What have you been reading lately?

You can relax. All the Wild Cards stuff is from over 10 years ago.

Oh, and if you see his name on this TV show called “Beauty and the Beast” - that was from the 80s

I recently finished up Exultant by Stephen Baxter. It’s part of his Xeelee Sequence future history. Good stuff if you’re a big science nerd like me - Baxters hard scifi is more about cool concepts than anything else. Characters and even plot are in the backseat.

The Persian Puzzle by Ken Pollack. I’m not too far into this, but so far it’s had a good overview of recent Iran/US relations and the reasons behind the historical animosity. Good stuff.

Shadowmarch by Tad Williams. This is Williams return to epic fantasy. I’m undecided - I’m about 150 pages in and so far it’s not grabbing me the way Memory Sorrow and Thorn or Otherland did.

JD

I fuckin’ love Jack Vance. An amazing prose writer, with more and more original ideas in each chapter than most SF/fantasy writers muster for a trilogy.

If you haven’t read them yet, I recommend the non-series novels Emphyrio and The Blue World, along with the first two books of the Lyonesse trilogy (the third is a throwaway contract-breaker) and the first two books of the Araminta Station trilogy.

Would the books you cited here be a good place to start with Vance in general, for those who haven’t read him at all? Looked at his stuff on Amazon just now and am interested in trying him out…

Would the books you cited here be a good place to start with Vance in general, for those who haven’t read him at all? Looked at his stuff on Amazon just now and am interested in trying him out…

I’d definately recommend the Demon Princes novels. They were a great read… and from what I’ve heard pretty representative of Vance’s work. Volume I contains three books “The Star King”, “The Killing Machine” and “The Palace of Love.” Volume II has the last two “The Face” and “The Book of Dreams”. The protagonist is wonderful. His name is Kirth Gersen and he is sort of a cross between Snake Pliskan and Sam Spade. The books sort of remind me of Dashiel Hammet’s but with a sci-fi setting.

Tried finding Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell at my local Waldenbooks, but no such luck. Had a $25 gift certificate from Christmas burning a hole in my pocket. Also noticed they didn’t have the latest David Gemmell Del Rey paperback, Ironhand’s Daughter. So I just grabbed both from Amazon for $23.

Tried reading Shadowmarch too, and while I usually enjoy Williams’ writing I just couldn’t get into it.

That sounds interesting – Let me know how it is. I’m currently reading Jack Aubrey Commands: An Historical Companion to the Naval World of Patrick O’Brian by Brian Lavery. It’s a fairly accessible top level review of the historical basis for the Age of Sail genre with lots of pretty pictures. As a non-sailor, this is the first book I’ve read that’s explained the basics regarding rigging in a way I could wrap my mind around.

More importantly, it turned me onto Frederick Marryat who was a captain during the age of sail who wrote several novels based on his experience. I’ve ordered two of his books to start with.

Jason, your list is what I should be reading but I’ve had my head in the sand all Fall. On the brightside, my need for escapism has bumped my volume for the year :D

If you’re more into SF, Vic is right that the Demon Princes novels are classic. Araminta Station would also be good and representative, with a slightly bigger scale.

If you’re more into fantasy, there are different flavors available. The Dying Earth is the first classic — vivid and strange stories set on a depopulated Earth in a far future when the sun is about to go out.

After that come two picaresque novels, The Eyes of Overworld and Cugel’s Saga; they’re set in the same world, but their protagonist Cugel makes them very different in tone — the vivid and strange stuff is still there, but now it’s also hilarious. Cugel is a total and true rogue, suckering whole towns with crazy swindles that then blow up in his face, seducing maidens and abandoning them to die at the hands of monsters while he flees for his life.

Also set in the Dying Earth world is Rhialto the Marvellous, about a vain and petty wizard who’s sort of like a Cugel made good.

Lyonesse is beautiful and epic “high fantasy,” set in a more Celtic and Earthly medieval world.

[color=white]SPOILER
I finished SOF about 3 or 4 days before the tsunami disaster struck Asia. A large part of SOF’s plot involves a group of “environmental terrorists” who plan to generate an artificial tsunami to strike the west coast of America . . . to raise awarness for their “cause”.

It was more than a little jarring to see an event unfold in real life that I had just read a similar fictional account of.[/color]
[/quote]
I finished State of Fear just before the tsunami as well – I’m glad I wasn’t the only person who found that a bit eerie.

As fiction, I thought it was on the same level as anything else as Crichton’s written lately – his usual cast of characters, etc. If you like his stuff, you’ll like this; if not, this won’t change your mind. I thought it was interesting, however, how he added real data throughout the book, and then added a bit of social commentary in a seperate afterword. He’s clearly emotionally invested in the subject.

Been on a random noir kick with the following:

Right as Rain by George Pelecanos; inspired by the Wire, in fact, the Season 3 subplot about Prez shooting that cop is pretty much lifted from this book.
Eight Million Ways To Die by Lawrence Block inspired by Kurt Busiek proclaiming this to be the best detective novel of the last fifty years in his opinion; I wouldn’t go that far, but it was damn good.
Hostage by Robert Crais; inspired by how the dude who directed the cutscenes in Splinter Cell is now making a Bruce Willis flick offa this book.
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester; inspired by me finding it in a bookstore and remembering to read this after I had read The Stars My Destination.
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan; inspired by me wanting to read it for the past year or so, and finally remembering to pick it up and do so by reading his run on Marvel’s Black Widow.

