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Third Quarter 2020 Reading is a Joy


Peadar

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I felt like reading some science fiction and I saw the first two books of Marko Kloos' The Palladium Wars series were on offer so I thought I'd give them a try. They're a bit weird. I thought they were just going to be bog standard military science fiction, which is fine, but there's really a lot of setting the scene with mysterious goings on presumably leading to the eponymous war. Ok, I suppose there's nothing wrong with that and as setting the scenes go it's fine but two books into the series and nothing much has really happened so far. 

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I finished Martha Wells' Network Effect. The ending did set up some potential future plotlines for further Murderbot stories.

I've now started Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint which has had a reasonable start although I'm still not sure what the main focus of the plot is going to be.

9 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

@williamjm

Forgot to ask, out if curiosity, how do you feel Lord of the Hunt compared with Resurrection Men?  It’s hard for me to ‘judge’, being the author.

They read a bit differently because the second book feels like it is focusing on a larger cast and the scope of the plot is expanding as well but I think the two books did seem consistent in terms of the quality of the writing.

 

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I read Roger M. Utley's Lone Star Justice: The First Century of The Texas Rangers. Cuts through the mythology of the Rangers. I'm glad I chose this over Webb's and Fehrenbach's works on the Rangers.

Now looking for something light before I pick up The Trouble with Peace on Sep 15.

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M. John Harrison: The pastel city

I didn't find any mention in this forum but it seemed a moderately well known and well received (Moorcock wrote some backcover blurb of my old pbck edition) book (apparently part of a loose cycle "Viriconium"), from the early 70s. It has fascinating ideas and worldbuilding but the main plot is concise, not to say sketchy (less than 160 pages, today's authors would make at least 500 with this material), despite some wordy descriptions. It's a SciFi+fantasy mix of the old/dying world with lost technology genre. But most of this background is only hinted at, hardly explained, apparently to reflect the very sketchy knowledge of the protagonists. Even the style seems somewhat incoherent, between swashbuckling swordplay, very brief legend/saga like summarizing of events, somewhat eloquent descriptions of bizarre landscapes and bad poetry (the protagonist is a kind of melancholy bard/swordsman).

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On 9/10/2020 at 7:21 PM, williamjm said:

I've now started Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint which has had a reasonable start although I'm still not sure what the main focus of the plot is going to be.

I remember thinking that Swordspoint was only okay, when I read it a few years ago, but I liked the (loose) sequel The Privilege of the Sword a lot more.  It's been long enough that the plot of both is a bit hazy in my memory now though.

1 hour ago, Jo498 said:

M. John Harrison: The pastel city

I didn't find any mention in this forum but it seemed a moderately well known and well received (Moorcock wrote some backcover blurb of my old pbck edition) book (apparently part of a loose cycle "Viriconium"), from the early 70s.

Back when I was more active on this board, we definitely had at least one M. John Harrison thread (though we're talking ... more than a decade ago, now, I guess?  Possibly back when this forum was still called Other Authors, which is going back quite a bit further than that).  Harrison can be a somewhat divisive author on this board (a bit like Moorcock, in fact), so I'm not sure you're missing much by not being able to find it.  Short (possibly unfairly short) version is that lots of critics and literary reviewers really like Harrison's work, but lots of people on this board don't and will be happy to tell you so. 

'The Pastel City' is included in the Fantasy Masterworks edition of Virconium (which also collects the novels 'A Storm of Wings' and 'In Viriconium' and a number of short stories).  The quality of those stories varies a bit, but if you liked The Pastel City you'd probably like the others too ('A Storm of Wings' is the best of them, I think).

One person who definitely liked the Viriconium stories is Jeff VanderMeer, whose early novels City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword are very heavily influenced by Harrison's work.  Again, if you like Viriconium you'll probably enjoy these.  Harrison also influenced a lot of other 'New Weird' authors, most prominently China Mieville.

(Is the New Weird still a thing?  It doesn't feel like it's a term I see anybody use anymore, and I know that some New Weird authors like Steph Swainston and K. J. Bishop stopped writing profesionally years ago, but maybe there are active writers still associated with this subgenre that I've just not heard of.)

After the Viriconium stories, Harrison stopped writing SF for a couple of decades, only return to the genre in the early 2000s.  His later SF novels have won several awards without, I think, selling particularly well.  Of those I quite liked Light, but not really enough to want to read either of its sequels.  It didn't have quite the same appeal to me as the Viriconium books (though I think technically the later books are probably stronger).

