What are you reading? First Quarter 2023

[williamjm]

I read Leigh Bardugo's Hell Bent, the second book in her urban fantasy series set at Yale University. I thought the early part of the book was perhaps the weakest, as in the first book the chapters are not in chronological order but while I think that served a purpose in Ninth House I don't think it added much here and made the pacing inconsistent with the switching between time periods. However, the later parts of the book are back to being sequential and I thought the pacing became much better - although perhaps a bit more time for the characters to reflects on events that had just happened to them might be welcome. I thought the main plotline with Alex and Dawes attempting a rescue mission and having to deal with some of the consequences of trying to do something exceedingly risky was compelling. Some of the subplots were less interesting, in particular the Eitan subplot felt contrived. The first book had mostly focused on Alex and Darlington and there's still a lot of focus on Alex here but other characters do get a lot more development, particularly in the Gauntlet scenes, and become more interesting as a result. I also liked the portrayal of magic in the series as something that can be extremely powerful, but always coming with its own dangers and often requiring moral compromises to be able to make use of it.

I've now gone back to reading through Ursula Le Guin's Hainish stories. I've read through three loosely-connected short stories all focusing on the development of a new and unpredictable method of instantaneous travel between star systems. I thought both The Fisherman of the Inland Sea and the ambiguous narrative of Dancing to Ganam were very good.

 

[williamjm]

On 1/27/2023 at 3:43 PM, HokieStone said:

So, now that I'm through The Martian, I have started Hail Mary.  And...I could swear that the main character is an exact carbon copy of Watney from The Martian. I'm enjoying the basic premise, and I'm interested in where the general story goes.  But I don't think Andy Weir is a particularly good writer.  The books seem to follow the pattern of "present an incredibly challenging technical problem to solve, have a bunch of engineering and scientific solutions to step through, and wrap that with paper-thin plotting and character development".  

We'll see if after this one I care enough to read his other book...Artemis.

Ryland doesn't swear, unlike Mark Watney. Other than that there is a lot of similarity in their character, sometimes I do wonder how similar they both might be to Andy Weir himself.

I really enjoyed the Martian scenes and the scenes aboard the Hail Mary. However, I think both books get much weaker when Weir has to write multiple human characters having to interact with each other, writing dialogue is not his strength.

I did also read Artemis, which to be fair does break from the formula of the other two books and Jazz is a different character to Watney and Ryland. However, I felt it was a bit underwhelming and the main plot wasn't as interesting as his other two books.

[HokieStone]

On 1/28/2023 at 6:12 PM, williamjm said:

Ryland doesn't swear, unlike Mark Watney. Other than that there is a lot of similarity in their character, sometimes I do wonder how similar they both might be to Andy Weir himself.

In my copy of The Martian, there's an interview with Weir in the back of the book.  He just comes out and says "Mark Watney is a smarter, braver version of how I view myself."

[Gaston de Foix]

57 minutes ago, HokieStone said:

In my copy of The Martian, there's an interview with Weir in the back of the book.  He just comes out and says "Mark Watney is a smarter, braver version of how I view myself."

All fictional characters are autobiographical to some extent, so brave of Weir to admit it.  

[Fragile Bird]

Haha. On that note, I’ve just started to read Mickey7 (listen to). So far it’s a lot of fun. 

Mickey Barnes gets himself into some bad trouble so he decides that he has to get off his home planet however he can. His best bud Berto, a pilot, tries to use his pull to get him a job as a security officer on the space colony ship crew he’s just joined, but all 16 spaces went instantly to people with serious experience or political pull, and as a historian Mickey has no job skills really needed on a settlement ship. Or on his planet for that matter. (“Why did you become a historian when everyone can just look up stuff on-line?”) In fact, there’s only one single job left to be filled, since this is the first colony ship to leave planet in 200 years and thousands applied for positions, the job of Expendable. Normally it’s filled by conscripts from prisons.

Here in the happy future they take a dna sample and spend a day mapping every cell in your body, and then they can make a replacement you in a vat in a few hours. They also scan your brain for your memories and you’re supposed to download updates of memories on a regular basis so that when you’ve died your new you will be relatively whole. Fortunately it also means you don’t remember your previous death. At one point Mickey says ‘won’t they send in a robot or drone into the reactor core to do the repairs,’ and the response back is, ‘no, machinery will fail within a minute, and while you will have received enough radiation to kill you in a minute, your body won’t start melting for an hour and you can do a lot of work in that time.’

