What are you reading? Fourth Quarter 2023

[Teng Ai Hui]

Somewhat recently, I finished the third and final novel in Rachel Aaron's DFZ series.  (DFZ stands for Detroit Free Zone.)  I then tried Aaron's By a Silver Thread.  I had to put this one aside for a while.  It says that it's set in the DFZ, but nothing about it resembles the DFZ series.  Also, I don't really care about the missing person that the main character is trying to find.

I also read To Sail Beyond the Botnet, novelette #3 in the Bot 9 series by Suzanne Palmer.

I’m currently trying Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey.  I'm half way through it, and it's a bit of a slog so far.  
 

[TheLastWolf]

The Plague by Albert Camus 

Spoiler

That magistrate Othon boy's death shook me like nothing else in recent memory 

Sailing through The Wager by David Grann (KOTFM) ahead of its adaptation by Marty and Leo. Non fiction has never been so good

[Wilbur]

This past weekend I read Rick Cook's Wizard's Bane, a Baen novel from 1989.

If you are a teenager from 1989 who recently read Spafford's Practical UNIX Security, enjoys portal fantasies and likes to play D&D, this book will appeal to you.

[TheLastWolf]

Dune is goated

[The Marquis de Leech]

On 10/27/2023 at 4:15 AM, maarsen said:

So did I a few years ago, only to find that the last few bits of the book is lost to time. If anything it does show we really have learned nothing in the ensuing millenia.

I think the implication is that Thucydides never got around to completing the book.

Xenophon apparently starts off where Thucydides leaves off, and even tries to imitate his style. Which means the book was unfinished in Xenophon's day too.

[Zorral]

Herodotus was the older of the two, he was the model, not the other way around.

Quote

.... A somewhat doubtful anecdote of his early life still exists. While still a youth of 10–12 years, he and his father were supposed to have gone to the agora of Athens where the young Thucydides heard a lecture by the historian Herodotus. According to some accounts, the young Thucydides wept with joy after hearing the lecture, deciding that writing history would be his life's calling. The same account also claims that after the lecture, Herodotus spoke with the youth and his father, stating: Oloros your son yearns for knowledge. In all essence, the episode is most likely from a later Greek or Roman account of his life.[11]  ....

Not that he didn't bother to finish, but that he was unable to finish.

Quote

.... Thucydides' narrative breaks off in the middle of the year 411 BC, and this abrupt end has traditionally been explained as due to his death while writing the book, although other explanations have been put forward. ....

Alas that we don't have much reliable, contemporary documentation for all those people

[Iskaral Pust]

After Dunkirk by Lee Jackson is historical fiction set in WWII.  It’s one of those sprawling sagas — in the manner of Wouk or Michener —following multiple family members through their wartime experiences and exploits as they are conveniently distributed to allow inclusion of the British military, the French Resistance, the Bletchley Park code-breakers, the RAF, etc.  It’s pretty well written but spends a lot of focus on the shock and uncertainty felt by the characters, which was good for the first 10-15% but then didn’t progress enough. I think I would have enjoyed it more if it felt fresh but it’s an over-mined topic.  Go watch Band Of Brothers instead.

Britannia’s Innocent by Antoine Vanner is another historical fiction, this time the first in a series about naval history in the era of steam-powered iron clads (1864).  So rather different from the usual age-of-sail fare: no longer focused on tacking, weather gauges, or broadsides, instead the focus is on steam boilers, screws, and bringing to bear just one massive gun with flexible rotation.  This is set in Denmark not long after the Crimean War and the military world is clearly in transition from Napoleon to WWI.  It was well written and a pretty good read except for the Confederate characters repeatedly pleading their case that their cause is misunderstood.  I’ll continue the series if they’re no longer featured.

The Corfe Castle Murder by Rachel McLean is a serviceable English police procedural novel with a fish-out-of-water DI arriving from a big city to a small town just in time for their first murder in many years.  It’s fine as a cosy-ish murder mystery but the author hammers the sexist angle so strongly that it dominates the entire book.  All of the male characters are crassly misogynistic creeps and/or petty, pompous, useless mansplainers, while all of the female characters are brilliant, superhumanly capable and highly attractive (to the miserable, self-pitying female DI, who will obviously realize later in the series that she is gay). Ultimately the novel is just a straw man of sexism and that’s the only impression it leaves.

