Third Quarter 2020 Reading is a Joy

[LongRider]

6 hours ago, hauberk said:

US Military decided that the occupation troops needed something to read and printed massive numbers of copies

Many of these books were made to fit in the breast pocked of a solider's jacket so they could easily take them with them and have them available when the solider had time to read.  I've seen some of these books and they are small and compact and were IMHO a great idea.  They can be collectors items now.   

[hauberk]

13 hours ago, LongRider said:

Many of these books were made to fit in the breast pocked of a solider's jacket so they could easily take them with them and have them available when the solider had time to read.  I've seen some of these books and they are small and compact and were IMHO a great idea.  They can be collectors items now.   

Agreed.  It was definitely a great idea.  I just question the selection of titles and the lasting consequence of those selections.  It's like american lit teachers in jr high and high school were conspiring to turn people who otherwise loved to read away from the page.

[hauberk]

18 hours ago, mushroomshirt said:

I finished the 1st book.  I liked ghost girl, but I wasn't really wild about the rest of the book.  Still I picked up book #2 and am liking it a lot better.  I'm about 1/3 of the way through.  I like the common thread (threat from Tiamat) that is running through all the stories.  This is more like what I expected when I picked up book 1.  I can handle reading a Fortunato chapter here and there if it advances the story a bit.

I almost put book #1 down after the Fortunato chapter.  Wow - that character did not age well.  Hard to imagine a writer in 2020 writing him.

Fortunato is definitely a man of his time.  Aces High certainly has some rough patches, though, with few exceptions, I'l take Fortunato over Sewer Jack or Bagabond hands down every time.  

I need to do a reread of it, but in my experience, Aces Abroad is the real slog.  

[Gigei]

On 8/31/2020 at 1:54 AM, mushroomshirt said:

I finished the 1st book.  I liked ghost girl, but I wasn't really wild about the rest of the book.  Still I picked up book #2 and am liking it a lot better.  I'm about 1/3 of the way through.  I like the common thread (threat from Tiamat) that is running through all the stories.  This is more like what I expected when I picked up book 1.  I can handle reading a Fortunato chapter here and there if it advances the story a bit.

I almost put book #1 down after the Fortunato chapter.  Wow - that character did not age well.  Hard to imagine a writer in 2020 writing him.

LOL, I've been trying to erase some parts of the Wild Cards storyline from my mind and this brought back some of them...

On 8/31/2020 at 2:04 AM, williamjm said:

I read the first book a few years ago and I think had a similar experience to yours, I found it even with some stories I liked and others such as the Fortunato one which I struggled to get through.

I feel like Fortunato would be a "good" villain/antihero if we just got glimpses of the guy but actually getting Fortunato chapters is annoying instead of interesting

[ESPOMAN]

I am on a Stephen King kick currently. I never read any of his books full until yesterday when I finished Misery. I am going to start 11/22/63 today. I then might read The Stand if I am feeling up to it. I read 3/4 of It a couple years ago but I had to stop because of College. 

[Plessiez]

On 8/28/2020 at 2:18 AM, ithanos said:

Foundation by Isaac Asimov: I liked the setup and there are some great ideas. The nature of the story though didn't lead to any character development that I could warm to until maybe the end.

I really like the concept behind the original Foundation works, but the actual execution is pretty underwhelming: there's really nothing in the way of characterisation at all and the setting is pretty undeveloped as well.  And (spoilers for later sequels, beginning with Foundation and Empire):

Spoiler

Once the Mule and the Second Foundation show up, all the original ideas of pyschohistory and the Seldon Plan are basically discarded anyway.

  And that's not even getting on to Foundation's Edge and the following novels, which ... ugh.

On 8/29/2020 at 10:40 PM, polishgenius said:

Our big school-age book was Of Mice and Men. Had such an effect that not only did the kids who usually had no interest in reading and usually came in having not read the chapters we were supposed to have read at home finish the entire book ahead of time, but then they came in without the book coz they'd passed it on to friends in a different class who got a different book.

We read Of Mice and Men in Year 10 (so ages 14-15).  Or, rather, we listened to random people in our class read it out loud, very awkwardly, over the course of many weeks.  Put me off trying anything else by Steinbeck for at least a decade, and I was already reading a lot at that age.  Can't imagine it did anything to encourage more reading by the people who weren't already reading for pleasure.

On 8/30/2020 at 5:43 PM, hauberk said:

I had absolutely the opposite reaction - love to read and always have.  Steinbeck, Hemingway, Buck and all of the other canon authors left me cold.  For the most part, I took in what I needed to from class discussions.  The saving grace for me to have any appreciation for American "classics" was William Faulkner.

I read a piece recently, that I can't find now, that chronicled how so many of those canon works were out of print or low print run until the end of WWII when the US Military decided that the occupation troops needed something to read and printed massive numbers of copies of many of, what are today, considered American classics and are taught as canon.  Just one more thing to blame on the military industrial complex.  

