March…can we just have spring already? For those of us up in the Northern Hemisphere this winter has been damn cold… and I’m not even in the path of the Polar Vortex. On the upside my daffodills are coming up… to snow. sigh
So what are you all reading? I’ve been bouncing back and forth between m/m romance and whodunnits with the occasional urban fantasy thrown in to keep thing…errr unreal?
I think it’s cozy time! I haven’t read a good cozy in ages
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of 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, who started these threads way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently when he suddenly and quite unexpectantly passed away, January of 2013 we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I filled in N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy with the short story collection Shade in Shadows and the novella *The Awakened Kingdom. *
I enjoyed Martha Wells’s novella All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1), though if I were her editor I’d have had her tighten a few loose threads.
With Lethal White and The Crimes of Grindelwald, I believe I’ve read all of J. K. Rowling’s published books (excluding a couple of the Pottermore “publish every scrap of exposition and back story” ebooks).
This afternoon I finished Michelle Obama’s excellent memoir Becoming, which is well-written, clear-eyed and basically optimistic, but doesn’t shy away from the less pleasant aspects of American society or her loathing of the current White House occupant. I feel I know her much better now.
I’m taking a break from Patrick O’Brian’s very good Napoleonic naval adventure Master and Commander, and have just begun John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream, about the ins and outs of interstellar diplomacy. Not into it far enough to have an opinion yet.
I just finished The Hod King by Josiah Bancroft, the third book in his Books of Babel series. It was the best one yet! These are just some of the most wonderful books I’ve read in years.
I won’t get to start anything new until Monday, but that’s cool because I’m having major afterglow right now.
I finished Only See Me by JD Chambers, last Saturday, a lovely story about a man in the midst of a nasty divorce falling for a nonbinary individual named Malcolm. Really sweet and straight to my own NB little heart.
A couple days ago I finished Murder on the Flying Scotsman by Lee Straus, a loving paeon to the Orient Express and married sleuths of the classic era, complete with a small dog.
I started The Housewife Assasin’s Handbook by Josie Brown. A bit of a screwball comedy and biting satire of the glories of suburbia and gated communities. So far a lot of fun.
This morning at the gym, I started The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInery in audiobook. I’m not far in but I’m pleased the woman reading it is Irish. I tend to abandon the books my bookclub picks but I may stick with this one just to hear her voice.
Just started No Beast So Fierce, the story of the Champawat tiger, an animal that was seriously wounded and turned to hunting humans for food. It terrorized an area on the India/Nepal border from 1900-1907, killing some 400+ people before finally being hunted down by renowned British hunter Jim Corbett, after all else had failed (including a team of Ghurkas).
I read John Grisham’s newest book, The Reckoning. A WW2 veteran, a well-off farmer in Mississippi, wakes up one day and shoots and kills the pastor of a local church. He refuses to tell anyone why he did it and is eventually executed. That’s the premise.
I can’t say I enjoyed it, exactly: it’s pretty grim. In particular, the middle of the book is taken up with a drawn-out nothing-held-back description of the Bataan Death March during WW2. But that’s not the only depressing part of the novel, by any means.
On the other hand, it’s well written, the background is interesting, the characters are well-drawn, and the story is compelling. Even if it’s sad. I’ve read most of Grisham’s novels, and though I appreciate most of his writing I’ll admit that a lot of them blend together. This one–doesn’t.
I finished Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic naval adventure Master and Commander, and enjoyed it immensely. I’ve now begun Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas, his first sf novel about a high-tech, distant future human society, the Culture. I’m not loving it, not yet anyway, but am willing to keep going with it.
Haven’t gotten back to John Scalzi’s sf novel The Android’s Dream just yet.
Consider Phlebas isn’t generally regarded as among the strongest of the Culture books. Player of Games and Use of Weapons, the next two in the series, are often suggested as starting points as they have more in common with subsequent books than Consider Phlebas, which is kind of an outlier in writing style and layout.
Finishing up E.E. Smith’s Galactic Patrol. I picked up a copy of The Universes of E.E. Smith by Ron Ellik and Bill Evans at Boskone to read afterwards – it’s a concordance to Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series, so it explains all the weird Smithian characters and places (including Qadgop the Mercotan, who gets his own entry – “A horribly slithering, clawed, snouted, metal-eating Bug-Eyed Monster in a novel by Sybly White. Qadgop’s sole purpose in life was to capture, outrage, kill, and devour the human wench Cynthia.” There’s a drawing of him.)
I’m also reading Writings from Ancient Egypt, a Penguin book translated and edited by Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson. It collects all sorts of writings across a 3000 year period, including tomb inscriptions, carvings on statues, and writings on papyri. Even granting that the translations are necessarily rather loose, I’m surprised at how textured and detailed even the inscriptions are. The book is pretty new, having come out in 2016, but this is the first I’ve seen of it, at an overstock and used bookstore in New Hampshire.
Foundryside is some pure heist entertainment. A blurb on the back describes it as something like “The best cyberpunk novel in years, set in a fantasy world,” and that’s pretty accurate.
You’ve got a decaying metropolis ruled by megacorporations with enormous headquarters under ultra-tight AI-run security systems, and the corporations hire teams of hackers to break into rival headquarters to steal software, only the jobs inevitably go wrong. The only difference is that the megacorporations are actually family-run Houses, and the AI-run security systems and the software targets are actually magical spells.
It’s tremendous fun. First in a series, but with a satisfying ending.
I’m re-reading most of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series while I wait for the latest book to either come out in paperback or to become available at the library. I’m currently on Whispers Underground and noting that the author seeds the earlier books with clues and little events that have an impact in later books.
Also on the go - two books of short stories: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, which is riddled with skilled and deeply considered explorations of different sci-fi scenarios (the film Arrival comes from one of the stories); and Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West which I picked up very cheaply from the remainders table. The nice thing about short story anthologies is that I can dip in and out as the whim takes me and not worry about forgetting what happened earlier, because the stories are all discrete.
