What Are You Reading? 2024 Quarter 1!

[Maithanet]

Finished my Dune reread, and I'm pumped to go see Dune Part 2 in theater. Overall this book still holds up really well.  It is a great example of what sci-fi can be, with a strange world that nonetheless feels lived in.  SO MUCH of sci-fi and fantasy that came after 1969 is built using pillars from Dune.  Star Wars and Wheel of Time are perhaps the most obvious examples.

Good/Great

The story is very tight, there are very few slow or superfluous scenes.  Great sense of setting and worldbuilding.  Good characters that make largely reasonable decisions.  The commentary about colonialism and exploitative resource extraction are as relevant now as they were 55 years ago. 

Less Good

Aside from the Bene Gesserit, the women characters don't have much to do or a lot of character development.  I'm not even sure there was an Atreides woman with a single line of dialogue (Jessica is not an Atreides).  The Fremen are treated respectfully, but very easily manipulated.  A Fremen-Atreides alliance should have been an EXTREMELY tough sell given that the Atreides are still looking to do the same resource extraction as the Harkonnens, just with more human rights protections. 

 

On the whole this is a great book, and well worth reading both as a classic of the genre and just on it's own as an enjoyable story. 

Edited March 19 by Maithanet

[Jaxom 1974]

New Read About to Start: Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. It had an eye catching cover that made me take a look at it and darn it, I"m a sucker for the Supernatural Western genre.  You don't find too much that excels, so hopefully this is good. (If you enjoy the genre and read comic books, find The Sixth Gun by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt).

Current Listen: Since I'm waiting on a couple stories I want to listen to to become available, I once again found myself taking a suggested available book and now find myself giving Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros a listen.  Has this one got a thread somewhere?  It's yet another Harry Potteresque school learning story, yet supposedly more "adult" with the setting being "college" (in a similar vein as my last listen, though this one is dragons).  I think it's more adult because of the language, violence and sex?  The snarky tone of the protagonist and the use of language more appropriate in a modern city setting like New York would have been slightly more jarring if I haven't already been exposed to Gideon the Ninth (who does it a little better I think).  I'll keep listening though.

[mcbigski]

10 hours ago, Maithanet said:

 

Less Good

  I'm not even sure there was an Atreides woman with a single line of dialogue (Jessica is not an Atreides).  The Fremen are treated respectfully, but very easily manipulated. 

Oh for fucks sake.  Super crap take there.  "I'm the Atreides Gom Jabbar" is, if not the best line in the first book, at least top 3 or so.  But critical analysis is so popular precisely because it's so much easier than creativity.  

Be less of a hack.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

I'm finally digging into Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, currently close to finishing The Stone of Farewell.

I have a lot of thoughts about how it does and does not connect with ASOIAF. GRRM was clearly influenced by it (he has said as much).

But I also think he saw a bit of his old work in it. Some characters and passages recall the more fantasy-leaning stories GRRM wrote in decades past.

My guess is that he saw a kindred spirit doing fantasy right; and concluded that his own fantasy story could be a compelling way to bring a lot of his own themes and motifs into a grand and coherent narrative world.

In any event, Memory is more high-magic than I prefer, but I like William's characters, and often love his prose. I'm eager to see how the story develops.

[IlyaP]

22 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I'm finally digging into Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, currently close to finishing The Stone of Farewell.

This is the trilogy that defeated me. They're just so ridiculously massive, and I'm still stuck on To Green Angel Tower Part 1 and can't work up the motivation to finish this ridiculous beneamoth. I feel like I'm being trolled every time I try to pick it up again. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

This is the trilogy that defeated me. They're just so ridiculously massive, and I'm still stuck on To Green Angel Tower Part 1 and can't work up the motivation to finish this ridiculous beneamoth. I feel like I'm being trolled every time I try to pick it up again. 

Well, to be honest, I'm doing this series via audiobook. Andrew Wincott does the reading, and he's pretty good (despite most of the non-human characters sounding similar). I too was intimidated by the massiveness of Book III, but I figure with the audiobook, it'll be more like a gargantuan radio play.

