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Third Quarter 2021 Reading


williamjm

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I finished Arkady Mantine's A Memory Called Empire yesterday and wow that's a hell of a debut novel. I'm definitely gonna be picking up the second one soon. I really loved the exploration of cultural imperialism, of the struggle of being rather in love with and wanting to belong within culture that sees you as other, and wishes to consume your own - Mahit's complex and evolving relationship with Teixcalaan was really the centrepiece of the novel for me.

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I'm currently slogging my way through the complete prose fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. While most of it is of questionable quality, it really is a reminder that Poe's association with Gothic Horror is actually something of an historical accident. Most of his stuff is comedy and satire, with even the occasional venture into early science-fiction.

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This past weekend I listened to Dave Duncan's The Reluctant Swordsman while I cleaned up the mess from the monsoon storms.

This was my first exposure to Dave Duncan, and after finishing it, my impression that he is to high fantasy (or maybe portal fantasy) what E.C. Tubb is to Science Fiction.  Both are British writers who wrote clean, competent prose of a type more popular back in the Golden Age.  But these guys wrote right up to the very recent past, creating stories of a type whose heights of popularity had waned long before.  Good writers putting out books that were decades after their time.

Anyway, The Reluctant Swordsman is a neat, well-written portal fantasy.  Some parts of it veer close to the realm of wish fulfillment, but then the story shows how the dicey bits actually fit within the world-building, so I will excuse it.  It isn't very long, either, and the plot only covers what GRRM would consider to be the opening chapter of the story, which is another hallmark of a previous generation's style.

I will likely pick up the next book, The Coming of Wisdom, to see what happens next.  Also, just to gaze upon those 80s-tastic covers, wow - how did I miss these back in the day?

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Dave was Scots-Canadian, not British, moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen after finishing school in Scotland.  I enjoyed a lovely e-mail correspondence with him in the earlier years of internet during which e-mail was the thing.  He was in every way one of the nicest people I've known.

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I just read (listened to) The Lies of Locke Lamora.

I was much more satisfied with the book about midway through than I am here at the end. It was good. Plenty of world building and interesting characters, plus much about the various deceits played out well. But a good bit of the manner in which everything played out in the second-half felt more plot-armory and less well-crafted. There just wasn't enough for me to suspend my disbelief when peril was escaped and everything got tied up in a nice, little bow.

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5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Dave was Scots-Canadian, not British, moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen after finishing school in Scotland.  I enjoyed a lovely e-mail correspondence with him in the earlier years of internet during which e-mail was the thing.  He was in every way one of the nicest people I've known.

I loved Dave Duncan's books, The Seventh Sword trilogy, the Man of His Word books, the King's Blades, and a bunch of his stand alone books.   I kind of lost track of him when my local book store closed and couldn't browse the shelves regularly, so didn't realize how much he has produced in the last dozen years, will have to delve back in.  

The month of July for me has mainly been a Michael Connelly binge.  Bosch ended on Amazon Prime, so decided to finally read his books.   Have read the first dozen Bosch books as well as some of the related Lincoln Lawyer and Jack McEvoy books.  Liking them a lot and can see where the TV series has touched on a lot of the different cases in the books, though not quite in the same order and with some characters blended or shifted around a bit. 

Had a couple of breaks waiting for Connelly books on hold at the library, so also read the 5th installment of Christian Cameron's Chivalry Series, Hawkwood's Sword, which was great return to the wars and politics in medieval Italy.

Then I read another historical tale with a twist, Patricia Anthony's God's Fires, dealing with aliens arriving in Portugal during the time of the Inquisition, with the peasants, priests, nobles, and Kings in the 1600's trying to mesh an alien visitation with their faith and experience. 

Waiting for more library books, so just started The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross, the first book in the Laundry  Files series about a a British government agency trying to prevent Lovecraftian horrors from finding a way into our universe.  I've read some of the other books in the series, just missed this one, love the humor and horror mix.

