Fourth Quarter 2020 Reading

[The Marquis de Leech]

5 hours ago, dog-days said:

That is a valid point. 

I read the illustrated Margaret Jones/ Kevin Crossley Holland version when I was around seven. Just kind of shrugged at the branch with Gwydion/Gilfaethwy getting it on as deer, boar and wolves. 

My favourite is the scene where Lleu Llaw Gyffes tells Blodeuedd how to kill him:

"Why," said she, "in what manner then couldst thou be slain?"

"I will tell thee," said he. "By making a bath for me on a river bank, and making a vaulted frame over the tub, and thatching it well and snugly too thereafter, and bringing in a he-goat," said he, "and setting it beside the tub, and myself placing one foot on the back of the he-goat and the other on the edge of the tub. Whoever should smite me when so, he would bring about my death."

No prizes for guessing what happens.

Spoiler

It doesn't actually kill him. Just badly wounds him.

 

[JGP]

As of last night almost halfway through Novik's latest, but temptation has arisen with the overnight download of P. Djeli Clark's Ring Shout.

Decisions, decisions.

[dog-days]

1 hour ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

My favourite is the scene where Lleu Llaw Gyffes tells Blodeuedd how to kill him:

"Why," said she, "in what manner then couldst thou be slain?"

"I will tell thee," said he. "By making a bath for me on a river bank, and making a vaulted frame over the tub, and thatching it well and snugly too thereafter, and bringing in a he-goat," said he, "and setting it beside the tub, and myself placing one foot on the back of the he-goat and the other on the edge of the tub. Whoever should smite me when so, he would bring about my death."

No prizes for guessing what happens.

  Reveal hidden contents

It doesn't actually kill him. Just badly wounds him.

 

It must have been the wrong breed of goat!

A couple of years ago I read Alan Garner's The Owl Service, which was - okay, brilliantly written, but not great at the same time. It felt a bit too much like Wales as seen through the eyes of a grammar-schooled Englishman. Also I was a bit disappointed that the title referred to crockery and not, as I'd fondly imagined as a child, to a troop of owls, like the fire service or police service or ambulance service, but owls. I'm still waiting for a modern interpretation of the Blodeuwedd myth that really grabs me. Saunders Lewis wrote a play based on it in the 1920s - I should give that a go. 

I think The Chronicles of Prydain remains my favourite Mabinogi-inspired fiction. It helped that my dad could do excellent voices for Gurgi and Fflewdur Fflam. 

[HexMachina]

I'd be remiss not to plug @Theda Baratheon Celtic Myths and Legends podcast with the Mabanogion discussion...

Finished Abercrombie's ALH, more thorough thoughts in the thread.

I'm also about to start Novik's new one. Somewhat disappointed hearing the problematic stuff but it's downloaded now and looks pretty short so *shrug*

[williamjm]

15 hours ago, Gigei said:

I'm still digesting the series and thinking of maybe tackling Intervention which I have never read or perhaps rereading Pliocene.

If you like the Milieu books I would recommend reading Intervention, it does give a lot of backstory for the Remillard family, particularly for Rogi and Denis.

[HexMachina]

I’ve only read one chapter of A Deadly Education so thoughts on anything else not applicable but that was an unpleasant and messy stream of consciousness start to a book. Holy information dump batman, it reads like an instruction book for her new world. I’m not sure i will even finish if it remains like this throughout.

 

eta: i really loved Uprooted and Spinning Silver too, for what its worth, so maybe i expected better

[Xray the Enforcer]

7 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

As of last night almost halfway through Novik's latest, but temptation has arisen with the overnight download of P. Djeli Clark's Ring Shout.

Decisions, decisions.

I'm really looking forward to starting Ring Shout.

[Xray the Enforcer]

Also one of my favorite recent reads was Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. A fantasy novel set in a graveyard with a transgender Latinx brujo protagonist and his gay ghostly sidekick? And written by a trans Latinx author? OMFG put it in my goddamn veins. 

[Iskaral Pust]

I’m long overdue an update here. I can’t remember though what was the last book I shared.

