Qt3 2019 Reading Challenge

Sorry it didn’t work for you, but as you say, some things just come down to individual tastes and reactions. I can definitely understand being underwhelmed if you don’t find the narration interesting, as that was one of my favorite parts.

Progress: 15/52

An alternatingly fascinating and frustrating read for me, this book effectively elucidates a number of the steps that led us to modern human society, but has a tendency to slip into what strikes me as fairly sketchy speculation, and fails to anticipate many of the questions raised thereby. The exploration of “inter-subjective” concepts that have no underlying objective reality but nonetheless have external existence because everyone else believes in them (i.e. money) is a really interesting lens, as is the idea of three revolutions (cognitive, agricultural, and scientific) that each ushered in a huge number of changes for our ancestors. But the ventures into comparative morality and philosophy seemed to be on much shakier ground to me. 4/5

Progress: 17/52

The Ivy Crown is 35 years old - written in 1984 - and it’s about a woman who lived almost 500 years ago. None of that made any difference to how much I enjoyed it. Entertaining story with plenty of drama and intrigue, and you don’t have to know much about English royalty (I certainly didn’t) to enjoy the ride.

It’s like you’ve been looking at my to-read list!

I’ve had The Accursed Kings series on my list for a while. Historical fiction that GRR Martin called a major inspirations for A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book is called…The Iron King. Perfect!

Also on the list for a good long time, David Drake’s Books of the Elements series. The Legions of Fire, Out of the Waters, Monsters of the Earth, and Air and Darkness. Can’t ask for a better fit than that! I enjoy Drake’s stuff, always solidly entertaining, though it’s rarely deep or groundbreaking.

I’m in the home stretch for both of my remaining April books. Don’t know if I’ll wrap up both by tomorrow, but it’ll be close.

Here’s what I’m thinking for May, though. Back to a bit more hopefully snappy narrative fare after a month of history.

Oh cool, that’s my next book for May. Still haven’t finished my April book yet though, I’m finding it slow going.

May is underway! I’m still wrapping up from April, but here are next month’s prompts. This time, the prompt theme is book format – getting out of the usual “single contiguous work of prose” comfort zone.

June 2019 prompts:

  • 6A - Main: Collection of multiple different works (essays, short stories, etc.) by one author
  • 6B - Bonus: Drama or poetry
  • 6C - Bonus: Collection of works by different authors
  • 6D - Bonus: Graphic novel / comic book

Progress: 16/52

This was excellent top to bottom, adroitly juggling the perspectives of soldiers on the ground, mid-level commanders dealing with immediate tactical problems, and the big-picture sweep of the war. All of it brought to life with a flair for narrative and language, a knack for picking out vivid bits of primary sources, and the ability to elucidate how these levels all fit together. The only thing I could quibble with would be a desire for just a bit more big-picture context – the connections between this campaign and other contemporaneous fronts. 5/5

Progress 18/52

Damn, this is good stuff. Historical fiction covering France (and some England) in the 14th century, written back in the 1950s and translated from the French. The first book is The Iron King (thus the prompt) but you won’t want to stop with that one. I went through all six of the original books. (A seventh was written many years later but the library didn’t have it.) No wonder this series has won awards, been made into a TV series (twice), and was an inspiration for GRR Martin in creating A Song of Ice and Fire. Read it.

Progress: 17/52

As with Blindsight by the same author, this suffered from somewhat flat characters and plotting, but was carried by its compelling exploration of several scientific ideas. Will hold off on further discussion until @divedivedive has a chance to read it. 3.5/5

I’m running a bit behind, but I have to travel next week and I always read a lot on the road. Should be able to catch up and read Starfish.

Progress: 18/52

Learned a lot from this one – I hadn’t really been familiar with most of the political figures of the civil war period, and this book did a lot to fill in so many of the details that get glossed over in school. A bit dry and slow-going at times, but still very worthwhile. 4/5

Progress: 19/52

This was just wonderful. The subject matter is interesting on its own, a memoir of a very eventful life. And it’s further elevated by some of the most beautiful and evocative prose I’ve read in a long time. 5/5

THERE IS A FEELING of absolute finality about the end of a flight through darkness. The whole scheme of things with which you have lived acutely, during hours of roaring sound in an element altogether detached from the world, ceases abruptly. The plane noses groundward, the wings strain to the firmer cushion of earthbound air, wheels touch, and the engine sighs into silence. The dream of flight is suddenly gone before the mundane realities of growing grass and swirling dust, the slow plodding of men and the enduring patience of rooted trees. Freedom escapes you again, and wings that were a moment ago no less than an eagle’s, and swifter, are metal and wood once more, inert and heavy.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.

It is too much that with all those pedestrian centuries behind us we should, in a few decades, have learned to fly; it is too heady a thought, too proud a boast. Only the dirt on a mechanic’s hands, the straining vise, the splintered bolt of steel underfoot on the hangar floor — only these and such anxiety as the face of a Jock Cameron can hold for a pilot and his plane before a flight, serve to remind us that, not unlike the heather, we too are earthbound. We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

Forgot to report back, but I did get through my designated April book (The Boy on the Bridge) and partway through my May book (Starfish). As I anticipated, travel made me a fairly prolific reader.

