I rated The Bees one star. I was very impressed with it initially, since I loved Paull’s description of the bee world. But that whole book seems like nothing but a big description of the bee world, and there’s virtually no actual plot or character development. To be fair, I didn’t finish the book, but I think I read about 200 pages before I abandoned it, so those are my thoughts on the first 200 pages. I hope you enjoy it; I don’t at all mean to dampen your reading experience. I just saw Dung Beetle offer her opinion and thought I’d chime in as well.
My favourite, and one of his most accessible novels, imho, is The City and the Stars. Maybe she’d like that.
Now reading Children of the Comet by Donald Moffitt, which I’m enjoying a lot. One or two quibbles and it feels very traditional sf, but it’s proving to be not as straight forward as I expected. Billions of years in the future the Sun has expanded and destroyed Earth but mankind still clings on to life on comets among the Oort Cloud…
I just put a link to this month’s thread in last month’s.
I’m a third of the way through The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx. Good so far.
Just finished the audiobook of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari. It’s an interesting, at-the-gallop look at how humanity came to dominate the globe, for better and for worse. I’d recommend it to any layperson interested in anthropology and sociology.
Ugh, Sorry I was all wrapped up in Halloween and the begininning of National Novel Writing Month and spaced off a new thread.
That said, I finished Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch and… man I like his characters I like his world, I like his plot but his ending are real pissers. This one wasn’t even an ending the book just freaking stopped. Middle of a conversation done :mad:
I started The Devil is a Part Timer which I bought on accident. It’s a translated “light novel” from Japan and my experience is they usually suck. Again I wonder if it’s because I’m not reading it in Japanese. The translation team is the same that translates Manga so I’m sure a LOT gets lost. Anyway it at least is getting a few chuckles out of me.
I’m about fifty pages into a bunch of new books.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is my favorite of the bunch so far. It’s kind of hard to tell what it’s about. A woman is remembering her experiences back at boarding school, and there was something strange about the school and the students in it. Because I’m still near the beginning, I don’t know a whole lot about what exactly this strange thing is, but I’m intrigued and having fun trying to pick up clues and form theories.
I’ve also picked up Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I think I might have set my hopes too high for this book. If you click on the link I provided, the book synopsis starts out with a list of a whole bunch of awards the book received, so I was expecting it to be a pretty amazing book. So far it’s been decent, but nowhere close to amazing. Maybe it’ll get more special as the book goes on.
The final book I’m reading is First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen. I’ve read every book SAA has written and am certainly a fan of hers, but this book makes me worried that I’m outgrowing her. She writes these absolutely charming, candy-sweet books with a dash of magic in them. Her latest offering is completely in-step with her signature style, but I’m finding that I’m just not as smitten with charmingly sweet books as I once was.
There was a well-reviewed 2010 movie based on the book, too. You’ll get no spoilers from me.
I think I’ll pick this up, although I may have slightly spoiled it for myself while looking at the info in the library catalog. Looks pretty good!
I’ll be starting Stephen King’s new collection of short stories tonight.
I’m about 5 stories in, pretty good so far! I quite liked his poem The Bone Church, and was surprised because I usually think his poetry sucks. (Sorry Steve!)
I tore through Carry On, by Rainbow Rowell, which is is based on the fanfic that was internal to her novel <i>Fangirl</i>. It’s one of those things where if you read the first book, you know pretty much what to expect. Its roots are in the Harry Potter series, but I was impressed that it stands on its own fairly well. Magical teenagers at a magic school. I think does a good job of poking very gentle fun at some of the HP stuff, like why does everyone listen to the headmaster even though he seldom provides any actual information, and why don’t they have cell phones? That sort of thing.
Just finished The Last Colony by John Scalzi, another excellent installment in his Old Man’s War series of sf military adventures. There’s a particularly good battle scene with an unexpected but very satisfying outcome.
I’ve begun The Battle of New Hope Church by Russell W. Blount Jr., about a portion of Sherman’s 1864 Atlanta campaign. It’s detailed but not particularly engrossing.
Still reading The Churchills in Love and War by Mary S. Lovell, which is more family gossip than political history, but good.
I think I mentioned this in the last thread, but I’m (now) in the middle of Requiem For A Dream. It’s not, as I recall, nearly as fast paced as the movie. I’m sure that’s partially due to the way the movie was directed and edited, but I’m sure we all remember these scenes in the movie, whereas in the book those scenes are more about the tedium of getting high. Basically, what many of us remember from our college days (even if your college days weren’t spent doing heroin). He took a hit from the joint, marion thought about drawing another picture and then she took a puff of of the joint. Harry took a few more tokes and put it out then took some dexies to get ready for work instead they just laid on the couch until the sun was too bright to sleep anymore.
Also similar to McCarthy’s The Road, there’s very little in the way of, well, any kind of grammar. Reading Selby’s wiki page it’s a combination of his lack of education, trying to crank out the words as fast as he could without losing his train of thought and that his finger was closer to the / than the ’ so possessives use slashes, there’s no quote marks and the entire book might as well be one giant paragraph. Paragraph breaks are just there for ‘scene changes’. Eitherway, that’s what editors are for, or proof reading, I assume, again like McCarthy, he did it on purpose, to give you a ‘nothing matters’ feeling.
