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What are you reading? First Quarter 2023


williamjm
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2 hours ago, Peadar said:

To be fair, the book is factually wrong about lots of things. As somebody who can speak Irish and has an MA in Italian linguistics, I spotted a lot of errors in these areas. I'm sure that people here who are experts in other fields will find issues too. However, it's a big book with such a wide scope that it would have been (in my opinion), impossible to research everything to sufficient depth to avoid making mistakes. Such is the fate of an author!

That's surely true!

Still, overall, there's a great deal of history in the book that I know deeply as well as broadly, that she gets right. 

Certainly the arc of colonial expansionism, imperialism, extraction and exploitation over the centuries of European imperialism is correct, including the methods of missionary / religious stations and scholarship and languages as one of the most significant arms of dominating peoples and regions.  In fact, that continues to this very day in Africa and South America.  US evangelical 'missions' have also done a very great deal to demonize traditional religions and customs, as well as individuals from those who are albinos to those who are LGBTQ.  One cannot read a genre novel written by African authors for African readers or watch such African television series without at least one villain being an xtain mega church pastor, extracting vast riches from the congregations -- while committing sexual abuse and other crimes -- not to mention interfering in elections and politics.

control of languages -- which ultimately cannot be controlled (the Poles still retained Polish as their language despite decades of state repression to erase it entirely) -- is certainly as strong an arm of colonialism as religion, so much so that it isn't even a paradigm for extraction of riches by European powers out of other peoples.  It just is.  Which, as you know too, all too well, is how it has worked by the English in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and here in the US at the very least with the Indigenous populations.  Destroy the language, destroy the culture, and thus destroy the people and any opposition.

So I particularly am with the author

Spoiler

when it appears that the currently ruling power of the British in particular is running into trouble, and certainly will be in more trouble in the future as languages as they have known them lose their power to fuel their silve tech as languages do inevitably change, the words change meaning from generation to generation.  And now the only truly resource extraction languages left are in Asia and Africa and South America -- and not enough people speak - dream in a single manner linguistically.

Pretty brilliant. Still, I'm only 200 pp. in, so we shall see.

I really hope the author starts to bring into the account

Spoiler

the kreyoles -- beyond Haitian Kreyole (which was only classified as a language in the 21st C, and where there are only about 3 universities that offer it -- Duke University - Chapel Hill was the first program -- and pidgeons

 

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Hi folks!  Long time no see.  Going to try posting regularly here again.  We'll see how long I manage it.

First read of the year was The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which came out in the UK last month.  This one is a fantasy about a revolution brewing in a city occupied by foreign powers.  I always enjoy Tchaikovsky and this was no exception, though at the end it felt like there was little point to anything that happened.  This might have been a five star read for me, but that brings it down to four. 

I made short work of Even Though I Knew the End, a queer historical fantasy by C.L. Polk.  This was a Tordotcom novella about sorcerers, souls, and angels in historical Chicago and I quite enjoyed it.

Also read The Snack Thief, third book in the Inspector Montalbano mystery series by Andrea Camilleri. 

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17 minutes ago, beniowa said:

Hi folks!  Long time no see.  Going to try posting regularly here again.  We'll see how long I manage it.

Also read The Snack Thief, third book in the Inspector Montalbano mystery series by Andrea Camilleri. 

Hi!!!!

Just looked up Camilleri at the library, and holy smokes, are there ever a lot of Inspector Montalbano books! 

eta: just borrowed the first book

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John Scalzi's Travel by Bullet appeared in the queue at the Mustang Library, so I loaded up and listened to it as well as the two previous stories in the series, The Dispatcher and Murder by Other Means.  I listened to each one of them in order, all very well read by Zachary Quinto.  The conceit of the "changed reality" and the implications thereof are well-considered, and the contemporary-times science fiction is a sort of alternate history that is difficult to do well, but Scalzi does a terrific job with that.

His incorporation of the outcomes and changes to society as a result of the corona virus pandemic are both real and while simultaneously alien, and he addresses cryptocurrencies in this latest book in a way that is both technically accurate and a good commentary on how a digital fiat currency actually represents wealth.  Because he is writing about current society in a contemporary time setting, as a reader (listener) you do get some weird paleo-futurism artifacts, but for me it serves to make the story more interesting.  His protagonist and other cast of recurring characters are interesting, flawed, and sympathetic, and the action in this latest installment centers around one recurring character that I have always enjoyed, an amoral action-taker whose actions are finally the driver of his precarious situation.