Not really sure the popularity of Hemmingway, Steinbeck or Buck can be blamed (if that's the right word) on the Armed Services Editions.  All three of them were critically acclaimed and best-selling authors by the start of WW2. Steinbeck and Buck had both won the Pullitzer by 1940 (and Hemmingway would have won it in 1941 if the original decision of the Prize Board hadn't been overruled).  The Grapes of Wrath sold almost half a million (hardcover) copies in 1939, as did For Whom The Bell Tolls a year later.

(Half a million might not sound a lot by modern standards, but a hardcover in 1939 cost the equivalent of about $50 in 2020 prices.) 

The existence of cheap, quality paperbacks obviously meant a lot more people read these books than otherwise might have done, but I suspect we'd both have been forced to read Steinbeck in school even without that.  (And actually, despite my initial experiences of Of Mice and Men, I ended up deciding that I rather like Steinbeck, so I can't even say that's a bad thing.)

[hauberk]

8 hours ago, Plessiez said:

Not really sure the popularity of Hemmingway, Steinbeck or Buck can be blamed (if that's the right word) on the Armed Services Editions.  All three of them were critically acclaimed and best-selling authors by the start of WW2. Steinbeck and Buck had both won the Pullitzer by 1940 (and Hemmingway would have won it in 1941 if the original decision of the Prize Board hadn't been overruled).  The Grapes of Wrath sold almost half a million (hardcover) copies in 1939, as did For Whom The Bell Tolls a year later.

(Half a million might not sound a lot by modern standards, but a hardcover in 1939 cost the equivalent of about $50 in 2020 prices.) 

The existence of cheap, quality paperbacks obviously meant a lot more people read these books than otherwise might have done, but I suspect we'd both have been forced to read Steinbeck in school even without that.  (And actually, despite my initial experiences of Of Mice and Men, I ended up deciding that I rather like Steinbeck, so I can't even say that's a bad thing.)

I didn't mean to suggest that all of them were a result of the Armed Forces editions, merely that I would have gotten more reading enjoyment out of toaster instructions than anything that we were forced to read from any of them and that I would contend some of the academic reading lists have been impacted by the Armed Forces Editions.  That said, having gone back and looked at titles that were issued through AFE, I'm seeing that the original article I referenced above either misrepresented the impacted books or that I completely misremembered.  Really wish I could find it to read again.   

[Starkess]

We read Of Mice and Men in high school and oh gods I hated it. And East of Eden is one my favorite books ever, so it's not like I hate Steinbeck. But obviously a lot of people really enjoy it, so maybe I'm the odd one!

[Gorn]

Finished the first book of the Lyonesse trilogy, Suldrun's Garden. It was a very, very good book, and I agree with a previous opinion on this thread that it was unlike anything else that was published in the same period. The closest analogy that I can make would be "adult-oriented Grimm fairy tale". I've started The Green Pearl, and its style is much closer to the "standard" fantasy format.

I can see where it influenced GRRM and ASoIaF - Vance has a frequent habit of introducing named characters only to kill them off several pages later, which keeps the cast down to a manageable size. Also, Aillas' method of discovering spies in his court in The Green Pearl is very reminiscent of Tyrion in ACoK.

[hauberk]

14 hours ago, Starkess said:

We read Of Mice and Men in high school and oh gods I hated it. And East of Eden is one my favorite books ever, so it's not like I hate Steinbeck. But obviously a lot of people really enjoy it, so maybe I'm the odd one!

We did The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Pearl.  He may have a winner out there somewhere, but after three strikes, I'm out.  

[Iskaral Pust]

2 hours ago, hauberk said:

We did The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Pearl.  He may have a winner out there somewhere, but after three strikes, I'm out.  

We did The Pearl early in high school too. I hated it.  It was so ridiculously juvenile/simplistic in prose, themes and characterization.  It was barely above See Spot Run.  I assumed it had been written for 8yr olds or else very badly translated.  I’ve never touched another of his books since.

We also studied The Mayor Of Casterbridge later in high school, which at least had better prose, characterization, and themes, but it was pretty dull all the same.  Especially considering we were also studying MacBeth and Philadelphia Here I Come and a wide sampling of Romantic poets (Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Hopkins, Elliot, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc, etc).  With all of the millions of books to choose from, how did they manage to make the novels so relatively dull?

[Zorral]

Need Fourth Quarter Reading forum, as that is where we officially are now, on September 3rd of 2020!  

It was still the1st quarter, when the pandemic began.   to those of us fortunate and privileged enough that ourselves and those we love have survived this far.

In the meantime I continue reading a lot of very thick and dense books, all of which are very good, such as Rick Perlstein's Reaganland. As well as less dense books, all of which are very good too, the latter including Cross of Snow, a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, followed by The Lowells of Massachusetts: And American Family.  I.e. reading bookended by poets! with the biography of The Black Prince and Prof. Pollard's Late Medieval England 1399-1509  stuck in the middle.

 

 

 

[Winterfella]

Not so hasty. Fourth quarter doesn't begin until October.  

