What are you reading? Fourth Quarter 2022

[Peadar]

I have just started The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles. I think I'm going to like it, but early days yet.

[ljkeane]

I finished City of Last Chances too. I liked it quite a lot but I'd agree with dog-days that there were probably a few to many pov characters for any of them to develop much. Still, as is standard for Tchaikovsky, the setting was very interesting and it was a good story. It does feel like something he could go back to.

I also read T. Kingfisher's A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. I was looking for a quick fun read and it was that but there wasn't a lot there to raise it above an okay read.

Next up I'm going to read Ada Palmer's  Too Like the Lightening.

[AncalagonTheBlack]

13 hours ago, Peadar said:

I have just started The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles. I think I'm going to like it, but early days yet.

I read this back in September and really liked it quite a lot. 

FYI, this is the author's first secondary world fantasy. He mainly writes literary fiction under the name Will Wiles.

[baxus]

At the moment, I'm reading A Little Hatred by Abercrombie. I know it's been out for a while but I haven't read as much as I would want for a couple of years now so my to-read pile is a sight to behold. It's a fun read and it's a great choice for getting back into the habit of reading regularly. Hopefully, I keep it up after finishing this book.

[Peadar]

8 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said:

I read this back in September and really liked it quite a lot. 

FYI, this is the author's first secondary world fantasy. He mainly writes literary fiction under the name Will Wiles.

I figured it wasn't his first rodeo. Very well written, but also great worldbuilding so far -- only about a fifth of the way through it.

[Starkess]

I picked up the audiobook Euphoria from the library. I knew literally nothing about it, not even the genre, but it turned out to be a historical fiction about some anthropologists studying native tribes in the 1930s. (I just saw on Goodreads that this is apparently loosely based on a period from the life of Margaret Mead, which I had no idea.) It was a good book but pretty depressing. 

Spoiler

The kind of main overarching arc is about the main character, a talented and intelligent woman, choosing to stay with her abusive husband, including after losing a much-wanted pregnancy due to his violence, until he finally kills her shortly after she decides to leave. Yeah quite the downer!!

I'm almost done with my re-read of The Two Towers. So that'll pretty much do me for 2022!

[bloodsteel bitterraven]

I just finished reading Dune!

[Teng Ai Hui]

I’ve had a lot of bad luck with reading this year, especially during this quarter.  I’ve had 3 failures to launch -- City of Golden Shadow, Locklands, and Interview with the Vampire.

I recently discovered an author named Tom Perrotta.  I’ll probably try one of his books to start the new year.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Atm reading The Tropic of Cancer.

Another one of those books that's been lying on a shelf for a while on my literature bucket list. And yes, I am enjoying the ride.

[Ormond]

I haven't posted here in too long.

Yesterday I finished Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a novel I'd been wanting to read for almost 40 years and finally got around to. I enjoyed it, even though I didn't particularly like the ending and sometimes thought the author was trying to show off his erudition by using too many obscure words. But it was a fascinating exposition of medieval monastic life with some interesting characters, especially the narrator, who is supposedly remembering all the events of the novel as an elderly man thought they happened when he was about 20.

Some other books I read in the last quarter include:

Miles Errant by Lois McMaster Bujold, an omnibus of a novella and two novels in her Vorkosigan series. Bujold is a fine author. I particularly liked the novel Mirror Dance within this volume because it featured Cordelia, the character Miles's mother, who is one of the fictional characters I love the most of all those I've read. She is an amazingly intelligent and perceptive person who manages to maintain her integrity while being married to a man who's a leader in a culture she didn't grow up in which is full of primitive misogynistic and violent beliefs. I actually regret sometimes that she's not a real person I could meet some day.  