I just finished Fire & Blood by GRRM.  I really enjoyed it and I’m glad I held it back in reserve.  It feels like such a long time since I visited Westeros.  And the melancholy tone is better suited to an autumn reading.

Before that was The Flooding by Sean Hancock, a novel about a consciously immortal soul whose memory of her past lives arrives in a “flooding” when she turns 18 each time.  Her soul was awakened back in ancient Egypt by her mentor and eternal love. (BTW all souls are eternal and reincarnated many times, but most have no memory of prior lives) But there is conflict over control of the knowledge of awakening, and she must evade her antagonists while she figures out what’s going on.  It’s an enjoyable read with good characterization and imagination.  It has echoes of David Mitchell, Claire North and Tim Powers.  There is a distinct British inflection to the characters, dialogue, writing, etc. The conclusion feels insufficiently resolved so I assume there will be more in this series.  My only criticism is that the main POV character doesn’t capture what it must be like to be ancient, to have lived for thousands of years, to have done everything and seen everything.  How much ennui, disillusionment and weirdness would creep in over that length of time?  Altered Carbon addresses that brilliantly.  Instead this character has the mental state of a normal 18yr old who just happens to have a lot of memories of past experiences.  Her mental state is not affected by having lived them all.  But an enjoyable read.

[Gigei]

20 hours ago, Little Valkyrie said:

Oh man, there's a lot you've missed if you didn't read Intervention.  The very ending of the book was a wonderful shock when I first read it and then HAD TO WAIT! to see what that all meant.

I love that the quotes on the back of my hardback omni of Intervention are Jean Auel, David Brin, and Gene Wolfe.  There's quite a lot of Catholicism in May's work as well (given a book entitled MAGNIFICAT), which I'm sure Wolfe enjoyed.

Really? I was thinking I might not be okay since I already know what will happen, having read all the other books.

5 hours ago, williamjm said:

If you like the Milieu books I would recommend reading Intervention, it does give a lot of backstory for the Remillard family, particularly for Rogi and Denis.

It's going to be so tragic given that

Spoiler

Denis is Fury

I guess I'll give it a go. I've never read a book in that setting that I didn't like, after all.

[Theda Baratheon]

17 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

My favourite is the scene where Lleu Llaw Gyffes tells Blodeuedd how to kill him:

"Why," said she, "in what manner then couldst thou be slain?"

"I will tell thee," said he. "By making a bath for me on a river bank, and making a vaulted frame over the tub, and thatching it well and snugly too thereafter, and bringing in a he-goat," said he, "and setting it beside the tub, and myself placing one foot on the back of the he-goat and the other on the edge of the tub. Whoever should smite me when so, he would bring about my death."

No prizes for guessing what happens.

  Reveal hidden contents

It doesn't actually kill him. Just badly wounds him.

 

OMG yes. I LOVE it. 
 

imagine being Blodeuwedd and you get conjured into wonderful life through flowers and nature only to find out your ONLY purpose in life is to be married to a fella SO DULL that he ACTUALLY tells you in MINUTE detail how he can SPECIFICALLY be killed just because you ask nicely...can’t believe he then has the AUDACITY to be upset by a light spot of ATTEMPTED murder...

[williamjm]

17 hours ago, Gigei said:

Really? I was thinking I might not be okay since I already know what will happen, having read all the other books.

It's going to be so tragic given that

  Reveal hidden contents

Denis is Fury

I guess I'll give it a go. I've never read a book in that setting that I didn't like, after all.

Reading it does definitely add to the eventual tragedy.

[Starkess]

I'm having trouble getting into The Dark Forest (the sequel to The Three-Body Problem). There's a lot of potential in this premise but it's just so dry and blah. Also the names are confusing as hell to me, tbh, I can't keep them straight at all. I do want to finish it but I find myself dragging my feet whenever I have time to read.

[Zorral]

FYI 

Descendant of Uhtred, Bernard Cornwell, speaks as historical fiction writer:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/15/bernard-cornwell-history-uhtred-sharpe-war-lord

War Lord, the final novel in the Uhtred series is published today in the UK.  Not until late November in the US, I think.

