Fourth Quarter 2020 Reading

[Peadar]

I've been really busy, so it's taken me a lot longer than I expected to finish David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue. I liked it a lot, the first half more than the second, but even so.

Up next, Good Samaritans by Will Carver.

[Plessiez]

I just finished Alix E. Harrow's The Once and Future Witches.  I liked her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but I thought this was quite a bit better.  It's a lot faster paced, too.  Only real complaint was with the ending, which I found a bit unsatisfying.

[ljkeane]

Forged wasn't great. Jacka's books have always been kind of stupid but entertaining quick reads. The stupid is starting to outweigh the entertaining I think. Things like calling in airstrikes on trains in London goes beyond my ability to suspend disbelief for a supposedly hidden magic world.

Spoiler

Also a book that mostly consists of Verus murdering a bunch of people really isn't that fun to read. I think Jacka's aiming for a Verus being tempted by the dark side before ultimately coming good kind of thing but I don't think he's really a good enough writer to pull it off.

Next up I'm going to read Peter F Hamilton's The Saints of Salvation.

[HexMachina]

9 hours ago, Plessiez said:

I just finished Alix E. Harrow's The Once and Future Witches.  I liked her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but I thought this was quite a bit better.  It's a lot faster paced, too.  Only real complaint was with the ending, which I found a bit unsatisfying.

Nice, i have this next on my to read list, and have just recently finished The Ten Thousand Doors after catching it on sale. I enjoyed that and appreciated her writing style and particularly liked the alternating structure in the beginning of January-Book Chapter.

[Iskaral Pust]

I’ve read a few since I last posted here:

In The Valley Of The Sun by Andy Davidson.  Pay attention to this one!  Any fans of Cormac McCarthy should take a look at this because the prose, setting and characterization have some real similarities to No Country For Old Men with just a hint of Blood Meridien’s sense of horror (or maybe Tim Powers’ The Stress Of Her Regard). On the surface it’s a story about a vampire in Texas in the early 1980s, but that description sounds ludicrously misleading.  Very well written, I enjoyed it.  But this is for fans of Cormac McCarthy much more than for fans of sparkly vampires.  

The Murder At Redmire Hall by J.R. Ellis is the third in his Yorkshire murder mystery series.  Enjoyable enough but excessively staged, of which it is very self-aware.  It’s a locked room mystery combined with a (openly acknowledged) Poirot-ish set-up of a fractious family of potential suspects up at the big house.

Little Siberia by Antti Tuomainen is a Scandinavian (Finnish) noir.  Another good read from him.  He has an unusual approach to noir: his last book was about a guy who realized he had been fatally poisoned and was investigating why and by whom before it killed him.  This one is about a man whose wife is pregnant despite him being secretly sterile, and as he processes this with suspicion and despair, his stubbornness leads him to prevent an attempted crime and draw him into peril.  These aren’t stories about hard-boiled PIs, they’re about regular people facing crisis in their lives.

To Brave The End by Frank Dorrian is a grimdark fantasy origin story with some similarities to Joe Abercrombie (especially Logen) and Glen Cook.  It was pretty good but felt very short, only 150 pages or so.  It’s clearly the start of a series, and probably a publishing strategy to sell it increments.  It introduces the central character and the setting pretty well.

[RedEyedGhost]

On 12/20/2020 at 7:07 AM, ljkeane said:

Forged wasn't great. Jacka's books have always been kind of stupid but entertaining quick reads. The stupid is starting to outweigh the entertaining I think. 

That's disappointing to hear.  I'm 38% in now and am still enjoying it 

Spoiler

Alex and Cinder are about to storm a London highrise in the middle of the day though...

I did get a helluva laugh out of Cinder's interaction with Starbreeze.  "Used to wonder why you didn't use that elemental more.  Now I know."

I am in the perfect mood for a light, quick read right now though.

[Teng Ai Hui]

6 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

 

I enjoyed reading that quote in your spoiler text.  I'm going to make another try at getting back into Jacka's series when my winter holiday starts in January. 

[williamjm]

I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Doors of Eden. I liked it, although I wouldn't rank it up with Tchaikovsky's best books. One issue with it was that the chapters scattered throughout the book describing alternate paths evolution could have taken on Earth are fascinating in their own right but they do break up the main plot and I think they take away some of the mystery of the rest of the book. While there are some surprises as the book goes on there are a lot of things the reader knows or can infer before the characters in the book do. Initially the book centres on Lee and Mal are the two main characters and I think their story is interesting but in the later stages of the plot they do often start to feel a bit peripheral to the events that are going on. The more mundane part of the plot with a couple of MI5 agents investigating a corrupt businessman with some unusual associates felt a bit dull compared to some of the more speculative parts of the story. I think it did come to a good ending, there is a clever plot device in the latter part of the book showing the same scenes from different perspectives which I thought worked well.

