What Are You Reading? Third Quarter, 2023

[Larry of the Lawn]

About to start reading Robert Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.  While I've been at work I've been listening to the Expanse audiobooks.  I've read the series multiple times and the audiobooks so far are good if not great.  Just finished Caliban's War which was better than I'd remembered (had previously considered it the weakest in the series).  Really looking forward to the ring gates and The Behemoth in the next one.  

 

[drawkcabi]

Blake Crouch's Recursion, for the 3rd time. One of my favorite books of all time 

Seriously though, it is one of my top favorites! 

[TheLastWolf]

Zizek is just mad and wonderful

[TormundsWoman]

On 8/3/2023 at 11:52 PM, IlyaP said:

And then there's fresh nonsense like this, which appalls me from a professional editing and layout/formatting perspective.

Jesus. Why would anyone explain in parenthesis in what looks like a cloak and dagger novel what a rapier is?! Nevermind the formatting and layout. I hope Rossignol's foe re-deployed himself for a lethal strike from around the corner and put the man out of his misery. Also out of the book!

Anyway, I am on a bit of a binge on Discworld the Death series. It's the Good Omens season 2 that brought me back to Terry Pratchett. However this time on the audiobooks and I'm loving the narration and the Death voice. Insanely good. Finishing Reaper Man.

[TormundsWoman]

On 8/5/2023 at 3:52 PM, The Wolves said:

Currently reading Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King, it’s a King Arthur retelling. This has been on my TBR since last year and since the show is coming out this month I wanted to get on it. 
 

I’ve heard nothing but great things about this trilogy so I’m excited to read it. 

I loved that trilogy. It's only good memories for me. Happy to read they're doing a series. Didn't know about it, but will check it out. Thank you!

[Corvinus85]

I'm also (re)reading The Winter King because the show is coming up, though I'm not sure I'll be watching. The trailer didn't look promising.

[Iskaral Pust]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

I'm also (re)reading The Winter King because the show is coming up, though I'm not sure I'll be watching. The trailer didn't look promising.

Same.  I started a reread but found it boring and slow to start so far, although I know I enjoyed it when I first read it years ago.

[IlyaP]

Had started reading William Gibson's short story collection Burning Chrome, which I'd never read, somehow, much to my astonishment. But then, today, while running errands, I received an alert that a media tie-in novel (are we still calling them 'transmedia', or have we decided that's a bit tasteless?) set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe was published here in Kangaroostan, and was written by Polish SF writer Rafal Kosik. 

Titled Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence, this has now become what I will be reading after having picked it up this afternoon from Better Read Than Dead, the terrific little independent bookshop located in Sydney's inner west. And because I think she'd want to know about this, @karaddin, I'm shamelessly (and geekishly) tagging your totally rad self to let you know you can buy this now in Sydney. I got it this afternoon in Newtown at Better Read Than Dead for $33 Aussie dollaridoos. It's apparently also available over at Galaxy Books in the city as well, if that's closer to you. 

[karaddin]

6 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Titled Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence, this has now become what I will be reading after having picked it up this afternoon from Better Read Than Dead, the terrific little independent bookshop located in Sydney's inner west. And because I think she'd want to know about this, @karaddin, I'm shamelessly (and geekishly) tagging your totally rad self to let you know you can buy this now in Sydney. I got it this afternoon in Newtown at Better Read Than Dead for $33 Aussie dollaridoos. It's apparently also available over at Galaxy Books in the city as well, if that's closer to you. 

I was thinking about listening to the audiobook for that one as its read by Cherami Leigh (female V in the game), that was a few months ago before it was out - thanks for the reminder!

[Deedles]

Reading Cassiel’s Servant by Jacqueline Carey. Loving it; she does extended training montages so well

[Liffguard]

I'm halfway through Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus. I suspect that someone more familiar with evangelical american christianity will resonate with this more, but even so I've found it arresting and suitably creepy so far. It could maybe do with a little bit more fleshing out and expanding, it feels a bit too short so far. But overall still enjoying it very much.

[Wilbur]

Recently I picked up the audiobook of Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, a book he wrote during Nazi occupation of most of Scandanavia.

As I listened to it, I repeatedly experienced a sort of literary deja vu, thinking that the scenes and actions unfolded exactly as they should, rolling smoothly to the correct conclusions.  I checked the Wikipedia link, and there I recognized the cover of this book - it had been in the library of my elementary school, so I must have read it as a kid.

Anyway, nostalgia aside, the story is really an excellent adventure tale.  The first quarter, set in Andalusia, and the final quarter, set in Ukraine, are particularly fine historical fiction.  In the middle the author adheres to the historical part of the description a little too closely, so the action in England is less interesting.

Nevertheless, the writing is consistently funny, including understatement and irony in equal measures.  The first part includes the trope of the important Jewish character in an historical fiction, but in this case it doesn't feel like an anachronistic inclusion, but actually propels the story, adds to the characters' growth, and is reasonable in the context of the time and tale.

