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Second Quarter 2021 Reading


williamjm

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4 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I'm unfortunately reliant on library books for GMF, and in addition to the ones I have already read, there is only Mr American and McAuslan in the Rough.

Does the New Zealand library system have an equivalent of InterLibrary Loan?  Back in the pre-internet 2.0 day I used ILL to get specific books from libraries in other states here in the States.

ILL is particularly useful for laying your hands on works on history, biography, etc. from university libraries, and Quartered Safe Out Here, for instance, is likely to be found in a college library if anywhere.

Once I asked the local librarian about it, my own access to less popular or well-known works increased hugely.

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I got Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads from the library after hearing praise for it--probably in this thread, though I can't remember from who. Only a few pages in but it's interesting so far!

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I've just started Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone. It seems like the standard coming-of-age fantasy. Same old "farmer/peasant finds out he/she has powers/chosen of the prophecy" thing so far.:thumbsup: But it's good for what it is. I'm entertained and that's all that matters to me right now.

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Read Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. Informative, yet approachable work for someone like me who has a very basic knowledge of Ancient Egypt. May be a bit lacking for more informed readers.

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I read two fairly short novels recently.

The first is a very obscure book by Ouida Crozier, evidently the only thing she ever wrote, called Shadows After Dark. I picked it up at a used book sale several years ago just because I was fascinated by its cover blurb which showed it was a lesbian vampire science fiction novel, which was a rather amazing combination to me. It turned out to be a lesbian vampire AIDS science fiction novel. It was surprisingly well-written for such an obscure book and some of the details of the other world (a planet in another dimension) that the vampires come from were very interesting. I did have some problems with what seemed to be an ethical attitude that it was perfectly OK for the vampires to kill humans while draining them of blood, especially if they were heterosexual men, and some of the very dated information about AIDS (the book was written when the newly discovered virus was still being called HTLV instead of HIV). 

Then I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Though quite short, this was an excellent work which was great fun to read, even though a few episodes were more disturbing than I was expecting. It's hard to describe without spoilers, but this little book about a man in his 50s remembering his fantastic forays into another dimension guarded by the women who live at the end of the lane was one of the best fantasy novels I've read in quite a while.

I have just started a nonfiction book by Lawrence Wright titled Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.  I am only about 20% into it and still on the part which is mostly a biography of L. Ron Hubbard. I hadn't learned so many details about him before. So far I can say that Hubbard's personality was a lot like Donald Trump's, but he was much more intelligent and had a gift for language. I think the world is actually lucky Hubbard decided to found a new religion instead of go into politics. 

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I just started listening to N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. I was excited to get this one because it had some buzz and I've enjoyed Jemisin's past work. This one so far is not doing it for me at all, about an hour into the audiobook. It's not that it's bad, but I just don't really like this genre. Not sure what to call it--modern urban fantasy or something? It reminds me of China Mieville whose books I could also never get into. Debating whether I'll continue on with it or not.

Oh and it's definitely one of those books that is like...overly fond of NYC? There's a whole slew of movies/books/TV shows/musicals that have this conceit, and I find it a bit tedious. 

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3 hours ago, Starkess said:

I just started listening to N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. I was excited to get this one because it had some buzz and I've enjoyed Jemisin's past work. This one so far is not doing it for me at all, about an hour into the audiobook. It's not that it's bad, but I just don't really like this genre. Not sure what to call it--modern urban fantasy or something? It reminds me of China Mieville whose books I could also never get into. Debating whether I'll continue on with it or not.

Oh and it's definitely one of those books that is like...overly fond of NYC? There's a whole slew of movies/books/TV shows/musicals that have this conceit, and I find it a bit tedious. 

What is the reading equivalent of ‘I like New York City but I wouldn’t want to live there.’? Maybe just skim the best parts and then speak of it knowingly when it comes up in conversation. :lol: 

 

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After a long slog, I finally finished City of Blades, book 2 of the Divine Cities series.  In City of Stairs, book 1, the worldbuilding was creative, fresh, and interesting, and the characters were dynamic and fun to read about.  Then, in CoB, the worldbuilding felt convoluted, and most of the characters were uninteresting.  Also, the plot was too heavy for me personally.  I wasn't really in a mood to read about regrets over past mistakes, the strained relationship between a father and daughter, or the attempts to redefine the duties of a soldier.

I'm not sure what I'll read next, but the Discworld thread has me interested in that universe again.

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Last night I started Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera -- who is one of the UK's citizens of Sikh heritage*, whose credentials lean more toward his literary career than that of an historian.  Thus it means his research isn't original, i.e. mining ancient records from East Indian Company House, but it reads very well, structurally and information-wise.  Though he may not have done that sort of original research, still he's a done a great deal into what is known, and put it into succinct, easy-to-read narrative.  Not to mention that I, at least, don't know everything he's writes about in detail, even if I do know a lot of it in (very) broad outline.

* A point of interest, perhaps, to those of us mentioning Sikhs this weekend in the International thread on the political forum.

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21 hours ago, Starkess said:

I just started listening to N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. I was excited to get this one because it had some buzz and I've enjoyed Jemisin's past work. This one so far is not doing it for me at all

It took me quite a while to get into that one, but it was worth it. I'd recommend pushing on.

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Finished Metamorphoses, by Ovid. It was the two volume century-old Miller translation... a tad literal for my taste, but still perfectly serviceable (one got the impression that Miller thought the reader ought to be reading Ovid in the original Latin, and that the English was there to help the doofuses).