We Are The Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson and The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller. I read both of these for the book club I belong to -- they are both YA first person novels with teenage gay male narrators who have major psychiatric issues. Hutchinson's hero deals with his problems of being bullied and poor by developing a delusion he's being regularly kidnapped by aliens, while Miller's becomes anorexic while believing the condition of starving gives him superhero like perceptual powers. They were both very well written, though they certainly surprised me by how much the "F-word" turns up in modern YA novels, especially Ants. As someone who formerly taught abnormal psychology I appreciated their depictions of the protagonists' problems, especially Miller's book, which really does a fine job of showing the cognitions of someone who has anorexia.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, another book I'd wanted to read for ages and finally got around to. It was extremely well written and held my interest, and the Venice-like city Lynch creates is a great example of fantasy world building.  However, I was a bit put off by the nearly complete unrepentant criminality of the culture he created and its characters. It was hard for me to really like Locke Lamora, and his sidekick Jean Tannen and the elderly noblewoman Angiavesta Vorchenza were the only two main characters who seemed to be even partially admirable to me. Still, it was a fascinating enough world that I hope to read the sequels some day. 

 

Edited January 1 by Ormond

[Larry of the Lake]

On 12/26/2022 at 3:23 AM, IFR said:

I was gifted for Christmas Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. I immediately dove in because I really enjoyed previous books by McCarthy, and I found the premise interesting.

The book is a transcription of sessions between a 20 year old genius mathematician and her counselor. The mathematician is schizophrenic and has a host of other mental illnesses. Her father worked on the Manhattan Project.

I'm 21 and though very far from a genius of any kind, I am partial to many of the subjects addressed in this book. Mathematics, physics, the history of science, logic, mathematical Platonism and such are all fascinating subjects.

I didn't get very far into this book before I had to put it down. In just one chapter, there were a few distinct errors that were very distracting.

The character asserts that Einstein, Dirac, et al claimed that Oppenheimer was the smartest person they knew. I doubted this because von Neumann was alive and he was widely regarded by his contemporaries as the single most astonishingly intelligent person of this group. One could argue that this is an understandable mistake of hearsay for anyone to make though.

However, shortly thereafter she mentions that a positron is a particle composed of two up quarks and a down quark. This really annoyed me because that's a proton. A positron is an elementary antiparticle to the negatron (electron). This is basic physics.

And then she mentions that quantum mechanics is fundementally contigent on human consciousness. This is a common misunderstanding of an aspect quantum mechanics known as the observer effect, usually represented through the Schrodinger's cat example. This is not contigent on a human observer, however. Any kind of detector will affect the wave function. Confusing the necessity of human consciousness with the behavior of quanta is quite a blunder for this genius to be making.

At this point I had to put the book down. I enjoyed books like Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country for Old Men because they had lovely prose, and the unbridled sadism and amoral behavior of the characters was really fun. This book was just the pontificating of a character who often didn't know what they were talking about, and certainly made mistakes I highly doubt a genius would make.

Anyway, disappointing, and I needed the catharsis of a rant.

Did you read The Passenger first?  

[RhaenysBee]

I finished Wuthering Heights. I get it, I respect it, but I didn’t enjoy it one bit. Team Charlotte all the way. What it did for me was make me see Northanger Abbey in a whole new light. Honestly, it was a tedious, torturous read. I’m glad I pushed through, but even if I’m in the mood for something dark, dreary and tragic, this would be the last of the kind I’d reach for.

I did get back to audiobooks because my subscription renewed itself - apparently Amazon only lets you pause it for 3 months.

I never finished The Problem with Work which I may have moaned about previously already. It’s the most nonsensical gibberish I have ever heard in my life and I gave up two thirds in. 

I did finish A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century which I found well paced, easy to follow and overall interesting and more realistic than other similar works. I don’t know how controversial it is, perhaps moderately, but not so much that I feel afraid to post on the internet that I consumed this book. Or should I? It’s been a minute, do I remember correctly how controversial it was? Oh well, whatever now.  

Edited January 1 by RhaenysBee

[IFR]

2 hours ago, Larry of the Lake said:

Did you read The Passenger first?  

I haven't read The Passenger. I may though, depending on how I ultimately feel about Stella Maris. I really do like Cormac McCarthy, despite my complaints.

