Fourth Quarter 2021 Reading

[Teng Ai Hui]

Recently, I finished The Flame Bearer, book 10 of The Saxon Tales. It was good but not as good as I had hoped. For me, this series (both the books and the tv show) is better when Uhtred is fighting against Danes / Norsemen rather than the people of Englaland.  Regardless, I was glad to see that Uhtred's journey finally came full circle.

There was some discussion about Charles Stross recently.  That made me want to read The Family Trade, book 1 of Merchant Princes.  Currently, I'm 15% into it.

[Peadar]

6 hours ago, Teng Ai Hui said:

There was some discussion about Charles Stross recently.  That made me want to read The Family Trade, book 1 of Merchant Princes.  Currently, I'm 15% into it.

I enjoyed this series a lot, although I had to skim whenever he did a recap of what had happened in previous books.

[Astromech]

I finished Alberto Angela's The Reach of Rome. Very interesting voyage through The Roman Empire during the end of Trajan's reign. Angela follows a Roman coin as it passes through the hands of various characters throughout the Roman Empire from one end to the other, highlighting various aspects of daily life in the Empire at the time. The characters and stories are mainly fictional but based on archaeological evidence and records.

[williamjm]

I read Naomi Novik's The Last Graduate, the second book in her Scholomance trilogy. I enjoyed it as much as the first book in the series, and I liked that while it started off continuing on in the obvious way from the ending of the first book it did after a while change direction to a less obvious and more interesting plot. I thought the secondary characters were developed more than in the first book and while the plot is still very focused on El she does have to rely on others a lot more and although she sets the plot in the second half into motion she isn't the one that comes up with the key revelation about how to make things work out. There are occasional times, particularly early in the book, where it does verge on getting bogged down in exposition about how some aspect of the magical society works, but other than that I thought it was well-paced. I'm definitely curious about where the final book is going to go, not so much in terms of resolving the immediate cliffhanger that this book but also about what is going to be a longer-term solution to the overall plot.

I then read P Djeli Clark's novella Ring Shout. It's set in in the 1920s Deep South which is an unusual setting for a fantasy story. Having never read any H.P. Lovecraft stories the recent trend for revisionist Lovecraftian stories do sometimes have the tendency to make me feel I'm missing something by not being familiar with what they are reacting against but I thought this stood-alone better than some other examples. It did have some memorable monsters in it, although I think the Night Doctors were possibly creepier than the actual antagonists were. I thought the story had good momentum, sometimes novellas feel like they have a novel's worth of plot crammed into a smaller page count but I think this was about the right length.

[Peadar]

I'm halfway through The Owl Service by Alan Garner. I'm amazed I never heard of this writer growing up, but there you are...

[dog-days]

Would be interested to hear more of your impressions. I read the Welsh language translation, and think I got most of it, but it's quite a difficult book to pin down. I've had a quote from it stuck in my head for years: "She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls." 

Alan Garner's just brought out a new book. It reminded me that I still haven't read the most recent of the Brisingamen trilogy Boneland (and since I was under ten when I read the first two books, and retain very little impression of them, I should probably go back to those too.) 

[williamjm]

3 hours ago, Peadar said:

I'm halfway through The Owl Service by Alan Garner. I'm amazed I never heard of this writer growing up, but there you are...

The Weirdstone of Bringsamen was on of my favourite books as a child.

[Peadar]

11 hours ago, dog-days said:

Would be interested to hear more of your impressions. I read the Welsh language translation, and think I got most of it, but it's quite a difficult book to pin down. I've had a quote from it stuck in my head for years: "She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls." 

Alan Garner's just brought out a new book. It reminded me that I still haven't read the most recent of the Brisingamen trilogy Boneland (and since I was under ten when I read the first two books, and retain very little impression of them, I should probably go back to those too.) 

I wouldn't mind reading it in Welsh either, except I have forgotten almost every bit of the language I used to know -- I can still talk about the weather, just almost! 

It's a strange book. There is very little of the hand-holding I've gotten used to in more recent books and the language of the day, both the Welsh and the English slang can be hard to follow too. But it has a wonderful atmosphere and sense of place. My main problem, is I don't really like any of the characters. Gwyn is the one I'm supposed to sympathise with, and I do! But his behaviour towards Alison isn't the best.

[Caligula_K3]

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.

[Wilbur]

18 hours ago, Peadar said:

I'm halfway through The Owl Service by Alan Garner. I'm amazed I never heard of this writer growing up, but there you are...

Count me in as one of the people who is interested in your impressions of the book.  Garner's stuff is very unique, and he was also a pretty singular individual.

[Peadar]

6 hours ago, Wilbur said:

Count me in as one of the people who is interested in your impressions of the book.  Garner's stuff is very unique, and he was also a pretty singular individual.

I think he's still alive! The book was good. One paragraph near the end was an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. Not so sure about the ending, which felt very abrupt to me.

[Wilbur]

2 minutes ago, Peadar said:

I think he's still alive! The book was good. One paragraph near the end was an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. Not so sure about the ending, which felt very abrupt to me.

Nice to hear.  He absolutely has his own, unique voice.

