Finished Judas Unchained. Top notch SF, interesting world building and characters, but long as hell…
Started Back Blast, Gray Man #5.
I somehow managed to grow old and gray without ever reading The Black Company by Glen Cook.
So now that’s rectified. I really enjoyed it.
Thanks to @JoshL I am rereading
It is a strange and twisted tale. In a way it’s like A Clockwork Orange because Spinrad has parts of it in a language he created. But that helps you submerge yourself into this skewed universe. If you don’t mind sex and drugs and spaceships, give it a shot.
I am reading Mortal Games: The Turbulent Genuis of Garry Kasparov. The book goes into some behind-the-scenes of the Kasparov/Karpov matchup in 1990.
A good, accessible, look of chess geniuses.
Yay! Yeah, what a weird freakin’ book. I just finished reading Gardens of the Moon (and, sorry ArmandoPenblade, but… I didn’t like it). And then I started reading Armada which is the other book buy the Ready Player One guy. I know Ready Player One is somewhat divisive, but I liked it, and so far this is pretty similar in style and I am liking it too. A light page-turner, so quite a change of pace from Gardens of the Moon.
Antony and Cleopatra
Bits ‘n’ pieces of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner
Under an Alien Sun, by Olan Thorensen
https://www.amazon.com/Cast-Under-Alien-Sun-Destinys/dp/B072FDB87D
This is a “crunchy” sci-fi survival story. I think the closest comparison would be The Martian crossed with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, though it’s not nearly as good as either of those. The basic plot is that a young chemistry grad student is deposited on a human-inhabited world that has roughly the tech level of the US circa 1700 (the Age of Reason: muskets, crossbows, the start of modern medicine ). After getting his feet under him, he starts to introduce new technology to his adopted planet/country/town. The book ends on a cliffhanger setting up later volumes.
I enjoyed the story and the characters fine, and the book scratched my techie/engineer itch in the same way that The Martian or even We are Legion; We Are Bob did. Problem-solving is fun to read about; at least for me.
The issue is that the author isn’t particularly skilled, or at least doesn’t have a good editor. The author (like the hero) has a PhD in the sciences, and the book is written using some habits he likely picked up while writing scholarly papers… and not in a good way. He constantly repeats basic information and reviews events from earlier in the book with almost silly detail and frequency; stuff that he ought to trust the reader to have remembered. He tends to lay out the conclusions that he (the author) thinks that the audience ought to have picked up on… and they’re not things than anyone would have been confused about. Characters often engage in utterly ridiculous levels of exposition that is ham-handedly shoehorned into the dialog.
His writing gets better as the book goes along, so I’m cautiously optimistic that the next book will be done with a little more literary skill.
I loved Ready Player One, but didn’t care much for Armada. It seemed to me both like a book that was deliberately written to sell as a movie script (btw what ever happened to the Ready Player One movie?) and that also read like a poorer version of Ender’s Game.
I’m on to The Collapsing Empire by Scalzi.I like it more than I thought I would. I like the swearing,and that people actually have sex. I think he does a pretty good job at creating at least a plausible idea for the science.
Looks like the movie is still moving along.
I just finished listening to the audio book of Gibson’s The Peripheral. I enjoyed it, but found that Gibson’s no-exposition style is even more challenging in a listen-only format than it is in print. Maybe that’s because an audio-book doesn’t allow you to flip back through pages to see other uses of his made-up terms. It took me forever to puzzle out what a “Michikoid” was. Interestingly he breaks his own rule and has a character give a fairly long explanation of “The Jackpot.”
Changes from the book notwithstanding, Ben Mendelsohn looks exactly like my mental image of Sorrento.
Well, I finshed Armada and ended up not liking it much. I kept waiting for the twist, and it ended up being kind of a damp squib.
Now I’m finally getting around to reading the third book in Abercrombies “Half of” trilogy. So good.
Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block. A private detective type ex-policeman, looking into a murder-suicide, and coming up with the truth. A good solid enjoyable read.
Lovecraft County. This was pretty passable. The lovecraftian stuff got good at times, but the racist time period which was used as a setting, could have been a good, but instead seemed rather contrived and caricatured and worn at the end of it. I think there’s room for a much better book using the same two bases, and this wasn’t it. In fact, given the racist views of the authors of Lovecraft’s day, including Howard, it seems almost as if this was a wasted opportunity.
A fine series which I have not thought about in years. And worth me checking Amazon to see if I have missed any…
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion was recommended by a podcast I’ve been listening to (Make Me Smart by some of the folks from Marketplace). It explores how (mostly) rational and reasonable people can end up with completely different moral and ethical views.
There are some very interesting ideas, but be warned that it’s an academic book - reads like a textbook at times, and it’s very dense. Not light reading for sure! I found it worth the time and effort, though. If you’d like to know more, I wrote about it here:
Reading Blowback, a Retrieval Artist novel. Series has definitely grown on me as it progresses…
I finished Underworld by Don DeLillo and I gotta be honest… It is now my favorite American novel. I’m not from New York and I’m not a huge fan of baseball so I am not quite sure why it has resonated with me to this degree. -White Noise had almost the same effect on me but on an entirely different level (American Beauty without the pedophile angle).- DeLillo just writes things I like to read I guess.
Unlike a lot of folks who only really enjoyed the prologue, I was enveloped by the thing as a whole. The prologue is truly masterful. It sets the tone of the book and puts into place a structure of sorts but I like how the narrative between the prologue and epilogue is mostly moving backwards in time while the ball is moving forwards. You know from the very first chapter who ends up with the ball but the history of the ball is only very slowly revealed. I like the Bruegel references. I like the loose connections that everything has to everything
But my favorite thing, and the reason I love this book so much is the prose:
I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.
DeLillo, Don. Underworld: A Novel (p. 810)
That is me at 46 looking back on me at 22.
Next up Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
I’ve been re-reading the last few Daniel Silva novels. The new Gabriel Allon book comes out in a few weeks and I had forgotten what happened in the last one.
I finally read A Universe From Nothing a couple weeks ago, which in many ways serves as a lesser update to A Brief History of Time. Lawrence Krauss is a good science expositor, but much like his friend Richard Dawkins, the most annoying thing about him is that he can’t shut up about religion even when it’s irrelevant. He literally closes the book with a jab. I much prefer the approach of writers like Peter Godfrey-Smith or Daniel Dennett, who are largely content to let the science speak for itself. That being said, it is a concise & eminently readable account of modern cosmology, which has indeed advanced to the point where, while short of a definite theory, it can at least explain how matter & energy spontaneously emerge from a void of either. My only (scientific) complaint is that it should have gone into more detail about the processes at play, which I suspect is avoided more for a general audience than due to lack of knowledge on the part of physicists. It’s always hard for me to gauge given my math background…
On that note, John Conway’s On Numbers and Games is a joy to read, as it unifies the theories of real numbers & transfinite ordinals while introducing a rigorous treatment of infinitesimal numbers and “surreal numbers,” called games in this text because they aren’t really numbers but do have applications to game theory. The most fascinating part is the simplicity & unified nature of the theory. It develops virtually all sets of numbers from one small set of axioms, itself shorter than the traditional set of axioms used just for the natural numbers. The theory was originally presented in dialog form (yes, really) in a book by Donald Knuth called Surreal Numbers, which is readable by someone with very little mathematics experience, even if it does require rather a lot of patience at that reading level.
I’ve also begun reading a book by one “Professor Woolley” (which is the only reason I picked it up, because of the Community episode on conspiracy theories) about early Sumerian civilization. It was written in the 50s or 60s, so even the language is a little dated by modern standards, but it’s a pretty good read for any ancient history nerds who are sick, as Woolley is, of Egypt hogging all the attention.