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What you're reading - June 2017


RedEyedGhost

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On Invalid Date at 9:44 PM, First of My Name said:

Reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The setting kind of reminds me of Blade Runner and the Acts of Caine books. Stephenson's style is sort of long-winded but engaging. I think I'll like this one, even if it'll take me some to finish it.

I think most here would agree with that. And Snow Crash is probably one of his most succinct works!

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17 hours ago, Peadar said:

I have just started The Religion by Tim Willocks. Yet another retelling of the siege of Malta, but enjoying it so far.

I think I've had that on my shelf for about 8-9 years.  Let me know if it's good, and it might make its way into the actual queue.

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4 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I think I've had that on my shelf for about 8-9 years.  Let me know if it's good, and it might make its way into the actual queue.

I will. I've just read a really dodgy bit. We'll see.

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I've been reading Hunters and Collectors, the second book by M. Suddain. I was slightly wary of taking the plunge on this because while I enjoyed his first, Theatre of the Gods (a truly bonkers steampunk space opera), quite a lot, it had a few issues that if he wasn't careful could have dragged any future books into a self-indulgent mess.

But he was careful and his second is an improvement in every way. The world (a different one, it's not a series) is still totally bonkers, but much more carefully introduced, the prose is great without feeling the need to show off quite as much, the humour sits better, and the plot, while on paper not much (it's about an interstellar food critic searching for a mythical restaurant, at basis, although that really doesn't cover it) is far more controlled and less sprawly and bloated  (at just after the half) and individual scenes rely much less on introducing the next flashy SFF concept.

It's great, so far. The sort of book I'd heartily recommend to @Myshkin in particular if he hasn't read it and to lovers of the likes of VanderMeer (Ambergris mode), Catherynne Valente, or Nick Harkaway in general*.


*(I have no idea if Myshkin actually likes those authors... but this seems in your mode of taste from the conversations I recall having with you on books in the past)

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I really liked A Shadow in Summer. The biggest complain I had was that the gestures were handled rather clunkily and sometimes distracted me from the story at hand.

On 6/12/2017 at 0:47 AM, Darth Richard II said:

Even as a kid I hated wishsong.

It's the one I remember the least about, so I'm pretty sure I only read it once. I definitely re-read the first two a few times.

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34 minutes ago, Starkess said:

I really liked A Shadow in Summer. The biggest complain I had was that the gestures were handled rather clunkily and sometimes distracted me from the story at hand.

It's the one I remember the least about, so I'm pretty sure I only read it once. I definitely re-read the first two a few times.

I've read the followup series oh crap, is it The Heritage of Shanara? I think that's it, like a billion times growing up.

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Perdido Street Station by China Mieville 

Emotional Agility by Susan David

Rogue One by Alexander Freed

And now, adding to that list: Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates, which looks absolutely spectacular! 

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Having finished Elantris (worst prose ever) I got back to Tales of the Ketty Jay after almost a year. I didn't like the first two books when I read this time last year, but the third book seems to be an improvement and I am enjoying it.

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Finished The Vegetarian  by Han Kang, Man Booker Prize winner, a well written relatively small scale story that was pretty surreal in bits but very personal.

Also blitzed through Death and the Penguin  by Andrey Kurkov, equally short but a fun read if a bit abrupt towards the end.

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Finished Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor, her fantasy-tinged eco-sf crazy happenings in Lagos novel, and am sad to say it ... well, it's not that it never worked for me, but it worked for me a lot less often than the reverse. A lot of the events sound great on paper, but there is just so much crazy shit going on so quickly all over the place that I found most of the book felt undeveloped for want of breathing room. There's an absolute shit-ton of characters, similarly, and they range from sketchy-but-clearly-seriously-intended character studies to larger-than-life satirical cartoons while all trying to cohabitate in the same book. Sometimes the book is ecological science fiction, sometimes it's fantasy, sometimes it's political cartoon, sometimes it's farce, and I love this tone-shifting in theory, but the book struggles, for me, to find its own overarching aesthetic as an umbrella for all these approaches to gather under; instead it just seems to dash ahead and hope everything works. The writing feels similarly slapdash -- I've seen Okorafor's prose praised by very smart people, so I think this is largely a matter of her style not matching my personal taste, but this feels choppy and haphazard to me even by the standards of her usual style. I think that's what a lot of this is: there are a lot of very conscious decisions here that see Okorafor doubling down on some of her ticks as a writer that haven't worked for me that well in her previous work I've read, and the result is a book that has a lot of good ideas and is -- I'm positive, though it doesn't feel this way to me -- very consciously crafted and is gonna make some people very happy, but is not my thing pretty definitively.

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Finished Willa Cather's, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Excellent, "narrative" as Cather called it. Especially the final part.

Now on to Philip Caputo's, A Rumor of War.

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I finished Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. It's a very interesting book, plunging the reader straight into the middle of a Universe based on principles very different from our own and which is generally reluctant to go into too much explanation about how any of it works. I thought there was enough explained to make it possible to follow the story, although I found it hard to really visualise some things like what the Fortress of Shattered Needles or the moth spacecraft looked like. Cheris and Jedao were both intriguing characters, the supporting characters might not get much time spent on them but even in some of the brief sections written from other points of view there is some good characterisation. One small problem is that it felt like we saw very little of the real enemy.

I'm also having to resist ending e-mails by writing 'Yours in calendrical heresy'.

Next up I think I'll continue going through the Hugo nominees with Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning.

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I finished (in German translation) Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians". This was pretty good; I have two more books of him on my shelves, but I apparently never got into any of them.

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