Currently passing the time with Stephen King at the Movies: a complete history of the film and television adaptations from the Master of Horror. It’s clumsily written and I’ve caught more than a few errors, but it’s interesting to find out about all the movies I never heard of, and it’s full of color pictures.
Finished Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, by Peg Kehret, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford.
I have a whole love seat (2-cushion couch) of books I’ve bought but either never got around to reading or read part of it and never finished. Starting to work my way through the pile.
Just finished **The Twilight Warriors[/B], by Robert Gandt, dealing with the battle of Okinawa in 1945. Not massively detailed, about 80% deals with a group of pilots on the carrier Intrepid and their battle with the Japanese Kamikazes. The ground campaign, which involved hundreds of thousands of men is not covered in any great detail and the sufferings of the civilian population (an estimated 100,000+ killed) rates barely a mention. Still, it kept me turning the pages all the way to the end, so there is that. If you know nothing about the battle and like having it told from a first-person POV, you could do worse.
Now starting Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which shows how big business will use ‘science’ to obfuscate and refute scientific conclusions, starting with the “Big Tobacco” campaign against the science showing smoking increases the risk of cancer (and other diseases), and progressing to Climate change and other issues where corporations and science tend to butt heads. Only 25 pages in, but looks interesting and we’ll see if it leads to a good read or not.
Started today on Anyone by Charles Soule, a sci-fi novel about what happens when a scientist develops the technology to transfer human consciousness into different bodies. So far, so good!
Finished The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford, which was excellent.
Now I’m reading Good Words to You, by John Ciardi.
That’s a plot point in the military sf novel Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, which I really liked.
The Borgias - Power and Fortune, Paul Strathern
The remarkable history of the Borgia family, starting in Spain in the 14th century with Alonso de Borja, who eventually became Pope. His nephew. Rodrigo also entered the church and rose to the Papacy himself. Here’s where it starts to get crazy. Despite his vow of celibacy, Rodrigo had seven children, by several different women, whom he openly acknowledged. Rodrigo spend much of his time scheming to advance the interests of his children amidst the violence of the Italy during Renaissance. The Borgias became notorious for their violence and some were even accused of incest, in particular Rodrigo’s son Cesare.
A rich history, generally well-written and enjoyable to read.
Finished A Hero Born. It’s apparently a megabestseller, not just in China but worldwide; overall the author’s works have sold more than 100 million copies, and AFAICT bear a large role in popularizing Wuxia/Kung Fu as a genre.
I expected, reading this book, to be immersed in China’s history, in courtly manners and intrigue, in poetry and lovely descriptions of landscapes. That was all there, but scarcer than I thought there’d be. What I wasn’t prepared for was the nonstop action using metaphorical names (I opened to a random page just now to find an example, and within three paragraphs a character “tapped her foot and spun into a Nodding Phoenix,” and her opponent counters by “thrust[ing] his palm in a Drive the Boat Downstream.”) I wasn’t ready for the supernatural combat. I wasn’t ready for the humor.
That said, as fun as this was, I didn’t find rococo plot especially engaging. I might read the others as they’re translated, but I don’t think I’ll seek them out. If I do, I’ll keep a cheat sheet of characters handy: as happened to me with The Count of Monte Cristo, I found myself losing track of the large cast.
I just finished reading Tales from the Gas Station and its sequel. Those were the funniest books I’ve read in a long, long time. Very similar to the Welcome to Nightvale podcast.
Finished Cadwell Turnbull’s debut science fiction novel The Lesson. Interesting but diffuse novel about our First Encounter with an alien race that has occasional disproportionate overreaction to perceived offenses. That part is pretty clearly an sf take on colonialism as perceived by the colonized. I’ll be meeting the author tonight.
Not sure what to read next. I’ve got a stack of books, and I’ll probably be getting others this weekend at Arisia.
Cool–this is my next up!
Scalzi is one of those authors I keep thinking I should try sometime…got any suggestions as to where I should start?
Scalzi is one of those authors I keep thinking I should try sometime…got any suggestions as to where I should start?
Scalzi is a delight to read, but he’s not a great author. He’s funny and snarky and too clever by half. First time you read one of his books, you think the protagonist is funny and snarky and too clever by half. Twelfth book you read by him, you realize that he can’t write characters who are any different from him, and all his characters sound the same.
But I read most everything he writes anyway, because I enjoy the funny snarky too-clever-by-half characters he writes.
So start wherever you’d like. Old Man’s War is a great place to start.
All righty then! I can cope with that. 
I second Left Hand of Dorkness’s comments on all points. Old Man’s War is a good place to start. You might also start with the Collapsing Empire, as the third book in that trilogy is due out in a few months.
I read The Seventh Bride, which was fun, and only $2.99 on Kindle, I also started Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which is not fun but has sucked me in. I’m still working on How Long 'Til Black Future Month, and suspect I will be for a while.
Finished Good Words to You, by John Ciardi, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Fed Up, by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant. It’s a cozy mystery.
I just finished this, and really liked it. The quiet, thoughtful, bleak mood reminds me a lot of Le Guin, and the reflections on colonialism are more complicated than I’m used to seeing. Good stuff!
I disagree that all the characters sound like him, but the protagonist usually does. And yes, definitely start with Old Man’s War. If you like it, go on to others in the series. Also very good: his series that begin with The Collapsing Empire (a distant-future interstellar allegory on global climate change) and Lock In (a near-future pandemic leaves a significant chunk of humanity “locked in” and unable to respond to outside stimuli, leading to major social changes and advances in robotics).
I also enjoyed his freestanding novels Redshirts (an affectionate, on-target parody of Star Trek) and Fuzzy Nation (about colonialism and First Contact).
Fair enough. In any case, I’d say that his characterization is a major weakness, except that I don’t think he’s particularly trying to write complex, fully-realized characters in the first place. Four-color is good enough for what he’s doing, and it’s usually fun enough that I’ll pick up whatever he writes.