April 2011 - Reading Thread

[BklynBlazer]

Yeah it must be an ARC for the US trade paperback edition - the cover says it goes on sale late April 26 for $16. Strange that they make ARCS even though it's been out for a couple years and they seem to be using the same cover for the US edition. With all the high praise it's been getting, I'm surprised it isn't currently on sale here. Looking forward to it!

[automne]

Just finished reading Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair - very whimsical, I liked it. It was also educational, because I've never actually read or learnt anything about Jane Eyre, so this one gave me a crash course :P.

it's one of my favourite feel-good and have-fun books. :)

I've just started reading Stephenson's Anathem

[Peadar]

I'm reading John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, which came to me from a friend. Good start!

[SkynJay]

Ok. The Dragon's Path is now in my hands. And I must say, it has sucked me in as quickly as the Long Price did. I know Abraham is already getting a ton of love from us, but I think he may be working his way into my top 5 the way it is going.

[Bellis]

I read Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien, a continuation of musings on the Vietnam war, loosely tied together by a fantastical plotline involving following an AWOL soldier as he flees west across Asia to Paris. I didn't like this as much as The Things They Carried - read that first.

[Cuchulain]

I read a number of works in the last week or so:

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Beautifully written, almost like a poem in novel form. DW might be overly sentimental and/or nostalgic for some, but I loved it. Made me misty-eyed several times too.

Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury. The Sequel to DW. Really well-written too but not up to par with the original. Also a bit short.

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds. A collection of Revelation Space short fiction. Excellent overall. Dilation Sleep was probably my least favourite tale, but really there isn't a single weak story in the collection. Highly recommended.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds. Omnibus of two RS novellas. Both excellent.

The Hammer by K J Parker. Another of Parker's great standalones. It takes talent to write a fantasy novel about some farmers in a remote colony and make it this interesting.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett. Classic hardboiled detective novel. Enjoyed it a lot.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett. Another classic hardboiled novel, but with a focus on politics this time. Another great read.

[murphy]

I read a number of works in the last week or so:

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Beautifully written, almost like a poem in novel form. DW might be overly sentimental and/or nostalgic for some, but I loved it. Made me misty-eyed several times too.

My favorite Bradbury book.

[Lord Toblerone]

I gave up on Thomas Covenant. I just couldn't get into it. Maybe someday I'll come back to it.

So now I'm reading Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman's short story collection.

[UndergroundMan]

I recently started "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigaulpi and "The Crystal Cave" by Mary Stewart. Almost finished with "White Noise" by Don DeLillo.

I can barely wait for "White-Luck Warrior".

[Mjolnir]

I finished Susan Palwick's sf novel of society forty years from now, Shelter -- this was in March, I suppose, so I'll try not to go on about it too long, but it was very very worthwhile. The novel follows two women in very different social situations -- and later and peripherally a computer program of dubious provinence installed in a house -- through roughly two decades, using Palwick's speculative US's evolving attitudes to AI and mental illness as background but keeping the story firmly honed in on the characters' personal lives. It's a very lived-in future that makes a lot of sense, to the point where I enjoyed spending time there even though in several important ways its actually a bit of a distopian shithole. Only the religious component of Palwick's future -- organized Gaianism, and some of the terminology associated with it -- wrang a bit corny on occasion. The characters are deeply drawn and I came to care a lot about them, though sometimes they're pretty damned frustrating. It is a very drama-heavy story, with much keeping-of-secrets and miscommunication and divided family loyalties etc, but Palwick never descends to soap opera for its own sake.

Palwick writes very well but in a slightly tell-heavy style, and long passages do read in a slightly more expository way than I personally would have found ideal. But all said reading is very easy; Palwick couches her concepts simply and never uses big words when straightforward language will do. Its simple, but deceptively so. And there were long stretches where I was really enthralled or frightened, physically could not stop reading, which is rarer these days. This is really good social science-fiction, getting at interesting ideas about the desire to provide care, the ways it can be interpreted, and what kind of litmus test it makes for humanity in an interesting and accessible way. It came out just four years ago, and deserved more attention.

I started Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear with much joy, but I have no power to resist shiny things so at the 90-page mark I stopped and read Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot, which was awesome fun and twisted in surprisingly upsetting ways a couple times. I'm loving The Wise Man's Fear and shall return to it now, but will probably continue to take it leisurely as I'm in no immediate rush to finish it.

[Ormond]

Since my last post in these threads I have read:

Troll by Johanna Sinisalo. I was expecting this book to be an "urban fantasy", but it turned out to be more like science fiction, as its basic conceit is that trolls are a real species of ape-like animals living in Finnish forests. A young gay man called Angel finds a juvenile troll and takes it back to his apartment, with unintended consequences both for his neighbors and a couple of other gay men he has sexual relationships with (Angel is in unrequited love with one of them; the other is in unrequited love with Angel.) It's an excellent story with a bit of a surprise ending.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. This is a "steampunk" novel set in an alternate history world where computers were invented back around 1800. I liked some of the characters, but I was a bit frustrated because I wanted more explanation of just how those computers had led to all the differences between the novel's world and our own. I didn't find this clear at all, and there were some things a bit hard to take -- in the novel's world the USA is four different countries, with the North and the Confederacy being separate nations, along with the Republics of Texas and California. But the year is 1855 -- somehow in that world the Civil War has happened decades before it really did, but the story is set in London and Paris and a coherent explanation of the American situation is never given, even though Sam Houston shows up as a character in the novel and at one point "Chickamauga boots" are mentioned. So a Civil War that happened at least 20 years earlier had the same battles as the real Civil War? I found that one impossible to believe! I'd give the book a B overall; worth reading but nothing to rave about.

