April Reads: What, fool, are you reading?!?

[Plessiez]

Finished Seven Surrenders yesterday.  Not sure I liked it quite as much as the first book -- there's more of a focus on plot than world-building in this one, I think.  But it was still very good (and the two books are really just different volumes of the same joint story anyway).

[Lily Valley]

On 4/1/2017 at 2:36 PM, Peadar said:

I've been using it as an instruction manual.

You are due for a spanking, sir.

This semester has me so stressed I am reading Julie Smith's New Orleans mysteries.  I tried to put my finger last night on WHY trashy PI mysteries are so appealing to me, I think I boiled it down to the exasperated enthusiasm the protagonists have for their job.  I totally get that.

I have NineFox Gambit waiting.  I tried to start it, but it looks like I'm going to have to THINK to read that one.  No thinking right now, please.  

[redeagl]

On 4/5/2017 at 6:55 AM, Darth Richard II said:

People read my posts on purpose?  Damn I need to release a collection.

Aye we do. O Master, please teach me thou glorious trolling ways.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Finished off The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The slow-wrap up at the end was annoying, but overall it's a book that has aged well (coming as it did before the Global Financial Crisis).  While there is an element of wish-fulfilment about Mikael, I thought it was useful to make the point that not all men are despicable rapists - the book may have originally had the title Men Who Hate Women, but it is not tarring an entire gender. 

Next up is The Great Ordeal, by R. Scott Bakker.

[beniowa]

On 4/6/2017 at 3:14 PM, RedEyedGhost said:

Is there still another book to come in this series or is this it?  I want to read them... when I know I won't be waiting.

I see several people answered already.    But yeah, I remember reading in Locus that he sold a third book so there's at least one more. 

[Iskaral Pust]

Finished Thomas Cahill's non-fiction history How The Irish Saved Civilization.  Very enjoyable, a good rec from the monthly threads.  If you accept the author's favoritism toward his national culture -- it reads like a paean -- it's very well written, focuses mostly on cultural influences and changes, and has a nice variety and span as it moves from late Roman era (Augustine especially) with echoes of the Greeks (Plato especially), then moves into pre-Christian and early Christian Ireland, and then post-Roman Britain & Europe.  Despite having heard the central claim decades earlier, I was still surprised to read how much the author thinks St. Patrick reduced slavery and warfare in Ireland.  I did not realize there was an abrupt reduction, in fact I thought slave ownership and trading remained widespread in Ireland until at least as late as the Viking era because they described large slave markets in Ireland.  I'll have to check on that in other sources.  For a non-fiction book, it does a great job of avoiding repetition, containing enough ideas and content to actually fill the book, and has a wonderfully lyrical & playful yet entirely erudite style of writing.  I'all definitely continue with this Hinges Of History non-fiction series. 

Next I have started The God Of Small Things by Rundhati Roy, a literary fiction novel set in India.  I don't recall how this got on my reading pile so I don't know what to expect.  So far, very evocative writing dense with sensory imagery rather than anything abstract.  It feels very immediate and almost tangible as you read. The characters and plot so far feel a bit muddled in their introduction, which I hope will improve.

[Maester Llama]

Have had a lot of time to read the last couple days. Finished off Four Roads Cross, the fifth book in Max Gladstone's excellent Craft Sequence of fantasy novels that use magic as a lens to examine late capitalism. Loved it -- I always love these. Epic stakes sketched with gravity but also playfulness, gripping characters, mindbending magic. Lots of gargoyles in this one too. Moves the series forward in major ways and, while perhaps a less crisply-structured standalone than previous books, begins tying several things introduced in earlier books together very satisfyingly. Things feel both complete and as if they are just beginning at the end of it.

 

Also finished Necessity, the third and last of Jo Walton's Just City books about a bunch of philosophers drawn together from throughout time to try and creat Plato's Republic. Very delightfully weird book, even moreso than the first two, based as it is largely on time travel antics. The plot manages to be simultaneously densely tangled / involving and almost nonexistent and mostly an excuse for people to talk. It's maybe less wholly successful for me than this series has been at its best -- at least on first reading, it's a complex book so I'll need to go through it again -- but it still renders philosophical questions and dialogue that I often find off-putting in a way I find compelling, and I still love the setting and the characters and think it wraps up their story quite well.

 

Oh, and in March I finished Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin series with The Spider's War after putting it off for a long time. It feels great when an author sticks the landing. One of my very favourite recent series, and a mark of how interesting and enjoyable the traditional structures of epic fantasy can still be. Also in March: Indra Das' The Devourers, which I was hugely impressed by all of the time and loved some of the time.