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I finished Tom Franklin's Smonk. I preferred his Hell at the Breech and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Smonk was fun and entertaining, in an outlandishly graphic way. Extremely violent, but plenty of humor thrown in.

Now diving back into Goldsworthy's Pax Romana.

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Currently a good way into The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. An extremely readable book, and fascinating. It's disturbing how many ways those times mirror our own times. 

Also on the nonfiction front, finished Rare Earth. Fantastic, educational read, though some of it is outdated and the premise itself is of course controversial to say the least. And I read Plentiful Energy by Charles Till and Yoon Chang, about the Integral Fast Reactor (the namesake of my handle). Really excellent personal accounts about the early years of Argonne National Lab, and the nearly limitless excitement of invention in the field of reactor development before environmentalists delivered a fatal gunshot to the hope of a habitable environment by quelling nuclear (admittedly a not wholly unprejudiced hot take, but I'm going to have to live in the world their ignorance produced, so I'm allowing myself some bitterness).

On the fiction front, since the last update I read Jurassic Park, Without Remorse, Catch 22 and A Confederacy of Dunces. All at least decently fun books. The latter two I absolutely loved. Modern classics tend to be a gamble for me, but those two books are hilarious.

I also read Project Hail Mary. Wonderfully exciting book. The author seems to be unable to write characters well, so it's basically Mark Watney vs space bacteria, but the real draw is the ingenuity of the problem solving, which is quite clever. I'm also impressed by how scientifically grounded Weir kept the book, considering the exotic premise. Some license was taken of course, but he avoided leaning too deeply in mystical science.

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Continuing to read aloud with Partner at night before lights out, Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400 – 1000 (2009). We are both learning a great deal, and enjoying every bit.

On my own I've started Byzantine scholar, Judith Herrin's Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (2021). It covers some of the same ground as the Wickham history, but with a much more narrow focus, of course, centering a particular city as it does.

I'm also reading two works of fiction, for the first time in a while:  Zakiya Dalila Harris's The Other Black Girl (2021) -- review here [paywall]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/books/review/the-other-black-girl-zakiya-dalila-harris.html 

which is sad, and uncomfortable, plus Bernard Knight's The Noble Knight, Book 11 in the Thomas Crowner Mystery series (2020), totally in my comfort-escapist zone.

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2 hours ago, The_Lone_Wolf said:

Never got around to it. Is it worth the hype? I hate how expectations ruin things. 

I'm not going to talk it up here because you're right, expectations do ruin things. But I do advise you to read it a.s.a.p. so you can get to it before the pile of expectations reaches impossible heights. It's clever and funny, and manages to be so in the vicinity of topics that are deadly serious. 

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10 hours ago, The_Lone_Wolf said:

Never got around to it. Is it worth the hype? I hate how expectations ruin things. 

I agree with dog-days, I wouldn't think about the hype. It actually seems to be a somewhat divisive book. I'd say pick it up and read the first 50 pages. If you don't like it, don't bother with the rest because it maintains a pretty consistent identity throughout. 

I personally found the absurdist humor very entertaining, and thought the end managed to achieve a surprisingly effective pathos.

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On 7/26/2021 at 11:15 AM, Ser Not Appearing said:

I just read (listened to) The Lies of Locke Lamora.

I was much more satisfied with the book about midway through than I am here at the end. It was good. Plenty of world building and interesting characters, plus much about the various deceits played out well. But a good bit of the manner in which everything played out in the second-half felt more plot-armory and less well-crafted. There just wasn't enough for me to suspend my disbelief when peril was escaped and everything got tied up in a nice, little bow.

I loved the book but I agree.  It turned into a Hollywood thriller by the end.

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Finally, FINALLY managed to finish Dune after two previous, aborted attempts to do so. Honestly, it was quite good. Herbert's imagination and creativity is the clear standout here, but his writing is also quite good as well... once you get used to it. I know that that was my primary hang-up on my prior reads, but going in this time, aware of it and ready for it, it wasn't so bad. Overall, a good read, I'm glad I got it done before the movie came out and I'm even kinda tempted to dig into the sequels... eventually maybe. I have a bunch of stuff I want to read first so maybe not for a while.

