July 2016 Reads

[benpeek]

3 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I just finished Leviathan's Blood by Ben Peek, which was excellent. When's the next one coming out?

June 2017.

It's called The Eternal Kingdom. 

I'm glad you liked Leviathan's Blood.

[Durckad]

My copy of The Great Ordeal arrived yesterday so I'm going to put Savages aside for the time being and plunge right back in to the Bakker-verse. That damn spoiler thread has been taunting me for the last month or so.

[The Wolves]

On July 10, 2016 at 0:28 PM, Jo498 said:

But would you not concede that it is pretty good writing to make you feel so strongly about the characters? Even if you are repulsed by them...

I agree with this. 

[TheRevanchist]

Finished Words of Radiance, but I didn't find it nowhere as good as The Way of Kings. In fact, I thought that the first part of the book was very boring, with the second one being decent, but not that great.

[Peadar]

16 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Especially with the guy that's like her that ended up becoming memorable, and the ex-spy that wants to become forgotten.

  Wow, I've completely forgotten how Touch ended.  I plan to read the Gamehouse books sometime in the near future.  How were they as a whole?

 

I really enjoyed them. All three are novellas. Characters aren't her strong point, I don't think. I read her for the quirky ideas and the Gamehouse books deliver on that front.

[HexMachina]

Finished The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie. I liked this one, but not quite as much as Best Served Cold. 

I'm also reading The Lies of Locke Lamora (I've just reached "Book 4") which has lived up to all expectations so far. Will hopefully finish this evening, or possibly tomorrow

[Maester Llama]

Half-way through Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass. Finding it to be a bit of a trudge, which is one problem I really didn't expect it to have. Maybe I'm putting Butcher in a box here, but when I heard he was doing steampunk with airships I expected that there'd be some swash and buckle, and there's a bit, but really very little so far. It's a lot slower and more plodding than I was expecting from Butcher. The characters have very broad, thuddingly-reinforced traits, though one or two of them are growing on me. There's some cat humour that is often kind of great, but is becoming quite impressed with its own cleverness. The writing doesn't move with the ease and grace of the Dresden books -- even if you think they're shit you have to admit they zip along, and this just doesn't; it feels effortful. A character who feels much more like the sort of propulsive personality I was expecting Butcher to come up with in a steampunk setting has just walked on half-way through and I am hoping she is here to get this party started, because the first half definitely has problems with energy that I didn't anticipate, whatever other problems the book had. I feel like I'm criticising the book for not fitting within my impression of Butcher as primarily an action writer, and I don't wanna do that and am glad he's trying a new thing, but thus far this more measured storytelling seems to be a bit of a slog for him.

 

Finished Richard Kadrey's The Everything Box. Weaves usually-gracefully-but-sometimes-wonderfully-drunkenly between light urban fantasy / horror and outright farce. The main character's an okay straightman for the quirky secondary characters to bounce off of, and a lot of those characters, especially the incompetent evil cult leaders and a couple of the book's supernatural cops, are quite fun. The full-throated laugh moments weren't as frequent as I was hoping for, but some of them are pretty great when they do arrive, and humour's very much a mileage-may-vary thing; Kadrey's certainly got big humour chops [this is not a revelation, I know; I've never read his stuff before.] The plot bops along energetically and nobody's terribly deep and I had decent fun. Not sure I need to read more, but I could.

 

Also finished off Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear's An Apprentice to Elves, the third -- and almost certainly last -- book in their Iskrynne Norse-inspired fantasy series. I loved it. This series has grown astonishingly from pretty shaky beginnings into an excellent example of thoughtful clash-of-cultures communication-based fantasy. The final installment is told from the perspectives of three women and a trans man, allowing for interesting reflections on the world we've seen only through male eyes throughout the previous two books, though the main characters from those books are still of course varying degrees of important in this one. The funky worldbuilding thing where being bonded to a wolf can force temporary changes to one's sexuality that swung at interesting targets in terms of talking about performing gender but often made the first book so uncomfortable to read is almost totally absent here. It hasn't been retconned out of the setting or anything, and we spend a lot of time in environments in which it is presumably taking place, but Bear and Monette have clearly said what they came to say using that device and are done talking about it; it plays no part in the plot of this book whatsoever and is so far as I recall not directly mentioned once. The focus is on the clash of cultures between the northerners, invading faux-Romans, and the elves [Norse-ish elves, so they're closer, if anything, to generic fantasy dwarves.] Great book that ends very solidly; I'll miss the series now it's gone, but the ending is a good one.

[Iskaral Pust]

Following a recommendation from my dad, I read A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman.  It's contemporary literary fiction about an elderly Swedish curmudgeon who progresses from interrupted suicide attempts to make friends and be a sort-of hero in small ways.  The main character and his arc feels a lot like the hero of the Pixar movie Up, but with a much less outlandish adventure.  It's well written and has some nice humor as it lavishes scorn on modern society and especially effete, white collar, modern men.  I have a feeling that the author expects us to love Ove and sympathize with his plight, and I did, but I also resented how much the author glosses over his faults: this guy is a deeply prejudiced reactionary who behaves like a raging jackass to all around him, he physically assaults several people when he feels upset or offended and most of all he's a petty tyrant creating rules for everyone else with self-assumed authority (and a hypocrite since his great nemeses are civil servant bureaucrats).  Ove would be front and center at a tea-party rally and a Trump speech, but because his OCD makes him fix small things for others this should be proof that he actually has a heart of gold.  Overall I felt like the book is written for, and possibly by, people who would identify with Ove and who want to feel like they're the hero despite everyone around them thinking they are jerks.  But I did enjoy reading it and would recommend it for anyone looking for a story about relationships and place in the world/community.

