The Books We're Reading: New Edition

[Palanan]

So, after a long lapse, this seems like a good time to once again pose that essential question: what books are you reading right now?

For my part, I'm just finishing Before Scotland, an absorbing survey of the cultures and landscapes which occupied the deep prehistory of Scotland. In this book, the Romans are latecomers and the Picts are positively arriviste; much of the book is taken up with the story of far earlier peoples, whose names are all but unknown, apart from a few lingering traces in ancient roots and place-names.

Since almost all of the book deals with prehistory, much of the story is told through inference from archaeology and related sciences; even marine geology contributes with insights on the drowned terrain of Doggerland. From Skara Brae to Hadrian's Wall, the story wanders lightly through lost millennia, along the way touching on curraghs and crannogs, hillforts and horse archers, the sacrifices in bogs and the ancient totems of Highland clans.

It's a fascinating and often meditative book, as the author often presents possible (if tenuous) links between ancient beliefs and echoes of customs which have survived to the present day. Alistair Moffat has written a longer and denser book, The Sea-Kingdoms, an exploration of Celtic history in Britain and Ireland. I've made it partway through that book, which is lyrical and quietly evocative; but its richness in writing wants time to absorb. Before Scotland is a lighter and quicker read, although more than rewarding in itself, and definitely worth the time for anyone interested in the windswept shores of prehistory.

[kraftcheese]

I'm about a third of a way through Years of Rice and Salt, which is an alternate history where The Black Plague killed almost everyone in Europe, leaving East and South Asia, Africa and the Islamic world relatively untouched.

It's been really interesting so far; each group of chapters ends with the characters dying, being judged and going through a reincarnation cycle, and they're all wound up together in each life they come back in (but they don't remember their past lives until they're back in the limbo between lives).

It's been really enjoyable so far.

[random11]

Trying "Drenai saga" by David Gemmell, currently on book 1, "Legend".

Saw someone write about it in a thread, and decided to try.

[Algeh]

I'm re-reading my old collection of GURPS books (mostly 3rd edition and from the 90s), because I've been feeling nostalgic for my old gaming groups from the 90s and early 2000s. Right now, I'm in the middle of "GURPS Swashbucklers", which I'm pretty sure went into more detail on swordfighting than any group I played in ever actually used.

[factotum]

Just started "Game of Thrones" (as in the first book of the "Song of Ice and Fire"). If the TV series is anything like the book I can understand why it's got a reputation for nudity and gore!

[kraftcheese]

Just started "Game of Thrones" (as in the first book of the "Song of Ice and Fire"). If the TV series is anything like the book I can understand why it's got a reputation for nudity and gore!
I always felt there was less nudity and gore in the books...but I did read them a few years back so I might be mistaken.

[Tom Tearcamel]

Just finished up the new Expanse book. (Babylon's Ashes) It obviously was pretty good, but reminded me heavily of A Dance With Dragons. (Fits that one of the writers was GRRM's Assistant for years) It seemed full of political machinations instead of action and with a ton of viewpoints from characters that we don't care about. I'm super excited for the show to start back up in Feb though.

[russdm]

Just started "Game of Thrones" (as in the first book of the "Song of Ice and Fire"). If the TV series is anything like the book I can understand why it's got a reputation for nudity and gore!

You have my Pity and deepest sympathies. Don't forget to have a quantity of brain bleach, and not end up liking many if any characters.

Have you read any of the Fifty Shades of Gray? Having read that will really help when reading the "Game of Thrones" books. As well as watching soap operas. Mainly Spanish ones.

[Lethologica]

Just finished the Naamah trilogy by Jacqueline Carey. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it's easy reading to get me back in the game after an unfortunate amount of time not reading books. I like Carey's characters, and her environments, and her magic, and her expressed views on love and religion. Pretty much all her fantasy-Earth cultures are heavily romanticized, but that can be nice too. The sex doesn't suit my, er, particular tastes the way it did in Phedre's trilogy when Kusheline intrigue played a bigger role, but by now that's not the main attraction. However, I do miss the intrigue itself--the plot has become much more predictable in the series' later books.

