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First Quarter 2019 Reading


Garett Hornwood

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1 hour ago, Paxter said:

I read Shelley's Frankenstein a month or so ago. This was a superb, quick read that surprised me both in tone and in its differences from today's pop culture concepts of The Monster. I loved Shelley's irony - the whole question of "who is the real monster?" hangs over the whole book and provides some great moments. I also wasn't expecting the fantastic passages describing the Swiss Alps. It's almost worth reading this for those alone. 

Now reading The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. About halfway through and I already think it's one of the best historical fictions I've ever picked up.  

I read Frankenstein for the first time last year and I also really liked it.  Kind of surprised me, I thought I was going to be in for a dated slog, but was very pleasantly surprised by it.  I think it was originally published in 1810ish?  Pretty cool how it holds up.

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41 minutes ago, S John said:

I read Frankenstein for the first time last year and I also really liked it.  Kind of surprised me, I thought I was going to be in for a dated slog, but was very pleasantly surprised by it.  I think it was originally published in 1810ish?  Pretty cool how it holds up.

Agreed. Also pretty cool that Shelley wrote it as a teenager!

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Well since my last post I completed four books, started at different times but finished within the last week.  So here we go...

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, this book was a compelling multi-layered narrative that has a ton of connections throughout the six different time intervals (though the eyes of five different POVs) covered.  Next was a home read The Political Writings of St. Augustine was honestly a poorly structured book as it had many selections from City of God, Augustine's sermons, and Augustine's letters because at the end of the book is a lecture by a prominent political historian that basically gives the reader a guide to Augustine's political thinking, which would have been good at the beginning of the book so I knew what why each selection was in the book.  Next was a weekend read E.J. Waggoner: From Physician of the Good News to Agent of Division by Woodrow Whidden, a good biography and interesting look at the theological development of this important minister in Adventist history between 1880-1905.  And finally I completed Women Warriors: An Unexpected History by Pamela D. Toler, this was a short book that was basically a primer and introduction and was a good job but it could have been better written.

On 3/19/2019 at 12:38 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

Finished Chariots Of The Gods by Erich Von Daniken, a non-fiction that speculates about ancient aliens seeding human civilization.  While it is interesting how many ancient civilizations referred to gods visiting from the sky in chariots of fire, the book overall veers deeply into crank paranoia as it rages against the obtuse conventional thinking and then tries to knit together everything from the paranormal into this theory.  It also shows a very thin understanding of genetics and DNA when it assumes these ancient aliens could easily indulge in inter-species cross-breeding.  

Haven't read Von Daniken, but I've just finished rereading/reading Zecharia Sitchin and while some of his theories were interesting along with some compelling evidence, his astrophysics and DNA knowledge was left wanting.

On 3/19/2019 at 1:18 PM, Wolfgang I said:

Erich Von Daniken... lol I loved his books as a kid but I was really into UFO stuff at the point of my life and my uncle had a lot of his books. Only years later I discovered that it was all bullshit.

The same for me with Sitchin, I really got into his books when I was a teenager but 20 years later I really see the holes in theory and science.

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Finshed Where Four Roads Meet.

Very well written, I think. Deals with the lives of three generations of women in the north of Finland, from around 1900 to 2000. Told from the view of the women, plus the husband of the second. The author manages very well to show their different personalities that way. Reccomended.

Believe I'll start Salvations's Fire next, by Justina Robson. Haven't really got any expectations for this one.

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Finished The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz, a fictional detective novel with an unusual structure.  The first person POV character and narrator is the author himself, with his actual name and a lot of real information from his life, including references to his past experience in writing TV detective series.  He is supposedly participating in a crime investigation alongside a consulting detective (former police detective), who he quite dislikes (and is unlikable), in order to write a true crime book about it.  Along the way the author muses about the difference in constructing a fictional crime novel compared to the unhelpful “reality” of true crime. 

Horowtiz is a good writer and the prose is written well, but the experiment with the structure and characterization doesn’t work well.  I would not recommend.

edit: I should note that this author likes meta deconstruction of the genre of crime/detective novels.  In Magpie Murders he experimented with a structure where the first half is an Agatha Christie-esque village murder written by an author who then apparently committed suicide, and the second half is his editor investigating the author’s death after reading the “novel”.  So he likes to play games with structure and loves to examine and deconstruct the norms/tropes of the genre, but this latest experiment fell flat.

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Recently finished Ruin of Kings, and was far from impressed. I did manage to finish it though, which is something. I guess. I have no interest in pursuing further.

Apocalypse Nyx was great. No surprise, Hurley rarely lets me down. Speaking of, her recently released Light Brigade is on top of my tbr pile. 

Currently reading The Raven Tower by Leckie and it's good so far. I have thoughts, but will save them for later. 

Nonfiction wise, chipping away at Applebaum's Red Famine, Mieville's October, and Weatherford's Secret History of the Mongol Queens. 

 

 

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I read both The Ruin of Kings and The Priory of the Orange Tree over the last few weeks. I enjoyed them both to a degree but they both had fairly significant elements which irritated me. The Ruins of Kings the way absolutely everything seems to revolve around Kihrin was excessive. The Priory of the Orange Tree Ead was a bit overly Mary Sue-ish and overall I found the bits of the book in the East a lot more interesting but Shannon seems a lot more focused on the Western part of the story.