John Scalzi is really skilled in this particular brand of near-contemporary setting science fiction, and if you enjoyed William Gibson's world of The Peripheral or Walter Jon Williams' very excellent Dagmar Shaw mystery thriller science fiction, I strongly recommend this to you.  All of these are the spiritual successors to Vernor Vinge's Peace War books, so if you want an 1980s-vintage version, check those out.  These are all writers who have mastered their craft of writing, and who have something to say about our society today, and who take a weird and unsettling cut at that society by changing one or two basic assumptions in reality, and then using that fun-house mirror to show up our own imperfections more clearly.

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I am also curious to see if Kuang's Babel will at any point employ the tools that music provides for learning languages, researching etymology and the history of languages -- an history of anything and everything.  It's a relatively new field, but forensic musical linguistics has become important in history and etymology.  Musicians themselves are excellent scholars in this area in many ways.  It's really difficult to do any African language or religions without dealing with music and dance.

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7 hours ago, Peadar said:

To be fair, the book is factually wrong about lots of things. As somebody who can speak Irish and has an MA in Italian linguistics, I spotted a lot of errors in these areas. I'm sure that people here who are experts in other fields will find issues too. However, it's a big book with such a wide scope that it would have been (in my opinion), impossible to research everything to sufficient depth to avoid making mistakes. Such is the fate of an author!

Isn't that what editors and beta-readers are for? Not to mention that the author is literally pursuing a PhD at Yale.  If you are going to write a polemic (thinly disguised as a fantasy novel), get your facts right.  

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I've started reading through the second volume of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Novels and Stories. The first one is her short novel The Word For World Is Forest, which I thought was very good and manage to pack a lot of ideas and world-building into about 100 pages. I thought the Athshans were fascinating, particularly Selver and the internal conflict he feels over having to do what he feels he has to do to preserve his home. To begin with, I did feel that the main antagonist Captain Davidson was maybe a bit of a caricature in his villainy but I think it makes sense thematically to have him as the equivalent and in some ways the opposite of Selver.

In the introduction (written in 2010) Le Guin mentions that many people had commented to her on how an unnamed 'recent blockbuster' had many similarities to the book, but she felt that she was glad there was no connection since it had completely reversed the morale premise of the story and suggested violence was a good solution. I do not think she would have liked Avatar 2 any better.

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1 hour ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Isn't that what editors and beta-readers are for? Not to mention that the author is literally pursuing a PhD at Yale.  If you are going to write a polemic (thinly disguised as a fantasy novel), get your facts right.  

Mostly she does get it right. In the big things certainly.  It's smaller details ... otoh, declaring the slavery was invented by Europeans is a pretty big thing,  Good grief there is slavery running all through the Old Testament, in various classical texts in Sanskrit, and certainly in Chinese texts.  As you all are probably sick to death of hearing, I do not ever deny what European began doing in the 14th century in terms of slavery and Africa, and it is undeniable what they did rapidly progressively got more hideous and heinous year-by-year, nation-by-nation.  But to say European invented slavery is just ... not right.  I keep wondering if I'm not understanding what that footnote was saying, or if the author didn't quite understand what she wrote there.  It's so weird. However, her scholarship studies are NOT history, but languages and linguistics.  So it's very easy to get historical things wrong, particularly speaking of so many countries and peoples and so many centuries.

 

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I tried to read Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon and couldn't do it.  I found Pynchon's writing style to be very difficult to read and hard to understand what was happening.  After getting halfway through, had no interest in continuing and so the book went back to the library.   :dunno:

Now reading, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, and like it so far.    

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3 hours ago, LongRider said:

I found Pynchon's writing style to be very difficult to read and hard to understand what was happening.

Would you say then, that Mason & Dixon is "spoiler-proof" in the sense that most people use spoilers -- as to giving away plot story and character?

I think of the Gormenghast trilogy that way -- since in my experience people what people call spoilers has to do with plot, story, etc., and you can't do that in a few words with Gormenghast.  It's so much about style and tune and attitude.  It's not a traditional fantasy in the way so many are used to.  IMO, of course.

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8 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Would you say then, that Mason & Dixon is "spoiler-proof" in the sense that most people use spoilers -- as to giving away plot story and character?