Now I'm crawling through Burning Chrome, the William Gibson proto-cyberpunk short story collection. It's interesting (though perhaps not entirely fair) to place Gibson's early work as part of a reaction to science fiction full of normal people interacting with weird technology and aliens, by writing science fiction where technology makes the people themselves weird. And of course there are lots of fun ideas being tossed around, because it's Gibson. I suspect the short story is a more natural habitat for him than the full-length novel. Neuromancer aside, others of his books can leave the impression that the plot is merely a distraction from poking into all the chromed-but-dirty corners of the future; in his short stories, though, the dirty corners are the point.

(There's also a textbook on film criticism I'm assiduously failing to read. Sigh.)

[GloatingSwine]

Just finished up the new Expanse book. (Babylon's Ashes) It obviously was pretty good, but reminded me heavily of A Dance With Dragons. (Fits that one of the writers was GRRM's Assistant for years) It seemed full of political machinations instead of action and with a ton of viewpoints from characters that we don't care about. I'm super excited for the show to start back up in Feb though.

After what went down in Nemesis Games I don't think you could reasonably expect Babylon's Ashes to be anything other than continuing to process the fallout.

On the other hand, I think the series is about ready to return to dealing with the alien weirdness plot from Cibola Burn.

It did have a hell of a lot of viewpoints this time though. (Though one of them was Avasarala which always helps, pity they toned her language down for the TV version).

[random11]

Trying "Drenai saga" by David Gemmell, currently on book 1, "Legend".

Saw someone write about it in a thread, and decided to try.

Finished the book and started the second.

As for the first, it was a pretty good war story book.
The flaws of the book were in the love story that felt both forced and rushed. Also some magical items from destiny came out of nowhere and could easily be discarded without harming the plot or the result of the battle.
All things considered, I would recommend it.

While I'm just starting with the second book, I unfortunately encountered exactly the same flaw right from the start, a forced rushed love story that came out of nowhere, and even the way it started kind of reminded me of the exact scene in the first book.
I'll postpone my rating for later, but I really hope it improves and that it will deliver something new.

[Morph Bark]

I finished Fables Vol. 2 this weekend and am currently reading Dishonored - The Corroded Man.

[Yora]

I am currently reading (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/48591513-martin) The Copper Promise, Time of Contempt, and The Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories. And I just finished Hellboy and will move on to my second reading of B.P.R.D.

Legend was an interesting book,but nothing I'd want to read more of right after it. Read it last year and I want to try Waylander next one.

[warty goblin]

It's arse cold, and I'm two weeks away from finishing a profoundly boring internship. Time to reread Dragonlance Chronicles for the umpteenth time. You may say I have no taste. And I'll totally agree with you.

[russdm]

It's arse cold, and I'm two weeks away from finishing a profoundly boring internship. Time to reread Dragonlance Chronicles for the umpteenth time. You may say I have no taste. And I'll totally agree with you.

I didn't know that Dragonlance Chronicles had a reputation for being lousy.

[warty goblin]

I didn't know that Dragonlance Chronicles had a reputation for being lousy.

I wouldn't say it's lousy, really. I'd say it's a series a person is less likely to enjoy if they first read it as an adult, but may well like a great deal if they encounter it as a bored and isolated 14 year old. Since that was pretty much my trajectory, I remain very fond of the entire deal.

I actually thought about doing a reread thread for the Chronicles a while back, but figured nobody would be interested. Was I wrong?

[rooster707]

Just finished a lengthy archive binge of Girl Genius. Now I'm going to try Discworld, since I keep hearing how good it is.

[Knaight]

I wouldn't say it's lousy, really. I'd say it's a series a person is less likely to enjoy if they first read it as an adult, but may well like a great deal if they encounter it as a bored and isolated 14 year old. Since that was pretty much my trajectory, I remain very fond of the entire deal.

It does have a reputation for lousiness though, albeit no more than any other D&D fiction (or really game based fiction in general). Does it suck? Yes. Does it suck worse than the Halo novels or similar? No.