That said, I've had an urge to reread a bunch of stuff that I read when I was much, much younger so I'm planning on doing a reread of the China Mieville Bad-Lag books, the Assassin trilogy by Robin Hobb, the first couple of Malazan books culminating in a full read through (I quite on Bonehunters some years ago so I definitely need a refresh), and possibly, if I have time, a reread of Tad William's Otherland and CS Friedman's The Coldfire Trilogy. I'm really interested in seeing how well some of these hold up in the ten years or so since I first read them.

Speaking of being old, holy fuck, Perdido Street Station was released in 2000? Fuck me. This one's first up on the reread pile and I'm pretty confident this one will hold up well if not get better with age.

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14 hours ago, Durckad said:

Speaking of being old, holy fuck, Perdido Street Station was released in 2000? Fuck me. This one's first up on the reread pile and I'm pretty confident this one will hold up well if not get better with age.

I was JUST thinking about PSS and The Scar, am definitely going to put them on the list for this year and re-read.

Just started Exhalation by Chianti, and The Copenhagen Trilogy by Ditlevsen, and still working through a book of native nations poetry and a self-help book called “the tools”

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On 7/31/2021 at 2:24 PM, VigoTheCarpathian said:

I was JUST thinking about PSS and The Scar, am definitely going to put them on the list for this year and re-read.

It's kinda strange, back in the day, the Bas-Lag books were critically lauded and Mieville was continually heralded as the next big thing. Now? It seems like they're barely talked about anymore, which is too bad because there's still nothing quite like them out there.

17 hours ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

I've tried rereading books from my earlier fantasy youth. It never goes well.

Eh, really depends upon what it is.

I've reread Tolkien (the first fantasy series I ever read), Martin (read the first 3 in high school), and Gaiman's Neverwhere (the first urban fantasy I ever read. Hell, even the cheapo BBC version was quite enjoyable) and all have held up rather well.

That said, I doubt the spate of D&D novels I read around the same time would be all that enjoyable nowadays and even Wheel of Time did not hold up well at all to modern me so I think there's a shot some of my old favorites might still end up being enjoyable nowadays. Only one way to find out.

This will also be a good way to figure out which ones I can safely purge from my library and make space for other books I don't really need.

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56 minutes ago, Durckad said:

It's kinda strange, back in the day, the Bas-Lag books were critically lauded and Mieville was continually heralded as the next big thing. Now? It seems like they're barely talked about anymore, which is too bad because there's still nothing quite like them out there.

Yes - I think if Mieville had put out a Bas-Lag book every few years, a younger me would have been very happy.  It was unique, and I tore through them, and the short story, in days.  The closest thing to them I’ve found has been in graphic novels, Monstress and Saga.

56 minutes ago, Durckad said:

I've reread Tolkien (the first fantasy series I ever read), Martin (read the first 3 in high school), and Gaiman's Neverwhere (the first urban fantasy I ever read. Hell, even the cheapo BBC version was quite enjoyable) and all have held up rather well.

That said, I doubt the spate of D&D novels I read around the same time would be all that enjoyable nowadays and even Wheel of Time did not hold up well at all to modern me so I think there's a shot some of my old favorites might still end up being enjoyable nowadays. Only one way to find out.

This will also be a good way to figure out which ones I can safely purge from my library and make space for other books I don't really need.

I’ve kept and reread my Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, along with my Sandman graphic novels and GRRM.  Wheel of Time and Malazan got purged in a move, because of volume, and i sort of regret that, because I likely wouldn’t reread without them at hand.

A friend dropped off a set of the Eddings Belgariad, and some of the dragon lance and forgotten realms books he had found in storage we consumed like mad in late middle school…and man, it was like rewatching the original He-Man.  Just…so bad.

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