Yeah I would say… just watch the movie.
— Alan
Finished The Emperor’s Soul. Sanderson has become my fantasy favorite.
Started The Third Bullet, Bob Lee Swagger on JFK. It amusingly begins with the author having himself murdered. Weird change of POV about halfway through, not sure it was a good choice.
I look back it as one of the more enjoyable novels, before the fandom started and he started churning out Culture schlock to milk it.
I just finished reading Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, which I loved, and was excited to discover that Sabatini was not only prolific, but his many of his novels are at least as well regarded as Captain Blood and available on Amazon for free (for the Kindle.)
I basically mainlined Shadows, Robin McKinley’s latest. If you’ve read McKinley before it should be no surprise that it’s utterly fantastic. Funny, emotionally rich, imaginative, original, etc. The thing that did surprise me is that although I didn’t feel the book ended in midplot or anything, and it does essentially describe a narrative arc, it strongly suggests to me that a sequel may be forthcoming. And McKinley practically never does sequels. (I would not mind a followup to Sunshine at all, for example, but there’s been no sign.) I might be wrong, though.
Irrespective of whatever counts as schlock, I don’t know that writing six distinct Culture novels over the 20-odd years after Use of Weapons made such a big splash in 1990 can be called “churning.” It’s not like Banks was writing the same book over and over, or stringing out a series of potboilers.
My only real complaint with Consider Phlebas is that parts of it read like vignettes that he happened to have lying around and just went ahead and stuck in there. “Damage” is a great idea, though, and the set piece chase through the GSV is a fantastic throwback to big ol’ skiffy.
Yeah, it was pretty good, but it was like the starting chapter in a novel or a short story, and no so much enough to be satisfying in terms of length.
To me, they were pretty potboilerish. I will admit, they were better than a lot of the other schlock that’s out there FWIW.
Well, considering my last Sanderson was the 1200 page Words of Radiance, a short novel went down perfect…
Finishing up marko kloos’ Lines of Departure the second in his Frontlines trilogy. It’s your basic military sci-fi. But it’s well written, good plot. I picked it up through some Kindle special deal email that was highlighting self published authors. I’m happy to support writers like this and maybe give them a chance to keep writing and expand their craft a little.
After that i think I’m going to go back and try to re-read the Expanse trilogy by James SA Corey. I put it down halfway through the first book last time and im going to give it another chance.
Just went through Jonah Keri’s history of the Montreal Expos, Up, Up, And Away. It’s a fun read, though he goes a lot easier on Jeffrey Loria than anyone else I’ve ever seen write about the subject.
Just read The Big Aha by Rudy Rucker. Gnarly, psychedelic, and transreal, as the author intended. Reading Rudy Rucker always inspires me creatively. I just wish there was more narrative coherence this time. The chaos interferes with my caring much about the characters or their situations. I recommend it even so, but I think it’s possible to have the cake and eat it too in terms of expressing the qualities the author cares about while at the same time telling a more compelling story.
Finished The Final Descent, the last book of Rick Yancey’s Monstrumologist series. Man. Fevered, bloody, haunting, mysterious. Crushingly bleak. I remain amazed that this series is filed under YA.
Reading Off Armageddon Reef. I’ve read some of Weber’s Honor Harrington series, but never tried this one. Some interesting ideas…
So probably this has no interest to anyone else, but I was ecstatic to finally get down to the largest branch of my local library and grab Volume I of architect Christopher Alexander’s crazy-ambitious The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Part one is called The Phenomenon of Life. It’s ostensibly a book about architecture and design, but Alexander is basically formulating a theory about space and our perception of it and why certain objects (and even people) just seem to have what he calls “life” or what we might call “pop” or “sparkle” or “charm.”
Alexander is famous for his book A Pattern Language, which inspired Will Wright in making SimCity and The Sims and is also the source for programmers and designers talking about “patterns” as strategies for addressing common problems.