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Fourth Quarter 2021 Reading


ljkeane

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On 11/2/2021 at 8:27 AM, Caligula_K3 said:

The new book (and final one in the Babel series) by Josiah Bancroft just arrived! I'm very excited to read it. After starting the first chapter though, I realized that I remember way too little of the first three books. So re-read time it is, starting with Senlin Ascends.

There are very good summaries online for the first two books but nothing for Hod King. I'm only going to re-read if I feel I'm lost. The small summary at the beginning does help a bit. A few chapters in. loving it.

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16 hours ago, Quinze said:

There are very good summaries online for the first two books but nothing for Hod King. I'm only going to re-read if I feel I'm lost. The small summary at the beginning does help a bit. A few chapters in. loving it.

Glad to hear that it's great! It had been so long since I read the first two that I figured I would just enjoy the fourth more if I remembered everything. And they're such a pleasure to re-read too. I love his prose.

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For the first time in my life, I'm reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth. I watched this as a TV series when I was very young indeed, but it may well have been the thing that first got me interested in ancient Rome. Very good so far, apart from one horrifically cringy comparison of a slave and a puppy. 

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It's been a while since I posted in this thread. Since my last post the fiction I've read has been:

Touched by Magic, a fantasy by Doranna Durgin where the main character is literally "allergic" to the magic in his world -- and so knows when someone near him is performing magic even though he himself doesn't have that talent. In his world magic has been outlawed but some are trying to revive it. This book was a good way to pass the time but wasn't particularly memorable.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor, a literary novel that I read along with the older gay men's book club I've joined. This book was nominated for several prizes. It's very autobiographical -- the viewpoint character is a gay male African-American graduate student of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, who grew up poor in Alabama, and those characteristics also describe the author. It's a very "interior" novel, where even though it's not told in first person focuses almost entirely on the interior emotional reactions of the main character over the course of a week-end where he ends up having an affair with a supposedly "straight" friend. I found it well-written but the main character's passivity would be frustrating to many readers. It does give some excellent descriptions about what being a graduate student is like, though.

Hild by Nicola Griffith, a historical novel based on the first two decades of the life of St. Hilda of Whitby, who lived in 7th century England. I thought this was the best of the novels in this selection. Griffith obviously did a great deal of research to try to accurately portray what life would have been like for the niece of a king of one of the small kingdoms England was then divided into.  There was a good bit of court intrigue -- the book got advertized as a "real history" version of Game of Thrones, though it isn't as graphic in its depiction of violence. I was very surprised at how and where Griffith chose to end the book. She was planning on writing a sequel, but has never published that, evidently partly because she developed multiple sclerosis. I hope she is eventually able to finish the next book as I'd like to see how she takes Hild up to the point where she became a nun at age 33, after which we know much more about her life in terms of real history. I'd recommend Hild to anyone who likes historical fiction.

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. This was the second novel about the character "Death" in Pratchett's Discworld series. I thought it was better than Mort, the first "Death" novel. The last part of the novel features, of all things, animated metal grocery carts, which I found out through this book are called "trolleys" in British English. For most of the book the character of Death has been demoted and is living as a "real man" called Bill Door, though he actually is still a skeleton, with small children able to see him for what he is and adults perceiving him as just very thin. :)  Unlike other "Death takes a holiday" tales, in this one people are still dying, but because Death is not helping them to "the other side" their spirits hang around and create all sorts of poltergeist effects. A fun little read. 

 

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3 hours ago, Ormond said:

It's been a while since I posted in this thread. Since my last post the fiction I've read has been:

 

Hild by Nicola Griffith, a historical novel based on the first two decades of the life of St. Hilda of Whitby, who lived in 7th century England. I thought this was the best of the novels in this selection. Griffith obviously did a great deal of research to try to accurately portray what life would have been like for the niece of a king of one of the small kingdoms England was then divided into.  There was a good bit of court intrigue -- the book got advertized as a "real history" version of Game of Thrones, though it isn't as graphic in its depiction of violence. I was very surprised at how and where Griffith chose to end the book. She was planning on writing a sequel, but has never published that, evidently partly because she developed multiple sclerosis. I hope she is eventually able to finish the next book as I'd like to see how she takes Hild up to the point where she became a nun at age 33, after which we know much more about her life in terms of real history. I'd recommend Hild to anyone who likes historical fiction.