Now I've started V.E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue which seems to have had a lot of recommendations recently. So far it seems good, the basic premise is in some respects very similar to Claire North's The Sudden Appearance of Hope, but I feel that the plot seems to be moving in a different direction.

[The Marquis de Leech]

On 12/16/2020 at 8:49 PM, TheLastWolf said:

I think you are confuCed. Jokes apart, i view religion, spirituality and philosophy differently and am reading the Analects

Might be worth comparing Confucius' Analects with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Both articulate some similar ideas, and both (for better or worse) shaped their respective civilisations for thousands of years. It helps that the Nicomachean Ethics is the most user-friendly Aristotle to read, since he is otherwise as dry as the Sahara Desert.

I myself have just finished Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. Really was not expecting the first Sherlock Holmes story to be part-Western.

[Zorral]

8 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Might be worth comparing Confucius' Analects with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Both articulate some similar ideas, and both (for better or worse) shaped their respective civilisations for thousands of years. It helps that the Nicomachean Ethics is the most user-friendly Aristotle to read, since he is otherwise as dry as the Sahara Desert.

I myself have just finished Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. Really was not expecting the first Sherlock Holmes story to be part-Western.

My ignorance of Confucious, and the times that produced him, is complete.  I don't know anything either, about why he became so important and formative, even in a culture that had existed for such a long time already.  So I presume there is some layering upon past attitudes and so on.  I heard way back when I was a truly ignorant undergrad from somebody who'd fought in Vietnam and got very interested in Asian culture, that Maoism grafted very elegantly upon both Confucious and Buddhism, both of them contributing a great amount to Chinese thinking, attitude and behavior.  I have no idea. Have been looking for some kind of book that could elucidate that for me, with a perspective that would be that of an historian, a cultural and / or social historian, along with the events that took place, historically. Maybe such a thing doesn't exist.  (Maybe I should do a serious JSTOR search too, hmmmm, silly me.)

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

4 hours ago, Zorral said:

My ignorance of Confucious, and the times that produced him, is complete.  I don't know anything either, about why he became so important and formative, even in a culture that had existed for such a long time already.  So I presume there is some layering upon past attitudes and so on.  I heard way back when I was a truly ignorant undergrad from somebody who'd fought in Vietnam and got very interested in Asian culture, that Maoism grafted very elegantly upon both Confucious and Buddhism, both of them contributing a great amount to Chinese thinking, attitude and behavior.  I have no idea. Have been looking for some kind of book that could elucidate that for me, with a perspective that would be that of an historian, a cultural and / or social historian, along with the events that took place, historically. Maybe such a thing doesn't exist.  (Maybe I should do a serious JSTOR search too, hmmmm, silly me.)

If it helps, I'd advise just starting with the Analects itself. It's short, and really just a collection of sayings and teachings to meditate on. Not complicated reading at all.

(Another comparison is Mao's Little Red Book, which is eerily similar in format, though rather different in message).

Confucianism is more an Ethical System than a religion in the conventional sense. It prioritises duty to one's family, following correct protocols in social interaction, and moderation in all things. It also emphasises the notion that virtue in authority follows down to virtue in wider society. Its polar opposite is Chinese Legalism, the philosophical tradition that emphasised a powerful state, and authoritarian enforcement of Machiavellianism.

You thus had the First Qin Emperor (a staunch Legalist) literally burning Confucian books (and scholars). 

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

Finished The Sign of Four. I was actually surprised by the racism - sure, it's from 1890, but that level of racial caricature is not something you normally associate with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Though to be fair to Conan Doyle, the bulk of his literary career was ahead of him, and he does get better. He's also not a H.P.Lovecraft anyway.

(The analogy that springs to mind is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

[Zorral]

14 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

If it helps, I'd advise just starting with the Analects itself. It's short, and really just a collection of sayings and teachings to meditate on. Not complicated reading at all.

(Another comparison is Mao's Little Red Book, which is eerily similar in format, though rather different in message).

Confucianism is more an Ethical System than a religion in the conventional sense. It prioritises duty to one's family, following correct protocols in social interaction, and moderation in all things. It also emphasises the notion that virtue in authority follows down to virtue in wider society. Its polar opposite is Chinese Legalism, the philosophical tradition that emphasised a powerful state, and authoritarian enforcement of Machiavellianism.

You thus had the First Qin Emperor (a staunch Legalist) literally burning Confucian books (and scholars). 

 

Thank you. This helps, though it isn't what I'm really looking for.

Something like the recent biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, that interweaves his work as a poet with all the political, religious, military, and cultural platforms in England and Europe among which he was working and living.

[Zorral]

8 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

(The analogy that springs to mind is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

It was H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain figure that much of Indy was based upon.

Quote

Quatermain was one of the templates for the American film character Indiana Jones.^[11][12][13]

Though Haggard and Doyle were friends.

 

 

[Starkess]

I finally finished The Dark Forest. The second half went much quicker than the first. It's really more philosophical thought experiment than novel in some ways. The characters are mere mouthpieces and plot-pushers, and the story doesn't really flow in a very readable way. But it was an interesting idea, and while I'm not sure I agree with it, I understand the reasoning.