I couldn’t finish The Boy on the Bridge in April because I just found the book to be quite a slog. I guess this will involve some minor spoilers, but I picked up the book thinking it was a sequel of sorts to The Girl with All the Gifts - but after getting a few chapters in, I recognized that the book’s characters were ignorant of several facts that were fairly common knowledge during the first book. So Boy is effectively a prequel of Girl, and for a while just feels like it’s spinning its wheels. The characters never really did grab me, and the events of the book didn’t really take me to any unexplored territory. It does pick up and get more interesting - and there is an interesting epilogue that ties the book back into the previous one - but overall I didn’t like it as much as Girl.

I’m liking Starfish so far. I’ll write a new post with more complete impressions once I finish (Kindle says I’m about 75% done, so not too long now). I was a bit disappointed to discover that the first few chapters were published as a short story in Beyond the Rift, but after that the story builds off that initial story and gets on with things. Again though, I’ll get back with more impressions when I’m done.

Decided to switch my Fire pick to something that has a fire as a plot element rather than just a place name (it starts with a house burning down and then rewinds to show the preceding events). It’s got some enjoyable and nuanced characters, and does a good job giving them some distinctiveness and depth. However, that comes across through an almost distractingly omniscient narrative style, frequently jumping into different characters’ thoughts, flashbacks, and flashforwards. It also suffers a bit from heavy-handed plot contrivance, with multiple instances of characters acting too obviously to set up future dramatic twists and reveals rather than growing naturally out of their personalities. Still, it got me to care enough about them to blow through the book in a couple of days. 3.5/5

https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Blood-Thrones-Targaryen-History/dp/B07CLNJBLD/

This was pretty good. The audiobook was 26 hours long, but I listened to it compulsively any chance I got, often volunteering to vacuum the house and clean the bathrooms so that I could listen to it in peace over the weekend… much to my wife’s delight.

I like GRRM’s writing style and this book is a good example of it, even if he doesn’t get into the “gritty details” of food choices and belt-buckle designs like he does in his other work. The book is essentially a set of short-stories, one per Targaryan generation, and the political intrigue is a lot of fun. You can tell that GRRM is having a great time fleshing out the backgrounds of all the little castles and Houses that he noted briefly (or not so briefly) in the Ice & Fire books. He also weaves some little details in there that feed into the “modern” books, like the three dragon eggs that Daenerys is gifted in the first book.

One disappointment is that 300 years didn’t seem to have any meaningful difference on Westeros. I was hoping to read about the evolution of Westeros from the “Viking Age” to the “Age of Chivalry” technology depicted in Game of Thrones. But no: The Westeros of Aegon the Conqueror is effectively identical to that of Game of Thrones in terms of social structure, technology, and beliefs. That doesn’t have any effect on the quality of the stories or the writing, but it was a missed opportunity in my mind.

The second disappointment is that the title implies that the book covers the 300 years before the events of Ice & Fire, but in fact it only covers about 150 years… with the second half presumably coming in a later book, and given GRRM’s record, that book might come next year or next decade or never.

Progress: 21/52

I had planned to use The Goldfinch for this prompt, but decided to keep myself honest and look for a more significant connection than just a color that happens to also be an element:

This brings to life a tragic bit of history – the health and legal battles of the women who suffered from radium poisoning from their work painting luminous watch dials. Informative and fascinating, though a bit repetitive in parts due to similar progression of symptoms in a number of people. 4/5

Here are the prompts for July, with some summer voyaging to far-flung settings.

Prompts for July:

  • 7A - Main: Set somewhere other than Earth
  • 7B - Bonus: Set in South America or Antarctica
  • 7C - Bonus: Set in Africa or Australia
  • 7D - Bonus: Set in Asia
  • 7E - Bonus: Set on Earth, but not on a major continent

I got behind this month, thanks to Game of Thrones S8 (meh), Westworld S2 (pretty good), and City of Heroes returning (all the nostalgia). But I got it in under the wire!

These fit nicely into David Drake’s Books of the Elements series. If you liked his Isles series, this is more of the same, but with more sex. I’d do Isles first if you haven’t already. I give it 3/5 - good work, but nothing that stands out as particularly special.

TBD on this one, but I’ve got a Harley Quinn collection I’ve been meaning to get to…

Oh whoops, I totally forgot to loop back around and write some impressions of Starfish, the first book of the Rifters trilogy. And after @thraeg was decent enough to hold off on posting impressions until after I finished the book. My bad!

Anyway, I did get to finish the book in May, and I did like the book. You can tell it’s an earlier effort than stuff like Blindsight, it’s a little looser, a little more of a shaggy dog story almost, despite not being a terribly long story. It’s more of a character study of these people inhabiting Beebe Station than anything else, and fortunately the lives (interior and otherwise) of these characters is pretty interesting. The basic idea being that, if you’re going to stick several people down in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, who do you get to do that job? A normal person will break. A broken person might - if not thrive exactly, then maybe at least tolerate the stress. So these people are modified, and stuck in station at the bottom of the ocean, and basically turned loose.

And there’s not a lot more to the story than that, for a pretty decent chunk of the story. We meet various characters and see them interact and go about their business. There’s a capital letter PLOT DEVICE introduced fairly late, and then things take kind of a turn at the very end of the book, setting up the next one. I feel like I have to read that next book, and the third one, not just out of fandom for Peter Watts but more because this first book just feels like a preface to the real meat of the story. Maybe that second book will be my June book, but I kind of want to space things out a bit maybe.