 

 

She finished the first draft in Nov 2020, though apparently it is a monster of a book. 

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Griffith has just delivered a new novel, but it's not the Hild sequel. It's another take on the King Arthur milieu, but queer. Expected 04/2022

https://nicolagriffith.com/spear/

https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-spear-by-nicola-griffith/

I loved Hild -- I can hardly describe how happy reading this novel made me.

 

 

 

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I have seen a few cursory posts for "The Fire Sacraments" (Master Assassins and Sidewinders) but I am surprised that there is not more love on here.  The series is exceptional and while it took me a little while in the first book to get used to the style it is a cracking story - well written, interesting characters with a lot of backstory and wit.

 

Well worth investing in and I honestly think it overshadows a number of other well known series.

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On 11/11/2021 at 5:40 PM, Zorral said:

Griffith has just delivered a new novel, but it's not the Hild sequel. It's another take on the King Arthur milieu, but queer. Expected 04/2022

https://nicolagriffith.com/spear/

https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-spear-by-nicola-griffith/

I loved Hild -- I can hardly describe how happy reading this novel made me.

 

 

 

AFIAK the Hild sequel was delivered. I'll have to dig through her blog to see if there has been any update.

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On 11/11/2021 at 11:42 PM, Casual Observer said:

I have seen a few cursory posts for "The Fire Sacraments" (Master Assassins and Sidewinders) but I am surprised that there is not more love on here.  The series is exceptional and while it took me a little while in the first book to get used to the style it is a cracking story - well written, interesting characters with a lot of backstory and wit.

 

Well worth investing in and I honestly think it overshadows a number of other well known series.

Agreed. This is a superb series so far. The first book is especially good IMHO.

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Finished Dean King's The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys, The True Story. Interesting learning more of this famous feud. It was so convoluted. (the feud, that is, not the book).

I found a copy of Andro Linklater's, An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson. I can't recall where exactly I first read about Wilkinson, but I've been looking for this book for a few years now. It would've been easier to just order it online, but I enjoy the hunt for titles in my local bookstores.

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4 hours ago, Astromech said:

An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson.

That was such a valuable read for me during the a period of historical research in the period.  It helped point me toward so much more understanding and description of the significant Spanish role in the French and Indian War, assistance for the colonists in the War of Independence, and then what happens before, during and after the cession of the Louisiana Territory by France to the US -- fury of Spain and England, etc.  Wilkinson was quite a fellow, all right.  France, Spain and England continued to compete via different means in North America as they did before Independence.  This is kind of hard to grasp.  We certainly never got it in course work.  But lordessa, is it fascinating, and helps make some kind of sense out of Aaron Burr's adventuring into the Territory.

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I read Lois McMaster Bujold's latest Penric and Desdemona novella, Knot of Shadows. I really enjoy the series and this is no exception, although it's a comparatively low-key story. It does have an interesting mystery at its heart, although most of the key events have occurred before the start of the story so it's largely about Penric trying to work out the details of what had happened and what can actually be done at this late stage. It's definitely got a melancholy feel to it, I saw a review comparing it to The Mountains of Mourning which Bujold wrote 30-odd years ago and I think that's a good comparison.

I'm now about to start Josiah Bancroft's The Fall of Babel, the fourth and final book in the series.

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I haven't been doing too much reading recently but I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race. Tchaikovsky's good in general but he's particularly good at this sort of imaginatively set short story. I really enjoyed it although I have to say I was definitely left wanting more.

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I loaded Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton onto my iPod for a week of serious hiking and finished it up yesterday.

This is a re-read, and I enjoyed all of PFH's books, and I recall finding this book to be particularly excellent the first time I read it.  On this occasion, however, some of the longer, more discursive passages were kind of slow.  This may be because I already know the information, but what I remembered as a tight, exciting story was a little less taut and thrilling as a result.

I found it interesting that, for a guy that loves his super-rich benevolent protagonists, this book contains some pretty sharp critiques of unfettered crony capitalism's tendencies and darker outcomes.

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