I’m re-reading Drums of Autumn (book 4 in the Outlander series). I raced through them all to find out what happened, so now I’m slowing down and re-reading.
For work, I’m reading Why Nobody Believes the Numbers. It’s about how the numbers are often totally incorrect in the field of population health management. It focuses on wellness programs, specifically – which is important since almost every company has one (because a company gets a lower cost on health insurance if they implement one, even though they don’t actually make people healthier).
I started A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman today. Perhaps this is a sign that I’m coming out of the “hard boiled, gritty” phase I’ve been in most of the year. … or maybe I just need a change of pace
Well, I had started to read Lisa Tuttle’s new novel, The Mysteries, about a mysteriously missing daughter but, several chapters in, I just ran into a dozen pages of the girl’s old diary. It’s reproduced in a ‘hand writing’ style of font and there’s no way I’m going to labour through that, I’m afraid.
I’ll try skipping it but if it transpires that it’s required reading for better understanding, I’ll give up. Which is a pity, because her previous book The Silver Bough (2006) was really good and this one was very promising.
I started on Bird Box by Josh Malerman this morning. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel in which an unknown creature drives people to murder and suicide if they so much as catch a glimpse of it. Therefore all the survivors live in dwellings with the windows covered and never go outdoors without blindfolds. Pretty good so far.
I just finished Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, and am now immersed in a collection of comical short stories by Saki (Hugh Munro) entitled Toys of Peace and Other Papers.
I skimmed through most Carthage just to find out what happened but it never grabbed me and made me want to read every word. I’m moved on to **A Man Called Ove **which is fun so far.
I read *The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl * by Arthur Allen.
Then I did an interview with the author:
I highly recommend the book. Allen gets into the development of the typhus vaccine during the interwar era and during the Nazis. Even if you’re not a scientist, I think you’ll enjoy his narrative. It’s part history, part house of horror and part basic narrative.
Have you read much Hillerman? He’s great. I lived in Albuquerque for a spell back when he was alive, and he was quite a celebrity, albeit a low-key one. There were large displays of his books everywhere including the airport when you first stepped off the plane. A shame when he died.
I’ve read about a half dozen of them. I enjoy them in spite of my confused feelings about looting. Not that I condone it, but museums loot all the time and lock the stuff up in store room where it never gets seen again and that’s legal. So yeah, I’m a former archaaeology/anthropology student with doubts.
I just gave up on Juliet Mariller’s Daughter of the Forest. The first five chapters were interesting, but didn’t grab me and by the time I got to the completely unnecessary rape scene I was done. I flipped ahead and found out the heroine didn’t end up with the man she was supposed to and decided to hell with it.
For the record, I am firmly against rape scenes that only exist to emphasize that men are horrible and that the heroine is a Strong Woman who can Overcome Anything. My question for any scene like that is “Does this advance the plot in any way?” In this book, no. It just drove the heroine further away from the brothers she was trying to save. Not only that, it showed a serious lack of imagination in giving the heroine obstacles. “Oh, she’s female, let’s just have some guys come up and rape her!” There are other things she can overcome. How about that brother of hers that was losing his humanity to his swanity? That could be something. But I forgot, she’s female so she has to be raped. :rolleyes:
Sorry about the rant, but this is one of my biggest pet peeves about novels of any kind.
I liked The God Engines, but I agree that it was also too slight to do the subject justice. I thought the length of *Redshirts *was just right, but that the codas should have been omitted - with such a silly subject, shorter is better.
Looting? I’ve read his Leaphorn and Chee books, and I don’t understand what you mean.
I just finished Cibola Burn, the 4th book in the Expanse series by James S.A. Covey. It has been getting weaker reviews than the earlier books, but I quite liked it. These books are old-fashioned space opera, and they are great fun.
The codas killed that book for me. I should never have read them.
I’m rereading Heidi for the millionth time. It was my first nicely bound hardcover book. Of course, since I got it when I was 8, my copy is falling to pieces. I see that Amazon has the same edition for sale. I may have to acquire it. I hate to get rid of my old copy, but there’s mold spots on some of the pages.
Finished Acceptance and I’m a little underwhelmed. Yes it was one of the most atmospheric and creepy series of books I’ve read in a while, and yes, I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time, but that ending. Ugh.
there were so many ideas, so many hypothesis and so much world building that it seems a shame to have ended it like that.
A common theme when dealing with the FOur Corners area is the traffic in illegal pot hunting and looting of Anasazi burials. After several semesters of archaeology, I decided that the worst looters were museums and universities, but that’s legal because we whites said it was. One of the MANY reasons I ran not walked away from archaeology. Your opinion may vary, of course.
I finished *Bird Box *this morning. Despite some serious faults (plot holes, implausibilities), I have to say I enjoyed the hell out of it. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more by this author.
I’m just starting on Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. This was the source material for the movie Angel Heart, which fortunately I haven’t seen.
As some of you may have noticed I am reading A Mote In God’s Eye. I both like the book and have stirrings of dislike for the book. The thing is, whenever I read Niven I always get this feeling like I simply dislike the guy. His books always have this whiff of “conservative white man writing his ideal future” about them. There’s only ever one woman, and she’s only in the book through no choice of her own - either she was kidnapped, or she was genetically engineered to do what they wanted, or she was taken along for the ride after a man decides he wants her. And she’ll inevitably screw the “main” character, and she’ll be naive and pure about sex. She never does or gets anything through her own merits. The book will continually bring up how pretty or sexy or supple she is and what her clothes look like against her skin. There will be no women with a role of power. There will be no women in the military.
I mean I very nearly rolled my eyes out of my head when Sally basically said (paraphrased), “Good women don’t have sex before marriage, and they certainly don’t use birth control pills. A good woman keeps her legs closed.” and went on to briefly fantasize about being a trophy wife so she wouldn’t have to deal with responsibility. The world she occupies obviously leans that way, but worlds and characters don’t act in vacuum and make choices on their own, they only act and exist due to their creators choices. The writers made them that way. I guess you could say “well, not every future is going to be bright and idealistic and equal” but it still rankles with me. Sci-fi is at it’s heart a “vision of tomorrow” and I don’t want this as my vision of tomorrow.
Anyway I don’t normally care so much if there are no woman characters with agency - I read entire books without any real women at all in them. It’s just something special about Niven’s books makes it feel…skeevy.
You can call me premature though, I HAVE only read three of his books. But they all give me the same vibe.
Not saying I disagree, but Teela Brown becomes a Pak Protector in one of his Ringworld books - very much a militant and powerful leadership role (she ends up in control of the Ringworld, more or less). Though perhaps, by that time, no longer strictly speaking a “woman” (or even human).
