Third Quarter 2020 Reading is a Joy

[Darth Richard II]

If you’re not reading the new Kate Elliott book you ate wrong and should be. Shame!

[Pecan]

3 hours ago, Wilbur said:

Today I sat down and finished off the Lies of Locke Lamora.  It was okay, but it really took a sincere effort to finish it for some reason.  Not a story or characters that seized my interest or attention, despite having all the ingredients that should have done so.  Still don't know why it did nothing for me.

I feel kind of the same way. It took me several tries to get into the book and eventually finish it. I put down the second book about 1/3 of the way in and haven't picked it up again. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I guess it has something to do with the characters. I do feel though, that the books could be much better as a TV adaptation.

[Pecan]

I finished off the Farseer Trilogy a few days ago and now I'm nearly done with Ship of Magic. I like these books well enough I suppose, but they really meander a lot and there's very little payback. On the plus side, Robin Hobb can really write. She's got the prose part down cold. But it just seems like she puts her characters through all this shit and there's very little reward for it. In all three of the Farseer books, Fitz almost never seems to take agency. He never grows. He's constantly surprised and caught off guard, and he never learns from his mistakes until right near the end where he seems to have collected some wisdom. Hopefully, this pattern won't be repeated in the other trilogies that he's part of.

And in Ship of Magic, I'm nearly at the end, and I realize this is only the first of three books, but I just feel like very little has happened to advance the plot, whatever it ultimately turns out to be. I'm especially annoyed with the Wintrow storyline and all I have to say is that there better be a reason she's putting him through the grinder. Fingers crossed. 

[Pecan]

1 hour ago, Triskele said:

I'm only admittedly about 50 pages into Curse of Chalion but struggling with it pretty hard so far.  Is there hope?  

I really enjoyed it. I thought the main character was strong. Also, the quality of the writing really helped. For me, that's a big deal. I can't deal with awkward prose, even if the story is great. If I'm reading along and I keep running into awkward, poorly constructed sentences, it just pulls me out of the experience. 

[ljkeane]

I've just started reading Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett. I remember really liking Foundryside but for some reason I remember very little of what happened in the book. Hopefully it'll come back to me.

5 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

If you’re not reading the new Kate Elliott book you ate wrong and should be. Shame!

Annoyingly it doesn't come out in the UK till October for some reason.

I'm definitely going to read it when it does come out because Kate Elliott's pretty consistently good but I have to say some of the advertising for this one comes across as a bit try hard. 'Gender swapped Alexander the Great'. Really? 

[Gigei]

13 hours ago, Pecan said:

I feel kind of the same way. It took me several tries to get into the book and eventually finish it. I put down the second book about 1/3 of the way in and haven't picked it up again. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I guess it has something to do with the characters. I do feel though, that the books could be much better as a TV adaptation.

Same. I'm not a fan but I'd still watch if there was a TV adaptation. I feel that Lies of Locke Lamora is quite witty but it didn't do much for me. 

[Caligula_K3]

13 hours ago, Pecan said:

I finished off the Farseer Trilogy a few days ago and now I'm nearly done with Ship of Magic. I like these books well enough I suppose, but they really meander a lot and there's very little payback. On the plus side, Robin Hobb can really write. She's got the prose part down cold. But it just seems like she puts her characters through all this shit and there's very little reward for it. In all three of the Farseer books, Fitz almost never seems to take agency. He never grows. He's constantly surprised and caught off guard, and he never learns from his mistakes until right near the end where he seems to have collected some wisdom. Hopefully, this pattern won't be repeated in the other trilogies that he's part of.

And in Ship of Magic, I'm nearly at the end, and I realize this is only the first of three books, but I just feel like very little has happened to advance the plot, whatever it ultimately turns out to be. I'm especially annoyed with the Wintrow storyline and all I have to say is that there better be a reason she's putting him through the grinder. Fingers crossed. 