The “upside” is immortality. Sort of.

No surprise, the book starts with Mickey7 about to die, best bud Berto abandons him deep in a crevice, (‘see you tomorrow’) but he doesn’t die and the worst horror that can happen, happens. Mickey8 is generated and there are 2 of them, something that should never, ever ever happen and one has to be destroyed. They try to figure out how to both live. Add severe food shortages on the planet to the problems, everyone is on severe rations. And to make things worse, the colony commander belongs to a religious sect that believes each person is born with one and only one soul, which dies when you die, and the regenerated are just soulless monsters. I gather so far that he’ll cheerfully send Mickey in to do a job like clean the reactor core, knowing he’ll die a truly horrible death, but it doesn’t matter because he’s a soulless monster. Talk about lousy bosses. Mark Ruffalo is going to play the commander in the movie, so that should be a lot of fun.

The movie comes out next year with Robert Pattinson playing the role of Mickey, age appropriate and all. My lord, Pattinson is 36 (Mickey is technically 39, but since he started at 30 I think the body is always the same at regeneration) where the hell did the time go since Harry Potter? However, the title of the movie is Mickey 17, and I guess writer, director and co-producer Bong Joon-ho is going to give us scenes of some really gruesome deaths (albeit funny in a black humor way) to add spice to the movie.

Back to the previous conversations. The author is Edward Ashton - how much of him is in Mickey?

[Ser Not Appearing]

I'm reading Shadow March by Tad Williams. About 2/3 of the way through the second book. I'm enjoying it, though it feels to be moving a bit more slowly than I'd like.

I also started Ender's Game with my (9 yr old) son this weekend. Probably going to discuss it on the podcast for the mid-month episode in February (we did The Belgariad this month). Haven't read it in years and it hooked my son pretty quickly. We probably spent about 6 hours with the audiobook on Sat and Sun.

[polishgenius]

The last couple of years I'd not been reading very much at all, a problem of having always read on my excessively long commute and then moving so I didn't have one- I just really struggled to get back into the habit of reading outside of that.

I think I made a decent start on overcoming that problem this month. 

Storm of Echoes - Christelle Dabos (the final part of the Mirror Visitor sequence. Bit chaotic and messy compared to previous books, which I absolutely love, but still fun) 
Last Exit - Max Gladstone (blacktop America monster hunter Lovecraftian fantasy. Very entertaining, as per usual for Gladstone)
City of Last Chances - Adrian Tchaikovsky (like Gladstone, Tchaikovsky can be counted on for entertainment. This is one of his odder ones, which I always enjoy)
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld- Patricia McKillip (old-school, Earthsea-esque fantasy. One character choice I didn't love, other than that, hit that classic-style itch)
Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao (blisteringly feminist mix of Pacific Rim and Chinese myth and history. Simulatneously angry and fun)
The Big Sleep- Raymond Chandler (liked the film better, but, you know: Chandler's a classic for a reason)
7 moons of Maali Almeida -  Shehan Karunatilaka (well-written, had a lot to say, but I found it a bit unfocused somehow) 
Notorious Sorcerer - Davinia Evans (riotously entertaining rogues-and-wizards city based adventure. Excellent debut, will read more)
Second Spear- Kerstin Hall (sequel to The Border Keeper. If you like weird, atmospheric turns to your epic fantasy, it's a good series to try) 

[Teng Ai Hui]

I just finished Legends and Lattes.  I enjoyed reading about the creation of a coffee shop in a fantasy setting.  It seems that book 2 in the series will be published in November.  It’s being described as a prequel.  I'm anxious to read it, but personally I would prefer a sequel.

Recently, I started Starship for Sale by M.R. Forbes.
 

[RhaenysBee]

I have never ever read a celebrity (auto)biography before and I’m not going to make a habit of it, but I do find Tom Felton’s Beyond the Wand pretty sweet and enchanting. It is the perfect chill listen I needed today. If you grew up with Harry Potter and want a little throwback, it’s an endearing trip down Tom Felton’s memory lane. 

[Caligula_K3]

I read Babel by R.F. Kuang, and found it to be pretty disappointing, all in all. The central idea is cool and her writing has improved since the Poppy War trilogy. Kuang is clearly intelligent, a great researcher, and has a ton of talent and potential. But I was frustrated with the book for a few reasons, mainly because of its lack of imagination and its heavy handed didactism. I'm going to write about it a lot, because this book is also getting a ton of praise. I recognize it's good qualities, but overall I just don't see it.