(ETA, just to be clear, I have seen the movie a few times, while I don’t remember much about it, don’t worry about spoiling anything for me if you want to talk about it)
Anyways, I’m still liking it, I might pick up Last Exit To Brooklyn to toss in my ‘unread’ pile. Like many other books, I really wish they wouldn’t change the cover art, I like the original one, but I’ll have to get the current one.
Getting the original one (or even something close to it) would cost somewhere between $35 and over $500.
I like old books, I (usually) like old cover art, so this is something I run into a lot.
ETA, I’m also watching Rear Window right now and thinking about picking up that book as well. They only way I’m finding it is as a book of short stories with that one included. From the reviews, I think most of the stories (whatever the combination) are supposed to be mostly good).
I’ve been reading screenplays of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Wow, a lot of those 7th season episodes ended on real downers!
What’s the book, or where did you find them?
I finished reading The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen. It’s a collection of short horror stories strung together into a novel using a frame story. It was somewhat inspired by R. L. Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights” and two of the stories were obvious inspirations for H. P. Lovecraft (“The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder”).
I liked it better than “New Arabian Nights” (which was pretty good); all of the stories were nice and creepy, even the frame story. If I had one criticism, it would be that the frame story undercuts some of the impact of the individual stories by making it clear that they were probably lies. I mean, obviously I, as the reader, know that they’re fiction, but knowing that they’re fiction inside a work of fiction made them a bit less creepy to me.
A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge, Charles B. MacDonald. A well-written book that delves into the intelligence failures that resulted in the Allies being caught flat-footed by Hitler’s final offensive. It also goes into great detail about the planning behind the offensive, which demonstrated one of those flashes of military genius that Hitler was known for. I’m only about 10% in, so there is a lot of information to come.
I have a couple of things on the go at the moment as well as a few just finished.
On the go:
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande does an outstanding job of presenting and humanizing the terrible issues in end-of-life care today, including quantity of life vs. quality of life, medical intervention for the terminal, etc. Terribly thoughtful and approachably written. By the end of this book, I’ll know to make much better decisions for myself and my family when the time comes, I believe.
Faithful Place by Tana French. Detective Frank Mackey, a bit player in The Likeness, returns as main character in this mystery revolving around the death of his former sweetheart, Rose. When Rose didn’t turn up for their proposed teenage elopement, Frank blamed his dysfunctional family for scaring off Rose. Turns out they may be responsible for much more than that, and the descriptions of how he comes to grips with the Mackey clan after decades of estrangement is compelling in itself. Add in that one of them may be Rose’s killer - or was it? - and the book is tough indeed to put down.
Just finished:
Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us about Crime by Val McDermid. If you have even a particle of interest in forensics, you’ll be completely riveted by the anecdotes, experts, and case studies in this book. If you’re an aspiring crime-writer, you may find it helpful as a reference and source of inspiration. True confession: I listened to it unabridged on audio. The woman who reads it (not McDermid) has a wonderful Scottish accent that just adds to the whole experience. This will surely be one of my favorite books of 2015, and I can’t recommend it too highly, however you decide to indulge.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George RR Martin. This is essentially a collected set of three novellas previously published by Martin about Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg. It’s been beautifully illustrated here by Gary Gianni. Although the stories are set before the Song of Ice and Fire and contain far fewer characters, Dunk and Egg are well-realized characters with plenty of humanity and interesting, though smaller-scale, adventures. I also liked this glimpse into the life of an hedge knight in Martin’s world; that wasn’t an easy life by any means.
You might like Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes, a novel about an Army JAG lawyer who gets caught up in the Battle of the Bulge. It’s pretty good.
I finished Tom Purdom’s Romance on Four Planets, his Casanova-in-Space collection. It’s very well done, and has some very high concepts, but for some reason I found it hard going. For a work begun twenty years ago, though, it’s still very fresh, and not close to being overtaken by developments.
I read Ralph Helfer’s Modoc – The True Story of the Greatest Elephant that Ever Lived. The book has a wonderful cover photo that sums up the book perfectly. Pepper Mill read this and loved it, and suggested I read it. I was only a short way into it when my thought was that this book was WAY too detailed to be an accurately “true stoty”. So I snooped on the internet, and learned that there is a website that tracks circus elephants. There were three elephants named Modoc, but none of them had a biography that fits with the book, and none were as old as the book’s Modoc. One page goes so far as to say:
Another site dissects the story at length:
http://woodentigress.blogspot.com/2009/05/ethical-fiction-or-fictional-ethics_6885.html
I hadn’t read that until I finished the book, but, as I say, my suspicions had been aroused by the detail. Also by the name “Modoc” doesn’t sound like German (the elephant was supposed to be born in Germany) or like Indian (She’s an Indian elephant). “Modoc” sounded sort of French, if anything. Actually, it’s the name of an American Indian group, which might be the real source of the name.
In any event, among the many discrepancies is that the book writes about Modoc’s tusks many times, but none of the photos show her with tusks.
So chalk this up as another “fiction” novel masquerading as “non-fiction”. According to internet sites, Kevin Costner was looking into turning this into a film about a decade ago, but then all mention of it was dropped. Maybe he found out the truth.