What Are You Reading? Third Quarter, 2023

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, Peadar said:

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.

Oooh, there’s a sequel, Prison of Sleep.

Sadly, no audiobooks, at the library anyway.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Just finished The Catskill Forest: A History  by Michael Kudish.  Describes the arrival and succession of forests post-glaciation, from the arrival of the boreal forest behind alpine plants, to its eventual replacement (for the most part) by the northern hardwood forest and later southern hardwood forest that dominates today.  The author uses carbon dating on plant matter preserved in bogs to determine when certain species arrived in specific locations.  

Pretty fascinating to consider the changes over time from when there was 800ft of ice overhead until today, and how recently it's all happened. I'd read the Catskills in the Ice Age by Robert Titus, which describes how glaciation affected the physical geography of the area, and this was an excellent follow-up.  

This quick read really grabbed me; I found it to be quite moving. If I was going to go back to school for anything forest history would be high on the list.  Really excited to go check out some of the bogs near me and explore some of the first growth stands of boreal forest nearby.  

Edited August 21, 2023 by Larry of the Lawn

[maarsen]

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Oooh, there’s a sequel, Prison of Sleep.

Sadly, no audiobooks, at the library anyway.

Does your library have access to Libby? Here in Aurora we do and ebooks can also be downloaded.

[maarsen]

On 8/15/2023 at 6:54 PM, Wilbur said:

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.

Phil Dick was not popular until after he died. That early stuff he wrote was really stuff he wrote to stay alive. Even in the SF community he was a fringe writer for most of his career.

[unJon]

3 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

Just finished The Catskill Forest: A History  by Michael Kudish.  Describes the arrival and succession of forests post-glaciation, from the arrival of the boreal forest behind alpine plants, to its eventual replacement (for the most part) by the northern hardwood forest and later southern hardwood forest that dominates today.  The author uses carbon dating on plant matter preserved in bogs to determine when certain species arrived in specific locations.  

Pretty fascinating to consider the changes over time from when there was 800ft of ice overhead until today, and how recently it's all happened. I'd read the Catskills in the Ice Age by Robert Titus, which describes how glaciation affected the physical geography of the area, and this was an excellent follow-up.  

This quick read really grabbed me; I found it to be quite moving. If I was going to go back to school for anything forest history would be high on the list.  Really excited to go check out some of the bogs near me and explore some of the first growth stands of boreal forest nearby.  

I want the @Happy Ent review is this book!

[Fragile Bird]

4 hours ago, maarsen said:

Does your library have access to Libby? Here in Aurora we do and ebooks can also be downloaded.

I meant, none of the author’s books are audiobooks. The Toronto library has zillions of audiobooks, never fear!

[Maithanet]

Just finished Inferno by Max Hastings, and man was that book ever long.  I think I started it back in March.  It was a good WW2 book, I definitely learned some things and his ability to consider different aspects of the war from different perspectives was quite interesting.  But I'm quite glad to be done with it and can move on to easier fare. 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

On 8/17/2023 at 5:56 PM, Wilbur said:

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.

I loved it, but I hear you.  I think "The Anarchy" is a very good title, and it is just the words after the colon that are misleading.  Maybe "The Indian Subcontinent at the End of the Early Modern Era" or something would have been more accurate.

I recently finished:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin.  Highly recommend.

Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt.  Do your self a favor and slither into this book.  It is fabulous.

Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus.  It's very entertaining, though a little heavy handed and lighter than it has pretenses of.

The Good Wife of Bath - Karen Brooks.  A retelling of Chaucer's Wife of Bath prologue from the point of view of the titular wife.  Starts off strong, drags towards the end.

Thorn Hedge - T. Kingfisher.  Absolutely delightful.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Mlle. Zabzie

[Slurktan]

Decided to pick up Corwalls Arthur trilogy after hearing about it many times over the years.  Bout halfway through Winter King and it's fantastic.

[Sw33t Summ3r Ch1ld]

I'm reading from my Walmart book collection. I picked up The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton because I like the movie. I also bought The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Walmart has some pretty okay books, but I think I still want to go to the used bookstore to find more eclectic books. I will have to be on the prowl and help myself to some incredible books and some incredible stories. 

[IlyaP]

On 8/10/2023 at 10:10 PM, karaddin said:

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!

