Yeah, without spoiling it, I love how… RUTHLESS the book is :)
:) And you know what? The space battles would be great in a game. Well… at least for me.
Oh now I need to re read it for sure. I forget how they are!
Victor Milan, one of the cadre of New Mexico-based sci-fi and fantasy writers has died. He wrote a bunch of novels, including his ongoing series The Dinosaur Lords, which is basically a Spanish medieval Earth where dinosaurs have been tamed and are ridden by knights.
GRRM wrote a remembrance.
Hey, you guys know Krysten Ritter? Of course you do, from Breaking Bad and Jessica Jones. But did you know she’s a writer, too? Yeah, neither did I until I heard an interview with her on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. I borrowed her novel Bonfire from the library, and enjoyed it. It’s a thriller-mystery with a hard-drinking heroine with some mental struggles…sounds kinda familiar, yeah? But don’t worry, it’s much different than Jessica Jones. It’s a fairly quick read and worth your time if you like the genre.
Ive been reading Barking to the Choir, by Gregory Boyle. Hes a jesuit priest who has been working with gang members in LA for 30 years or more. He writes with a hope and compassion that feel especially welcome these days. As an atheist, I can get behind the vast majority of his arguments, because they mostly come down to ‘lets be kind to each other’. Not what I expected, but the jesuits often surprise.
Ive been reading a chapter every few days or even weeks, cause I dont want to come to the end of so much positiveness.
He was on fresh air, which is where I initially heard about the book. Its well worth a listen.
I seem to recall the Jesuits actually being one of the most reasonable, worldly religious orders, which is not what I would originally have assumed.
I have read many books lately, but the one I want to highlight here is
https://www.amazon.com/Gnomon-novel-Nick-Harkaway-ebook/dp/B071R1GVX2/
I have been a huge, huge fan of Harkaway since his masterful debut, The Gone Away World, but holy shit this book is incredible. I started out baffled and lost and I thought about putting it down a couple of times as it went a bunch of weird places to no apparent purpose and with a level of richness of myth and allegory that made it seem like one of those lofty books so beloved of the Literary Scene ™ that have generally struck me as being unreadably up their own backsides. But I dig Harkaway, so I kept going. And it became increasingly clear that it was a work of staggering ambition and beauty as well as a trenchant reflection on the direction our technology and society may be going and the moral questions that ought to be considered, and all that as well as being a thriller of sorts. The sort of thing that would either be a huge mess if it went off the rails at any point or indescribably brilliant if it stuck the landing.
It stuck the landing.
I can attest they make great teachers.
Hectic month, so little reading.
Finished Altered Carbon. I enjoyed it, and it managed to make all the bleakness work. Overall interesting characters and setting. More nuanced than the Netflix adaption. It felt pretty contained, so I don’t really feel any need to read the rest of the series.
So I knocked off two books this month.
Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett. A Watch book, and a good one. Not as good as Going Postal, but somehow I suspect none will ever top that one, but a fun read and definitely a good ‘lighter’ book to intersperse with my other book. Interestingly this one does seem to lead into the events of the Most von Lipwig stories, which was fun. Since most of the books I’ve read take place after the golem independence movement started, so seeing that change in the world begin was nice to see, knowing where he takes that.
The other book was Foucalt’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. And it is definitely worthy of the accolades it gets. It is also a dense read, and overwhelming at times. The pure overwhelming detail on historical conspiracies made it tough to follow, meaning that any more than 20 pages and my head would be swimming. IT dragged quite a bit in the middle 200 pages for me, namely the entire Amparo and Brazil storylines, but he does use those trails. Despite the occasional slog, and slow moving detail, he tied it all together in the end well.
I don’t know if the last 100 pages represent a style and tone change, or if I had adjusted, but they were snappy and easier to read. But, in the end, there is a very coherent theme that he keeps focused on wonderfully. At first all the lines about the rearranging of the Torah might seem incongruous, but it is the point of the whole book.
My overwhelming end feeling was a realization that this book would thoroughly ruin something like a Dan Brown book for me (not that I ever had any interest in them). Because this book is so thorough, well written, and thematically coherent that a lesser mainstream book would greatly annoy me for its inferiority. So this is why certain books that the mainstream audience views as adequate to good get savaged by critics…
There’s no need to read them from an ongoing plot perspective - there isn’t really any of that. But IMO Broken Angels, at the very least, is every bit as enjoyable in a different style, so I’d recommend reading it anyway. Woken Furies I wasn’t as enamored with but certainly don’t regret reading.