I don't know that Catholic readers will enjoy it quite as much, as the church and the priesthood circa 999 A.D. come off kind of poorly - grasping, self-interested, etc.  One priest, however, does grow and mature throughout the story, and does so in a way that only in the latter portions of the book did I realize that he was an important character.  The Viking worldview, or perhaps the modern view of Vikings as heroic ubermen is skewered violently and constantly, as characters decide whether to fight based upon a strict financial assessment or pointed deliberation as to whether fighting or not will make them look like fools.

Michael Page reads the audiobook, and he is tremendous for this story.  The translation is smooth and suitable for the setting, and I highly recommend it on these two technical aspects, but most importantly because the story itself is terrific.

 

Edited August 14, 2023 by Wilbur
cain't spel

[Wilbur]

Yesterday and today were spent cleaning up downed trees in the neighborhood, and I listened to two Librivox audiobooks of Philip K. Dick while I worked.

The first was the retro Hugo award-winning The Second Variety, and the audiobook was read by veteran reader Gregg Margarite.  It is set in a post-nuclear-exchange Cold War, and as is usual, it features questions of identity and reality among the characters and their view of the world.

The second was the planetary war story Mr. Spaceship, and again well-read by Phil Chenevert on Librivox.  It is set on an Earth under attack by aliens, although it is also very much like the other work, in that the Earth is not at all different from New York City of the Eisenhower era.

I really want to like Dick's work, and so I seek out his stuff as it becomes available, especially in these well-performed audiobooks.  But the writing of his early stuff is so very clearly written or edited for a 1950s or 1960s audience of Popular Science Magazine readers and Boy Scouts that it is hard to get past the "Gee, Whillikers, Batman!" of the tone.  Also, if you boil down a lot of his novelettes, you get 5% action, 5% ideas, and about 90% descriptions of people saying what they are doing, and then commenting on how odd the thing they are doing is.  Later novels are not nearly as bad as that in terms of filler, but his early stuff is rough going.

I wonder how much of that filler is just the financial incentives for writers of the time who were paid a penny a word or whatever, because Dick has such a strong reputation, and his works have won awards.  But even the stuff he wrote that is well-regarded seems more dated and pinned down by that dated-ness than other writers of the time.

I think maybe that feeling of dated-ness arises from and is because Dick's world-building is so weak that it is almost never differentiated from the time and place that he wrote from.  For comparison, I can consume Heinlein of the same era that is equally dated, but his worlds and setting are notably not the Earth of the time of writing.  Or the opposite end of the spectrum is someone like Vance, whose settings are so very, very alien from contemporary real life that the dated ideas or attitudes are overwhelmed by the characters and settings.

[Fragile Bird]

A friend and I were talking about books that were very popular when we were kids, books everybody was reading in high school, and we went down memory lane on titles. As a result I’ve put holds on Cheaper By The Dozen and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was surprised that the former only has a wait list of 4 people for one copy of the audiobook, even though it was a fairly recent movie, while the latter has 48 people waiting for 10 copies. I wonder if I’ll still like them. I was always fascinated by the efficiency-expert father in Cheaper!

I just did a re-read of the Penric and the Demon books, and I think I’ve mentioned before that Penric and the Shaman is my favorite. Bujold writes so well about faith. 

I’ve been trying to clean out my bookshelves and decided that I would get the audiobook versions of some of my books so that I could more quickly donate them. I’ve listened to the first two volumes of Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap saga, Magyk and Flyte. I could have sworn I’d read them but I didn’t remember them at all, and they were fun YA books to listen to. I think I’ll listen to the rest of the series as well.

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

A friend and I were talking about books that were very popular when we were kids, books everybody was reading in high school, and we went down memory lane on titles. As a result I’ve put holds on Cheaper By The Dozen and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was surprised that the former only has a wait list of 4 people for one copy of the audiobook, even though it was a fairly recent movie, while the latter has 48 people waiting for 10 copies. I wonder if I’ll still like them. I was always fascinated by the efficiency-expert father in Cheaper!

 

FB, the RECENT movie called "Cheaper By The Dozen" has almost nothing to do with the book. It just stole the title for a film about a family with 12 kids. And the 2022 movie itself was based on the 2003 Steve Martin movie which also had nothing to do with the book by Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Frank Gilbreth Jr.  The film version where the script is taken from the book is the 1950 version starring Myrna Loy.

I know that the Wikipedia articles on the later films claim they are based on the book, but that is really a ludicrous claim. The families are very different -- both of the later films include sets of twins as part of the 12 kids, for instance, and there were no twins in the original Gilbreth family. The father in the latter two films is NOT an efficiency expert -- he's a football coach in the 2003 film and a restaurant owner in the 2022 film. But I suppose if you had really seen either of the  21st century films you'd know that.

[Fragile Bird]

3 hours ago, Ormond said:

But I suppose if you had really seen either of the  21st century films you'd know that.

Ahhh, I guess it was pretty obvious I hadn’t seen them, I just knew the book. I thought the Steve Martin movie was an updated version. I vaguely remember watching the Myrna Loy movie, it was on tv when I was a teen. I think I remember scenes of the efficient way to wash yourself!