Spoiler

That basic conclusion at the end is what seems like a giant version of the prisoner's dilemma, wherein any civilization (benign or not) that knows of another civilization (benign or not) must destroy it just in case. I would think that not all civilizations would have the same resource requirements, exponential growth forever is not a given, and this is a rather simplistic reasoning that surely would not hold as a universal maxim.

I also finished listening to The Girls by Emma Cline. This is a fictionalized story about a cult murder in the 60s--which I think means the Manson cult? Not sure. Anyway it's a very dark story of obsession and possession and how far someone will go. I found it dark and fascinating, although I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone. The main story is interwoven with some present day scenes of the main character showing how this brief period in her life really shaped and stunted her. I found it incredibly sad.

Now I am listening to Cinder, a sci-fi retelling based on Cinderella by Marissa Meyer. It's been entertaining so far, but a subtle book this is not.

I've also picked up A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik from the library. She's a great writer, so I'm looking forward to it.

[The Marquis de Leech]

10 hours ago, Zorral said:

It was H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain figure that much of Indy was based upon.

Though Haggard and Doyle were friends.

I meant in the sense of Evil People from the Subcontinent versus Good Heroic White People - an ugly side of the Temple of Doom, and an ugly side of The Sign of Four. Again, it's not the sort of thing one associates with Doyle. The Sign of Four was just unexpected like that, though to be fair to Doyle, an 1890 interpretation of the Indian Mutiny - then within living memory - would be rather different from a modern one.

(And to be fair to Rider Haggard, he's pretty OK for his time period too).

[The Marquis de Leech]

15 hours ago, Zorral said:

Thank you. This helps, though it isn't what I'm really looking for.

Something like the recent biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, that interweaves his work as a poet with all the political, religious, military, and cultural platforms in England and Europe among which he was working and living.

I can't point you to any written sources along those lines, but if it helps, here is a ten minute YouTube video, which tries to put Confucius' life in some historical context:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOGoHnU4LDM

[HexMachina]

7 hours ago, Starkess said:

I finally finished The Dark Forest. The second half went much quicker than the first. It's really more philosophical thought experiment than novel in some ways. The characters are mere mouthpieces and plot-pushers, and the story doesn't really flow in a very readable way. But it was an interesting idea, and while I'm not sure I agree with it, I understand the reasoning.

  Reveal hidden contents

That basic conclusion at the end is what seems like a giant version of the prisoner's dilemma, wherein any civilization (benign or not) that knows of another civilization (benign or not) must destroy it just in case. I would think that not all civilizations would have the same resource requirements, exponential growth forever is not a given, and this is a rather simplistic reasoning that surely would not hold as a universal maxim.

I also finished listening to The Girls by Emma Cline. This is a fictionalized story about a cult murder in the 60s--which I think means the Manson cult? Not sure. Anyway it's a very dark story of obsession and possession and how far someone will go. I found it dark and fascinating, although I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone. The main story is interwoven with some present day scenes of the main character showing how this brief period in her life really shaped and stunted her. I found it incredibly sad.

Now I am listening to Cinder, a sci-fi retelling based on Cinderella by Marissa Meyer. It's been entertaining so far, but a subtle book this is not.

I've also picked up A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik from the library. She's a great writer, so I'm looking forward to it.

I enjoy Novik's other books I've read but found A Deadly Education a struggle, and the writing was disappointing compared to her other stuff. The plot itself was fine but it's not a series I think I would continue.

Based a recommendation by X-ray, I'm reading Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. I also got a few other books that were on sale to queue up to read including Harrow the Ninth, Dune and Once and Future Witches

[Plessiez]

I read A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher a couple of days ago.  I quite liked it, and I can see why it made so many people's best-of-year lists, though I'm not sure it would have made mine.  There's a strange tension between the parts of the book that want to be a fun YA adventure about a magical baker and the parts that are about ordinary people being persecuted or neglected by authority figures, and sometimes the balance between those two different aspects didn't quite work for me.

I'm now about a third of the way into The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart. I don't think I've seen this mentioned on the board, but I've seen it recommended in a few other places online. (I thought I'd seen Alix E. Harrow write something nice about it, actually, but I can't track that down now.)

It's okay so far, though I'm slightly worried by the number of different POVs, especially as none of them appear to have much connection to each other yet.  (I'm reminded a bit of my struggles with J. V. Jones's A Sword from Red Ice earlier this year.)  But still some way to go yet.

After that, I'm hoping to get through two more books before the end of the year, both of which have been mentioned in this thread (or its predecessors): Robert Jackson Bennett's Shorefall and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future.

[bms295]

The wife killed it this Christmas with the book giving. She got me Luna: New Moon by Ian Mcdonald, Ohio by Stephen Markley, Brian Durfee's the Forgetting Moon, and the Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. Im about sixty pages into New Moon and loving it so far.