The David Raker series is great. Really enjoy them. 7 in the series so far and they have some great twists later on.
Still marching through Clarissa – now 500 “iBook” pages out of 3000 down. It’s not exactly a difficult read, just a long one, but Samuel Richardson’s imaginative scope borders on the supernatural. I have no idea how he or any mortal could have assembled a narrative so bounteous in psychological detail. (And most of the time is spent in the heads of female characters, which he inhabits with ease.) Occasionally bouncing over to Shirer’s Rise & Fall of the Third Reich for research purposes from time to time. Also started to reread Middlemarch, which I admire so much that I have no excuse for not having finished it.
It’s pretty hard for me to stay focused on a single book in my dotage.
I just finished Expeditionary Force: Columbus Day by Craig Alanson. Audiobook version.
This book has perhaps the worst title I’ve ever come across, and it’s not a great book, but it might scratch your itch. The idea is that Earth is attacked by an alien race that pretty much knocks out the planet’s industrial infrastructure. Shortly thereafter, a second alien race appears and drives away the first. The main character is a army specialist who volunteers to go into space as part of an UN-led expeditionary force to (a) prove that humanity has something to offer to the second alien race, and (b) get back at the first alien race.
Off-world, the main character learns that the second alien race largely views humanity as an expendable Janissary force, and that the first alien race might not be as evil as everyone first assumed…
It’s pretty rote mil-sci-fi, obviously written by a guy who is either in the army or just left. The writing is a little simplistic, but the action is well-paced and the universe is nicely consistent: every once in a while I would find myself looking askance at some concept that the guy put forward, thinking that it was stupid and didn’t make any sense… only to find that in the next chapter he explained the reasons for it and it now made perfect sense. Quality-wise, I’d put it at about the same level as Marco Kloos’ “Frontlines” series… with maybe with a few more clever ideas thrown in there.
For me, what really drew it together as an audio book was the absolutely fantastic narration of R.C. Bray, who also narrated the audiobook version of The Martian. I’m not sure that the book alone would have held my interest.
Ohhh, I’ve got that book in my backlog, along with some Frontlines books. It sounds fun at least.
I dont get the interest in the Expanse series. I read Leviathan Wakes a while ago on a whim and found it uncompelling, and the ending fell flat for me.
I tried a bit of the show on Amazon and it was paced a bit better. The inter-faction tension seems to be better expressed in the show as well. The eccentricities of the Belters were adapted really well too, I expected that to turn out very corny.
Then I…can’t really help you…
I just finished The Abominable by Dan Simmons.
An awful, awful book. 688 pages, over 3/4 of which is setup and long-winded descriptions of 1920’s alpine climbing techniques. You literally don’t even get to Everest until somewhere around page 400. To add insult to injury, the central mystery in the story is dumb. Like, really dumb.
The Yeti turn out to be Nazi mountain climbers that want to kill everyone on the expedition to stop them from finding a bunch of photos of Hitler as a young man having gay sex. Seriously. The pornographic photos are characterized as “abominable” which is where the title really comes from.
Stick with The Terror if you want Dan Simmons writing about a monster killing people in the snow.
Thanks, will skip. I enjoyed the Terror but it was borderline for a lot of it.