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October is in the Chair: October 2011 Reads


Larry.

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I'm still on my vacation and too busy traveling and being a tourist to get alot of reading done. I did finish Jo Graham's Ravens of Falkenau and other Stories. Recommend if you are a fan of her works.

I also re-read one of my favorite historical fiction of all time, Ironfire by David Ball.

I'm halfway through an anthology of short stories about pirates called Fast Ships, Black Sails.

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I read The Submission by Amy Waldmen, one of this fall's notable American mimetic releases. It's the story of a New York selection committee, in an alternate 2003, which chooses "accidentally" a Muslim architect's design for the Ground Zero memorial. Intervowen are several characters in the city - angry family members, grieving widows, politicians, pundits, civil-rights types, and illegals on the margins. Lots of themes here, but Waldmen keeps it insightful and subtle. Her background as the NYTimes South Asian bureau chief shows in her knowledgeable portrait of brown peoples and cultures. The ending is a bit too drawn out, a bit too sentimental, but overall I was impressed. Recommended.

I read this last month and I had pretty much the same reactions you did, including the ending, which felt deflated after all the tension building up to it. Certainly an above-average novel, especially for a debut.

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I'm about 20% into Time and Chance, by Sharon Kay Penman. Melikes, a lot.

I've read half of the short stories in Warriors, and am working on completing them. The Mystery Knight wasn't really to my taste, but there are some excellent and enjoyable stories in there so far.

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I'm mixing in readings of various Thomas Ligotti short stories in with several novels. I just wrote a review of his 2003 story, "Purity." Also reading some of the essays in Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds, which I hope to finish this weekend.

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Just got my copy of a And Another Thing... from the library (on my Kindle--from San Diego--so cool!), the book that Colfer wrote to finish up the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Excited to get started on that, although I don't have too high of hopes--no one can compare to the great Mr. Adams!

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Just finishing up "Then Everything Changed" by Jeff Greenfield. Alternate histories of American politics from 1960 through 1980 or thereabouts. What a wonderfully, surprising great read! Greenfield takes a look at certain real life events and alters them. Then he details political history as it might have happened thereafter. And very realistically so.

For example, and I was unaware of this, JFK was almost assassinated as a President-elect in 1960 by a suicide bomber. The bomber decided not to detonate when Jackie and one of their kids approach to say goodbye. Not wanting to kill them as well, he hesitates and JFK goes on to take the oath and, of course, is later gunned down in November 1963. But, suppose he was killed in 1960? A small change of history? Hardly. LBJ then has to deal with Civil Rights, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis... All with RFK just in the background.

Or, suppose RFK had not been assassinated? The election, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Yippie movement, and later an RFK administration that becomes embroiled in an overzealous supporter sponsored "third rate burglary attempt".

Just fascinating stuff. As was the different takes on what happens to Nixon, Ford, Carter, Gary Hart, Reagan... Highly recommend this one. :thumbsup:

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I've just started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Heirs To The Blade. It's reasonably good so far, although I'm not quite sure where the plot is going yet, hopefully it's going somewhere that doesn't involve Tynisa wandering around being angsty and depressed for too much more of the book. Like earlier books in the series it does seem to overuse the plot device of characters coincidentally happening to run into each other.

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Currently reading Neuromancer by William Gibson. It's certainly an experience. I don't really get the main character at all, but aside from that I'm enjoying it. There are some passages I reread three or four times because they were just written so elegantly. There are also some passages I had to reread three or four times because I didn't understand what the fuck was going on. I also have a soft place in my heart for writers who are economical with words and can write dense books without writing big books. I don't reread books much at all any more, but I'll definitely read this one again because I'm sure there's a lot I've missed.

Also read Until the Final Hour by Traudl Junge, an account of the time that Hitler's last secretary spent with him in his bunker and one of the books that the film Downfall was based on. It is however a little different to Downfall. There Hitler comes across as an angry, unstable, deluded madman. But the Hitler in this book is much worse. Because of Junge's position at this time, apparently just a naive young woman who didn't have much interest in politics, her version of him is more of a charming, friendly, hard-working, selfless man fighting the good fight but with an occassional mad glint in his eye. She doesn't actually say much of that, but it's inferred from the very matter-of-fact way she wrote it. Compared with other accounts I read some time ago I think there are some things Junge left out, or just didn't remember, but it's still quite an unsettling read.

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Received my copy of Caitlin Sweet's third novel, Pattern Scars a week earlier than I expected, so I'll be reading that tonight and maybe tomorrow as well. Style reminds me more of her A Telling of Stars than The Silences of Home.

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I just finished "The Dragon's Path" by Abraham. First fiction book I've read in months, and it was very good.

I'm turning into a big fan of Daniel Abraham. He puts out books relatively quickly too, which is a huge plus for me. I'd put him above his other contemporaries: Sanderson, Abercrombie, Rothfuss, etc.

I actually spent an hour searching for a thread on this book, and the only one I found I had like 60 responses. Rothfuss gets multiple threads and thousands of posts, and only 60 responses for The Dragon's Path? SMH

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Lately, I've been reading a lot of nonfiction. I just finished Justice by Michael J. Sandel, Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens, and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I'm currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fate of human societies by Jared Diamond; after I'm done, I'll read The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz, then History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.

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Just finished Reamde by Neal Stephenson. NS is one of my favourite writers, but this, for me, was the least of his books. It doesn't have a tenth of the sensawunda of Anathem or a hundredth of the humour found in Cryptonomicon. Just OK.

