What Are You Reading? 2024 Quarter 1!

[TheLastWolf]

44 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Which Faulkner work are you reading?

Oh Sorry, As I lay Dying. 

[Zorral]

13 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

Oh Sorry, As I lay Dying. 

Ya. Killer.

[Larry of the Lawn]

On 2/3/2024 at 7:04 AM, Liffguard said:

Okay I am absolutely tearing through The Mountain in the Sea. About 3/4 done, really enjoying it so far. I'd recommend this for any fans of Peter Watts' Blindsight  or Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life.

I started The Mountain in the Sea last night, about halfway through and very much loving it so far.

 

 

[maarsen]

43 minutes ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

I started The Mountain in the Sea last night, about halfway through and very much loving it so far.

 

 

Did you ever finish Dhalgren? Did you like It? Just curious as it is not to all tastes and is a challenging read.

[felice]

On 2/5/2024 at 11:57 PM, ljkeane said:

So I ended up reading Red Scholars Wake.

  Hide contents

I was actually thinking there might be a dark twist with humans being used to make the organic cores of the mindships or something to explain it but apparently not.

I'm pretty sure they were? Either way they're certainly organic beings with cybernetic extensions to their bodies, not AIs. And the way humans are linked into their own bots and VR overlays blurs the distinction further.

[ljkeane]

23 minutes ago, felice said:

I'm pretty sure they were? 

I don’t think so. None of the characters mention it and there’s no indication of it in the description of Rice Fish’s organic parts.

25 minutes ago, felice said:

Either way they're certainly organic beings with cybernetic extensions to their bodies, not AIs.

I don’t know, I read it more as the mind ships were machines that had some organic components. AIs which run partially on some organic hardware.

[Larry of the Lawn]

8 hours ago, maarsen said:

Did you ever finish Dhalgren? Did you like It? Just curious as it is not to all tastes and is a challenging read.

I did not, was maybe a third of the way through, and I was enjoying it quite a bit, but it was due back at the library and then it was reserved when I tried to get it again.  And then recently was made aware of Delany's past support of NAMBLA and it has kind of fallen down and maybe our of the t.b.r. pile.

I am sort of bummed on a personal preference level that books like that aren't really en vogue anymore.  I am a sucker for giant sprawling books but I think works like Dhalgren, or any of Pynchon or DeLillo's longer stuff would likely either be heavily edited.  Maybe serialized if the structure allowed it.

Maybe there will be a resurgence of very long books but I don't know that if that kind of thing has any monetary value anymore even if there was the cultural attention span for it.  

Edited February 7 by Larry of the Lawn

[unJon]

A few items. 
 

Absolutely loved The City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky. That guy writes so many different types of books. These are two of my favs of his. Think fantasy not sci-fi. Thank you to those that recommended them in these threads. 
 

Also just finished Seth Dickenson’s Exordia. I thought I was going to love it. Ended up liking it. There are some really interesting ideas mixed up in the book, which I enjoyed. And some interesting Bakker-esque philosophy, but in a good way, not a grim dark navel gazing way. I thought it was a stand alone when I started it, but it seems to me to be the start of a series or at least in need of a sequel. Anyone know?

[Zorral]

Burma Sahib (2024) by Paul Theroux.  

Novelist’s depiction of the 19-year-old George Orwell who still was Eric Blair, freshly released from Eton, on his sojourn in the police of Burma.  How this experience working inside the Brit Raj shaped his future self.   On the ship journey, in the company of all those Brit Raj sahibs who live their colonialist dominance snobbery dream life ‘out there’ which they can’t afford ‘at home,’ he already feels fish out of water, far more so, than merely the awkwardness of an inexperienced youth in the company of people all older than he is, who all know each other, and practice their colonial codes of speech and attitude with unaware precision and brutality.

[williamjm]

I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's House of Open Wounds. I liked City of Last Chances a lot, which this is a loose sequel to, and I think this book might be even better. There are a lot of fantasy stories which focus on wars and battles (such as Tchaikovsky's own Guns of the Dawn), this is a bit different to most of them because while it is set in an army during a war we see very little of the fighting and often the characters have only a vague idea about how the war is progressing. The setting is an experimental field hospital where a motley bunch of outcasts, magicians and priests are applying their varied talents to saving the lives of wounded soldiers who might not survive with conventional medicine. Their existence is complicated because the country whose army they are serving is has very strict rules against outcasts, magicians and priests and would normally be hanging most of them rather than employing them. This is particularly true of their newest recruit Yasnic (previously seen in City of Last Chances) whose speciality is divine healing which can cure any wound as long as the person being cured commits to a life of pacifism, which is not a good fit for someone healing soldiers. It features a last cast of characters, many of them get chapters told from their own perspective, and I thought they were all interesting and the way their backstories are gradually revealed is very effective. The tension builds as the story goes along and the hospital's continued existence gets increasingly tenuous and the story has a great ending. There's also a good amount of (often dark) comedy to lighten the mood a bit, particularly in the interactions between Yasnic and his irritable God who is continuing to have trouble adjusting to only having a single follower.

[KingintheNorth4]

Yesterday I finished my re-read of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the first time in years. One thing that bothered me is the fact that four first year students spent their detention by walking through a notoriously dangerous forest at night looking for whatever is killing the unicorns, and the only person to help guide through all this is an inept gamekeeper and and cowardly dog. That always seemed like a bad idea to me. 

[Peadar]

On 2/4/2024 at 10:02 PM, Underfoot said:

I found this interview from last year:

No info on the third book on the skyhorse/talos publishing website, Goodreads, or Amazon. Hopefully 2025??

Ah, now, well sure that's good news, so it is! Thanks for sharing.