(You've also hit on my shameful relationship with War and Peace and Gravity's Rainbow. They're looking down on me from my bookshelf as I type this)

[IlyaP]

My brain struggles with audiobooks, but I high-five anyone who has a brain wired to vibe with them!

[ljkeane]

So I found Locklands a bit of a strange read. It's a very imaginative and well thought out setting and the story's good but elements of it didn't really click with me.

Spoiler

Basically the Givan society (a hive mind essentially) that's presented as the way forward for humanity and is ultimately victorious at the end of the book sounds fucking awful to me. That's personal preference though rather than any issue with how good the book is.

Next up I'm going to red Christian Cameron's Treason of Sparta.

Edited March 24 by ljkeane

[Underfoot]

35 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

So I found Locklands a bit of a strange read. It's a very imaginative and well thought out setting and the story's good but elements of it didn't really click with me.

  Hide contents

Basically the Givan society (a hive mind essentially) that's presented as the way forward for humanity and is ultimately victorious at the end of the book sounds fucking awful to me. That's personal preference though rather than any issue with how good the book is.

 

Agreed on the ending, I just didn't get it. It was strange how much it mirrored the final book / problem of The Expanse, and how the authors chose such different endings 

[Underfoot]

I read the Kings of Paradise trilogy by Richard Nell and it mostly worked for me. The first book was really difficult as you have to learn that yeah, there's not really anyone to root for precisely, and the world building took a bit to click for me. Ultimately I enjoyed the bulk of it; a very different type of fantasy world with a very different type of magic and some interesting character work. The end was little weird and some of the character fates felt a little loosely tied up - with so much attention given to Ruka in the final book, there wasn't much room for much else. 

I also read She Who Became the Sun by Shelly Parker-Chan in less than 24 hours this weekend. SO engrossing. I had read (or thought I read) that it was really bleak/depressing, but I didn't find it too bad (Maybe mixed that up with The Poppy Wars). Mostly historical fiction with the just-right about of fantasy elements to lend it an air of myth, with some interesting gender identity / sexuality themes sprinkled in. Looking forward to He Who Drowned the World.

[williamjm]

I read Morgan Stang's Murder on the Lamplight Express, the second in her series about a monster hunter employed to deal with supernatural threats who finds her hunts sometimes interrupted by having to solve a mundane murder mystery. As the name suggests this time the murder is aboard a luxurious sleeper train where, inevitably, all the travellers seem to have their own secrets and possible motives for murder. It's a fun pastiche of mystery novels with a fast pace which manages to cover a large number of subplots. I also like the way the world-building gradually reveals how different this world is to our world.

Then the sad news of Vernor Vinge's death reminded me that although I've read most of his work I hadn't read one of his most famous stories. True Names is often cited as inventing the cyberpunk genre and it is remarkably prescient for a story written in 1981. Many parts of it still feel very topical, particularly with recent developments in AI. Although some details are dated (such as its idea of how much computing power would be unusually large) I think the basic premise still works well today and there are a few unexpected twists along the way.

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

So I found Locklands a bit of a strange read. It's a very imaginative and well thought out setting and the story's good but elements of it didn't really click with me.

  Hide contents

Basically the Givan society (a hive mind essentially) that's presented as the way forward for humanity and is ultimately victorious at the end of the book sounds fucking awful to me. That's personal preference though rather than any issue with how good the book is.

I think the events are a logical extrapolation of things introduced in the first two books but I definitely enjoyed it less than the earlier books in the series.

[hauberk]

Wrapped up Erikson’s Fall of Light last week. It was a super dense read, covered a bunch of stuff that felt superfluous while circling around some pretty relevant story beats while not fully touching on them. 
 

Started Harry Crosby’s A Wing and a Prayer - one of the source books for the Masters of Air. Good info and is mostly accessible but it’s not told in chronological order.  It also suffers from what appears to be some aggressive copy editing.  Multiple instances of his/a service .45 being described as a revolver. Very specifically when describing the runway configuration at Thorpe-Abbott being similar to a pistol it looks like someone went looking for synonyms and came up short.  