And now, Thinking With Type, so that I understand those people who love fonts.

Hostage by Robert Crais; inspired by how the dude who directed the cutscenes in Splinter Cell is now making a Bruce Willis flick offa this book.

Holy Crap, I saw the preview for that film this weekend. I didn’t recognize the director’s name when it came up on the screen- had know idea he was a cutscene director. Especially considering I can’t recall a single memorable moment in the Splinter Cell cutscenes.

Also surprised that, while I haven’t read any of Crais’ work, the movie preview looked nothing like what I’ve heard about it and looked like a fairly generic action thriller.

I’ll second these recommendations. “Eyes” in particular has a lot of the typical Vancian elements–the strange cultures, the obnoxious protagonist, the ironic endings, the vivid writing style, and so on.

Edit: Also, I would not reoommend the Demon Rpince books as a place to start. The first couple (as I recall them; it’s been a while since I read them) are pretty formulaic–there’s some good stuff in there, but if they’re the first Vance you read, you may wonder what the fuss is about him.

Also, worth hunting down in a library is “The Five Moons,” not so much for the stories, as for the intro, where he explains that this is a collection of his “almost-worst stories.” It’s a funny intro, though not worth buying the book for.
Gav

For a fun, fast paced read, check out Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler. I got his second book for Christmas and haven’t read it yet but Gun Monkeys was a blast.

Finally getting around to catching up here after the holidays. I read two of Jean Shepherd’s books while travelling: “In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash” and “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters”, both of which contain source elements for the movie “A Christmas Story”. I’ve now started Spider Robinson’s new novel “Very Bad Deaths” and have his collection of columns “The Crazy Years” to follow that.

Block and Pelecanos are more hard boiled than noir.

This week I have mostly been reading:

Teeth of the tiger by young Mr Clancy. Good to read on a bus, many pages long (unless it’s a Clancy book, which it is. Where’s the other 300 pages you git?). Jackie Collins for blokes. Mmmm. tell me about the poison pen and how you stab it in arab buttocks again.

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. I smell another character change in the diskworld series mebbe. Still feature Vimes, just. Not bad, labours a point, really feels like he has got diskworld by numbers down to pat which is a shame as Night Watch was the best Diskworld book for a long time.

American Dream, Global Nightmare by the same people who wrote why do people hate America?. Actually meant to pick up the Da Vinci code but this might have given me more to think about. I’ve been at the wine so shouldn’t really say much about this one except I have mixed feelings about both it’s arguments and conclusions.

The Iliad by Homer. Watch Troy, then imagine it with passion, proper characters, Gods and as poetry instead of the book of the film that could have been, and you’re about there. Hard work but worth persevering with once you can get into the flow. If you live in the UK, Penguin Classics flog it absurdly cheapl compared to most books which is why I also own, but have never finished, The Histories by Herodotus. I do feel that I should probably learn ancient greek to really appreciate them at their best though.

The Fagles translation of the Iliad and Green translation of Herodotus are, I think, widely accepted as the next best thing to being ancient Greek, so don’t worry too much about that.

I think Herodotus is actually a much better read because it’s a lot funnier than the Iliad. You do need a good edition to get the most out of it, though.

Troy

They both suffer[edit: wrong word. They both need you to adapt to how they are written] from needing to get your head around the flow of the script (I’m reminded of an Eddie Izzard Sketch). I can’t remember the version of the Histories I have, but it’s basically 19th Century translation and still apparently one of the best. I’m an egypt nut and bought it on that basis, a first hand account of Egypt from antiquity. However the style of writing is heavy, heavy going to me at least. I’ve got further learning to read heiroglyphs[sp] than the histories so far :(

Trust me. Get the Green. Faithful to the original but lacking none of the energy of Herodotus. He is an exciting writer, not a stultifyingly dull guy.

You gotta be careful with some of those 19th century and early 20th century guys, too. A lot of them (not all of them, to be sure) were translating based on what they thought the ancients should have been saying more than what they did. They’d occasionally stick in an anachronistic word without any explanation for why they did so. They were very egregious in their translations of Plato, but there’s a new translation of him every other year so no permanent harm was done so long as you compared them.

Troy

Soon as I can dig it out of storage, I will find out which version I have. It remains top of the books I’ve started but not managed to get into, let alone finish.

It’s not that I think it is necessarily badly translated (insofar as I can make that judgement) nor especially lacks narrative. It does however start off with a lot of people that, basically, you have very little identification with and hence while it is switching backwards and forwards, you are trying to remember who is who.

[edit] The comparison is with the Illiad, for example, that before I pick up the book I know who Achilles, Hector, Agammenon, Paris, Odysseus etc are, the (re)discovery of a character like Diomedes is therefore a bonus.

My current reading list:

Fear’s Empire by Ben Barber

America by Jon Stewart and friends

Got Game by John Beck and Michael Wade.