I see Elia Kazan made a movie version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I don’t think I’ve seen that. I went to a girl’s Catholic high school, and both books were considered appropriate reading material, available in the school library. 

[Khloey]

Currently in my "antiquity period" ^^

I read Damalis by Marie Berthelet, it's a historical novel about a young thrace whose village is slaughtered, the novel follows his journey as a slave who ends up in a wealthy greek family.

Read it in 2 days, I really liked it.

I'm currently reading SPQR by Mary Beard and Bisexuality in the ancient world by Eva Cantarella.

Both very good so far, very interesting.

 

[Wilbur]

An earlier incarnation of this thread included recommendations for William Dalrymple's The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, and I immediately sought it out.  For it seemed like it would combine two of my favorite types of non-fiction, in that it would be a corporate history and British colonial history.

And indeed, it does contain a lot of history, but having listened to the excellent Sid Sagar read it on an audiobook, I find that my expectations, based upon the title, were unmet.  The title suggests that the reader will learn about the "Rise of the East India Company", but what the book actually presents is a series of stories about the various rajas, nabobs, chieftans, governors, viziers and emperors of the Mughual Empire.  These stories are loosely linked to the EIC, but the through-line of a single plot or story of the "Rise of the East India Company" is something that seems to occur in the background while various of these characters take boat rides, plot to overthrow each other or supplant each other, trade with the French or Portuguese, send each other presents and diplomatic missions, etc.  And sometimes the story will follow a single individual leading the EIC such as Clive, and talk about his actions and letters and proclivities.  The main focus is very rarely on the EIC as a company, however.

An recent analogy would be if someone wrote "The History of Motorola", and then spent 80% of the book describing events at NASA, the Defense Department, GE, GM, Apple and AT&T.  "Steve Jobs was very offended when the Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector head of engineering pointed out that the Macintosh Computer failed to take full advantage of the Power PC chip.  And later he was angered again when, after inventing the capacitive touch screen interface and developing the antennae-less radio technology of the iPhone, Motorola refused to also manufacture the devices at the low price Jobs demanded.  Jobs called the Motorola SPS President and provided a list of reasons why Motorola should use its factories in Texas, Taiwan and China to build the iPhone, and he was insulted by Fred Shlapak's negative response.  When Apple subsequently learned that Motorola SPS would no longer provide them with Tier 1 pricing on PowerPC chips, Apple decided to subcontract their phone manufacturing to FoxConn."

I mean, this is all true, but it doesn't really tell the history of Motorola.  This is kind of the approach of this book, kind of glancing obliquely at the EIC without ever looking directly at it.  Given the long description of what source material and translation help that author had in hand while writing the book, it seems like he indulged in explaining these little-known recent Persian translations that he had available to him rather than focusing on the actual EIC.

Now, I like this history as well, and the author is correct in saying that the decline in the Mughal Empire led to a sort of renaissance period in the successor kingdoms and principalities in the arts and diplomacy.  But the author makes a lot of statements about how perfidious the EIC was, but only presents evidence in the form of letters of complaint from one princeling to a neighbor.  And he condemns the mercantilism of the EIC without really describing the processes or institutions used to loot the Bengal region.

Indeed, the book is full of cash values obviously drawn out of the accounting records of the company found in the museum, and the author faithfully provides current-day economic values to show how vast the amounts were.  But accounting records also tell the tale of the flows of capital, and account velocities demonstrate to the auditor what aspects of the business are critical, and the author never evinces the slightest interest in using the accounting records to describe how the EIC grew.

So as a corporate history, this book is a failure.  And indeed, the title is misleading.  A better title might have been something around the slow decay of the Mughals and how they lost India to British influence through indolence, lack of attention to government, failure to enforce their own laws, and the influence of the bankers (sahukars, shroffs, mahajans) upon state policy.  In these areas, the book is terrifically enlightening, and should be recommended on these merits.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Wilbur
added links, cain't spel

[williamjm]

I read David Mitchell's number9dream. I've read most of his later books and liked them a lot. Initially I found this a bit difficult to get into, each section of the novel has interludes in different styles in addition to the main narrative and in the first one we get the protagonist's lurid fantasies (involving lots of guns and occasional androids) of how he is going to track down his father, interspersed with the real-life Eiji procrastinating in a Tokyo cafe. However, I thought the story got more involving once we got to know more about Eiji and his background. There is some violent action in the book, as Eiji unwittingly stumbles across warring groups of Yakuza, but I think the book tended to be at its strongest in the quieter, more character-centred moments. I liked some of the interludes in the book more than others, probably my favourites were the whimsical Goatwriter children's stories and the very different tone of the wartime diaries of the pilot of a human-guided torpedo.

I've now started Chris Wooding's The Shadow Casket, so far I am mostly trying to remember what happened in the first book. I did enjoy the first book when I read it, but 2018 feels like a long time ago now.

Edited August 19, 2023 by williamjm

[Peadar]

I have almost finished Tim Pratt's Doors of Sleep. It's about a guy who travels (seemingly randomly) between universes every time he falls asleep. It's an entertaining and easy read. I may well check out some of the author's other books.