Been reading a lot of books in the LitRPG genre recently. For those not familiar with that, it basically refers to novels that are set in some type of Virtual Reality MMORPG type games. If you are familiar with the novel Ready, Player One, it is similar to those. If you are a fan of that book or just RPG/VR type games in general I’d recommend the below series. All of the below are still ongoing series.
The Dragon’s Wraith -Brent Roth
-A Virtual Dream
-Ashes of the Fallen
-Shadows in the Flame
The Land Series - Aleron King
-Founding
-Forging
-Alliances
-Catacombs
-Swarm
Omnia Online - Christopher Booth
-Omnia Online
-Omnia Online: Making the Grade
End Online - D. Wolfin
-Volumes 1-6 (will be a 12 part series)
Ascend Online - Luke Chmilenko
Portals of Infinity - John Van Stry (1 more pending)
-Champion for Hire
-The God Game
-Of Temples and Trials
-The Sea of Grass
-Demigods and Deities
-Reprisal
-Kaiju
The Feedback Loop Series - Harmon Cooper (8 part series)
-The Feedback Loop
-Steampunk is Dead
-High Fantasy
-Reapers & Repercissions
-The Mechanical Heart
I finished Prudence by Gail Carriger today. It wan’t bad but it was a long way from the quality of The Parasol Protectorate. It’s biggest failing, in my opinion, was that she couldn’t decide if she wanted to write a YA book or an Adult book, so the narrative was all over the map.
Finished several recently. I recommend the ones in red.
-The Yid, a very dark and very funny story about the plot to assassinate Stalin before he could start up a second Holocaust.
-Sleeping Giants, a fine but not amazing story that begins with a little girl riding her bike, falling down a huge hole, and being discovered at the bottom of the hole cradled in the palm of a 50’ long metal hand.
-Everfair, a novel about the Belgian terror in the Congo, except that the Congolese adopt steampunk/nuclear (?) technology. Great ideas, but I never cared about any of the characters.
-I Am Providence, a novel about a murder at a Lovecraft convention. Fine but forgettable.
-The Obelisk Gate, the second in NK Jemisin’s super-grim series about earth-mages and just how wrong that can go. Damn, this is a good series! The characters are excellent, the worldbuilding is top-notch, and the violence is shocking and every bit earned.
I started, but did not finish, Barsk, some poorly-written twee tripe about anthropomorphic elephants and cheetahs and shit.
Now I’m reading Welcome to Night Vale, a comic novel by the podcast creators, and while the humor’s pretty fun, I’m not sure it’ll sustain over an entire novel.
Finished this one up today, not enjoying it as much. It became less comedy and more about rape culture and how she bested internet trolls. Kind of hard to take when we just elected President Trump.
There is a brand new book on the expeditions of Stephens and Catherwood!
I always thought this was one of the most exciting true stories in the history of archaeology (it is about the pair who first popularized the discovery of the ancient Maya ruins - and made a truly incredible, in some ways never surpassed, series of detailed drawings of their artifacts - along the way having all sorts of bizarre adventures, a sort of cross between a buddy road trip, innocents abroad, and Indiana Jones). Though I wonder what new this particular book brings to the tale.
I just finished an odd book: Dream London, by Tony Ballantyne. London is in the grip of a strange power that causes the city to change on a daily basis: streets move or vanish, the Thames is a shadow of its former self, red and gold salamanders are appearing everywhere, along with blue monkeys, buildings grow like plants (one scene takes place on the 892nd floor of an office building).
I have never taken any hallucinogenic substance, but this book has that feel to it as far as I can tell.
Yeah; I liked it, and I understand the author has also written Dream Paris as well.
Finished The Trouble With Testosterone by Robert M. Sapolsky. Overall I’d say skip it, although the last chapter, on the possible links between OCD and religious ritual, was quite interesting.
I really liked Star Trek: 50 Artists / 50 Years (no author listed, but it’s published by Titan Books), a coffee-table book which offers a wide range of artistic takes on the franchise. There are no fewer than three interpretations of Kirk vs. the Gorn. Dusty Abell’s giant group portrait is definitely my favorite of the book: How many characters can you identify in this massive original Star Trek poster?
I’m about halfway through an audiobook of Nevil Shute’s 1957 post-WWIII novel On the Beach, which is quietly chilling (although Shute is constantly writing about his characters nodding at each other; there’s a nod at least every ten minutes or so).
Finally, Daniel Black’s novel Perfect Peace, about a black woman in the Jim Crow South raising her son as a daughter, didn’t pass my 50-page rule. Just not good enough to keep going.
Finished The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story behind the Legend, by David McCullough. Good, like I would expect McCullough to be. Although he did flub a couple of numbers toward the end. For instance, he had sister Katharine becoming engaged for the first time at age 58, but that would be some trick considering she died at age 54 like he showed on the same page. In reality, she became engaged at age 51. And he had Orville dying at age 77 when in reality he was 76 (although he would have turned 77 later that same year.) But minor quibbles. This is a good read.