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Book related, because it's about GRRM and writing, thus of likely interest to members of the forum:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/arts/game-of-thrones-santa-fe-castle.html?

Quote

 

... this week the Santa Fe Historic Districts Review Board crushed a proposal by the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin to construct a 24- to 26-foot, seven-sided tower with battered stucco walls on his property in the New Mexico city.

The edifice, complete with an elevator and a roof deck, was designed to house Mr. Martin’s vast library. It was to be named the “Water Garden Keep.”

But the board said the size and design were out of scale with the traditional, low-lying Southwestern architecture typical of Santa Fe.

“It is so clear that this is not an adobe building,” Frank Katz, the vice chairman of the review board, said at a meeting on Tuesday. “It is a medieval castle, and I don’t understand how we could possibly approve it in its style.”

Mark Graham, who lives near the property, said “the notoriety of Mr. Martin and ‘Game of Thrones’” would put the neighborhood at risk of being visited by marauding fans of the HBO show and the “Song of Ice and Fire” novels it was adapted from.

“We absolutely fear that our neighborhood will become the next treasure hunt,” he said. “That his fans will be looking to find the castle that’s in the middle of Santa Fe.”

The decision to reject the proposal came at the end of a six-hour online meeting and after nearly two hours of discussion about the project.

It was the second time the board had rejected Mr. Martin’s bid to build the library. Board members denied approval for the first proposal, which was submitted in January, because of the height of the tower and a design that was “incongruous” with the historic character of the neighborhood, according to Lisa Roach, the manager of the city’s Historic Preservation Division.

Mr. Martin did not appear before the board. In a statement released on Friday night, Michel Stern, a representative for Mr. Martin, said: “Mr. Martin and his wife are frankly in the midst of processing this disappointing news. They are carefully weighing their options with their advisers.”. . . .

 

 

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7 hours ago, Plessiez said:

Back when I was more active on this board, we definitely had at least one M. John Harrison thread (though we're talking ... more than a decade ago, now, I guess?  Possibly back when this forum was still called Other Authors, which is going back quite a bit further than that).  Harrison can be a somewhat divisive author on this board (a bit like Moorcock, in fact), so I'm not sure you're missing much by not being able to find it.  Short (possibly unfairly short) version is that lots of critics and literary reviewers really like Harrison's work, but lots of people on this board don't and will be happy to tell you so.

I remember he had a post on his blog with some strong feelings about fantasy world-building that some people on here disagreed with. I found a portion of it here.

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Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

I liked the first couple of Viriconium books, it had some memorable scenes and plenty of atmosphere even if the world-building was unsurprisingly a bit vague. I thought some of the other stories in the setting did get a bit incoherent at times.

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1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Book related, because it's about GRRM and writing, thus of likely interest to members of the forum:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/arts/game-of-thrones-santa-fe-castle.html?

 

The curse of Harrenhal...
He should send them an mp3 of The Rains of Castamere from the series

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Thanks for the comments and information on Harrison and Viriconium. I was aware that it was a loose series and would almost have bought the kindle omnibus but then decided to get an even cheaper used copy of the first book to see if I like it. It is a bit paradoxical. Because the past is central to the plot in The pastel city the reader is given some information albeit in a rather incomplete way. Harrison also gives fairly elaborate descriptions (in face of the overall brevity of the narrative) of the strangely colored toxic wastes and swamps in parts of his world. I guess he wants to set the mood but leave things mysterious on purpose but it errs a bit on the side of leaving the reader puzzled.

In the case of Tolkien it has often been remarked that LotR appears so "deep" because it is full of the history of ME but in the main text this is usually not systematically explained and many things remain as mysterious to the reader as they appear to the hobbits. Not sure if Harrison was simply lazy or if it was a conscious choice to leave a lot very mysterious.

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This afternoon I finished The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan. This was the second Amy Tan novel I've read -- quite a while ago I read The Hundred Secret Senses.  I have read several term papers by students in my Culture & Psychology class on The Joy Luck Club, though, so I also know some of the basics of that story. 

I really think The Kitchen God's Wife is a great book. Though there are some "frame story" chapters set around 1990 when the book was written told in first person by Pearl, a second generation Chinese-American woman married to a Caucasian man, most of the book is the tale of her mother Winnie's life in China between her birth around 1919 and her departure for the United States in the late 1940s. This is also told in the first person, by Winnie.