For what it's worth, I think the Liveship Traders is much stronger overall than the Farseer Trilogy, and tends to get better in books 2-3. While the last book has its problems, it's still nowehre near the disappointment I found Assassin's Quest to be; that trilogy really had very little payoff for everything.

I'm continuing my strange readthrough of the Expanse now. I love the TV show but have generally found the books to range from "fun-good" to really bad, so I read books 1-3, book 5, and now skipped ahead to book 8.  I'm only 150 pages in, but I'm liking this one a lot more than some of the past books so far. At least this one is finally dealing with

Spoiler

the proto-molecule killers, rather than another series of forgettable and one dimensional human villains who the show will eventually turn into interesting characters. It helps that the human villain in this one is much more interesting from the get-go than say, book-Ashford or book-Mao or book-Inaros.

 

[dog-days]

I finished Field Notes From a Hidden City by Esther Woolfson and really recommend it. I picked it up after reading Corvus by the same writer last year. The book consists of diary-style entries from across a year in Aberdeen based on the author's observations, reading and experiences. She touches on topics that range from a brook concealed behind suburban houses, only accessible through the gardens of said houses, to a consideration of attitudes towards "invasive" species in modern Britain and the problematic military language of conquest, foreignness and resistance that is used in discussions of them, to clear evocations of the feelings of the changing seasons in the north-east of Scotland.  And fragments of her life are scattered in there too - since she lives with a rook called Chicken and a crow called Ziki along with memories of many other animals, spent time on a Kibbutz in her youth, and studied Chinese, her life is a pretty fascinating one. 

Although I am a fan of Robert MacFarlane, I couldn't get through his most recent book Underland. It finally crossed the thin boundary between being richly descriptive and committing purple prose of a patience-trying nature that could do with a strict editor. I felt quite bad about it, wondering if perhaps I just didn't like nature writing. Reading Woolfson came as a reassurance. She can summon up places and animals in a few crisp lines, but retains a down-to-earth attitude. It's a marvellous book that wears its scholarship very lightly. 

Re: Farseer Trilogy. Fitz is a character I initially found frustrating because of his seeming passivity, his failure to ask the right questions, his mulishness. But I think I gradually started to appreciate what Hobb was doing with him - in theory, he was such a stereotypical fantasy hero (handsome, strong, son of the heir to the throne yet brought up in humble circumstances, has special powers that others don't etc.) yet Hobb treats him with a kind of psychological realism (by fantasy standards). Horrible things happen to him and he's permanently damaged, and messed-up, and he doesn't usually know what the right thing to do is because he doesn't have the instincts of a protagonist of an adventure story, he's got the instincts of a man lost in a violent world. 

[Jaxom 1974]

Starting Samantha Shannon's Priory of the Orange Tree, which Inhave no idea about, but it serves as a book who's striking cover got me to read the blurb, which in turn got me to want to read the book...

[Caligula_K3]

On 7/17/2020 at 12:44 AM, Darth Richard II said:

If you’re not reading the new Kate Elliott book you ate wrong and should be. Shame!

What's it like in terms of writing style, or what would you compare it to? I looked it up and couldn't find any quality reviews, but Alexander the Great in space sounds promising. I've never read any Elliot before.

 

[Plessiez]

  I finished A Fortress of Grey Ice.  I liked it:  Jones is a solid writer and does a good job of making a lot of characters sympathetic who really shouldn't be.  

That said, it's frustrating that the various POV characters really don't interact at all, and (with the exception of one character whose last couple of chapters seemed to almost come out of nowhere), most of the storylines don't really have any sort of conclusion in this volume.  And compared to where they were at the end of the first book, not all that much seems to have actually happened to some of the characters.  So in that sense it feels very much like the middle installment in a series; and knowing that the series isn't complete makes me hesitate about starting the next book too soon.

 (I know I've seen some discussion on the forum about Jones going back to work on Endlords -- in fact that was actually part of why I picked up A Cavern of Black Ice last year -- but does anybody know if this is intended to be the final book in the series?)