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

FYI 

Descendant of Uhtred, Bernard Cornwell, speaks as historical fiction writer:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/15/bernard-cornwell-history-uhtred-sharpe-war-lord

War Lord, the final novel in the Uhtred series is published today in the UK.  Not until late November in the US, I think.

My copy arrives tomorrow. Just finished the previous book. Not as good as the Arthurian books, definitely feel a bit phoned in in the later books.

Interesting to see he’s doing more Sharpe novels

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Interesting to see he’s doing more Sharpe novels

Well, one more Sharpe novel anyway.  As he points out he's 76, so he doesn't want to start another 10 book series that he more than likely can't finish for one reason or another, but at this stage, cannot stop writing.  He expressed that condition of the writer contemplating the threshold of mortality very well, it seemed to me.

 

[mushroomshirt]

I am almost finished with Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone.  I hate to say this but I don't think I've ever read a book that was such a chore to finish.  I really want to like the book.  I love the world and the atmosphere.  I love Gladstone's descriptive text & mood.  I love his characters, Tara, Abelard and Cat in particular.  I should really love this book.

I'm not super satisfied with the lawyer fantasy genre here.  It's more Law and Order detective / police drama and less the kind of Sidhe contract & loophole stuff of @Peadar's The Call and The Invasion, which I loved.  But this is really a small complaint.

I just can't figure out why I don't love this book when I love so many parts of it.  When it comes together I can barely get the motivation to continue reading.  

Not sure if I'm making sense or if anyone else feels this way about Three Parts Dead or other books in general.

I think I might try The War Hound and the World's Pain recommended by @stonebender next.

[williamjm]

I finished Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth. I'm not sure what I really expected to follow on the from the end of the previous book but it certainly wasn't this. It was a bit of a struggle in the early stages because the main character is really confused about what is going on and while the reader has some information they don't have there is also a lot of confusion. There's also quite a bit of unreliable narration going on, which isn't really concealed to the reader but it didn't make it any easier to get into the book. The latter stages of the book were a big improvement and at times managed to be as compelling as some parts of the first book, and in retrospect a lot of the things that happened in the earlier parts of the book (and in the first book) do end up making a lot of sense in the end. I think Harrow herself may have been a more interesting character when we couldn't see inside her head but there was some good character development for the supporting cast, including both new characters and some that I wouldn't necessarily have expected to see again after the first book. Overall I think the second half did save the book but it's a pity that it took a couple of hundred pages for me to start enjoying reading it as much as the first book.

I've now started Susanna Clarke's Piranesi which coincidentally is another story about a character with memory issues in a vast and mysterious structure although other than that not very similar to Harrow the Ninth. It's also not much like Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but it is good so far.

[Plessiez]

On 10/14/2020 at 9:53 PM, Starkess said:

I'm having trouble getting into The Dark Forest (the sequel to The Three-Body Problem). There's a lot of potential in this premise but it's just so dry and blah. Also the names are confusing as hell to me, tbh, I can't keep them straight at all. I do want to finish it but I find myself dragging my feet whenever I have time to read.

I think that The Dark Forest is my favourite volume of the trilogy, but I'd agree that the prose is rather dry (I'm not sure if that's a result of the translation or not, but I think it might be).  As I recall, the narrative deliberately avoids dwelling on character's internal thoughts, which is definitely a deliberate choice but one that can make it hard to relate to the characters.

It's also an incredibly depressing book, to the extent I find it slightly hard to recommend (especially because I think the third volume doesn't really do the trilogy justice).

As I said in the dedicated thread, I just finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab.  (Is there a precedent for titles of the form The [Adjective] Life of [Full Name] other than Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?  It feels like both titles are references to something I'm missing.)

Now started Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas and Electric, one of several books that's been somewhere on my nebulous "I should probably read this one day" list for a bit more than twenty years.  Once that's done, I'm either going to finally force myself to finish A Sword from Red Ice or admit that it's just not working for me.

[Corvinus85]

I finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. What an interesting book, but if you have a certain phobia, you may have a hard time reading it. I was itching all over at some of the early chapters. Jumping right into its sequel, Children of Ruin.