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January 2015 Reading Thread


AncalagonTheBlack

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Little Exiles was brilliant, and incredibly sad. Definitely keeping an eye out for more books based on the children's migration to Australia.

Keeping with my other theme of the witch trials in the UK and US, I started Witch Child by Celia Rees. It's a very short, YA book, but very good. I ordered the sequel, and a couple of other similar books.

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100 pages left of Memory of Ice. Better than the previous ones, but still a lot of serious flaws that are hard to look over. Definitely taking a break from this world for a few months. Starting up The King's Bastard this weekend and will have Head First: Software Design Patterns on Monday. A little computer science skill investment for the job.


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I seem to be getting through books really quickly at the moment. Witch Child was great, but I'm glad I ordered the sequel, as it ends pretty abruptly.

While I wait for more books to arrive, I started The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M Valente. Seems to be a strong sequel so far.

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Finished Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, still as excellent as I remember it. This is most likely my favorite book of the series, the only two challengers have to be Goblet of Fire and Half-Blood Prince. (The film adaptation is without a doubt my personal favorite of the movie series.)



I started William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher yesterday and am only finished with the 176 page book. I read everything by Shakespeare last year and Doescher has the iambic pentameter going to perfection while keeping true to the movie. What is excellent are the monologues and asides by numerous characters, the best are by R2 though Luke and Han have a great few lines in some of theirs as well.



Since I'll be finishing up Doescher's book very early during lunch, I'm going to immediately begin Brave New World by Huxley.


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What I've read in January:



Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy (The clockwork rocket, The eternal flame, The arrows of time). It's about amorphous blobs living in a universe without time trying to prevent the destruction of their world. Or it's an alternative history of science, with alternative science. The clockwork rocket is about optics, mechanics, and launching a mountain into space, The eternal flame is about quantum physics, an asteroid made of antimatter, and a sexual revolution, and The arrows of time is about causality, cosmology, and terrorism. It's easily his most accessible and conventional story, plot-wise, but the fact that it's full of diagrams and physics discussions and that no part of the trilogy has any connection whatsoever to anything human or even anything in our universe probably reduces the number of potential readers. Which is good, because I like feeling elitist about reading his stuff.



The lightness of being by Frank Wilczek. Mostly about QCD, the origin of most of the mass of normal matter, and potential unified models of particle physics. Decent, but like almost all physics books written before the Great Disappointment the enthusiasm for all the cool supersymmetric particles that the LHC will soon discover is a bit depressing. It's also a shame that this book is almost less technical than Egan's fiction - Wilczek even mentions somewhere that he would like to include more equations, but his publisher has advised him against it.



A thin ghost and others by M R James. Nice, cosy ghost stories, if a bit predictable and anticlimactic sometimes. James is like Lovecraft without the cosmic terror and the tendency for the protagonists to go mad from their revelations.


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Just finished The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. I read World War Z years ago but only just got to the first book. While it's intelligent in the extreme, especially with some of the historical zombie stories he outlines at the end, it does end up getting repetitive, both in the initial guide in what to do and in how historical outbreaks are dealt with.



WWZ is one of my favourite books of all time, however. Although I've never seen the movie.


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I put Fairyland #2 aside and read Sorceress by Celia Rees, the sequel to Witch Child, almost without stopping today. Another quick, interesting read. I loved the Native American aspects.

I think I'll read The Traitor's Wife by Kathleen Kent next. It's the prequel to The Heretic's Daughter, which I adored. It seems I'm stuck in 1600's England/America for the time being.

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I'm currently reading Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson, a combination of Islamic legend/Arab myth fantasy and politically concerned techno-thriller that's really very excellent. I enjoyed her comic, Cairo, that explores similar subjects of the tensions in the Arab world both between various factions and between religion and modernity, but this book for me works much better.


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Finished The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter and it is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. So amazing, much wow. The blend of gothic, fairy tale and the mundane works perfectly.

I just got this, based on your reaction. Looking forward to reading it soon.

I finished All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and I loved every minute of it. It's beautiful, it's complex, it's compelling, it's lyrical and moving... I didn't want it to end, simple as that.

I'll be starting Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron next.

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I finished The Lady, the second book in the Marrakand duology by K.V. Johansen. It was good, but I think it suffered from not reading it along with The Leopard. It's clearly one book that was split into two and probably should be read back-to-back.



I also finished Jerusalem Poker by Whittemore. I'm still gathering my thoughts on it, but it was definitely a great read. I think the whole Jerusalem Quartet is going to be a top read of the year for me.



About to start iD by Madeline Ashby.


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