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I finished Tim Powers' Alternate Routes. I always like Powers' books and I enjoyed this one, although I wouldn't rank it among his best books. I do generally prefer it when he's writing in a historical setting, although there were still some 'secret history' elements in the backstory the modern-day Los Angeles setting wasn't as interesting as the settings of some of his other books. One of the things Powers does well is to take a bizarre supernatural premise and make it feel strangely plausible, for most of this book he manages that, although it maybe gets a bit too surreal right at the end. The book doesn't waste any time in establishing the premise and characters and then keeps the momentum going throughout, with the stakes rising as the story progresses. I thought the two main characters were likeable, although Vickery did maybe feel a bit too reminiscent of the protagonists of some of Powers' other books. Overall, it doesn't really compare to the likes of The Anubis Gates or Last Call, but it's still an entertaining book to read.

Next up I'm going to start the final book in Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy, Moon Rising.

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I read THE WARLORD CHRONICLES by Bernard Cornwall, consisting of THE WINTER KING, The ENEMY OF GOD and EXCALIBUR.   Excellent series and really enjoyed it. 

It was a good telling of the King Arthur myth and really enjoyed it.  The final novel EXCALIBUR was one of the best final books of a series I have read in a long time. 

Cornwell tied up things nicely with lots of tension and action until the very end.  Very satisfied with the ending and the series.

 

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Just finished "The Sex Lives of Cannibals" by J. Maarten Troost. Really funny/insightful piece of travel writing that focuses on a part of the world, the equatorial pacific, that hasn't really been investigated often. This is not the south pacific we have read about. Tahiti and Fiji and the like. This is a different animal entirely. Easy, fun read that I highly recommend!

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Inspired by Iskaral Pust, I'm reading "Stiger's Tigers". I'd love to cut a hundred words from every page on this one. A pale shadow compared to my recent reread of some of Cornwell's best.

After this, I absolutely must finish Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy.

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I've never read the Harry Potter books; I was at an age were I didn't really want to read a children's book when they first came out and I've sort seen bits of the films etc since then that it didn't really seem worth it. It is a bit of a cultural phenomenon though so I decided I might as well just read them anyway. So far the first book's fine. 

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I have just finished reading, rereading I should say, The Man in The High Castle by Phil Dick. I have a vague memory of reading it back in the 70's when I was a bit of a PKD fan, but I could not remember much of it. After a reread I think I know why. This was probably his most linear and straightforward book and had none of the quirks, self-reference, or logical twists of his other stuff. I then reread UBIK, also by PKD and yeah, this is what I liked about him in the first place,

I also just finished Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear. This is the first time I have read anything by her and I found it to be a nice change from PKD.  Interesting characters, well plotted and a shout out to both Iain Banks and PKD included in the last bit of the book. That just made my day.

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17 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I've never read the Harry Potter books; I was at an age were I didn't really want to read a children's book when they first came out and I've sort seen bits of the films etc since then that it didn't really seem worth it. It is a bit of a cultural phenomenon though so I decided I might as well just read them anyway. So far the first book's fine. 

They do grow with the protagonists, so you know. Philosopher’s stone is much more child friendly (im terms of tone, writing style etc.) than later instalments

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Recently finished 'The Mask of Apollo' by Mary Renault.  Historical fiction set in Ancient Greece from the perspective of an actor who is sort of a minor character in the lives of Dion, Dionysius, and Plato.  Book is split between Athens and Sicily and pretty much revolves around political turmoil in Syracuse.  Picked this one up on a whim at a University surplus sale about a year ago and I'm glad i finally got around to reading it.  The author clearly knows a lot about the time period.  I appreciated that it was a different take on most historical fiction that I read where the main character is a king or a warrior or something.  The perspective of an actor was an interesting take on the genre and injected the story with all kinds of interesting nuggets about Ancient Greek theater that I had no previous knowledge about.  It didn't blow my mind or anything, but this book was solid and I'm curious to read another one from Renault now.

Last night finished 'All the Pretty Horses' by McCarthy.  My wife was borrowing it from a coworker and asked me if I wanted to read it before giving it back.  Figured, what the hell.  I've not read much McCarthy, and don't know if I intend to, but I found several sequences in this book to be really enjoyable.

Not sure what I'll read next.  I'm leaning towards The Light Fantastic while The Color of magic is still relatively fresh in my mind.  Got a couple of Arthur C. Clarke books on stand-by I want to read too, as well as Bank's Player of Games, which I bought anyway after saying I wasn't going to until I'd cleared some other books. 

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Finished All The Birds in the Sky last week and loved it. It's blend of modern (perhaps near future) every-day life, magic and science makes it really hard to classify and it feels original and. The central conflict between magic/nature and science was really well done. But the highlight and focus are the two main characters, who have a wonderfully warm, but complicated relationship. The book has a very modern fell to it. I wonder if books where climate change is the big threat, like this one, will become more common. It has a lot of great story-telling potential (apart from being an important social/political topic).

The news and speculations around Amazon's Lord of the Ring series inspired me to reread the books, so currently reading the trilogy. It's my first time reading them in English (read them once in translation ten years ago or so and absolutely adored them) and I'm loving it.

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David Grann's, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Excellent, riveting account about these forgotten crimes that took place in Oklahoma in the 1920s and 30s.

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I have just started Ian McDonald's latest, Luna: Moon Rising. Already enjoying it. He's one of my favourite authors and I feel very privileged that I get to chat with him at TitanCon every year. 

You can too, by the way. He's very approachable and will be our guest of honour at this year's WorldCon.

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Finished Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I'd say I like Uprooted more, as it had a tighter pace. The premise of this one hooked me right away, but it really slowed down about a third of the way through, and only picked up much later. Still, another really enjoyable book from Novik. 

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Daniel Abraham has this somewhat well known Long Price Quartet. People may have heard of it. Am currently reading the giant, wrist-shattering omnibus edition that Tor (finally!) released, as I could not find copies of the third and fourth books *anywhere* in Australia. 

This shit is good. @Werthead: as I know you've read this quartet, do you think you could answer a question about one event in A Shadow in Summer that left me a bit confused? 

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