Finished Nemesis, started The Blood Mirror, the 4th Lightbringer fantasy.
Still working my way through Clarissa. It’s well over 1000 pages long, so it could take months to finish it.
Though I have a massive backlog (thanks Book Barbarian and BookBub newsletters!), I’ve resolved to finally finish the Expanse series before season 2 of the show comes out, so I just began Cibola Burn (I know, I know, I’m really behind, I get easily distracted) and of course I’m loving it. Can’t wait to get caught up.
Apparently, there is no spellcheck in the title bar.
Error corrected!
Been bottom-feeding on self-publishing stuff and the like, but one gem I just finished I’ll totally recommend: We Are Legion (We Are Bob). What happens ifyou inadvertently sign away your head, and one day wake up as a long distance probe’s artificial consciousness?
Started Hex last night. Made it through where they give some background to what’s going on in the town. Really looking forward to reading more!
I was in an annoying situation that involved many, many hours of solitary driving this past month, so I picked up a non-fiction audiobook:
The author (Kevin Kelly) is one of the founding editors of WIRED and (obviously) a decent writer. The book itself is pretty much what the title purports to be: a discussion of 12 things that will shake up the planet/society/humanity.
However, it’s all a little hit-or-miss. The dozen things from the title are not technologies (like, say, quantum processing), but rather abstract concepts like “accessing” or “becoming” that will be accelerated or modified by various technologies in the near-future. So basically, it’s a lot of hand-waving about how the future will be awesome in vague ways because these various concepts will… do stuff.
The book is at its best when Kelly discusses a cool usage of a new or underutilized technology, and extrapolates where it could go. And these moments come reasonably frequently throughout the book. They provided really interesting fodder for my daily afternoon dog-walk conversations with my wife, so in that respect I really enjoyed the book. As an example, he cited a neat story where a guy made a belt that always slightly vibrated on the side that was pointing North using cheap sensors; the guy found that because of the device he quickly gained new insights and a much better ability to navigate due to this new, artificial “sense”. Stuff like that is fascinating to me and has some interesting possibilities, which Kelly mentions.
The problem is that in between are stretches of pontificating about the philosophies that are engendered by these new or expanded concepts. For example, he goes on at length about the success of Wikipedia and what it says about the “wisdom of crowds” and how no one thought it would work out… that’s OK, but as a techie myself, I didn’t really learn anything NEW from the section or any of the others like it. I suspect that most people on Qt3 would be similarly unimpressed. His long side-bar on how this relates to Socialism and Libertarianism wasn’t as interesting as it sounds.
So what you have is a sine-wave of a book. Each of the twelve chapters has a really cool section where the author makes or illustrates a neat point… followed by a long trough of fairly dull pontificating about the point he already made.
Finished The Blood Mirror. I enjoy this series, but am not sure I liked the ret conning of the prior books in this one, by suddenly making one of the main POVs an unreliable narrator. Started Perfection,on the 1972 Dolphins.
Some years ago I picked up Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House, started reading it and the book physically disappeared. Obstinately I refused to replace it, and it finally turned up again – no I can’t explain either the disappearance or reappearance, but they were separated by around 5 years. Pretty good so far, but I expect it will be stolen by Djinns again as I get into it.
Anyway it’s set in a turbulent Istanbul in the mid-21st century, one with nanotech and bots and terrorists and various people trying to get rich and/or happy, with a complicated plot swirling around the search for a mellified man.
Really, really enjoyed it. There were times when I thought everything was just going too easily for the protagonist, but the pacing and the ideas that the author throws at you are just wonderful, as well as a nice, breezy writing style. My one criticism is that the book effectively ends with nothing resolved; it’s all dangling plot-threads. Worse, the second book isn’t out yet.
So I finished Cibola Burn, and while I did like it a lot, y’all were right, it was missing…SOMETHING from the earlier novels. Still glad I read it though, now onto Nemesis Games!