I'm in the final 50 pages of Anathem by Neal Stephenson which has taken me so long to read I'm embarrassed to say, and I even put it down to read Dark Matter by Blake Crouch to kickstart my reading.  Both are very good, I've just been in a reading funk this whole year.

Going to sit in on a book group through zoom tonight for the Martian which I actually read 6-7 years ago and remember more of the movie, but I'm hoping some live conversation may stimulate my reading motivation.

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Winterfella said:

Not so hasty. Fourth quarter doesn't begin until October.

You're so right!  My sense of time after all these months since March, and still the virus burns -- it's out of whack.  And today's not Friday either.  Sheesh.

[hauberk]

Wrapped up Wild Cards: Texas Hold'Em, the final book of the American Triad.  I think it was the weakest of the three, but it was also the only one to primarily focus on characters created no later than the Committee Triad (starting with Inside Straight) and really only featured one classic Wild Card character.  Overall, the individual arcs worked well together, though Victor Milan's piece, while an OK turn both leaned into some amalgam of modern western / crime noir that felt a little jarring and was mostly outside of the main story.

Knaves over Queens is next and then I will be up to date on Wild Cards.  

[Starkess]

I'm re-reading Nemesis Games (book 5 of The Expanse), although my plan to re-read the series ahead of the release of Book 9 is looking pretty suspect. Surprisingly, given their ability to write at a predictable pace and their plan to release Book 9 in 2020, but there's not been a peep about it other than to say it's not done. Doesn't even have a name yet. Oh well. This is an interesting book with a big Oh Shit plot point, although in some ways I found that actually brought down the book for me the first time through (the story is just of meandering along and then something huge happens with basically no warning). I feel somewhat similarly this time around. Still a good read, though.

I'm still working my way, slowly, through Bartlett's History of Ireland, which is very interesting.

I'm on the last installment of listening to The Martian Chronicles. I've enjoyed it, but also found the stories very frustratingly sexist in ways that don't feel intentional. A common complaint with sci fi from that time, though, and I can set it aside enough to enjoy being frustrated at humanity in ways that were definitely intentional.

[Zorral]

Going to re-read, i.e. savor, Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and Light.  The pandemic was looming, or was even here, anyway my anxiety levels were too high to enjoy the book my first time around.  Now it's Labor Day weekend and though the local richies are running off to the Hamptons, the out of town richies and the all the students returning to the colleges and universities are packing the streets (no masks, or Distance, of course) -- the weather is splendid.  So, guess, after all my time outside this week and today, I'm inside for the long weekend, with just us, books, the internet and lots of Zoom meetings.  Really sick of Zoom for whatever reason I'm on it.  Give me a book, a real hard cover book, that I read, holding in my hands and on my lap!    Got some damned good wines here, and glorious late summer harvest food from upstate Farmer's Markets.  I am ready.

[Wall Flower]

4 hours ago, Zorral said:

Going to re-read, i.e. savor, Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and Light.  The pandemic was looming, or was even here, anyway my anxiety levels were too high to enjoy the book my first time around.  Now it's Labor Day weekend and though the local richies are running off to the Hamptons, the out of town richies and the all the students returning to the colleges and universities are packing the streets (no masks, or Distance, of course) -- the weather is splendid.  So, guess, after all my time outside this week and today, I'm inside for the long weekend, with just us, books, the internet and lots of Zoom meetings.  Really sick of Zoom for whatever reason I'm on it.  Give me a book, a real hard cover book, that I read, holding in my hands and on my lap!    Got some damned good wines here, and glorious late summer harvest food from upstate Farmer's Markets.  I am ready.

I pre-ordered The Mirror and the Light but I still haven't read it yet. My brain just seems to be struggling with idea of really big books at the moment. Maybe some good Aussie wine would lubricate the little grey cells.

That hardcover book must be a good alternative to weightlifting!

[HoodedCrow]

Wallflower, I read the Mirror and the Light on kindle! It was hard for me because I know the ending, and there are style issues. If you read the first two you should be fine!

I thought the interpretations were close to what I have imagined from other books. I’m glad they didn’t just vilify Queen Anne, as is that is more lazy and usual. Cromwell ‘s portrayal seems accurate but generous.

[Wall Flower]

1 hour ago, HoodedCrow said:

Wallflower, I read the Mirror and the Light on kindle! It was hard for me because I know the ending, and there are style issues. If you read the first two you should be fine!

I thought the interpretations were close to what I have imagined from other books. I’m glad they didn’t just vilify Queen Anne, as is that is more lazy and usual. Cromwell ‘s portrayal seems accurate but generous.

 

I've actually got it on kindle, so I really have no excuse! I'm not sure the ending is a spoiler after 500 years! I have read and enjoyed the first two (Wolf Hall twice), though the style does take a little getting used to.

I agree that the first two were pretty generous to Cromwell ( I guess it is told from his point of view) and to my mind could have been a little more generous to Anne and the Boleyns.