[williamjm]

I read Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquillity. It's a relatively short book but does still manage to fit in half a dozen time periods ranging from early 20th Century Canada to a lunar colony several centuries in the future. Despite that I thought this had a more focused plot than her previous book, The Glass Hotel, which had plenty of good writing but I was a bit unsure about the point of it. This has a much stronger science fiction element than her previous books and although I have seen most of the ideas in here before in books by other authors I thought those elements did work well. Mandel's primary strength has always been her characters and the same is true here where they do get plenty of depth despite mostly not being in the story for very long. I think the one character that didn't really work was Gaspery, who is frustratingly passive on many occasions and is very poor at doing his job.

I think there's some clear autobiographical bits in here with one character being an author who, like Mandel, had come to fame as the author of a novel about a pandemic a few short years before an actual pandemic. Unlike Station Eleven this isn't primarily a book about a pandemic but it is a subject that comes up multiple times throughout the story, I think perhaps the author had some thoughts about the topic she wanted to get out of her system.

I think Station Eleven is still her best book out of those that I've read, but I did like this a lot.

I have now started Martha Wells' new Murderbot Diaries story, System Collapse.

Edited November 14, 2023 by williamjm

[Fragile Bird]

29 minutes ago, williamjm said:

 

I have now started Martha Wells' new Murderbot Diaries story, System Collapse.

Say what???? Cool! I didn’t realize this was out!

[TheLastWolf]

Is the Catch 22 sequel worth the time?

[The Marquis de Leech]

On 11/11/2023 at 6:51 AM, Zorral said:

Herodotus was the older of the two, he was the model, not the other way around.

I said Xenophon, not Herodotus.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

said Xenophon, not Herodotus.

Gods!  I can't even read properly these days!  

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Re reading Sapkowski’s witcher series. I bought the official translations to show my support but I’m actually reading from the fan translated ones available online because they are so much better at capturing the feel and tone of the original polish. The official ones are kinda sterile. 

[mcbigski]

Also working on the latest Murderbot myself.  

[Zorral]

@RhaenysBee  It belatedly occurred to me, going by what you have liked and not liked, both here and screen forums, you might enjoy one of my favorite novels, Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt.  The film is not as good, but it is good too.  The reason it just now came to mind is the notifications today that Byatt has died at age 87.

[Wilbur]

M.R. Forbes' Starship for Sale was a recommended on here sometime recently, so I loaded it up about three weeks ago in the audiobook format read by Dave Jackson.

The reader was good, but it took me three weeks to slog through this one.  Part of it was catching the illness during that time, but the other was a strong absence of a sense of place in the story.  Also, the hokey tone meant that I never felt that any of the conflict was real or needed careful attention, despite the ostensibly high stakes.

I might be too...experienced...for this kind of story.

[Gaston de Foix]

On 11/14/2023 at 6:47 PM, williamjm said:

I have now started Martha Wells' new Murderbot Diaries story, System Collapse.

Is it a return to form for Martha Wells?  I devoured the Murderbot Diaries in April 2022 on vacation, but couldn't bring myself to read Witch King after the bad reviews.  

[Gaston de Foix]

On 11/17/2023 at 10:45 AM, Zorral said:

@RhaenysBee  It belatedly occurred to me, going by what you have liked and not liked, both here and screen forums, you might enjoy one of my favorite novels, Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt.  The film is not as good, but it is good too.  The reason it just now came to mind is the notifications today that Byatt has died at age 87.

If you like Byatt, I commend this lecture by Kenji Yoshino: 

https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/17626/Commencement_2005_Yoshino.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

this lecture by Kenji Yoshino: 

"She describes one scholar as “a kind of verbal Cleopatra, creating appetite where most she satisfied.” This seemed to capture many Yale Law School professors, and it gave me hours of joy to listen to Bruce Ackerman urge us toward his particular pet theory of Constitutional Law and to think: “Bruce Ackerman: The Verbal Cleopatra.”

I loved that too!  O Byatt was clever -- and droll -- so often!

[williamjm]

7 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Is it a return to form for Martha Wells?  I devoured the Murderbot Diaries in April 2022 on vacation, but couldn't bring myself to read Witch King after the bad reviews.  

So far I think the new story is on par with the previous Murderbot stories, it feels very much like part 2 of Network Effect.

I haven't read Witch King so don't know how it would compare to that.