[Wall Flower]

On 2/12/2024 at 4:56 AM, Zorral said:

Burma Sahib (2024) by Paul Theroux.  

Novelist’s depiction of the 19-year-old George Orwell who still was Eric Blair, freshly released from Eton, on his sojourn in the police of Burma.  How this experience working inside the Brit Raj shaped his future self.   On the ship journey, in the company of all those Brit Raj sahibs who live their colonialist dominance snobbery dream life ‘out there’ which they can’t afford ‘at home,’ he already feels fish out of water, far more so, than merely the awkwardness of an inexperienced youth in the company of people all older than he is, who all know each other, and practice their colonial codes of speech and attitude with unaware precision and brutality.

I'll have to mention this one to my bookclub and have a look at it myself. We're reading two Orwell related books this year - his Spanish civil war memoir, Homage to Catalonia, and Wifedom, Anna Funder's book about his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

[Zorral]

1 minute ago, Wall Flower said:

I'll have to mention this one to my bookclub and have a look at it myself. We're reading two Orwell related books this year - his Spanish civil war memoir, Homage to Catalonia, and Wifedom, Anna Funder's book about his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Remember that Wellington is supposed to have said Britain won Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton?  (He didn't say that, but nevermind!)

This book has Orwell thinking the Empire was made by caning and class and bullying everywhere in Eton.  The fragging system created Brit men perfectly indoctrinated and trained on both ends >ah-hem< to effectively bully and break down the 'scum' they were sent out to rule.

 

[Wall Flower]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Remember that Wellington is supposed to have said Britain won Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton?  (He didn't say that, but nevermind!)

This book has Orwell thinking the Empire was made by caning and class and bullying everywhere in Eton.  The fragging system created Brit men perfectly indoctrinated and trained on both ends >ah-hem< to effectively bully and break down the 'scum' they were sent out to rule.

 

Looking at the current British Government, I'm not sure much has changed - except the loss of their empire of course.

[mcbigski]

Not sure if I got the rec from here or from one of my friends, but out of the 50 or so plus kindle unlimited you might like this offered, I started Blind Sight last night.  Quite engrossing.  Only about 40% through, so minor spoiler if does it even need a tag, on the birthday thing at least, I've pretty much agreed with Siri since I was about 14, and it got worse in the online era.

[Wilbur]

A conversation with my wife prompted me to look at the list of Hugo award winning novels at the end of last year, and I noticed that I had never read Vonda N. McIntyre's 1979 winning novel, Dreamsnake.  I had seen copies of the paperback in used bookstore many times, but the seventies-erific cover illustrations were such that I always figured it was a New Wave story, and I don't really know anything about the author, so I had passed on it.

Last week I picked up the audiobook, read by the excellent Anna Fields.  It started off very unobtrusively, featuring simple scenes and straightforward characterizations.  However it soon became obvious why it won the Hugo (and Locus and Nebula), as the world-building and character development became expansive and enchanting.

I won't spoil too much here, except to say that this book shares a development path with the first third of Walter M Miller Jr.'s most famous novel without really sharing much else with it.  But the sense of wonder, of exploring a strange new world, and learning about people who are learning about their world - all of that is here in Dreamsnake.  I won't touch on the plot any further because it is difficult to do so without spoiling various elements that will surprise the first-time reader, but it is a plot that works on three levels in retrospect.

At least half of the characters are women, and the protagonist is a women with strong agency without partaking of the Mary Sue trope.  Sexuality is handled in a way that could only happen after the New Wave in science fiction, but doesn't engage in the shock tactics of most of that sub-genre.  Literature critics among you ought to have a field day considering some of the themes and symbols, but more importantly, the story left me wanting much, much more, and sad to discover that I could not follow what happened to the protagonist at the end of the book.

Strongly recommended and genuinely deserving of the Hugo.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

I am out of the habit of reading spec fic right now.  Need to find some good stuff.  However, recent excellent reads:

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano.  It’s schmaltzy but enjoyed it.  Nothing too deep.

The Wolf Age by Tore Skele (in translation).  History of the Vikings in the 9th-11th centuries.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

The Hapsburgs by Martin Rady

The Middle Kingdoms by Martin Rady

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason

Next up:  The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years, The Young Queens, Starling House

[williamjm]

I finished Lois McMaster Bujold's latest Penric and Desdemona novella, Demon Daughter. I thought it was another good story in the series, with some good character development for Penric and his family and also for the new character Otta, although sometimes I felt she was maybe a bit too perceptive for a six year-old.

I also read Lost Sols, a bonus chapter that Andy Weir recently published to mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of The Martian, available on his website: galactanet.com/lostsols.pdf

Edited February 17 by williamjm

[Iskaral Pust]

On 1/21/2024 at 7:23 PM, polishgenius said:

 

.I think it's a classic because it codified a story template in a way that hadn't really been seen before, one that's since been imitated or been a heavy influence in one way or another countless times (including, as you say, by Apocalypse Now). It's a pretty foundational work of modern storytelling, regardless of how the actual telling itself has aged. The colonialism part was part of it, of course, but that find-the-Kurtz-character, geographic-journey-mirrors-a-mental-journey structure has also been influential to stories without that aspect. 

 

I forgot to respond to this good engagement on The Heart Of Darkness.  It’s a good point that an influential new structure or style should be a classic even if it’s subsequently executed better.  But the bolded part appears to have a very long history in literature, going back to The Odyssey, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, and many prehistoric myths where geographical symbolism of the wilderness/forest, sea, underworld, desert, etc mirrored or was a metaphor for the mental or spiritual journey of the protagonist.  It’s pretty central to the entire hero’s journey too.