I poked around online to see if I could confirm one way or the other and definitely saw a fair amount of complaining about the editing but it was more stuff like character names being spelled differently and dead minor characters turning up again in later books.
Another one to visit, maybe not immediately after Guns, Germs, and Steel, is Sapiens. I put off reading it for several years, thinking “I’ve already read this book in the Jared Diamond version,” but it turned out to be far more complementary. There is still a fair bit of overlap, of course, but Yuval Noah Harari has a different perspective and enough fresh information to go with his approach to make both books worthwhile. (If you’re into the development of humankind, of course.)
I thought he was fat! Shit.
GRRM should go back and change it so he is fat. A fat bald guy named “Littlefinger” is perfect.
I had a hard time in the books at first because I didn’t grok how much the geography changed in the first chapters. Then the show hit and I went, “okkkk NOW it makes sense.”
While we’re here, let me just highly recommend Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles. I just finished them and they are flipping fantastic.
The basic idea is that in this setting, the Continent used to rule the world, and they weren’t very nice about it, enslaving pretty much everyone else and punishing them brutally for the least infraction. Because, you see, the Continent had gods, and everyone not so blessed was clearly born to servitude. And we’re not talking remote, retiring gods. Miracles were an everyday part of Continental life, and their armies were rendered unstoppable by Divine power. Until the Saypuri people had enough and rebelled, their Kaj somehow contriving a weapon that could kill Divinities and using it to, at least in theory, kill all of the Continental gods and purge their offspring and monstrous servitors. (Their miraculous works disappeared with their deaths as well, wreaking untold havoc as entire city neighborhoods simply vanished, buildings fell into the sea, plagues found new purchase on newly unwarded Continentals, and so on.) Now Saypur rules the Continent with superior armed might and technology, and forbids even the mention of the dead gods or their religions (though their grip is uneasy).
The books themselves are espionage thrillers with Saypuri agents working on the Continent. The first is an investigation of the murder of a Saypuri professor, who came to do research in the Holy City of Bulikov, where the six Divinities’ domains met in the middle, something which was popular with essentially no-one there as he was allowed to research and discuss their history in a way they were not. Only, there’s strong hints that at least one of the Divinities isn’t as dead as they had believed. The second follows a secondary character from the first who comes out of retirement to investigate the disappearance of a Saypuri spy who was looking into a possibly Divine material in the Goddess of War’s land that has properties incredibly, indeed unrealistically well suited to electrical transmission, amidst continuing unrest from the locals and efforts to dredge the harbor of the former city’s ruins and open up the harbor that will allow maritime trade deep into the Continent. And the third…well, it’s really cool too, but by that point we’re deep into spoiler territory.
I just finished reading The Bone Clocks by the guy who wrote Cloud Atlas. I liked Cloud Atlas (both the movie and the book), so I thought what the heck.
It’s a weird book. It’s in six parts. The first four parts are fairly prosaic stories about a girl in the 80s whose boyfriends cheats on her and she runs away from home; a college student-slash-con-man in the 90s; a wartime journalist in the 00s; and a once-famous author in the 2010s. The stories are all connected, but largely concern themselves with their separate protagonists. They each have a supernatural element, but that element is usually a minor part of each story.
Then you get to the 5th story (in the 2020s), which explains all the supernatural stuff and reads like a fantasy novel, maybe like Nine Princes in Amber. And the 6th story is a depressingly realistic post-apocalypse story in the 2040s.
It’s a good read, it’s never boring; but I don’t really care about the first four stories. I’m only reading them to get to the part where everything is explained. All the pieces fall into place, and it has a satisfying resolution. But then there’s a 6th part…
Anyway, it’s odd. I guess if you liked Cloud Atlas, you’d at least get some entertainment out of it, but I dunno if I’d recommend it in general.
Huh, I think you have to dig David Mitchell’s writing to get The Bone Clocks. I loved it start to finish. And I was just as enthralled by the more prosaic parts of the novel as I was by the weird stuff. I think that’s Mitchell’s gift, actually; he can make the prosaic fascinating.
Finished The Border, by Don Winslow, and also Satori, again by Don Winslow. The Border is third and last in a reasonably interesting series on Mexican cartels. I’d recommend the series as a whole for fans of the first Sicario movie. That said, the third book gets less and less believable, and by the end you’re rooting for the lead character to eat a bullet.
Speaking of terrible, terrible lead characters–Satori is a prequel to someone else’s utterly inane Mary Sue, Orientalist bullshit that apparently was a thing in the late 70s. It is Remo Williams without the humor, action, or even a semblance of a logical plot.
I’m starting to think Don Winslow isn’t actually very good. It’s sad, because I quite liked him. But his decline is Frederick Forsyth-esque.