For those unaware, Metamorphoses is Ovid jamming together a vast array of Greek myths, to ostensibly tell the story of the world from the Creation to the death of Julius Caesar. As the name suggests, he's interested in those myths that show change in some way, while a recurring theme is gods and men being turned crazy by Love. Because it's Ovid (a political exile), there's also the subtext that all gods are bastards, and by extension, his final comparison of Augustus to Jupiter is not a flattering one.

Anyway, some of the myths that jumped out to me:

- The one where Hermes and Apollo tag-team rape a sleeping woman. One expects this sort of behaviour from Zeus and Poseidon... but Hermes a rapist? That's a bit different. In fact, Ovid goes out of his way to demonise all the gods, not simply Zeus... it's a poem with lots and lots of rape.

- The Scylla gets a backstory.

- Adonis' gloriously messed-up family backstory, which I wasn't aware of when reading Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.

- Orpheus gives up on women after he fails to rescue Eurydice... and turns to the "tender boys" of Thrace instead. I am actually unsure if this is Ovid (a Roman) having a go at Greek cultural norms, but dear god, it makes for icky reading.

- The ones Shakespeare straight-out stole.

I also think that Tolkien having Elwing turn into a bird in The Silmarillion is a shout-out to Ovid. Ovid has lots and lots of cases of people becoming birds (and plants/trees).

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Ovid's awesome. Poeta urbanissimus :) An internet troll two thousand years before there were internet trolls. It's also worth reading his Ars Amatoria, a collection of ironic love elegies occasionally credited with nuking love elegies as a genre. 

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Years ago, I received Ken Follett's World Without End for my birthday. I think I read it once, then once again during a particularly long field exercise during my military service (I was in a logistics unit. Our work mostly consisted of sitting in our truck, waiting for orders). This Christmas, my aunt gave me Pillars of the Earth, of which the former book is a standalone sequel. Now I've read them both back-to-back.

As I said, the books are connected, as in that they take place in the same medieval English town of Kingsbridge, but two hundred years apart. I think the author makes a really good effort to describe daily life in the middle ages, although I understand that some of the details are way off. At least he got the architecture and engineering right, which is a major part of both books. They both feature a builder as a main character.

Having read the first book, I now understand how many callbacks the second book has. Characters from the first book are constantly brought up and alluded to, as if everyone knows their story, 200 years later. Even the rather insignificant brother of the first book's main character (he is noted by a character in the second book to have been insignificant in-universe as well, but somehow remembered anyway). There are also a ton of similarities between the plots: A builder as a main character, his evil brother with a penchant for raping, a woman who makes it through life through determination and ingenuity, and the scheming of monastery politics. It's as if the author had so much fun writing the first book he wanted to do it again, but split up some characters (Caris and Gwenda both have clear traits of the first book's Aliena), merged others (Ralph of the second book is basically a mix of William and Alfred from the first book), and flipped some (Godwyn the prior is the diametric opposite of Philip). The (re)building of the cathedral in Kingsbridge is also a major plot point in both books.

I've heard there is a third novel as well, set about two hundred years after World Without End again. I think I'll have a look at that one too. 

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19 hours ago, Zorral said:

Last night I started Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera -- who is one of the UK's citizens of Sikh heritage*, whose credentials lean more toward his literary career than that of an historian.  Thus it means his research isn't original, i.e. mining ancient records from East Indian Company House, but it reads very well, structurally and information-wise.  Though he may not have done that sort of original research, still he's a done a great deal into what is known, and put it into succinct, easy-to-read narrative.  Not to mention that I, at least, don't know everything he's writes about in detail, even if I do know a lot of it in (very) broad outline.

* A point of interest, perhaps, to those of us mentioning Sikhs this weekend in the International thread on the political forum.

Didn't we discuss Sanghera a few weeks ago...? 

Plus... 

Not to be confused with Satnam Singh, first Indian origin NBA BB pro. 

Issued in public interest by TLW&Co. 

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4 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

Didn't we discuss Sanghera a few weeks ago.

Enforcing the value of reading these sorts of books, for those of us who wish to be better informed in these matters. Be assured, nothing nefarious intended.

 

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I gave it another hour or so on the audiobook, but in the end decided to give up on The City We Became. Just not my thing!

I decided to give Turtles All the Way Down by John Green a shot next. Don't think I've read any of his work, so not really sure what to expect. But I like the title!

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18 hours ago, dog-days said:

Ovid's awesome. Poeta urbanissimus :) An internet troll two thousand years before there were internet trolls. It's also worth reading his Ars Amatoria, a collection of ironic love elegies occasionally credited with nuking love elegies as a genre. 

Hmm, wouldn't it be Amores? If you mean the series of double poems with lovers writing to each other, say Ulysses or Theseus writing "Oh sorry about leaving you and not catching up for the last 3 years, so how are you on your lonely island?" who then gets roasted by the girl they took advantage of and left without a second thought.

Ars amatoria is the quite amusing original pick-up artist's guidebook on how to get girls. For a change, the last part is advices to the ladies on how to flirt and hook the guys.

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9 hours ago, Zorral said:

Enforcing the value of reading these sorts of books, for those of us who wish to be better informed in these matters. Be assured, nothing nefarious intended.

 

Got it. Now I remember, it was comparing views on imperialism with him and Shashi Tharoor. Forgot the name of my Irish friend. Was it by any chance you? 

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5 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Hmm, wouldn't it be Amores? If you mean the series of double poems with lovers writing to each other, say Ulysses or Theseus writing "Oh sorry about leaving you and not catching up for the last 3 years, so how are you on your lonely island?" who then gets roasted by the girl they took advantage of and left without a second thought.

Ars amatoria is the quite amusing original pick-up artist's guidebook on how to get girls. For a change, the last part is advices to the ladies on how to flirt and hook the guys.

Yep, you're right. Long time since I read either!

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