Spoiler

1. It's alternative history with a form of magic that's been around since the Roman empire and which any people with access to silver and language instruction should be able to replicate. But absolutely nothing about history has changed, aside from Oxford getting a train station five years early. The same inventors are inventing the same things that they did in our reality in more or less the same years, but this time they use silver to do it. It just feels like the fantasy/alt-reality concept is wasted from the get-go.

2. On the other hand, this book fails as a work of historical fiction, because all the main (good) characters are completely 21st century in their outlook and conceptualization of the world, down to the vocabulary they use. This makes the characters fall flat, because they're either mouthpieces for what the author thinks is right (Ramy and Griffin), mouthpieces for attitudes the author thinks are wrong (Letty), or cartoonish caricatures of colonialist villains. There was no real effort to understand how a 19th century Cantonese boy or a gay Muslim Indian young man or Haitian woman might understand the world they faced or be shaped by their own 19th century cultures- despite all of Kuang's meticulousness, this is a failure of both research and imagination, and condescending to the past. It was also a problem in the Poppy War trilogy, which took fascinating historical events and figures and turned them into less interesting versions of themselves.

3. The didactism. The themes of this novel are not particularly deep and they are delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The characters are mouthpieces, making it difficult to care about them. Victoire, one of the main three characters, only gets real backstory in the epilogue! And then the footnotes... Jesus, do we really need the author to intrude on the novel to say "this racist thing is racist" or "just in case you didn't get it, colonialism is bad?" I guarantee that 99% of people reading this novel already agree with these things. There's so much potential here for exploration of interesting ideas relating to language, academia, and colonialism, and Kuang is clearly very smart. But the worldview she endorses is so Manichean and simplistic, with no other interpretations even considered as being possibly right, that it hurts the novel and her message about the "necessity of violence."

4. Because Kuang is so heavy handed, the novel became predictable - I predicted Letty's betrayal, the death of Ramy, and the exact ending about 100 pages in. Whatever, that's fine, but the story also became completely ridiculous towards the end, especially the cover-up over the Professor's death, the Hermes society in general, and then the strike. This is allegedly the most important building in the entire British empire, upon which everything rests, yet it has less security than your average public library and the army is unwilling to storm the building and shoot 8 striking grad students and Professors in the leg. Come on.

 

I think I would have been able to forgive a few of these things, but altogether, they really soured my experience with this book. Which is too bad, because I do see the ingredients for something great here, and I think Kuang could pull it off. But I'm not sure I'll be reading another novel by her for a while, especially if she can't dial down the didactism and treat her readers as people with brains.

On another note, I'm looking into trying out some Adrian Tchaikovsky novels, but he has something like two-hundred, and there's a lot of debate online about which are good or best. I already have my eye on Guns of the Dawn, which looks up my alley, but I'm currently in the mood for sci-fi. Any recommendations about where to start there?

[Wilbur]

This past week I listened to Eric. H. Cline read his own, updated 1177 B.C. - The Bronze Age Collapse.  Already a fine study of one of the great mysteries of human history, he had the time and inclination to make revisions and updates during Covid lockdown, so this version includes a lot of the recent discoveries associated with microbiological archeology and DNA sequencing.

His original work did a nice job of contextualizing the Bronze Age Collapse for amateurs like me, showing how it relates to the Fall of Troy, where the Biblical stories show the collapse around the story of the Israelites, and how the Greeks understood the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.  The Collapse took place so long ago that today most of us have little understanding how it absolutely cleaved human history, separating the long, literate past of the Egyptians of the Old Kingdoms, Middle Kingdoms, and New Kingdom from the Egypt most of us think of from the Bible or movies that lived in the ruins of the glory from before the collapse.  Who among us understands that the time since the Bronze Age Collapse to today is only about as long as the pre-collapse civilizations that flourished and had complex international trade prior to the Collapse?

What is truly impressive in the book is how he manages to make this extended tour of Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and the islands of the Eastern Med so interesting as he compiles and presents the evidence for and against the Sea Peoples as the single source of the collapse of civilization.  I particularly like his comprehensive use of the correspondence available between Ugaritic, Egyptian, Cypriot, Minoan, and Hittite sources, because obviously it takes a lot of effort to assemble the content of these letters (tablets?) from the museums on different continents today, and because he pieces together the correspondence to provide human evidence of the experience of the collapse.