Thinking about it more, I wonder if I was able to enjoy Cloud Atlas more because the stories didn’t have any connection to each other (except probably some deep thematic connection that went right over my head), so I was able to enjoy the stories in isolation.
In Bone Clocks I kept waiting for him to explain what was going on, so everything else felt like something I had to get through to get to the explanation. Probably not the attitude the author was looking for :)
Bone Clocks was interesting I guess. The ending was pretty powerful, but I wasn’t wowed by the earlier parts. I tried reading Cloud Atlas but got bored pretty early on, and couldn’t understand Tom Hanks’ mumblings when I saw the movie. (No subtitles for those parts.)
I haven’t actually seen the movie version yet, but you didn’t see any connection between the stories even after the movie had actors playing multiple characters?
I can’t speak for JoshL, but one of my biggest complaints with Cloud Atlas was that it cast the same actors in multiple roles but there was never any actual connection between the stories other than said casting gimmick.
I’m pretty sure this was a budget choice made by the Wachowskis. They can’t hire Tom Hanks and then only use him for 1/6 of the film. The reincarnation and redemption themes in the movie are nowhere in the novel. I think what the Wachowskis did with fluid identity there is pretty in-line with themes they’ve been interested in for a long time. But the book is about narrative, not identity. It’s about individuals striving against injustice and how narrative informs our understanding of history. I actually like the film quite a bit (though the race-bending makeup just doesn’t work–it makes the actors look like Star Trek aliens.) I think the performances are very strong, the film is interesting and fun to watch, and the theme is a worthy one that they manage to pull off. But it’s not the same theme the novel has.
There’s an interesting discussion to be had here. The movie is actually pretty faithful to the novel; the narratives are largely unchanged. The one thing it’s not faithful to is the novel’s structure. The novel is like six novellas nested inside each other. Literally, like you opened 6 short books midway, stacked them on top of each other, then closed the whole thing up. The first half of the first novella is at the beginning of the novel and the last half of it is at the end. And the novellas proceed chronologically for the first half of the novel, but reverse chronologically in the second. This lets Mitchell set up these narratives in order and then see how the historical interpretation of the narratives cascades backwards. It fits wonderfully with the themes he’s exploring.
In the film, the narratives are cut up into small chunks and sprinkled throughout the film. (Kind of like Inarritu’s 21 Grams does.) This allows for a much closer juxtaposition of the narratives and lets the themes of identity and redemption play right against each other. It’s a great example of how the same narratives with different structure can highlight quite different themes.
Even while reading, I noticed the comet/birthmark thing (thanks Kindle for saving my highlights and making my copy easily searchable – page numbers are from my Kindle app)
Also, Frobisher in 1931 describes Ayr’s dream below:
Which is pretty much the daily life of the clones in the future for Sonmi’s story in the future.
David Mitchell himself, starting at the 3:30 mark:
So maybe Mitchell could have been more explicit about the throughline in all the stories, but the comet stuff plus his own words shows that he intended the book to be about what Matt_W pointed out plus reincarnation.
Ok, good point. That always felt like a MacGuffin to me. It’s a bit too broad to be taken seriously. He even comments on it internally with the “hippy druggy new age” comment. I’ll point out that in the film, the same actor does not play all of the main characters.
I’ve never read the book. Just saying the movie was cut and cast like these stories were going to end up coming together in some big culmination and, nope. They’re completely separate the whole way through. Thematic echoes, at best. Felt like I’d wasted my time.
Slade House, a tiny novel (novelette?) by Mitchell was quite good, and somewhat tied into Bone Clocks.
Please forgive me if this has already been mentioned… I did a search and didn’t see it. “Tiamat’s Wrath” is out on audible – James R. Corey. Though I believe the authors name isn’t particularly accurate…
It is pretty good. They set up a good universe. And aside from the guy that plays James Holden on the tv show (who I don’t quite think was cast well) I like James Holden.
(it probably has its own thread and some guy like Telefrog will remind me not to start a new subject)
I read The Gift of Fear , by Gavin DeBecker
This is a self-help book by the guy that Jeff Bezos pulled in to help with his current mess with stolen text messages and the National Enquirer. The book is frequently cited by a lot of advice columnists when someone writes in about an abusive spouse or someone paying them unwelcome attention.
It’s full of pretty good anecdotes and a lot of pretty easy-to-understand and follow “how-to” lists… like how to identify a potentially abusive partner, or how to identify the type of guy would would be likely to become vindictive if fired, or what to do when someone is trying to threaten or extort you.
All good stuff, though the author does get repetitive as a chapter or subject goes along.
Hugo nominees: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/2/18291920/2019-hugo-award-nominations-science-fiction-fantasy-books
I am so out of the loop that I only recognize one of the author’s names in the Novel, Novella, Novelette, or Short Story categories. Martha Wells. The only one of the series nominees I know is the Laundry Files.