[factotum]

Just finished a lengthy archive binge of Girl Genius. Now I'm going to try Discworld, since I keep hearing how good it is.

There are forty-one Discworld novels, where are you going to start? :smallsmile:

[rooster707]

There are forty-one Discworld novels, where are you going to start? :smallsmile:

Good God. Well, uh... the first one, I guess?

[Lethologica]

After the obligatory debate over whether The Color of Magic is a better starting point than Mort or Guards! Guards!, you'll end up reading TCoM first anyway. Might as well bow to the inevitable.

Finished Burning Chrome (well, finished a first read, I'll reread most of the stories over the holidays). I'm sitting on Peter Beagle's urban fantasy anthology, and also Accelerando by Charles Stross, which is apparently composed of interconnected short stories, and also Second Foundation in case I need more short stories. (Or maybe Asimov kicked the habit after the Mule showed up, I don't know yet.) Short story city over here. Maybe I'll start reading Wheel of Time afterwards for a larff.

[Douglas]

Second Foundation in case I need more short stories. (Or maybe Asimov kicked the habit after the Mule showed up, I don't know yet.) Short story city over here.
Second Foundation is all one big story as I recall, and the time skip between it and the next book is the last one in the series - all the books after it form a single cohesive story together following the same characters with little skipped time.

[Lethologica]

Second Foundation is all one big story as I recall, and the time skip between it and the next book is the last one in the series - all the books after it form a single cohesive story together following the same characters with little skipped time.
Good to know. Maybe I'll use the series to space out the short stories.

[tantric]

i'm rereading the Pliocene Exile by julian may. i'm still convinced it's the epitomal science-fantasy series. it's just *crafted*.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Time to reread Dragonlance Chronicles for the umpteenth time….

I wouldn't say it's lousy, really. I'd say it's a series a person is less likely to enjoy if they first read it as an adult, but may well like a great deal if they encounter it as a bored and isolated 14 year old. Since that was pretty much my trajectory, I remain very fond of the entire deal..

I read Dragons of Autumn Twilight my senior year in high school, after a friend all but pushed his copy on me. I thought it was barely mediocre at best, and I think I read the next two books just in the hope they might get better. Apart from Raistlin's hourglass pupils, and his use of a featherfall spell, I don't remember much else.

But I can understand how it would be great for someone at the right age. I read the original Pern trilogy when I was eleven, and the Harper Hall trilogy when I was a couple years older, and I have that same warm nostalgia for them.


Originally Posted by Algeh
Right now, I'm in the middle of "GURPS Swashbucklers", which I'm pretty sure went into more detail on swordfighting than any group I played in ever actually used.

Found this on Amazon and it looks great, although sadly a little pricier than I can justify on a whim.

I've never looked into GURPS, and I have no idea how the system works. How much of the swashbucklers material could be easily transferred to Pathfinder?

.

[Algeh]

Found this on Amazon and it looks great, although sadly a little pricier than I can justify on a whim.

I've never looked into GURPS, and I have no idea how the system works. How much of the swashbucklers material could be easily transferred to Pathfinder?

.

I haven't played Pathfinder, so I'm really not sure (I played in a several-year 2nd edition AD&D campaign once, but almost all of my gaming, and all of my GMing, was in GURPS). A lot of the overview/setting information (places, people, timelines, suggested adventure/campaign ideas, terminology) would transfer just fine, but the details on things like how to model different characters learning swordplay from different fighting schools within the GURPS skill system would of course not transfer nearly as well.

(Broadly, GURPS is a level-less, classless point buy system where characters are built from Attributes (ST/DX/HT/IQ), Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills. Most GURPS characters in campaigns I've played in have a giant wad of skills in various things, and Swashbucklers presents some ways to add complexity to the sword fighting skills so as to make different sword-using characters who trained in different schools fight differently rather than everyone just rolling against their Rapier (or whatever) skill a lot. I have no idea how well any of that works in practice because my groups were always pretty combat light and didn't ever use those rules.)