I'm nearly done with the book. If there's a street library near you where you'd be happy to have me drop it, to save you some cash, I'd be happy to do so, if you like. It's a perfectly servicable piece of tie-in fiction, but I can't see a reason to hold onto it once I've finished with it...

[IlyaP]

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidences was an intensely meh novel. I was hoping it could be more, but alas, t'was not the case. Going back to Steven Brust's The Book of Jhereg in the meantime, which I'd paused reading to plow through an unmemorable 405 page detour to nowhere interesting in Night City.

[Ran]

2 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidences was an intensely meh novel. I was hoping it could be more, but alas, t'was not the case. Going back to Steven Brust's The Book of Jhereg in the meantime, which I'd paused reading to plow through an unmemorable 405 page detour to nowhere interesting in Night City.

Brust is terrific. Eventually you'll want to try The Phoenix Guards, which is a pastiche of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers set in Dragaera. Has some hilarious exchanges.

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Brust is terrific. Eventually you'll want to try The Phoenix Guards, which is a pastiche of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers set in Dragaera. Has some hilarious exchanges.

I'm pretty much working my way through all of his books, as he's fantastically curt, which makes reading him a pleasure, as I never think to myself "oh gods, here we go, a thousand page wrist-breaker!"

I've picked up the second collection of Taltos books as a result, The Book of Taltos. 

[Ran]

8 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I'm pretty much working my way through all of his books, as he's fantastically curt, which makes reading him a pleasure, as I never think to myself "oh gods, here we go, a thousand page wrist-breaker!"

 

Yeah, he's less known than he ought to be, and is still plugging away at the Vlad Taltos series. Lyorn is out next year, and then Brust intends two more novels to close out the series. There are also sequels to The Phoenix Guard.

I really liked Brokedown Palace, which started life as an explicitly Marxist parable, but became a bit deeper and more intriguing. And his epistolary novel Freedom and Neccessity co-written with Emma Bull is also excellent.

Back in the day, I had this exchange from The Phoenix Guards as my signature on Usenet:

Quote

On the murder of a critic by an artist:

"And it was well done, too," affirmed Tazendra. "I'd have done the same, only..."

"Yes?"

"I don't paint."

His then-girlfriend, a painter herself, noticed and read it to him, and he said something along the lines that it was funny, which is why he put it in the book. Heh.

Edited August 27, 2023 by Ran

[IlyaP]

3 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, he's less known than he ought to be, and is still plugging away at the Vlad Taltos series. Lyorn is out next year, and then Brist intends two more novels to close out the series. There are also sequels to The Phoenix Guard.

Pretty sure I saw/heard Scott Lynch praise him in an interview or a podcast, which was part of the desire to pick it up. And, it's, uh, a lot shorter than a lot of the fat fantasy that crowds my bookshelves. 

[Zorral]

I like Brust's Vlad Taltos series a lot.  I haven't seen mention of the latest ones, so haven't read them.  He seems to have dropped off the places online where it was easy to keep up with his latest books, and I, of course, don't do meta or nitter in their previous or present nomenclaturtura.

[Peadar]

I am just starting The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt. 

[HokieStone]

I decided to re-read the "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" trilogy.  I last read it...I dunno, 30 years ago?  I remember really liking it, and I know there's been some new books in the series (or a follow-up series, however you want to look at it).  I'm about 1/3 through "The Dragonbone Chair" - I pretty much have no recollection of my first read(other than enjoying it), so it's like it's new to me.

Does seem to have some 1970's/80's fantasy clichés - Simon the kitchen boy obviously has some secret parentage which make him destined to be a hero.  Pyrates is a little too "muhahahah" of a villain.  I'm at the point where Simon is wandering the countryside, having fled the castle, and he seems to conveniently be running into situations/people that important/helpful.

Still, I'm enjoying it.

ETA:  One other complaint - the map at the front of my 30 year old paperback is garbage - tiny print, and not much detail.  I printed off a better one found online and keep it tucked away in the front cover.

Edited August 29, 2023 by HokieStone

[drawkcabi]

Been rereading a lot of Ken Follett. The Kingsbridge series and a couple of stand alones (A Dangerous Fortune and A Place Called Freedom).

Looking forward to the new Kingsbridge book coming out the end of September.