Read Lightless and Supernova by C.A. Higgins. Wasn’t honestly super impressed with the first one, although it got better as it went on. It’s almost like a one room play, with the entire action happening on one starship and having a cast of just a few characters for the majority of the book, with everything about the outside world being told, not shown. That didn’t really work for me since in text you have all the budget of your imagination and there’s far fewer reasons to so constrain the action. It’s also very talky (with the main threads being a weird computer problem being worked on and an interrogation) and light on much else. That said, when things finally heat up, they really heat up. And Supernova winds up being significantly more interesting as a result, as it follows the (mostly offscreen) terrorist/freedom fighter leader of the first book’s plot and her coming to grips with just how little she was prepared for the consequences of her action, as well as the engineer from the ship in the first book having to try to mother something vastly more powerful than she is.
Also finished up the third book in A.M. Dellamonica’s Hidden Sea series (she apparently thinks of it as a trilogy which is concerning to me because there are still a bunch of story threads I want followed). Love the whole series, which has a smart, curiosity-driven female scientist and diver accidentally slipping into another world while trying to connect with her birth family and consequently getting enmeshed in the politics and drama of that world, proving to be a real game-changer because of her very different perspective and scientific knowledge, but also regularly tripped up by the cultural differences and, well, magic.
Then I moved on to Glen Hirshberg’s Motherless Child, a lean, mean little horror novel about a pair of young mothers, lifelong best friends, who end up at the wrong concert and are selected for vampirism by the Whistler. Once the protagonist, Natalie, is told about what he’s done to them, she immediately passes their children to her mother and tells her to flee somewhere neither Natalie nor her friend Sophie can find them. And then the two of them go on a road trip, gradually realizing all the things they’ve lost and fighting against the hunger growing inside them. It’s pretty devastating, honestly, and probably even more so for people who, unlike me, have children.
Currently working on the sequel, Good Girls, which follows the aftermath of the previous novel while also introducing Rebecca, an orphan and foster child who’s working in a college Crisis Center and manages to attract the Whistler’s attention as he’s feeling blue. This isn’t going very well for her friends right now. Both books have really strong characterization and although they do contain some pretty grisly bits (vampires, after all), it’s more about the horror of the monstrous existence and losing friends and loved ones than shock or gore.
[quote=“Tin_Wisdom, post:10, topic:127829”]
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)[/quote]
Yeah, nice little gem there. Granted, lately I’ve been wading through a ton of crappy self-published books that aren’t even worth mentioning, so perhaps my bar is descending, but I had the same reaction.
Edit: Halfway through Cibola Burn. It’s fine. Most of my interest in the book series kind of evaporated after reading book 1 and then watching the first SyFy series season, but it’s still decent stuff if you avoid trying to compare it to the show/previous books.
I just wanted to write down somewhere that I started Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace on about the 1st of January 2017. About 400 pages in now. It was only after around 200 pages that I started to think about it alot even when not reading it. Even though I am not even half way I am starting to think it might be the best thing I have read that was published after, say, 1961 (Catch-22 was published that year)?
I can’t recommend this book highly enough to any fan of science fiction. Everyone I’ve given it to has loved it.
Reading The Skill of Our Hands by Steven Brust and Skyler White. Sequel to The Incrementalists. Go out and buy it, or both of them if you haven’t read the first one.
Full disclosure: I got to read an early draft, and a character of mine has been Tuckerized in the novel, but it really is good stuff. If only there were Incrementalists around for this last election…
Finished Hex. It was one of the better horror books I have read in a couple of years. It certainly wasn’t afraid to go “there” when it needed to. Kudos to the author.
So it took me a while to go through Cibola Burn because it was…alright. Nemesis Games, however? Holy shit, I can’t put it down. I didn’t realize how much CB didn’t really resonate with me as much as earlier novels until I began reading NG, which is a total return to form for the series. Y’all, again, were right. While CB wasn’t baaaaaaad, per se, it wasn’t amazing. NG is amazing.
Finished it last week. I haven’t read a book structured this way before, where it’s just joke after joke. The narrative serves as a scaffolding to get to the next punchline. Maybe a good comparison would be something like John Dies at the End, but JDatE doesn’t really match how concentrated the humor is throughout the book. I suppose that’s the Simpson’s pedigree in action.
Anyways, it was a quite funny read. I’m sure I’ll continue the saga of Detective Frank Burly at some point.
Finished The Dead Tracks, the second David Raker mystery. He is essentially an English Private Eye, a “missing persons’ investigator”.