I feel like it's also trying to serve slightly too many different campaign ideas within the book because it's trying to handle Three Musketeers-flavored games and pirate-focused games in the same book. It doesn't cover everything from that broad historical period (barely touches on, say, Gustavus Adolphus or large-scale battle tactics in those eras), but does try to cover campaigns that focus around European political intrigue as well as campaigns set in the Caribbean. It's focused on two different settings where PCs could reasonably be expected to swing dramatically from something, land on their feet, and wave a sword around, but I found the linkage less strong on a "settings I'd want to know about at the same time because they'll both come up in my next campaign" level than a "settings I might want to consider choosing from if my players want a game about swordfighting" level, if that makes sense. (I have the Third Edition, first printing, which came out in 1999. I have no idea how much the book may vary by edition - some GURPS books vary a lot by edition and some very little, depending on whether they decided to expand what was previously one book into several or similar.)

It does cover ship-to-ship and multi-ship battles, but using a very abstract and "what happens to the PCs" based system that is not detailed enough for really tactical play of naval engagements. It probably would have worked fine for my story-focused players (I don't remember us ever actually having any naval combat), but wouldn't really be much use to someone who is a fan of the type of books where a lot of time is spent explaining why a certain ship's sail plan allowed it use a certain tactic to set up a certain type of engagement.

It also is designed primarily to support games set on historical Earth rather than a fantasy world, and spends maybe a single sidebar on things like magic (suggesting that it may not mesh well with the flavor of a swashbuckling campaign and thought should be used before allowing it) and doesn't consider the idea of fantasy races or other typical fantasy setting details. If I were trying to run a game about generic fantasy world pirates rather than one set on historical Earth or a romanticized movie/TV/book version of historical Earth (it does a good job of highlighting which things from the book best support each of those things), I'd probably only use about a chapter of the book.

I don't think it would be a violation of the forum rules to post information from the table of contents (as opposed to wholesale text from the "meat" of the book), so if you're curious what the various chapters and such are I could type up a summary of how many pages they spend on what.

[Feytalist]

As always (for the past 2 years, at least), I'm reading Malazan. Finished the first series, finished the second series, started on the first prequel series, about to start on the second prequel series. Honestly, if I get to read Malazan for the rest of my life I'd be pretty content.

The Kharkanas Trilogy (a.k.a. the 100,000 year prequel) has been described as a Shakespearean tragedy, and it really kinda is. Lots of young protagonists, trapped in ennui, lamenting their tragic life. It's a bit of a slog, but the prose is really good as always, and the backstory (endlessly hinted at in the first two series) is fairly interesting. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, as I'm about two thirds through the first book, and that's usually when the **** show starts.

The Path to Ascendancy (a.k.a. the 20 year prequel) has also now started, and it's apparently really bloody good. I've got the first book... just have to dive in.

Oh, and I'm also reading Principles of Financial Economics. But that's less fun.


While I'm just starting with the second book, I unfortunately encountered exactly the same flaw right from the start, a forced rushed love story that came out of nowhere, and even the way it started kind of reminded me of the exact scene in the first book.
I'll postpone my rating for later, but I really hope it improves and that it will deliver something new.

Honestly, that particular aspect isn't ever going to get any better. But that's okay! Gemmell isn't about the love story anyway. It's about that classic pulp adventure. It's never very high-brow, but it's some of the most fun books I've read. You might want to give Waylander a go, or some of his stand-alones. Dark Moon, or Knights of Dark Renown.


I didn't know that Dragonlance Chronicles had a reputation for being lousy.

Not lousy, really. Just pulp. Like most DnD books, it's a lot of fun when your'e younger, but doesn't age well. The later works do apparently suffer from a dip in quality (never read them myself), but the first couple of books are not bad, if you go into them with the "it's a DnD book" mindset. More of a nostalgia trip, really.


After the obligatory debate over whether The Color of Magic is a better starting point than Mort or Guards! Guards!, you'll end up reading TCoM first anyway. Might as well bow to the inevitable.

Yeah, start with The Color of Magic anyway. The series only really hits its stride 3 or 4 books in, but the first couple are fairly fun, and funny, and parodic on their own, and they're short, so it's hardly a chore.