Tonight I just finished A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers by Hsiao Li-hung. This is a book that was a huge bestseller in Taiwan when it was published there in 1981. It's set in the mid 1970s. The preface to the English translation points out that the story was a bit old-fashioned and nostalgic to the Taiwanese themselves even in 1981.

It focuses on a heroine named Zhenguan who comes from a small town in southern Taiwan. Her large family maintains many traditional Chinese customs that are carefully described in the novel, and people act in ways that would be incomprehensible to most Americans or Europeans but that fit into traditional Chinese culture. For example, one of Zhenguan's uncles was thought lost in World War II (Taiwanese were drafted into the Japanese army in that war), but it turns out he has been living in Japan for the past 25 years. He turns up again with a Japanese wife, surprising his own parents as well as the Taiwanese wife he left behind. But the Taiwanese wife meekly accepts the fact that her husband has abandoned her for the Japanese woman and is grateful to the Japanese wife for taking care of him all these years. That definitely wouldn't be how the story would be written in an American novel or soap opera! :)

The main plot line in the story is Zhenguan's own love story with a man named Daxin, and that certainly doesn't go the way a Westerner would expect either.

I am going to recommend this book to students in my Cross-Cultural Psychology class as an excellent introduction to a very different culture. I do wonder, though, if young people in Taiwan today still feel fond nostalgia for the past when they read this book or if the new generation in Taiwan thinks it's now backward and silly.

I plan to read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde next -- completely coincidental to this book being mentioned in this thread already; I've been planning to read this one soon for several months.

[Eponine]

I really enjoyed The Anubis Gates - it's fantastic the way that fantasy of that sort should be. It's kind of jumpy, but I can't think of a way to bring the story all together that isn't. I would definitely recommend it, but I wouldn't consider it essential, like you haven't really lived if you haven't read it or anything like that.

[Astra]

Gardens of the Moon [The Malazan Book of the Fallen #1] by Steven Erikson

[Procrastimancer]

I finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. It was a sad novel and I was wiping away tears as it came to a close, but I loved it. I also fucking hate Baby Kochamma, I don't think I have ever encountered a more vile, hateful, disgusting bitter bitch of a character.

EDIT:

It has been a while since I read any SF that didn't revolve around some near future apocalypse, so I picked up Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief. Although, could be I just have a thing for author names that I can't spell without referencing the cover. I am about forty pages into the book, which is a bit of a surprise, because I could have sworn I'd only read it for a handful of minutes before heading to bed. It is either fast paced or I was so into it I lost track of time. Whichever one, it is definitely a good sign. I am enjoying it so far, but my mind does occasionally turn to mush when it starts delving too deeply into the technical.

[beniowa]

I finished The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham yesterday afternoon and it was quite good.

Next up is The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones.

[Jon Sprunk]

Just started re-reading A Feast of Crows in anticipation of the upcoming HBO series.

[Datepalm]

Finshed Jo Walton's Farthing, after an up-thread rec. I enjoyed it, but it was a bit odd with the shifts in tone and genre. First its a cosy, classic murder mystery (english countryside, big house, fun with class, etc, with bonus alternative history and antisemitism), so far so good. Then it begins to get a little silly with the characters (Is everyone in this book bisexual or adulterous? Really?) but then I sort of shifted gears to accept it and it grew into something almost baroque (Everyone in this book is bisexually adulterous! Really!) The final shift into grim, political alternative history with a decidedly less than happy ending and the original murder mystery completely pushed aside was a bit jarring for me. In particular, Lucy's breezy, gossipy first person POV, that worked fine for most of the book, couldn't really carry the seriousness of the end of it.

In particular, the old nanny turning out to be running the underground railroad, and Lucy knowing about it all along, came out of nowhere and felt like that politically principled side of Lucy had been deliberately hidden away by authorial fiat with the chatty, girly, epistolary POV.

.

Also finished Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts, which was very slow (its not a long book though) and didn't really work for me, though it seems like it should have, and I really wanted to like it (especially since I really enjoy Roberts Blog), but still - wry ironic non-characterization and a plot as an excuse to muse about the nature of collective belief just weren't enough to make for an engaging book, I guess.

[nickg]

Picked up Tower of Fear by Glen Cook today at a used book store near my house. Not too far into it, but I love me some Glen cook and this one doesn't seem like its going to disappoint. Probably reading his Starfishers Trilogy next, which I received as a gift.

[Grack21]

Picked up Tower of Fear by Glen Cook today at a used book store near my house. Not too far into it, but I love me some Glen cook and this one doesn't seem like its going to disappoint. Probably reading his Starfishers Trilogy next, which I received as a gift.

Tower of Fear is my favorite Glen Cook. Is it out of print already again? Tor just did a MMP reprint a few years back.

[Starkess]

Finished The Ringworld Engineers. Pretty good stuff--I find the basic idea of Ringworld fascinating. Although I don't know why sci fi authors seem to love to make everyone in their books promiscuous. I don't really mind usually, but I felt like half the book was about inter-species sex.

Starting The Company by KJ Parker. Never read any of her stuff, but heard good things, so I'm pretty excited.