproduced horror movie. A large, unwelcome package left at his front door sends the story in a very different direction. For most of the book it’s a pretty good cross-country chase novel set in the near future, with offhand references to a Moon colony, the reintroduction of the draft, and AI highways that let you take a nap or read on long trips. The author brings the book to an abrupt and unconvincing conclusion, though, badly stumbling at the end. Skip it unless you’re a hardcore Haldeman fan.

Almost halfway through the audiobook of Michael Crichton’s 1996 novel Airframe, about the investigation of a lethal in-flight incident aboard a Chinese passenger jet flying into Denver. it started slow but is picking up speed (no pun intended).

I’ve also started Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives, a tongue-in-cheek Lovecraft/Le Carre mashup about a top-secret British agency fighting eldritch horrors. It’s not as funny as it could be, but it has its moments.

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Finished Off the Menu by Stacey Ballis. Meh. Her books interest me most when she’s not talking about relationships but about her MC’s job. And zero tension about her overly perfect boyfriend.

Started Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik, the second book in the Temeraire series, which I’m enjoying more than the first, actually.

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Couldn’t finish News of the World either. I had to lay it aside for a while, and lost any desire to pick it up again.

Started today on Family Plot by Cherie Priest. A haunted house story. I hope it’s good, because I see this author has written a few other things I might want.

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Reading Al Franken’s King of the Senate which until someone posted a thread on here I had no idea existed.

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Do you mean this?: https://www.amazon.com/Al-Franken-Giant-Senate/dp/1455540412/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496690776&sr=1-1&keywords=al+franken+giant+of+the+senate

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Yes, sorry. Got the title wrong.

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I’m reading Uprooted, but then will dive back into choie’s That Moment When (she has a story in it.)

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I spent several hours last Wednesday getting new brakes, shocks and drums repacked on my little truck, as a consequence i got rather far into Jo Nesbo’s Nemesis.

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I remember that was the first place I had ever seen the word “ocarina”. I had to look it up in the dictionary to figure out what an ocarina-shaped island would look like.

I just finished the book The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays by W. E. B. Du Bois discussing the history of black Americans from 1863-1903. Most of the essays were quite interesting; it’s not a subject area that got much discussion in my (Canadian) history classes and it was interesting to contrast then and now. There were a few essays that I found pretty turgid: his defense of the importance of a liberal arts education and the overly flowery essay on his dead son, for instance.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts on that one when you finish!

I’m REALLY enjoying The Girl Who Drank the Moon, speaking of fairy-tale-ish fantasy. This year’s Newberry, so no doubt some of you have devoured it already! I’ve been doing a lot of reading, a lot of editing, and a lot of writing recently, so my brain is attuned to the Hows a lot more than usual, which is interesting, but kind of gets in the way of really dwelling in a story.

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Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. Hm. I would say, if you read a lot of books and you like mysteries, particularly atmospheric British small town mysteries, you might like this one. However, there are like seven narrators, so there’s a lot of head-hopping, and early on before the characters are established it all seems pretty vague and without much drive.

Now I tend to read fast, which means I usually don’t put a book down, once I’ve picked it up, unless it’s some 600+ word tome. However, I have to say that, had I put the book down, or had I had another book to hand to pick up, I might not have got through those early pages. I might have gone on to some other book.

But it did get a bit more interesting once the characters were established.

The characters are all pretty flawed, and as narrators some of them are unreliable. I happen to like reading the inner thoughts of shitty people, though, so that didn’t bother me.

There are some twists, of course. I pretty much saw them coming, but I am a professional when it comes to guessing who’s guilty.

If you only read a few books a year, this one is probably not worth it. If you read voraciously and like mysteries, it works.

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I read The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser, which I learned about through one of these Whatcha Reading threads. But whoever posted about the book did so years ago, and while the synopsis sounded interesting (a girl looks into a magical mirror and gets transported into her grandmother’s teenage body on the eve of her grandmother’s wedding night, and vice versa), the book wasn’t available on Kindle and so I removed it from my to read list.

Then last month, I was a bit dissatisfied with the books on my current to-read list, so I found an old list from years ago, which included The Mirror. Now it is available on Kindle, so I bought it, absolutely enjoyed it, and thoroughly recommended it. It kind of reminded me of the books I used to read as a child, because things like time travel seem to be more prevalent in children’s books (or at least the children’s books I read). It had adult subject matter in it, though, so it was a nice blend of adventure and mature topics.

Also from that old to read list, I found The China Study. Back in 2010-2011, I dated a vegan, and I think I first became interested in the book during that period of time, because it’s about nutrition and how a whole foods, plant-based diet is the healthiest diet for you, while animal-based food products can cause cancer and other health problems. When I broke up with him, I lost interest. Then last month, my husband and I gave up meat for a month because we had lost a bet, and I thought reading a book on how meat is bad for you might be some good encouragement. And it was.

I have read a fair amount of diet books – of the top of my head, I’ve read the Whole 30 diet book, South Beach Diet, Engine 2 Diet, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which advocates a local foods diet). I have never read a book so thoroughly researched as The China Study. It cites loads of studies, and moreover, it describes how the studies were conducted, who sponsored the studies, and the statistical significance of the findings from each study. It’s absolutely made me re-think some of my own beliefs about nutrition.

I also read The Ice Twins, which I first learned about when it was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Horror. The synopsis intrigued me: “A year after one of their identical twin daughters, Lydia, dies in an accident, Angus and Sarah Moorcraft move to the tiny Scottish island Angus inherited from his grandmother, hoping to put together the pieces of their shattered lives. But when their surviving daughter, Kirstie, claims they have mistaken her identity—that she, in fact, is Lydia—their world comes crashing down once again.” It was a gripping story with a cool ending.

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I read this book, and while it had the potential to be a good book, I don’t think it delivered. The author makes no effort to orient you in any way, just constantly throwing in random scenes with characters we’ve never met in different situations that don’t seem to have any connection to one another. I’m often a fan of postmodern books with unreliable narrators and confusing circumstances, but this book was too much for me.