Also, the other scientific disciplines get their fair shake as well.  Similarly to how I like the collection of diverse evidence in Jared Diamond's works, I find it fascinating how geological, archeological, microbiological, literary, and genetic studies contribute to our understanding of how and why the sophisticated, interconnected competing civilizations of the Bronze Age all (or mostly) had their ruling and literate classes destroyed at about the same time.

Cline reads his own work, and in this update, he makes some comparisons to the theory of Systems Collapse to our own recent experiences with Covid and the bank crisis of a decade ago.  Really fine stuff, and I strongly recommend it.

If you don't have time for the entire audiobook, but you do have twenty minutes to learn what all the Bronze Age Collapse fuss is about, here is a good summary from Youtube:

 

[Peadar]

3 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

 

On another note, I'm looking into trying out some Adrian Tchaikovsky novels, but he has something like two-hundred, and there's a lot of debate online about which are good or best. I already have my eye on Guns of the Dawn, which looks up my alley, but I'm currently in the mood for sci-fi. Any recommendations about where to start there?

"Guns of the Dawn" is brilliant. However, if you want to read one of his SF books, my personal favourites are "Dogs of War" and "Cage of Souls". 

[williamjm]

4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

On another note, I'm looking into trying out some Adrian Tchaikovsky novels, but he has something like two-hundred, and there's a lot of debate online about which are good or best. I already have my eye on Guns of the Dawn, which looks up my alley, but I'm currently in the mood for sci-fi. Any recommendations about where to start there?

If you haven't seen it, this thread has some discussion. As I say there, I think Children of Time and Dogs of War are good SF choices. I do also really like Guns of the Dawn, although it's probably not all that typical of his work, I don't think it even has any spiders in it.

 

[Maia]

On 1/23/2023 at 12:24 AM, Zorral said:

Finished Babel -- well actually skimmed the last 5th of it.  The novel as a novel would have been better reading if about 100 pp. had been cut out.  The plotting and characterization was good, but, and I know this sounds odd -- there was too much of both. 

Huh, I agree with the second part, but not with the first, at least not during the second half or so of the book. Here are my thoughts from a discussion of it elsewhere:

For me constant equating of silverwork magic and industrialization just didn't work and constantly jarred me out of the narrative. Like, sure, it is believable that it would put people out of work through optimization and so on, but how is it increasing pollution, when it really should be doing the opposite? How is Britain, of all places, on the forefront of translation magic, if it is so important to have bilingual people to make it work? Places like Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungary, Russian Empire, Switzerland, etc., where lots of people had to be fluent at the native speaker levels in 2 or more often very different languages still exist in the setting - shouldn't they have a massive advantage? For that matter, shouldn't India and China themselves been unassailably powerful, because they had both lots of silver and lots of multi-lingual people, as well as comparatively large educated classes? Likewise, why wouldn't the British mine Welsh and Irish languages before going farther afield?

Honestly, a lot of things that were clearly included just to get to that ending make very little sense.

Spoiler

Like the absurd concentration of all that power in the hands of a few absent-minded scholars, Babel not being as rich and influential as it should have been, intake of just 4-5 students a year when so much rides on them, so many silver bars depending on Mandarin, when there were just 2 people able to service them, a convenient self-destruct button, everything about Hermes, etc, etc. And the ending itself should again have achieved the opposite result than what the author suggests. Destroying the silver stockpile and killing thousands due to the sabotage of infrastructure would have only made it more urgent to get more silver from China, while provoking even more xenophobia. And military/navy silver bars should be unaffected - it has been established that they are high-quality, long-lasting and don't depend on resonance. Not to mention that Luddism really isn't the answer and there are other colonial powers, not all of them Western.

I thought that the idea of translation magic and how Kuang illustrated it, was brilliant, and very much conducive to exploring the themes of cultural appropriation, but it's implications just's weren't thought through in a satisfying way. I also thought that characterization beyond the main character, who was very well realised, was very hit-or-miss.

[Peadar]

I loved Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances. Very reminiscent of late, great Tanith Lee's "Secret Books of Paradys". Highly recommended for lovers of top class world building. My favourite of his since Cage of Souls.

[Gaston de Foix]

@Zorral, you might be interested in this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/salman-rushdie-recovery-victory-city

I'm going to pick it up - my first new Rushdie novel in a while.

[Jace, Extat]

Just wrapped up a reread of seveneves

@DMC

You readin? What-if so?

