I really enjoyed The Mote in God’s Eye and don’t think it ends too abruptly. Still one of my favorite first-contact novels; great world-building of both the Empire and the Motie civilization. I agree, however, that Niven and Pournelle tend not to write female characters all that well.
Zipping now through Counselor by Theodore Sorensen. Lots of great stories about life on the 1960 Presidential campaign trail with JFK.
Also, I’ve just begun A.J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically, in which he reads the Bible cover to cover, compiling its more than 700 rules (the Ten Commandments are just the beginning), and doing his very best to comply with every one of them for a whole year. Funny and thought-provoking.
Thanks; I didn’t see an easy way for it to fit with the other two, but I haven’t read very much about it.
It comes out in the UK in a week or so, so I didn’t want to spring for a US hardback…
Amazonia, James Rollins, which is a pretty good yarn. Just finished Savage Arena, by Joe Tasker, which is a book about his mountain climbing ventures in the Himalayas. Not the best book on mountain climbing.
I thought Amazonia was great fun, as were most of his early books.
I more or less gave up on him when he started his Sigma Force books though.
Currently reading The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter by Rod Duncan, which is a steampunk detective/mystery novel with a female lead who disguises herself as her ‘brother’ half the time so she can get work and also be able to live alone without raising eyebrows in the ever-so-correct 19th C society…
Finished Falling Angel over the weekend. Pretty good detective/horror novel set in the fifties. The more you know about New York city, the more you’ll like this. And a twist ending that I didn’t see coming.
Nearly finished Rothfuss’s second - wise man’s fear. Very poor effort IMO - bloated beyond belief. The whole genre is, really, but we all just accept it - I feel like I’ve had moments of clarity with this one, though, where you come up for air and realise just how clod-hoppingly mediocre the writing is. Then it’s back to turning the pages.
I think what’s got me grumpy about this particular book is that the * A wizard of earthsea *is such an obvious reference point. Now clearly it’s totally unfair to make comparisons with that masterpiece, but still - it does show you what an artist can achieve in 224 pages, versus an artisan taking 1600 (and still not finished).
Got Bolano’s 2666 up next - taking a break from fantasy.
Okay so I finished Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children … and assembled a list of people who should have written it: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, Daniel O’Malley (oh wait he DID write it) and Chris Claremont (Yeah so did he).
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about the book ever since I laid it down. I actually read the last chapter twice. I’m definitely picking up the movie at the library.
I finished The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai, which was okay. Multi-generational family saga, told backwards. I wasn’t wild about the first section, which takes place in the present day, but I liked the later parts of the story a bit more.
Well, I too wasn’t very impressed by WMF, but I think Rothfuss made a strategic error that contributed to the bloat of this book. For some odd reason, he chose to make the series a trilogy, despite setting up an apparent mythos for his character in The Name of the Wind that could easily support a much longer series. So now he’s stuck with trying to hit all the highlights in just a couple of books and advance the plot, and I think that’s more than he can handle with his level of writing experience.
The other obvious error he makes, of course, is saddling the reader with the most irritating female love interest ever. Every time she shows up, the user is taken completely out of the story by fantasizing about how much better it would be if she would just die in a fire.
Well put. I think the lack of momentum in the plot would be more acceptable if there was some real character development, but the main players remain resolutely two dimensional (and Denna can get tae fuck).
It does point to a guy learning his trade, as you infer. When GRRM puts out a lemon in SoIF he does at least have an excuse - so many balls in the air, massive multi-narrative story that is v hard to hold together. Rothfuss has shat the bed on the second book.