For me, yes, but many readers can parse the writing so for them, they could spoil it I guess.  The bummer for me is I would like to read about M & D but there are few books about them and only the Pynchon one at my library.

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18 minutes ago, LongRider said:

there are few books about them and only the Pynchon one at my library.

We had to research quite a bit in them for our TASC, so I know you're right that your local library is unlikely to have those books, alas.  Do you have interlibrary loan? 

This isn't at all what you want, but this will likely include information -- https://library.unc.edu/wilson/shc/

And this -- https://www.mdlpp.org/library

But it isn't a book, and I do know the type of book you're looking for, because that's what I always look for myself at the start of any kind of project.  The nuts and bolts, the weeds, etc., come later, after I get a sense of what the nuts and bolts and weeds may be.

 

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On 1/13/2023 at 10:01 PM, Fragile Bird said:

Hi!!!!

Just looked up Camilleri at the library, and holy smokes, are there ever a lot of Inspector Montalbano books! 

eta: just borrowed the first book

And a lot of tv episodes as well! 15 seasons i think. Have watched most of them, really enjoyable. :)

https://www.amazon.com/Detective-Montalbano/dp/B017T732TW

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Read them all and watched them all.  There's also the Young Montalbano series too, which I've watched as well.

~~~~~~

Tonight begin Book IV, page 363, of R.F. Kuang's Babel.  Book III ended with, um a bang, all right.  Again, this wasn't what I expected.  It's seldom these latter days, after having read thousands of fictions over my lifetime, to be surprised, particularly at this point in a novel.  I will say though, the novel's momentum slowed to a great degree in Book III.  It is probably just me, since I  know the history of opium and the Pearl River complex pretty well, so it felt very much like much-traveled ground.

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On 1/14/2023 at 3:34 PM, Zorral said:

We had to research quite a bit in them for our TASC, so I know you're right that your local library is unlikely to have those books, alas.  Do you have interlibrary loan? 

Just a follow up, I searched the library's catalog for Mason Dixon line and came up with :

Author: Walker, Sally M.

Title: Boundaries [electronic resource] / Sally M. Walker

Summary: The Mason-Dixon Line's history, replete with property disputes, persecution, and ideological conflicts, traverses our country's history from its founding to today. We live in a world of boundaries—geographic, scientific, cultural, and religious...

Subjects:  History, Politics, Sociology

Young Adult Nonfiction

 

Since I now own a Kindle, when I've finished the two books I've borrowed, I can read this.  :read:

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I have finally read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. I have reserved A Desolation Called Peace, which should come in a month or so.

I had started last year and I think the style and the language initially put me off a bit, but once I got into the cadence I really started to enjoy it. I am listening to the audiobook, I suspect I’d really enjoy reading a physical book as well.

I have been listening to two series, one which I started last year, and I’ll talk about them in a separate post.

Oh, I also listened to a collection of Inspector Montalbano stories called Montalbano’s First Case, and other stories, and have now moved to the first book, The Shape of Water. I felt like reading some familiar detective stories and I looked at the Agatha Christie at the library, but only less popular books were available without waiting (Lord Edgeware Dies is not fun) and borrowed Murder is Easy. Boring.

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I had picked up another John Scalzi book recently, and I saw and also included The Kaiju Preservation Society on my playlist.  It is a very recent short book, covering a story set in 2020, and does exactly as it is described on the tin.

This is not a deep book, but an adventure story about Gen Y.1 or Gen Z folks (I am not sure what to call people who are currently between 20 and 30 years old right now) who live in NYC, or at least who live in NYC at the start of the book.  It is fine.

However, you should be aware that the language of the book is dialect, such as Feersum Endjinn.  Only here, the dialect is that of hipsters.  So this is to warn you that if forced humor and the word "like" are not to your taste, the characters may be hard to take.  I had to listen to the audiobook (read by Wil Wheaton) in short sections, as I found the dialect to be grating.  Wil Wheaton does a fine job of reading the dialog and the rest of the text, but the dialog was very hard to swallow in large doses.

Apparently Scalzi wrote this as a palliative to his very negative pandemic lockdown experience, and it is very different from most of the rest of his work in tone and style.  It wasn't to my taste, but it is a story about hipsters, a nuclear-powered portal to another Earth, Kaiju, and dirty dealings by Failsons of the Trump Variety.  If you find those elements intriguing, this may be a book for you.

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