Book Thread 2020

Release order, yeah.

Just started a new fantasy series with Cold Iron.

I made it halfway through Cold Iron before putting it down, a couple of weeks ago. It starts out well enough but the tangential relationship stuff and the long suspension of plot and character development was boring me to tears.

I tried Cold Iron last year and had a similar reaction to @Barstein.

Finished up Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter this morning, after previously reading his newest novel, Recursion. They tread similar, orthogonally related territory. Recursion is a tighter, more consistent story with better, more relatable protagonists. Dark Matter, which is a techno-thriller about a junior college physics professor and family man who is kidnapped and thrust into very strange circumstances, is fine, but the dude is sometimes an utter idiot, and the author applies the rules of the universe inconsistently. There’s a neat twist at the end that changes the paradigm of the story, but the twist is undercut because he doesn’t follow through on it to its logical conclusion and ends the novel too neatly. It was an entertaining read, but I’d recommend anything by Peter Cline over it.

And now I’m moving back to The Expanse for book 7. I’ve been spacing them out over the last couple of years, hoping to catch up to the authors just about at the time they release book 9. But, it looks like I might end up a bit ahead of them.

So I just finished this gem:

Given to me by my QT3 Secret Santa, it has proven a FANTASTIC history book about D&D, but also wargaming and boardgaming in general (and a tiny bit of computer games).

I’m immersed in along term project of reading through the whole Cambridge Ancient History (finishing book 5 out of 19, 3 more years to go or so) so it was fascinating to jump from such broad-stroke history to this hyper-focused and well written approach.

It’s still a history book throughtout, though. Expect a lot of data and a dettached (if ironic and charming at times) approach.

Still, highly recommended if you like history or games!

I’ve been tearing through the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Just fantastic stuff. I can’t stop reading.
I’ve also gotten into Philip Kerr’s pre and post-WW2 Germany “Bernard Gunther” noir detective mystery novels. So much so that I’ve even started watching Babylon Berlin on Netflix. I just find the whole time period of 1920s/30s Berlin fascinating. I’ve read through the first 3 novels in the series and really enjoyed them but they’re not going to be for everyone. There are some descriptions of graphic violence and I have to admit that the protagonist is quite flawed and, well, a bit of a mysoginistic pick at times. I don’t know if that was the common way of thinking or not back in the 30s but it is a little jarring. On the other hand, he gets a bit of a pass because almost everyone else around him is a Nazi.

I just finished Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration: America’s Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present. It’s, obviously about the Union Pacific Railroad from 1969 on. It goes into the effects that deregulation had on the industry and the merger of the UP and a whole bunch of railroads.

As a railroad geek, I loved it. It is a long book at 520 pages. Granted, a lot of that is footnotes but it took me almost a month to get through it.

I loved the Murderbot Diaries. Such an awesome series.

I just finished The Rhesus Chart, another in the Laundry series by Charles Stross. I’m torn on this one. It really slogged for the first half of the book and it was a chore to pick it up every night and read a chapter but then it hit its stride the 2nd half and I was up till 2:30am because I couldn’t put it down.

And there’s a full novel out this year!
https://www.amazon.com/Network-Effect-Murderbot-Novel-Diaries/dp/1250229863

That’s going to be so good! I ended up going the library route on the last 2 books of the diaries b/c they were so short. I’d love a nice 400 page novel length!

I’m deep in the Malazan series right now. I couldn’t tell you the title of the book without looking it up, but I think it’s #7.

I just finished @scottagibson 's The Mortality in Lies , which I enjoyed very much.

It’s quite unique, you don’t see a whole bunch of historical espionage fiction.

It reminded me a bit of an old favorite of mine, Dennis Wheatley.

Nice job, Scott!

Thanks, Lloyd, I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Can we get a mod to close the 2018/2019 thread?

Got some reading done the past weeks.

The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross. This was a slog. #7 in the Laundry Files. I appreciate how it dealt with the multiverse of the setting, and how it advanced the plot, but I really didn’t care for how Stross wrote most of the characters. I’ve already bought book 8, but I’ll take a time-out on the series. I’m quite worn out of it for the time being.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Just great. Incredible flow, good characters. A joy to read, even though it is quite dark. Good use of switching between past and present. Fantastic, one of my favorite reads in a while.

I’m about a quarter through The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Catherine Webb, and it is incredible, more when I’m done.

I finished The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North / Catherine Webb. It is great! A very neat concept that is executed in a really good way. Recommended. The pacing is excellent.

Claire North is my favorite author. Glad you liked it! Check out Touch next; it’s got a similar feel.

I also really liked Station Eleven, that you mentioned earlier. ESJM has a new novel coming out next month that sounds pretty interesting:

I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea and am really enjoying it.

I have been sort of fascinated by the LitRPG subgenre of novels, but so far nobody doing them is all that great a writer (and that stat block stuff is unnecessary). I have tried a couple Japanese takes on the trapped-in-an-MMO trope, but the actual MMOs always seem super grindy and terrible and Sword Art Online at least really did not seem to care about the game aspects of the premise even remotely.

Enter Forever Fantasy Online. It’s co-written by an actual professionally published author with two excellent five book series under her belt (Rachel Aaron). It feels like the MMOs -I- have played (minus the VR bit) and the authors have clearly got plenty of experience with these games and their players. And it really thinks through its premise and has some pretty great worldbuilding and characters, too. I have read the whole trilogy and heartily recommend it.


I just finished Becky Chambers latest sci-fi novella, To Be Taught if Fortunate which can be best described as a book in which not very much happens. But as with all of her books, it ended with me wanting more, more, more! However after reading her 4 books, I know that “more” is not coming, at least not more of the same story or characters. I’m still looking forward to reading whatever she puts out next.

The setting she created is interesting, but yeah, not much happens. (Her books are not long either.)