I agree about the ending of The Owl Service - it strongly recalls the ending of M.R. James' The Five Jars, whose catch-phrase of, "And that, my dear, is how I learned to speak with the owls" became our family motto for all non-plus situations.

[dog-days]

9 hours ago, Peadar said:

I think he's still alive! The book was good. One paragraph near the end was an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. Not so sure about the ending, which felt very abrupt to me.

Yes, I think the writing and atmosphere are the dominant elements of the book - the plot and characters, not so much. Just been reading an article "Tomorrow will be beyond all imagining" by Cat Ashton. She writes:

Quote

Garner's books are less explicit, but they, too, posit a world in which magic is not the most appropriate or most useful tool with which to engage the present-day world. It is true that Garner has written at length of the value of myth, and the young protagonists of The Weird-stone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath enjoy their adventures with the wizard of Alderley Edge.⁹ However, in the two later books, Elidor and The Owl Service, the fantasy element is intrusive, disruptive, and dangerous. Safeguarding the Treasures of Elidor interferes with the lives of the protagonists and makes them the objects of pursuit and attack; and a moment of wonder, the encounter with the unicorn Findhorn, is eclipsed by its violent death. In The Owl Service, as the myth of Blodeuwedd works on Roger, Gwyn, and Alison, the atmosphere of the story becomes one of claustrophobia and impending doom, and the conclusion suggests that the cycle will ensnare future generations as well (Sullivan 48). Both novels end abruptly when the magic loses its hold; and in both cases, the effect is relief, rather than triumph. 

ETA: Cat Ashton does some really fascinating research. Just been reading this interview with her on the fiction of white Christian evangelicals.

[Wilbur]

This morning I finished off the third book in Peter F. Hamilton's Greg Mandel Trilogy, The Nano Flower.

Once again, this book has an atmosphere that strongly tastes of William Gibson's Neuromancer.  The structure also feels like it walks down the same path, with technologists walking down the plot to an ultimate showdown with a new being/intelligence/lifeform.

For me, this book is better than A Quantum Murder, and not quite on the level of Mindstar Rising.  The familiar characters have grown and matured, and the problems they face, both interpersonal and technological, are more serious and of greater import.

I remember reviewers complaining about the length, but I liked the stretches of introspection and explicit consideration of the past, of options, and of the feelings of others.  I felt like it gave the story a little room to breathe, and this is what improved the experience of it for me.

The biggest problem for me within all three of the stories is the reliance upon filing a patent as the end-all and be-all target for business success.  That isn't how ideation really works, nor is filing a patent claim the final step for business success or untold wealth.  I'm a Motorolan, ask me how I know.

Finally, the text does include a couple of direct critiques of unfettered capitalism, which I suppose are a reaction to the first two books lack of critical thought about the power of crony capitalism.

Good stuff.  I listened to the audiobook, and Toby Longworth is an excellent reader.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Wilbur said:

I remember reviewers complaining about the length,

Which is a really big difference between the two writers; Bill writes slender books.

[Starkess]

I've been enjoying listening to Justin Cronin's The Passage, but it's feeling really long. I was just thinking earlier today that it feels like the first section could have been a book of its own and feeling a bit lost about where this book is actually going in terms of the overall plot...only to check and see that I'm less than halfway through? Phew!

[Zorral]

David Graeber, author of  Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and David Wengrow , cited Ursula Le Guin in a NYT guest essay, "Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World" -- Graeber's final book (he died), in company with Wengrow, has just been published to quite a bit of attention: The Dawn of Everything.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history.html

Quote

 

.... Yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up in scholarship. When they do, academics tend to call them “mega-sites” rather than cities, a kind of euphemism that signals to a wider audience that they should not be thought of as proper cities but as villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some even refer to them outright as “overgrown villages.” How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins? Why has anyone with even a passing interest in the origin of cities heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost no one of Taljanky or Nebelivka?

It’s hard here not to recall Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” about an imaginary city that also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as “simple,” but in fact these citizens of Omelas were “not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.” The trouble is just that we have a bad habit of “considering happiness as something rather stupid.”

Le Guin had a point. Obviously, we have no idea how relatively happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidanetske or Nebelivka were, compared with the steppe-lords who covered nearby landscapes with treasure-filled mounds, or even the servants ritually sacrificed at their funerals (though we can guess). And as anyone who has read the story knows, Omelas had some problems, too. ....

 

 

[LongRider]

23 hours ago, Zorral said:

David Graeber, author of  Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and David Wengrow , cited Ursula Le Guin in a NYT guest essay, "Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World" -- Graeber's final book (he died), in company with Wengrow, has just been published to quite a bit of attention: The Dawn of Everything.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history.html

 

I read Debt several years ago and got a lot out of it, though a reread might be in order.  I didn’t know about the new book, thanks for posting.  Was very saddened when I learned of his death. 
Will see about reading the new one too.  Actually, I should just explore more of his writing.   

 

  

[Zorral]

3 minutes ago, LongRider said:

 I didn’t know about the new book, thanks for posting.  Was very saddened when I learned of his death. 

For me it's always a great delight to share this kind of information with people who for many reasons may not run into it!  So, thank you!

[TheLastWolf]

Read the unabridged Anne Frank diary finally....phew...I can't believe how I got through my teens.