On 7/16/2020 at 5:11 AM, Darth Richard II said:

Isn’t it the only one of his books to get a Hugo nom? Also now mad about the Hugos again 

Yeah, Banks doesn't seem to have had much luck with any of the traditional big SF awards (don't think he was ever nominated for a Nebula Award, and some googling indicates he was only nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award once, for Use of Weapons).  Of course, most of Banks' early work (and, I think, his best work) was published during a period when the Hugo Award nominations tended to be (almost) exclusively American, which probably didn't help his chances.  WorldCon was in Glasgow the year The Algebraist was nominated, which I suspect was a large factor in it getting the nomination: I think all the nominations went to British authors that year.

(I remember not really being that impressed with The Algebraist when it came out, but other than a couple of vague memories about an unsatisyfing plot twist I don't have any strong impressions of the book.)

[Plessiez]

On 7/17/2020 at 11:02 AM, ljkeane said:

On 7/17/2020 at 5:44 AM, Darth Richard II said:

If you’re not reading the new Kate Elliott book you ate wrong and should be. Shame!

Annoyingly it doesn't come out in the UK till October for some reason.

I think the book is published by a smaller company in the UK than in the US, which might be the reason for the delay.

[ljkeane]

18 minutes ago, Plessiez said:

I think the book is published by a smaller company in the UK than in the US, which might be the reason for the delay.

Yeah, presumably it's not a big enough deal for them to bother aligning the release with the US. You can actually get the US hardback on Amazon UK, which I'm a bit tempted by, but it is a little steep.

ETA: Fuck it. You've all tempted me into it. I'll just get it now.

[Wilbur]

I finished off Space Opera by Jack Vance last night.  Of all his excellent lifetime output, this is probably the weakest offering.  Think of a mid-century modern milieu, lightly influenced by PG Wodehouse's aunts in charge, in space, with actual opera music.

This is one of those Vance books where he either hit the agreed-upon word limit to get paid or else got bored with the subject, as the novel follows the pattern of starting off thick and rich, but thinning out as it progresses, until it suddenly ends.  Jack wraps it all up in a two-page final chapter, and the reader puts down the book and says, "Huh, I guess that's it."

Several very funny scenes, great use of language as usual, very much a product of the American Century with a little mid-Atlantic influence, but it really adds nothing to the accomplishments Vance piled up in his other, more substantive, works.

 

[Anya, Vengeance Demon]

I just finished City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty, and really enjoyed it. I got it on Friday and tore through it in a couple of days. Glad to hear that folks are enjoying the final book in the trilogy, I can't want to read more in the series.

Otherwise, I've been spending the quarantine mostly reading romance novels. I just finished Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert, which is a charming contemporary rom-com; Hibbert is one of my favorite romance writers because of how she weaves in stories about healing from trauma and dealing with mental and emotional health in a light and often funny way. (Also, her books are hot.) Now I'm enjoying The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite, which is a sapphic Regency romance about a young female astronomer and her wealthy patron.

On 7/17/2020 at 2:36 AM, Pecan said:

And in Ship of Magic, I'm nearly at the end, and I realize this is only the first of three books, but I just feel like very little has happened to advance the plot, whatever it ultimately turns out to be. I'm especially annoyed with the Wintrow storyline and all I have to say is that there better be a reason she's putting him through the grinder. Fingers crossed. 

"Fingers crossed" is a funny thing to say about Wintrow's storyline in particular.

I will say, Robin Hobb is probably my favorite fantasy writer and the Liveship Trilogy is one that I've re-read a number of times. Wintrow has quite a journey in front of him, and I certainly think that he changes a lot by the end of the third book. Malta is a character that I personally struggled with when first reading Ship of Magic, but she also has a really strong arc imo.

[SeanF]

3 hours ago, Anya, Vengeance Demon said:

I just finished City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty, and really enjoyed it. I got it on Friday and tore through it in a couple of days. Glad to hear that folks are enjoying the final book in the trilogy, I can't want to read more in the series.