Yep, this is my favorite Eco and one of my favorite books ever, and I can’t stand any mainstream conspiracy book because of it. It’s not only better written than those (and it’s very hard to reach this level, you are talking about top of the line literary fiction here, few authors as well considered as Eco), it also is incredibly thematically consisten (it “has a thesis” one might say) that shows you why conspiracy fiction is indeed a con job and you can never read one again without realizing the inconsistencies…
It was dense for me, but somewhat on purpose on certain sections, and not overwhelmingly so, but I wonder whether some of the density you felt had to do with the translation. Most Eco books are very carefully translated into Spanish (many do have a section on the translation before the book) but also Spanish is really close to Italian so a lot of the structure and sounds is still there (even if it’s just a sniff) in the translation.
I thought his name sounded familiar, I went to his Wiki page and he wrote one of my favorite (probably doesn’t hold up well today) series the Guardians as Richard Austin. At the time I found them my buddies and I were big into the Twilight 2000 RPG and this post WW3 series went along with it perfectly. I don’t remember if I knew this at the time or if it was happenstance but I see he co-wrote the War of Power series with Robert Vardeman. Another one that I have fond teenage memories of. I know I have a few GRRM Wildcard books too but I don’t really remember much of those let alone any by Milan. It’s interesting though it reminds me of the Lovecraft circle the way some of these writers got around.
I whipped through two quick reads in the last week or so:
https://www.amazon.com/Silver-Screen-Fiend-Learning-Addiction/dp/B00QVZA8QY/
Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt was on sale as an Audible “daily deal” (thanks to @Reemul who recommended that service to me) the other month but I had not gotten around to listening to it until just now. It’s fine. Patton Oswalt narrates it quite well and he of course he has the proper comedic timing for his own words, but it’s pretty much a half of a memoir describing a not-very-dramatic rise to fame. It’s super-short: just barely over four hours for the audiobook version. If it’s on sale again for $1.50, it’s more than worth it; I don’t recommend you pay the $15 they’re asking for right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Waterloo-History-Three-Armies-Battles/dp/B00U03R6KY/
Waterloo, by Bernard Cornwell. Not to be confused with Cornwell’s other book entitled “Waterloo”, which was a “Sharpe’s Rifles” novel, this one is a non-fiction account of the battle itself. Cornwell of course is pretty much the undisputed master of describing Napoleonic battles, and he brings his skill to this book as well. It’s a really quick read (or listen – just nine hours), but he manages to make it very dramatic… mostly because it’s one of the most dramatic battles of that era. The audiobook is narrated by the author (the long prologue and epilogues) and by Dugald Bruce Lockhart, who is himself a historical novelist. Lockhart does very well with the French to my untrained ear, though I think I enjoyed Cornwell’s more cultured-sounding voice.
I’d recommend it if you’re a fan of non-fiction accounts of battles.
I’m finally reading again, and I went with John Scalzi’s Redshirts on the recommendations of a lot of people over many years.
I like it well enough (a bit less than halfway through now) and am more or less onboard with what’s happening, but. . .
Am I being unreasonable if I find the prose and characters remarkably dull and lifeless?
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m reading it on my Kindle and am too lazy to decrease the font size from the doofy giant Duplo-block sized letters it defaulted to after some update it underwent in the last two years of not being used at all. Maybe it’s actually a clever meta-commentary on the paucity of good writing on Star Trek knockoff fiction. Or maybe Scalzi thinks his dry wit is half as clever as Douglas Adams’ and he’s just off by a factor of ten or so.
Which is frustrating, because as much as I joke about liking “bad” fiction (I’d watch a third-tier Marvel movie over an Oscar winner any day), I don’t remember most of the stuff I read being this obnoxiously dull and workmanlike. Steven Erikson can spin a ripping yarn with some surprisingly beautiful prose when he puts his mind to it. Rowling, for all her flaws, had that delightfully British way with words and covered up gaping holes in her worldbuilding with a lot of clever little moments. Even Coville’s kids’ books had some winked-and-nodded sardonic charm to the writing.
Any other Scalzi recs to improve my opinion after this one’s done?
I can certainly recommend that you don’t read Collapsing Empire, because it’s a hellpit of awful dialogue that is not remotely as witty as it thinks it is.
Collapsing Empire is just plain bad, IMO.
I thought Redshirts was okay, but only after I got past the relentlessly painful Star Trek parody in the opening. There was more characterization and pathos later on. However it didn’t really motivate me to seek out more of Scalzi’s stuff. I have Old Man’s War on ebook sitting around waiting for me to read it, and it might have to wait a long time.
I never got past it.
In Redshirts, the star trek parody was the entire point of the beginning.
I don’t think Scalzi is the best writer ever, but he does a decent job - he’s one of the authors for whom his narrative flows rather well when being read by someone like me at least, with english as a second language. Not quite as well, but kinda like Brandon Sandersen.
Redshirts suffers from ‘good idea, bad execution’. Scalzi takes an interesting setup and then doesn’t do nearly enough with it, meaning it just fizzles out towards the end. His recent novel, Lock In, suffers from this as well, though that at least had a proper flowing plot.
The Old man’s war series remains his best work imho.