[C.T. Phipps]

I'm in a space opera mood while I write my sequel to LUCIFER'S STAR so this month I'm going try to read:

Alexis Carew 1 and 2

Hard Luck Hank 1 and 2

The Expanse 1 and 2

And am open to suggestions for more.

[Maia]

I have been on a Robin Hobb binge since her latest trilogy is about to conclude and I have held back from starting it to spare myself the waiting between volumes. Of course, I somehow thought that "Assassin's Fate" was already out in March, but 3 weeks of agonized impatience are certainly better than a couple of years.

Anyway, I have decided to re-read the Six Duchies novels only, since tackling everything in "The Realms of the Elderlings" cycle would be too monumental a task. I can't deny that I felt a bit of trepidation re: how the books stood the test of time.

In the past, I have considered "Assassin's Apprentice" to be the best book, "Royal Assassin" to be very good, but not quite as strong and "Assassin's Quest" to be a bit of a chore, but with an excellent ending. I am happy to say that my opinion of the latter 2 books has gone way up during this re-read. In part it is due to my complete re-evaluation of the villains, whom I used to disdain, but now find to be shockingly realistic. Also, having payed particular attention to the circumstances that benefited them, I actually found the points of failure to be quite well constructed and believable. It also turned out that I didn't sufficiently appreciate the character of the Fool in this trilogy on my previous reads and some others as well. The third book may be too long, but OTOH all the build-up is quite organic and makes the victory feel earned. Facit, IMHO the first trilogy is like fine wine that only became better with age.

Now,  there is one thing that new readers just have to accept - and that is that certain aspects of Six Duchies world-building are inconsistent and remain so throughout. It wouldn't have been difficult to make them consistent, but for some ineffable reason Hobb never does. All the rest more than makes up for it, though.

When  "The Tawny Man" trilogy- the second set in the Six Duchies came out after the excellent "Liveship" trilogy, I found it disappointing, on the whole, the last book in particular. And while I am again happy to say that it improved on re-read and that I now see that some of my dissatisfaction was due to preconceived notions and cherished theories re: certain developments, some of my reservations remain:
 

Spoiler

 

In particular, I still feel that keeping Nettle a peripherial plot device rather than fleshing her into an actual character and letting her have real agency was a major mistake. After building up all the anticipation of her appearance in the series, no less. Worse, what we are told about her just never jives with her actual actions - which are those of a passive and slightly dim girl, who does nothing but cry to and make demands on her imaginary friend. Shoe-horning of her little brother into the plot adds insult to injury just so that we can have yet another tired re-tread of father-son issues - as if those haven't been continiously and much better explored with other characters throughout both trilogies!

Female characters generally don't fare well in this trilogy, as new ones don't get sufficiently fleshed out and  it becomes a total sausage-fest in the last volume for no good reason. Hobb's tendency of depicting elderly men as vital and vigorous, while women who are a generation or more(!) younger than them are consistently disabled by encroaching age doesn't help either - and doesn't jiive with my personal experience.

Ret-cons are also still palpably awkward  - how could Six Duchies elite be so ignorant of Outislander traditions, when it is often re-iterated throughout the series that before the Red Ship War there had always been marriages with them  among the nobility? Why conflate the Elderling Realder's  dragon with a Six-Duchies-coetrie-made Girl on a Dragon? Surely, another reason why the latter would want the Rooster's Crown could have been easily found.

Speaking of which - I am not sure that I like the whole notion of Fitz's lost memories being responsible for his withdrawal. After all, he tended to do that after experiencing trauma previously and it took intervention and/or events to knock him out of it . Not to mention that the Fool also put parts of himself into the Girl on a Dragon back in  "Assassin's Quest" and it didn't seem to hamper him in that way. I hated this development back when I first read it, and while I am a bit more accepting of it now, it still seems cheap.

Oh, and Burrich's appearance and heroic death still feels as painfully contrived and fan-servicy as ever, much as I love him as a character.

 

At the same time, again, I feel that I have really under-appreciated the character of the Fool and his dynamic with Fitz in this trilogy on the first read and all the evolutions of their relationship and plot.

Spoiler

On the first read I also thought that the Fool's return from death was cheap - now I feel that it was anything but - very fitting and excellently done. And that was even before I started the new trilogy.

That part is great. Ditto a couple of new characters and Fitz's relationships with them. And, of course some of the returning old characters and their developements have always been a pleasure.

The villains make sense too, though they are not standout characters by any means and some of them profit from the next trilogy re: retroactive fleshing-out of their motives. 