Now I have started The Devil In the White City by Erik Larson, which is part history of boom-town Chicago in the late 19th century and part early serial killer.  It's a historical fiction based quite closely on real events.  So far it's well written and very interesting.  I hope it maintains this quality.

 

[Hello World]

Started Perdido Street Station today. Heard a lot about those books, especially The Scar. Hopefully I won't be disappointed. The language seems a bit tough though: I had to look up some 20 words in the prologue alone. Thankfully, it's an ebook so I can just highlight a word to see it's definition.

[AncalagonTheBlack]

On 7/14/2016 at 1:44 AM, ljkeane said:

I just finished Leviathan's Blood by Ben Peek, which was excellent. When's the next one coming out?

Up next I'm thinking about reading Anthony Ryan's The Waking Fire but I'm a bit torn. I really liked the first book in his last series but the next two were varying degrees of disappointing, it felt like he didn't really know how to carry on after the first book given the changes in format etc. Given a new start I'm hopeful that'll be less of a problem and he can get back to the standard of his debut book but I'm a bit wary. I'll probably give it a chance.

Agreed about Leviathan's Blood.Previous book was very good but this one takes it up a notch.Great series so far.More people need to read this.

I'm 34% done with The Waking Fire and i'm sorry to say it's just not that interesting.I'm having to force myself to go back to reading it.Maybe it gets better/stronger later on but right now it feels like a chore reading it.The main characters being bland also does not help,nor does it have the narrative pull/page-turning quality of Blood Song.

[TheRevanchist]

Started The Rain Wild Chronicles. Seems boring, and the writing isn't nowhere as good as in other Realm of the Elderlings books.

[Starkess]

I finished GGK's Lord of Emperors, book 2 in the Sarantine Mosaic. It was quite good, I think it was better than the first one. On the sad side, but not a complete tragedy. It had its happy moments and its amusing ones, but a definite air of melancholy overall.

Not sure what is up next for me. Been a bit busy so reading is somewhat slowing down.

[Spockydog]

Oooh, The Milkweed Triptych is pretty darn good. Halfway through the second book and really enjoying it.

[Starkess]

I finished up Kameron Hurley's essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution, this afternoon. It wasn't a bad book, though I found it repetitive and irksome at times. She's a good writer and that really shows in her work. I also found it more personally resonant than some, as I am an aspiring SF female writer, which is basically the target demographic here. Wondering if I could convince my boyfriend to read this, but probably not. 

[williamjm]

I finished Naomi Novik's Uprooted. I liked it, and I thought it got stronger as it went along - in the earliest chapters I felt that while Agnieszka had plenty of good reasons to be naive her naivety did sometimes feel excessive and when she suddenly starts being competent and decisive it felt a bit too sudden. I liked the characters, but I think based on this and Temeraire maybe character depth isn't really Novik's strength. I think what the book did best was presenting the Wood as a malevolent presence in the book, I also liked the way the ending

managed to make the Wood more complex in its motivation than it had originally appeared, apparently even evil forests can have origin stories. The solution being Agnieszka showing mercy to the Wood Queen rather than just destroying her felt very appropriate as well.

[Iskaral Pust]

2 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Oooh, The Milkweed Triptych is pretty darn good. Halfway through the second book and really enjoying it.

I enjoyed that trilogy a lot, but thought that it peaked with the second book.  The third is ok but not as good. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Oooh, The Milkweed Triptych is pretty darn good. Halfway through the second book and really enjoying it.

I've got it in my library reading pile. I've got Gemmell, Lindqvist, and a couple of others to work through first.

[Guinevere Seaworth]

Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O'Brian was ok. 

I found Madouc, the last book in the Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance the best book in the series.  It was whimsical and lighthearted compared to the first two books.  I did find the ending rushed.

Now reading a book by Barbara Hambly, Sisters of the Raven from the library.

[Jo498]

5 minutes ago, Guinevere Seaworth said:

I found Madouc, the last book in the Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance the best book in the series.  It was whimsical and lighthearted compared to the first two books.  I did find the ending rushed.

The ending is rushed and it apparently was in fact rushed, partly because of Vance's declining health (including losing his eyesight, as far as I recall). I still think Suldrun's Garden is the best by some margin and if the whole trilogy was on that level I would consider it probably the best fantasy (of the stuff I have read) of the last 50 years or so but Madouc is good (and the title character is also one of my favorites from the trilogy) and except for the rushed ending a pretty good conclusion. The 2nd one is unfortunately rather weak although it has a good beginning and some good scenes.

Despite its flaws, Lyonesse deserved to be better known; it is quite amazing that it seems almost forgotten after only about 30 years.

[Garett Hornwood]

It's been a good couple of days for my reading.  On Friday I finished Marlborough: His Life and Times, Book Two by Winston Churchill and it was as excellent as the first book.  On Saturday I finished The Poetry of Robert Frost the complete collection of all of the poet's work and that I started at the end of October 2014...word of advice the poems read in English and Literature classes not representative of the majority of Frost's work.  Also on Saturday I finished Seventh-day Adventists Believe, which I started in April reading on a chapter on Saturdays and Wednesdays.

I started Catching Fire on Sunday and am already over 50%, I'm seeing while a fair number of people consider this the weakest of the trilogy because it feels like set up and bridging from The Hunger Games to Mockingjay.