[TheLastWolf]

Ludlum's Rhinemann Exchange, not his best but still a classic

[hauberk]

On 3/24/2024 at 7:24 PM, hauberk said:
 

Started Harry Crosby’s A Wing and a Prayer - one of the source books for the Masters of Air. Good info and is mostly accessible but it’s not told in chronological order.  It also suffers from what appears to be some aggressive copy editing.  Multiple instances of his/a service .45 being described as a revolver. Very specifically when describing the runway configuration at Thorpe-Abbott being similar to a pistol it looks like someone went looking for synonyms and came up short.  

Best I can tell, Open Road Media, the current publishers of Wing and A Prayer, just scanned an old manuscript, used text recognition/conversion software and didn’t bother to actually review the conversion. It’s disappointingly sloppy. It’s well written and very much fleshes out the TV series. I’ll be looking for an older edition for the shelf and skipping Open Road editions in the future. 

Edited March 31 by hauberk

[unJon]

So I feel old. I’m on Amazon and I see a book by James SA Corey. I remember they have a new SiFi series coming out and I get excited and buy it. 
 

It turns out it was a 30 something page short story. It was good but I was surprised when I went to turn the virtual page and it was over! 
 

Fun story though. It’s called How it Unfolds. Apparently part of a collection called the Far Reaches, but I bought it standalone on kindle. 

[snowleo]

I read the final 5-book arc of "Wings of Fire," a middle-grade dragon society series greatly enjoyed by both my kids. My 3rd grader was finishing up the series and I'd read the previous 10 books a few year s back when my older kid was in grades 3 and 4. I total enjoyed these--engaging plot and characters, plus it's easy to forgive an author's worldbuilding and retcons when books are meant for kids. Not so much when a book is ostensibly for adults--Hannah Kaner's "Godkiller" had shockingly weak characters (when you constantly have to flip to front of chapter to see whose POV it is, because they all have the same voice, including the God) and a boring world.

I'm also sad to say that I didn't much care for most of "Wild Cards #1." I picked this up at a Friends of the Library sale and won't be hunting for any more. Maybe I'm too old, or the fresh-at-the-time stories have all been done to death since then?

[Jaxom 1974]

On 3/16/2024 at 2:43 PM, Jaxom 1974 said:

 

Currently listening to: Tom Miller's The Philosopher's Flight. This is one I've flirted with purchasing for a while since I saw it at B&N, but never pulled the trigger. When it came up as a suggested option for listening, I decided to give it a go. And damn it is fun. Plenty of Harry Potter or Wise Man's Fear vibes here, but (for me at least) mostly better. Now I know I'll pick this one up to have a hard copy.

Soooo...to try something different, I've actually chose to read the second book after listening to the first.  The Philosopher's War by Tom Miller, who because I'm reading the physical copy, I've come to realize is from (originally) the very town I live in now in Wisconsin...

[mcbigski]

Discovered that the Thieves' World anthologies are current part of Kindle Unlimited.  Read them all in the 90s as a teen.  Interesting to reread them now after being a whole lot older and also having read a bunch of stuff by Farmer, Brunner, Anderson, Asprin, Haldeman, and Bradley.

Happened upon it back in the days when I had a membership to the Science Fiction Book Club probably in the late 80s.  Took a chance on Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Adventures series, and figured the Sanctuary three book anthology would be similar.  Not exactly but...

Rereading it, I mostly prefer the Asprin, Abbey, and Offut stories for the continuing narratives, but the Haldeman story was probably my favorite from the first book.  One Thumb is a hell of a character name.

Interestingly, "The Fruit of Enlibar" in the second book is largely about an attempt to replicate an ancient sort of steel for sword making.  Features magical forging, the knowledge of which has been lost, a sort of rippled patterned alloy like Damascus steel (or Oathkeeper!), and a quenching of the blade.  The blacksmith in this story used sea water brine, but did say that in the Empire they prefer to use the heart of a slave (Nissa Nissa!).  Rereading that gave me huge Valyrian steel vibes.

Could be entirely parallel evolution, but reading that story in particular made me think GRRM probably mined that vein as well.  Zelazny was supposed to write for the first book or two but backed out due to other obligations, and I think that was well before George moved to New Mexico, but I'd be surprised if he hadn't read that back in the day.