Have started The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Good so far.
Halfway though Jungle of Stone. It’s a great read, though mostly taken from Stephens’ own work, there’s a lot of added detail.
The description of Catherwood’s initial despair at attempting to draw Mayan sculpture really struck home to me - I’ve attempted the same thing, so I know exactly what he was talking about: the ornamentation and concepts are so alien to western-trained artists as to be basically incomprehensible to them (well, us); it is very hard to draw things you seriously don’t understand, even with tools like a camera lucida (which I for one never used). Plus, the sheer complexity of it is daunting; plus he was drawing them in most uncertain conditions - in the middle of a malarial jungle during a civil war. Yet he eventually succeeded so well his drawings are still referenced today.
I’m back to the Lightbringer series. Book 4 just released a couple weeks ago. Brent Weeks has impressed me with his ability to create magic systems I haven’t seen before, or even imagined, first with the ka’kari and now with luxin.
Finished this one. Slightly puzzled and underwhelmed by the ending because [spoiler] Nyalatharp (or whatever his name was) indicated that there was a monkey's paw element in the final prize. Which usually means that you get your wish, but it's not what you wanted (Trump voters will understand this in time, not that I'm bitter.) But in using the vials, each person pretty much got exactly what they wanted with no repercussions. Yes, of course, Cabal was thwarted in his ultimate quest, but he achieved some personal growth, maybe. His house burned down (a somewhat distressingly literal take on the title), but he seems to have taken that with equanimity. If that's the Red Queen's vengeance, it's surprisingly tepid. [/spoiler]
I tend to consider this more of a conclusion to the 2-parter started by the previous book than an actual end to the series.
Reading A Blade of Black Steel, sequel to A Crown for Cold Silver. It’s very much in the Abercrombi/Martin tradition of grimdark fantasy, except that it’s hilarious. Characters suffer all sorts of indignities and have no illusions about their grandiosity. The books are just fun, which is exactly what I need right now.
I’m about two-thirds done with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. I’m up to the point where a U.S. Navy sub is visiting depopulated, post-WWIII Puget Sound. Well-written and quietly bleak.
Making steady progress through The Jews in America, a history by Arthur Hertzberg. I’m now up to the early 1900s - T.R., pushing back against rising anti-Semitism, just issued a ringing defense of Jews as valued citizens.
Over the weekend I started Sharkey Ward’s Sea Harrier over the Falklands. Interesting so far. Ward, a top Royal Navy fighter pilot, writes pretty well and obviously has a very healthy ego.
Finished up Shanghai Girls and the sequel, Dreams of Joy. Harrowing insight into the Famine of China after the Great Leap Forward.
I was trying to find The Bastard by John Jakes online at my library (formulaic, I know, but I read the series in high school and liked the historical part) but what popped up was Lies of Locke Lamora, the first of the trilogy Gentleman Bastards. It’s not historical fiction but a fantasy, and I am digging the hell out of it.
Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
Fascinating stuff. As an Australian, I have issues with Winston: he sent a bunch of my relatives to Gallipoli, and I’m only here because my ancestor there was lucky and survived. Many didn’t, and it was a terrible idea that got a lot of good men pointlessly slaughtered.
As a humanist, I also have issues with Winston: he was a terrible aristocratic snob and an unapologetic racist.
But… I will give credit where it’s due, and Winston is due a lot of credit for being the one man in politics who saw Hitler for what he was when everyone else was expecting Hitler to listen to reason and not be, you know, a batshit insane genocidal maniac. Winston was the right man to lead the UK in WW2, and he did it brilliantly.
What I didn’t know was that young Winston was a literal war hero who displayed an impressive degree of personal courage and leadership.
Book is very well written, and doesn’t shy away from WC’s flaws - and there were many of them. But he was, nonetheless, a very admirable man. Excellent read, so far.
I’ve been muddling about with some non-fiction, Raising Chickens for Dummies. We’ve recently moved to a large property and it seems like we ought to do something with it, so chickens are one possibility. It’s a pretty darn comprehensive book, I’d say.
Started this morning on Replica by Lauren Oliver. It’s a “flip book”, meaning two stories bound back to back and upside down. Each story will cover the same ground with a different narrator. So I’ve started on the “Gemma” side. (The other side is “Lyra”; I decided to do things alphabetically). A YA sci-fi tale about clones.
I recommend Roy Jenkins’s Churchill: A Biography, a witty and erudite one-volume bio of Churchill by a British statesman who also long served in the House of Commons, and Mary S. Lovell’s The Churchills: In Love and War, a just as well-researched but quite a bit more gossipy account of his extended family.