Winnie's story is one of the greatest "resilient survivor" stories in all of literature. The child of a wealthy father and the youngest of his several wives, her mother disappears when she is still very young (and we never find out for sure what happened to her.) She endures a childhood of emotional deprivation raised in her paternal uncle's home. She has an arranged marriage to a man who turns out to be one of the more monstrous characters in mainstream literature -- an abusive narcissistic sociopath who abuses her severely. Her husband is a pilot in the Chinese air force, and she must live through World War II and the Japanese occupation of eastern China -- though she actually does not end up living under the Japanese or directly experiencing their atrocities herself, escaping to a city in southwestern China that the Japanese never occupied, though she does have to endure that city being regularly bombed. After enduring the deaths of three children, she is finally able to leave her husband and go to America under sponsorship of a Chinese-American man who becomes her second husband.

WInnie's story pulled me in and and was one of the most compelling mainstream novels I've ever read. I note that the Wikipedia pages on Amy Tan in general and this novel in particular accuse Tan of writing her Chinese men as monsters. In this book this really isn't true -- the first husband is indeed truly monstrous, but the second husband is the opposite, a "knight in shining armor" who helps save her from a dire situation (though she does take a lot of initiative herself). None of her other Chinese men are monsters like the first husband. However, it is certainly true that Tan is a writer who focuses on women's lives and that her male characters are less fully developed and more one-dimensional. In The Kitchen God's Wife, though, one can see how Winnie, who is telling the story, has a vested psychological interest in presenting the first husband as a monster and the second husband as a paragon. I never had the idea in the story that Tan was saying the first husband was typical of Chinese men. Certainly there are points where Chinese society and culture look the other way and allow him to abuse her -- but I think similar injustices would have been part of many other cultures in the 1930s and 1940s.

So -- this is a book that I highly recommend. 

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8 hours ago, Zorral said:

If you read down in the article, one can see they are beyond sick of his books already.  Plus, you know, peace and privacy.

 

Quote

“We absolutely fear that our neighborhood will become the next treasure hunt,” he said. “That his fans will be looking to find the castle that’s in the middle of Santa Fe.”

God forbid. Other people are so scary...NIMBY assholes are much the same everywhere.

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8 hours ago, Peadar said:

I'm mainlining Wild Card books this weekend. Just finished Mississippi Roll. 10% into Low Chicago. I hope to clear the decks in time for the arrival of M.R. Carey's The Trials of Koli in a few days time...

I quite liked Low Chicago.  I'm currently on Knaves over Queens and very much enjoying it.  Just discovered that there is another volume, Three Kings, currently out in hardback.  

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On 9/12/2020 at 9:26 AM, Zorral said:

Book related, because it's about GRRM and writing, thus of likely interest to members of the forum:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/arts/game-of-thrones-santa-fe-castle.html?

 

Unfortunately, the tower Martin is proposing would definitely be out of character for his neighborhood.  Santa Fe has several quite lovely neighborhoods, and although the idea of a tower is cool, it is also probably best built elsewhere.

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18 hours ago, hauberk said:

I quite liked Low Chicago.  I'm currently on Knaves over Queens and very much enjoying it.  Just discovered that there is another volume, Three Kings, currently out in hardback.  

Delighted you're enjoying Knaves, although I think Three Kings came together very well too :)

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I finished Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. I thought it was a well-written book, it took a while for the main point of the plot to become apparent but several seemingly loosely connected plotlines did end up being linked much more closely than it had initially appeared and the conclusion wrapped up most things neatly. The only thing that felt a bit unfinished was the Michael Goodwin plotline which initially seemed important but didn't have much of a conclusion. The duelling and the political intrigues were fun although I felt a bit indifferent towards most of the characters, I was curious about how the plot was going to be resolved but I didn't find them to be all that compelling.

On 9/12/2020 at 11:17 AM, Plessiez said:

I remember thinking that Swordspoint was only okay, when I read it a few years ago, but I liked the (loose) sequel The Privilege of the Sword a lot more.  It's been long enough that the plot of both is a bit hazy in my memory now though.

There was an excerpt from The Privilege of the Sword at the end of the book which did sound intriguing so I might pick it up at some point.

I've now moved onto Andrezj Sapkowski's The Last Wish, which I picked up earlier in the year after watching the TV show.

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