Is it Autumn yet? Dopers in the Houston Texas area, be safe! The rest of us, if you can afford it, donate to help organizations, please.
So what are we reading?
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.
Following Brian Aldiss’ recent death, I’ve started reading The Shape of Further Things, which is a diary/musings he wrote over January 1969 about all sorts of things.
I was looking through the books of his I owned, thinking it might be appropriate to finally read the Helliconia books, when I came across it - my partner must have bought it decades ago before we merged our collections, but she hadn’t read it either!
‘Earth is charged with a beauty we are destroying…’ So begins this unique book, in which joy and doom intermingle. It spans one month in the life of Aldiss and his wife Margaret and family, living in the peaceful Oxfordshire countryside. Here’s a tapestry of provocative meditations, theories of dreams, of the Moon as real estate, and the role of technology and pollution in our lives - all served up with soup and sausage rolls. Aldiss speaks of ‘The sheer delight of being alive’ - and captures that delight here.
If you like that, you might also enjoy Never After, by Dan Elconin. The original Peter Pan didn’t click much for me, but I’ve really grooved on some books that used it as inspiration.
Thanks for the kick in the pants. I’ve got Dennis LeHane Since We Fell and Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz from the library and need to apply myself this weekend! It’s nice and cold so curling up in bed with a book will be no problem.
I’m reading But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman. It’s about about what Culture survives long term and how it is almost impossible to predict because current values and future values differ so much. It’s really fascinating and I have been thinking of starting a few discussion threads here based on stuff he brings up in the book.
I finished Fallon’s Jewel by Sidonia Guillone. It’s a m/m romance that’s part space opera an part epic. Unfortunately she should have stuck to it being all space opera, that half of the book was a fun read and more forgiving of the less than stellar writing.
While I know e-books are not as good as real books, there is an advantage to them. I can reserve them as soon as they are announced and if I was first, I get first crack at them when they are released. I started *Y is for Yesterday *as soon as I finished the last book I was reading.
Just finished Sleeping with the Fishes, by Mary Janice Davidson, which I enjoyed. Next up: You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, by John Scalzi.
I gave up on Ed Lin’s Ghost Month, a mystery novel about a glum street vendor in Taiwan who looks into the unsolved murder of his ex-girlfriend, after my customary 50 pages (or the equivalent, since I was listening to an audiobook). Plodding and dull.
I’m a few chapters into rereading Frank Herbert’s sf classic Dune, which isn’t as well-written as I remember from when I last read it in high school (no surprise there), although its world-building is still terrific. I’m also reading Education in Violence by Francis F. McKinney, a biography of a Civil War hero of mine, Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga.” A rather stolid personality but a talented and courageous soldier.
Also just about halfway through David McCullough’s first book, The Johnstown Flood. The tension of the events leading up to the May 1889 dam break was thick enough to cut with a knife, and now the tales of death and survival in Johnstown are pretty gripping.
