I’m on the last book of Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy. It takes place in the 28th century, where humankind has a galactic empire. The first book takes place on a distant colony planet which is being settled by newcomers. A mysterious breakout occurs when the people who have died throughout human history are able to possess the bodies of the living. They do so because the afterlife is actually a cold, lonely void and they would rather go back to living. They become stronger, able to disrupt anything that relies on electrical power, and can mold their host bodies to their original appearance. Collectively, they can combine their powers enough to remove the entire planet to a parallel dimension.
Most of the series is the struggle between the living and the possessed. Even though humans have superior tech, combat ability and weaponry, they can’t effectively fight the possessed because a) their weapons fail, b) the possessed are really hard to kill, and c) there’s the matter of the possessed using the bodies of innocent victims who would die through no fault of their own. It poses big ethical dilemmas, and often their best strategies and tactics fail because they’ve never contended with this type of enemy.
Largely, the trilogy is a space opera with a huge cast of characters and its fair share of space battles and swashbuckling ship captains. Al Capone makes a return as a possessed, and eventually takes over his colony and runs it like a mob boss. Hamilton did a great job of establishing separate earth colony cultures, their longtime rivalries with each other, and their reluctance to unify in the face of the threat of the possessed.
The only issue I have with Hamilton’s writing is that comma splices are frequent. I remember my high school English teacher saying that any paper with a comma splice would automatically fail. His books could have had better editors.
I enjoyed Hamilton’s trilogy, mostly. He does fantastic world-building (interstellar society-building, really), and has some really big and cool ideas, but I thought he stumbled badly at the end.
As posted in last month’s: Finished Ragtime, by EL Doctorow. Fictional and historical characters interact in the greater New York City area largely from 1902-12, with brief scenes continuing to 1917 at the very end. The main story is a black man takes matters into his own hands when a bunch of Irish firefighters vandalize his car and indirectly lead to the death of his fiancee/mother of his child. I especially liked the Harry Houdini story line. Ranked No. 86 on the Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the 20th century. This is a great book. I remember watching the 1981 film when it came out and enjoying that. It was 80-something-year-old James Cagney’s last movie role, as the NYC police commissioner, although I think he did appear in a TV movie after that. He had not acted in a movie in something like 20 years, and he was terrific. Pat O’Brian’s last film too. Like Ulf above, I had read only Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate before and found itt only so-so. Ragtime is fantastic.
Next up is The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. Close to halfway finished, and it is very good.
The Dead Zone is one of my favorite King books. Gotta reread it one of these days.
Still on a break from A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Bachman, a so-so novel about a Swedish curmudgeon.
In Michelle Obama’s Becoming, her memoir, she and Barack have just gotten married and she’s about to start a new job with a Chicago nonprofit. I’m really enjoying the book.
On Friday I finished the audiobook of Tara Westover’s Educated. I sometimes found myself shouting at her not to make what invariably turned out to be the worst possible decision in dealing with her bipolar, Bible-thumping Mormon dad, her lying and passive mom, and her controlling, physically-abusive older brother. A harrowing memoir and, I have to say, not as good as all the glowing reviews led me to believe.
Just began David Sedaris’s latest collection of short stories, Calypso, which is pretty good so far. I’m listening to the audiobook, of course - his delivery is at least half the fun.
Finished Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. I enjoyed it a lot. I’m actually a fan of neither statistics nor baseball, but this book is still a lot of fun. (I only read it because I’m doing a book challenge and had to pick a book that was made into a movie.) I strongly recommend it.
Now I’m reading A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War, by Patricia Fara.
I finished The Death of Mrs. Westaway and quite enjoyed it. In a few weeks I’ll probably have forgotten what it was all about, but I did spend time thinking about it whenever I had to lay it aside, trying (and failing) to solve the mystery.
This morning I read 33 pages of Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. I’ve always heard the Lord Peter Wimsey novels highly spoken of, but this didn’t grab me and I’m not in the mood to work at it right now, so tomorrow I will be starting on 438 Days: an extraordinary true story of survival at sea.
Gaudy Night is probably not the best Lord Peter story to start with. There’s a lot of back-history by that point that figures into the plot.
The best by far of the Lord Peter series is The Nine Tailors, but I suggest you read them in publication order because of the character building over the series.
Finished it tonight, and really liked it. Standout bits: “Now We Are Five” (about his sister’s suicide and how the family dealt with it), “The Perfect Fit” (buying very weird, very pricy clothes in Tokyo - when having lunch later in a fancy restaurant with his sisters, he writes, “we looked like expensively-dressed mental patients”), “Boo-Hooey” (ghosts and how skeptical he is of them) and “Why Aren’t You Laughing?” (his mother’s alcoholism and gradual decline).
Nobody I’ve ever read has Sedaris’s knack for making you cringe and laugh at the same time.
Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Michael Dobbs.
I’d read Dobbs’ other two books about the cold war and really enjoyed them. Dobbs is a skilled writer. He was working as a journalist when the Soviet Union collapsed and was present during many of the events he covers in this book. But the book doesn’t just cover his personal experiences and also serves well as a general history.
Probably should mention that this Michael Dobbs is not the same person as the author of House of Cards.
Finished A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War, by Patricia Fara.
Interesting stuff. It’s about the contributions British women made in STEM fields during WWI, often despite official opposition. For example, a number of female doctors, not permitted to work in hospitals in France due to the danger, (despite the fact that female nurses were there) worked in hospitals just as close to the front in Serbia and Russia. One, Dr. Isabel Emslie, ran what sounds like a MASH unit.
Next up: The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, by Bill Bryson.
Finished The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. A young high-school teacher in Maine gets into a car crash and is in a coma for four-and-a-half years. Finally coming to, he exhibits clairvoyance and precognition with limitations due to a “dead zone,” an area of his brain that suffered permanent damage as the result of his accident. Very, very good, and the ending is near-perfect.
Still enjoying Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. I’m up to the 2008 campaign, when she was first becoming a lightning rod for conservative attacks. She writes that she needed to develop a thick skin pretty fast.
Just started the audiobook of Patrick O’Brian’s first book of Napoleonic naval adventures, Master and Commander (1969). Off to a good start already.
Just finished* Lincoln In The Bardo* by George Saunders. Very memorable indeed. Not often that a book actually makes me cry. The same library visit I also checked out Interpreter of Maladies the debut short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri but I couldn’t finish it, it bored me. If it wasn’t about Indian emigres told by an Indian emigre, would it have been so cried up I wonder? There is this insatiable hunger among white western intelligentsia for “authentic” tales of foreign cultures told in a modern minimalist style, but it isn’t a hunger of mine.