Otherwise, I've been spending the quarantine mostly reading romance novels. I just finished Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert, which is a charming contemporary rom-com; Hibbert is one of my favorite romance writers because of how she weaves in stories about healing from trauma and dealing with mental and emotional health in a light and often funny way. (Also, her books are hot.) Now I'm enjoying The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite, which is a sapphic Regency romance about a young female astronomer and her wealthy patron.

"Fingers crossed" is a funny thing to say about Wintrow's storyline in particular.

I will say, Robin Hobb is probably my favorite fantasy writer and the Liveship Trilogy is one that I've re-read a number of times. Wintrow has quite a journey in front of him, and I certainly think that he changes a lot by the end of the third book. Malta is a character that I personally struggled with when first reading Ship of Magic, but she also has a really strong arc imo.

Malta was completely obnoxious to begin with.

[SeanF]

I've just finished re-reading The Prince, which I haven't read since I was twenty.

I appreciate it much more in middle age, seeing the world as a greyer place, and having encountered people like the people described in the book.  The humour in the book is black as pitch,

eg Men will more readily recover from the death of a father than the loss of their patrimony, or,

it is fatal for a ruler to practice clemency, kindness, good faith, or religion, but he must always give the impression that he does.

[HexMachina]

5 hours ago, Anya, Vengeance Demon said:

I just finished City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty, and really enjoyed it. I got it on Friday and tore through it in a couple of days. Glad to hear that folks are enjoying the final book in the trilogy, I can't want to read more in the series.

Otherwise, I've been spending the quarantine mostly reading romance novels. I just finished Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert, which is a charming contemporary rom-com; Hibbert is one of my favorite romance writers because of how she weaves in stories about healing from trauma and dealing with mental and emotional health in a light and often funny way. (Also, her books are hot.) Now I'm enjoying The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite, which is a sapphic Regency romance about a young female astronomer and her wealthy patron.

"Fingers crossed" is a funny thing to say about Wintrow's storyline in particular.

I will say, Robin Hobb is probably my favorite fantasy writer and the Liveship Trilogy is one that I've re-read a number of times. Wintrow has quite a journey in front of him, and I certainly think that he changes a lot by the end of the third book. Malta is a character that I personally struggled with when first reading Ship of Magic, but she also has a really strong arc imo.

 

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

Malta was completely obnoxious to begin with.

That's kind of the point though - she has her characters grow and develop throughout her novels. 

Hobb is my favourite fantasy author. I do recognise the complaints about pacing. They just don't bother me because I just love spending time in her world and with the characters I've come to love.

I completely disagree with the previous comment someone made that the final trilogy had no pay off. It was absolutely chock full of throwbacks to earlier books, resolutions to long dangling plot threads and a very emotional and satisfying end for the characters. It was an ending of a series she had worked with for almost 20 years and I loved it.

Currently rereading and can't wait to get to that last trilogy

[SeanF]

14 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

 

That's kind of the point though - she has her characters grow and develop throughout her novels. 

Hobb is my favourite fantasy author. I do recognise the complaints about pacing. They just don't bother me because I just love spending time in her world and with the characters I've come to love.

I completely disagree with the previous comment someone made that the final trilogy had no pay off. It was absolutely chock full of throwbacks to earlier books, resolutions to long dangling plot threads and a very emotional and satisfying end for the characters. It was an ending of a series she had worked with for almost 20 years and I loved it.

Currently rereading and can't wait to get to that last trilogy

Malta does grow and improve.  I just re-read Liveships, and I'd forgotten just how frightful she was at the start.

I enjoyed the final trilogy too.  I'd like to read more about Bee and the others.

[Inkdaub]

Liveship Traders has always been my favorite of Hobb's work.  Malta's arc is the primary reason for that, though I like just about everything in that story. I love the growth of the dragons and all the associated lore as well.  The only things I don't like are...

Spoiler

Shoehorning The Fool in because enough Fool already, and the personalities of the dragons after they hatch and grow a bit.

These are minor gripes, though.