[IFR]

16 hours ago, Ormond said:

Yesterday I finished Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a novel I'd been wanting to read for almost 40 years and finally got around to. I enjoyed it, even though I didn't particularly like the ending and sometimes thought the author was trying to show off his erudition by using too many obscure words. But it was a fascinating exposition of medieval monastic life with some interesting characters, especially the narrator, who is supposedly remembering all the events of the novel as an elderly man thought they happened when he was about 20.

I really enjoy Umberto Eco's works. I was initiated with Foucault's Pendulum - which I found to be excellent - and then moved on to The Name of the Rose.

I agree with your take on The Name of the Rose: the writing was often dense, but it's a clever and breathtaking exploration of that period and lifestyle, with a fun murder mystery added to the mix. I do not know if you've already read Foucault's Pendulum, but I highly recommend it if you enjoyed The Name of the Rose.

[Zorral]

From Radium Age, 

/https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/introducing-radium-age

an imprint established to re-publish the very early sf/f novels of turn-of-19th-20th-century:

A pioneering Black author’s novel takes us to a Wakanda-like civilization
Pauline Hopkins’s ‘Of One Blood,’ originally published in 1903, is an exceptionally entertaining book with a serious subtext

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/12/21/pauline-hopkins-novel/

Quote

 

.... Set in Boston in what must be the 1880s, “Of One Blood” focuses on Reuel Briggs, a brilliant, penniless and moody young medical researcher who is strongly drawn to the secret knowledge found in alchemical texts. No one knows much about his background, but he is thought to be of Italian descent. His only close friend, Aubrey Livingston, bears “the beautiful face of a Greek god” and is, in fact, the devil-may-care scion of an old Virginia family. ....

.... The book’s first section is dominated by images of Whiteness. In its middle chapters, the novel turns to the “Afritopian” element stressed by science fiction writer Minister Faust in his biographically informative — and angrily impassioned — prefatory essay: At one point, Faust alludes to “imperialist scouts for mass-murdering kleptocrats,” adding: “Schoolbooks call them ‘explorers.’” (If you’re sensitive to spoilers, Faust’s introduction reveals too much of Hopkins’s plot, as does the paperback’s back cover. Both should be read after you’ve enjoyed the novel.)

Throughout her narrative, Hopkins regularly quotes Shakespeare, Longfellow and other poets but also seems to be well read in the subgenre known as the Lost World or Lost Civilization Romance. Established by H. Rider Haggard in “She” (1886) and “Allan Quatermain” (1887), its most famous modern example is James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon” (1933), which gave us Shangri-La. In these novels, a legend, a map or a dying man’s confession reveals the existence of an unknown kingdom, somewhere largely inaccessible, where an ancient civilization survives, hidden from the modern world. There, its priests or sages possess powers far beyond any of those we know. More often than not, its people are also awaiting or fearing the fulfillment of a centuries-old prophecy. For instance, in Gilbert Collins’s “The Valley of Eyes Unseen” (1924), the hero turns out to be the long-promised reincarnation of Alexander the Great.

In Hopkins’s novel, Reuel, desperately needing money, joins an expedition to Africa, searching for a fabulous treasure. En route, he learns about the advanced technological and cultural achievements of the long-vanished Ethiopian kingdom of Meroe. But has this Wakanda-like civilization really disappeared? As Reuel eventually discovers, “in the heart of Africa was a knowledge of science that all the wealth and learning of modern times could not emulate.”

In her book’s first act, Hopkins seems to be re-creating a classic Gothic romance; in its second, she offers a suspenseful Lost World adventure; and in the third, she boldly updates Greek tragedy, as the South’s racist history embroils her main characters. Ultimately, the White, or seeming White, of Boston and the Black of Africa commingle, when she brings her color-themed plot to a thrillingly melodramatic finish. ....

 

Also -- time for the new year's quarterly reading thread!

Edited January 1 by Zorral