 

Meanwhile, I stalled out last year on Lord of Chaos (doing an audible pass through the series) because someone I thought was my best friend fucking tricked me and made me lose a bunch of (all) my money by refusing to just be a man and tell me what was up and what he needed to do for himself at a time when I could still do what I needed to do for myself. 

Not to, like, fob off the blame for that onto somebody else or nothing. It's just like this weird, intertangled, web of things... Like, this "friend" introduced me to Game of Thrones, the book, in my Sophomore year. We were besties. He was already on Storm of Swords. And then he told me about WoT only to wuss out around Book 4 while I went on to brave the depravities of Sanderson (he did his best, give him a break. It's not THAT bad, it's just noticeably not Mr. Jordan in a lot of ways. Give him a break). Anyway, so, like. Literally a decade later. We're living together as besties sometimes do and we started a reread(for me) and a resumption for him of WoT in anticipation of that (dreadful) Amazon show. And yeah. I was on Lord of Chaos on my Audible, while playing videogames usually to keep my hands busy, when. Y'know. Motherfuckers be breaking their friends' hearts and then, like, thinkin he gonna still send me memes and shit. So whatever. Didn't even get to my favorite fucking character appearing 

Anyway 

I forget, have you read The Expanse? Or seen the series? I seem to feel for some reason like you have, but that might take a long time to archive-stalk for answers. 

Anyways, I recommend The Expanse. Great series.

And I'm sure I stole this from wherever or whatever, and credit where it's due but I've smoked a lot of weed in my time. Anyways...

I sometimes say that in Sci Fi stories you generally have one of three different types of equilibrium states, for the universe or galaxy or solar system or world or whatever...

IMMEDIATE: 

Immediate Science Fiction is what I define as generally near-tech. Y'know, stuff we can envision even if we ain't gonna be making it in anybody today's lifetime. Maybe a child's child of someone alive today might see tech more-or-less like the kind of stuff that drives the societies and conflicts and PLOTS of these kinds of stories. 

And, also, the reason it's called IMMEDIATE (by me) is about more than, like, it being maybe somehow near or close. I call it Immediate because the problems, the PLOT, is going to be something very very pressing. Quick-as-you-can we have no room for error type stuff. Whether it's World Savery, Political Defusery, or Resource Resourcery   the general trend of Immediate Sci Fi, as defined by me, is that the systems that have been in place at the outset of the story are probably going to be what has to be changed in the process in order to achieve the desired effect. 

Examples- Interstellar       Sunshine         Minority Report       Aurora (book)        The Martian         The Matrix 

 

 

IMPERIAL: 

Exactly what it sounds like. You're gonna have a pretty stable board state, PROBABLY gonna see some more grander kinda sci fi concepts here. And, like, it's probably gonna be a lived in kinda universe right? You're gonna have some Great Powers. They're gonna have some Spheres of Influence... you've read a book!?! Stuff happens? Yes? Movies as well I think. 

Examples- Enders Game(book)          Avatar(ugh)           Starship Troopers            Halo          Mass Effect           Star Trek

 

GRAND:                 

Grand Science Fiction is Full-On We Raw'n It, Unadulterated, Sci Fi. 

Examples- Star Wars            FOUNDATION                   The Chronicles of Riddick(Love this movie)                  Midnight at the Well of Souls 

 

----------------

Anyway, the great thing about The Expanse, besides the fact that it's awesome... Is that over the course of the series you go through ALL THREE equilibrium states! 

 

 

Fuck Amazon

[Peadar]

Up next for me, An Litir by Liam Mac Cóil, an Irish language historical novel, set in 1612. It's years since I last read a book in Irish, so I hope I'm still capable of it. Use it or lose it!

[dog-days]

Let us know what you think of it, Peadar. Would be interested to hear if you find reading in Irish changes the experience at all. 

[williamjm]

I finished reading through the second (and final) volume of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Stories. I thought it was a good collection throughout, although The Word For World Is Forest is still the highlight. The Five Ways To Forgiveness story suite with its loosely-connected stories showing the times after, before and during revolutions on two planets against a slave-owning society had a wide variety of perspectives on the events and was at various times both harrowing and hopeful. The Telling was a quieter story but although the society on Aka might not have some of the horrific excesses of Werel it was dystopian in its own way with the world's traditional culture being almost completely erased by the government. Sutty's efforts to slowly puzzle out what has been lost and what fragments of it might still be preserved did become an increasingly compelling story as it progressed.