Up next, I might try The Magicians by Lev Grossman, or Bernard Cornwell's latest entry in his Saxon Chronicles.

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Finally finished Gary Gibson's Final Days. Did not like it, at all. Theres a few cool, big-shiny-SF ideas, which I love, but it just makes seeing them mired in this plodding mess of nonplot and uncharacter all the sadder.

How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming, non fiction about the discovery of the Kuiper belt objects and Pluto's demotion was fun, though, oddly enough, I thought the most interesting bits were the look at the beuracracy and academic wrangling around classification. (The giant rocks in outer space were nice too, if you like that sort of thing, which I do, come to think of it.)

Death in the City of Light is ok true crime, but I was hoping for more of a social history of the Nazi occupation (like the Worlds Fair in Devil in the White City). Murder and insane ranting, gruesome as they are, get kind of repetitive as bed time reading when there's, like, 63 victims.

Currently reading RA MacAvoys Book of Kells - time travel to medieval Ireland. Not bad, particularly the characterization. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge, which feels a bit inert, possibly because so much of the plot is kind of on the far extremes of either utterly mundane daily highschool drama or cackling evil world spanning conspiracy, and nothing much holds it together once the initial novelty of Vinges, admittedly interesting, but low key, future predictions wears off. Also Justina Robsons Keeping it Real, a high tech fantasy hybrid with cyborg secret agents and elves, which is quite fun so far. I've never really heard this one mentioned here, I don't think.

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Finally finished Gary Gibson's Final Days. Did not like it, at all. Theres a few cool, big-shiny-SF ideas, which I love, but it just makes seeing them mired in this plodding mess of nonplot and uncharacter all the sadder.

I thought similar things about Gibson's Stealing Light, it was an interesting (if unoriginal) premise but the storytelling and characterisation were both lacking.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge, which feels a bit inert, possibly because so much of the plot is kind of on the far extremes of either utterly mundane daily highschool drama or cackling evil world spanning conspiracy, and nothing much holds it together once the initial novelty of Vinges, admittedly interesting, but low key, future predictions wears off.

I'd agree with that as well. I think Vinge has some interesting ideas about how the Internet and advances in computing are going to change society, and I liked some of the characterisation but the plot itself is a bit unexciting. It's a well-written, reasonably entertaining book that unfortunately fails to be compelling. I think it was reasonable for Vinge to want to write a more low-key story than his previous space operas, but it ended up being one of his weaker books.

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I'd agree with that as well. I think Vinge has some interesting ideas about how the Internet and advances in computing are going to change society, and I liked some of the characterisation but the plot itself is a bit unexciting. It's a well-written, reasonably entertaining book that unfortunately fails to be compelling. I think it was reasonable for Vinge to want to write a more low-key story than his previous space operas, but it ended up being one of his weaker books.

He seems to be almost deliberately going for some kind of Future! - Just like Now, but with more Internet idea, which I think might have slightly dated ,in the sense that it hardly feels futuristic, in just the 4 years or so it's been out. (which is a shame, since his other books that i've read - well, just Deepness in the Sky and Fire on the Deep - were so awesomely vibrant.)

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I actually spent an hour searching for a thread on this book, and the only one I found I had like 60 responses. Rothfuss gets multiple threads and thousands of posts, and only 60 responses for The Dragon's Path? SMH

I love Abraham, and Long Price is one of my favorites. But in defense of the multiple thread things, I think there is a reason for that other than pure popularity. Rothfuss deliberately leaves so many loose ends, it is part of the intrigue, that page after page of speculation have ensued. Abraham's debut of Coin and Dagger was more strait forward. I kind of know where everyone sits at this point of time.

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He seems to be almost deliberately going for some kind of Future! - Just like Now, but with more Internet idea, which I think might have slightly dated ,in the sense that it hardly feels futuristic, in just the 4 years or so it's been out. (which is a shame, since his other books that i've read - well, just Deepness in the Sky and Fire on the Deep - were so awesomely vibrant.)

It is a risk when writing near-future Science Fiction that you can quickly become dated, to take another example from Vinge he had a short story where the end revelation was that one character's mysterious project was to make a film of Lord of the Rings using a computer to generate the images, which probably sounded really cool and futuristic in the 1970s but not so much now. Writing Space Opera can also have this problem, but it's probably easier to avoid, although the interstellar communication system in A Fire Upon The Deep was very reminiscent of 90s-era Usenet discussion groups, and I thought it did feel a bit dated, even though I did like the idea of some alien races posting incomprehensible conspiracy theories that the rest of the network's users try their best to ignore. Admittedly, their interstellar network was low-bandwidth so the similarity does make some sort of sense.

He originally used the Rainbows End setting for his short story Fast Times At Fairmont High which I think is about 10 years old now, and 10 years is a long time when dealing with computing and the Internet - I don't remember Rainbows End feeling dated when I read it but that was about the time it was released, so I might feel differently now.

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since his other books that i've read - well, just Deepness in the Sky and Fire on the Deep - were so awesomely vibrant.)

Speaking of Vernor Vinge, I am very anxiously awaiting the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep that is coming out Tuesday, The Children of the Sky. A Fire Upon the Deep was an incredible book, worried my expectations will be too high. The only other book I have looked forward to as much as this was ADWD. Gogo Ravna and the Tines!

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