So, I still feel that "The Tawny Man" is markedly weaker than the previous trilogy, but it is not as much of a disappointment as I used to think and has some really excellent elements.

And, thankfully, the new trilogy is much stronger so far. I loved the 2 books that are out - "Fool's Assassin" and "Fool's Quest", even though I have some minor quibbles - but then, I always do. I fervently hope that the concluding volume sticks the landing and I can't wait to read it.  

 

 

 

 

 

[Paxter]

I finished Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman (a Nobel-prize winning psychologist) provides an insightful and comprehensive overview of human biases and decision making. As Isk mentioned earlier, he writes in a light-hearted and accessible manner, transforming what could be quite a dour subject matter into something that is both challenging and worthwhile. My only criticism relates to the final section on memory and the concept of 'self'. While it was very thought-provoking, it felt a little out of sync with the previous material and probably deserves its own book.

Now for a change of tack: Greenwell's What Belongs To You.

[Reny of Storms End]

On 4/9/2017 at 1:27 AM, C.T. Phipps said:

I'm in a space opera mood while I write my sequel to LUCIFER'S STAR so this month I'm going try to read:

Alexis Carew 1 and 2

Hard Luck Hank 1 and 2

The Expanse 1 and 2

And am open to suggestions for more.

This may be stupid, but have you read any Peter Hamilton?

[C.T. Phipps]

46 minutes ago, Reny of Storms End said:

This may be stupid, but have you read and Peter Hamilton?

I can't say that I have. I have these weird blindspots in my reading that often come up.

His wiki is really interesting. *puts him on the list*

[polishgenius]

14 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I can't say that I have. I have these weird blindspots in my reading that often come up.

His wiki is really interesting. *puts him on the list*

Do bear in mind that his books are FUCKING MASSIVE and if you plan to read books 1 + 2 for him that's probably equivalent to reading books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 from some other authors.


Also, in case you've also blindspotted them: Alastair Reynolds and Iain M Banks.

[C.T. Phipps]

Banks, no, I know him well.

Reynolds...yes.

*grimace*

I'm also going to try to read the Berserkers series.

[Iskaral Pust]

I finished The God Of Small Things by Rundhati Roy, which seems like a quick read.  I still don't recall how it got on my reading pile.  The style throughout used a dense amount of sensory imagery, and most of the story is from the POV of young kids, which gets annoying after a while.  That device is over-used and generally twee.  

It's a novel set in India in the late 60s, reflected upon by a character in the early 90s.  The story uses a specific climactic tragedy and their family story to criticize the caste system and patriarchy in India.  It felt a bit too pessimistic that almost every male character was cruel & abusive or just useless & selfish, and almost every female character strove for independence but then failed at life and returned to be a lifelong dependent of her extended family.

Cheerful, it was not.  Richly written and immersive, it's worth a read if you want to be drawn into a story.  

Just started The Stars Are Legion, for yet another change of pace.  Such an intriguing start -- that's how you hook your reader! -- I hope it lives up to it.  

[Starkess]

I finished Return of the King. Damn but the scene at the end gets me every. single. time! 

Next up I am switching gears and going for a non-fiction book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott.

[Darth Richard II]

5 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Banks, no, I know him well.

Reynolds...yes.

*grimace*

I'm also going to try to read the Berserkers series.

Turn in your gun and badge.

[unJon]

8 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Banks, no, I know him well.

Reynolds...yes.

*grimace*

I'm also going to try to read the Berserkers series.

If you like Banks Culture, I highly recommend reading Neal Asher. 

[Darth Richard II]

Isn't Neal Asher a climate change denial and one of the sad puppies?

i could be remembering wrong.

[Maester Llama]

I definitely recall Asher being a climate change denier the last time I looked in on him, though that was a while ago so he may have come round to the factual. No idea about the puppy thing. I suppose I should try some of his stuff one day. It just never struck me as appealing for some reason -- it looked like mostly kill machines fighting other kill machines, and while I love me some kill machines it ... I dunno, just didn't grab me or give me much to latch onto.

 

Read Laurie Penny's short novella Everything Belongs to the Future, about a dystopic / if-this-goes-on Britain in which the rich have got anti-aging treatments and everybody else has got shit. Short, sharp, brutal but not showily nihilistic, really good. Felt like a quality episode of a freaky sf anthology series, like Black Mirror but with genetech instead of screens. Had this shown up on the Hugo shortlist I would not have thought people insane.

 

It's Guy Gavriel Kay time now.