[Palanan]

So, while I decide on further titles for Dark Ages Britain, I've started reading The Age of the Vikings by Anders Winroth. There's a lot of overlap with the Dark Ages, not to mention some direct and prolonged contact in the British Isles. Plus I've just started watching Vikings (and its rather superficial little brother, Real Vikings) and wanted to get a sense of the historical context.

I'm also reading stories from Agents of Treachery, which sounds like another Marvel TV series, but in fact it's a recent collection of short spy fiction by people who are supposedly top writers in the genre. I'm not familiar with the scene or its conventions, and the first one I read, by Lee Child, left me more confused than anything. But it was extremely well-written, and so was the next, so I'm enjoying the stories despite my general lack of clue.

And I should mention that thanks to a recommendation from an earlier reading thread, I now have a copy of Laura Rowland's Shinjū waiting its turn. Once I work through the Scandinavian and British Dark Ages, I'll see if I can get into a samurai mood.

[DraPrime]

I'm currently reading The Last Stand of Fox Company. It's umm...kind of fiction, kind of non-fiction? The book is about an actual historical event, from when a company of U.S. Marines held a hill against the Chinese offensive during the Korean War (near the Chosin Reservoir, if you know your history/geography). Fox Company and the men in it were all real, but the book is narrated exactly like a novel. It details the events from the perspectives of dozens of different individuals, which is not surprising, because the authors actually interviewed many of the survivors of the battle. It might not be the most academic way of telling the history of the battle, but it's more about the story than providing an exact historical account, so I'm fine with how it's done. Overall, it's a good story of a really horrible battle that doesn't get remembered much, because the Korean War didn't have the massive political controversy of Vietnam, or the enormous scale of WWII.

[Palanan]

I'm sixty pages into The Age of the Vikings and about ready to quit.

Most writers tend to develop a sympathy for their subjects, if they didn't start out with it, but in this case the author's bias is not subtle. He's an apologist for brutality, as long as it's committed by Viking warbands, and he uses one incident from Charlemagne's reign to demonstrate that (in his view) state rulers of the time were equally barbaric. This may be true, but the author glosses lightly across passages in which Scandinavian invaders almost certainly exterminated native populations--and then suggests "maybe they just moved" with a straight face. The first chapter in particular is suffused with this sort of thing.

He also has a habit of setting up straw men and boldly demolishing them, without ever giving any real evidence for his assertions. Likewise he dismisses written documents when they disagree with his notions, but never provides anything to back up his counterclaims, not so much as a footnote. He's an established historian and presumably knows his sources, but he doesn't always want to mention them. His previous book is billed as a "radical reinterpretation," and while he's nowhere near radical here, there's more than a tinge of righteous jousting at false preconceptions.

So far the book is a little breathless and all over the place, and it's hard to know who he's writing for. It often feels just on the edge of superficial, and while the writing isn't truly awful, it can be awkwardly phrased, as if this was a second or third draft that hadn't been completely polished. And there are some cringeworthy editorial mistakes, such as the statement that "the waters outside Greenland team with fish," which is an obvious case of someone relying on a spellchecker rather than doing a careful read. (And waters are usually off a landmass, rather than outside it.)

I'm a quarter of the way through the book, and for the moment I persevere. I'm hoping it'll pick up once he moves past the political self-interest of chieftains (evidently a favorite theme of his) and gets more into ships and trade.

[Velaryon]

I would say that my actual reading has slowed to a crawl, but that would be an understatement. It has been months since I cracked open a book for more than a couple minutes. Thankfully, I still have audiobooks for my commute, which is where I get my reading done anymore.

I've nearly finished Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson - I have about three more discs to go, which means I'll likely finish on Tuesday or Wednesday. Not sure what I will start on next, since the sequel is nearly a year away from publication.



I'm a quarter of the way through the book, and for the moment I persevere. I'm hoping it'll pick up once he moves past the political self-interest of chieftains (evidently a favorite theme of his) and gets more into ships and trade.

Life is too short, and there are too many good books to waste your time on one you're not enjoying. If it picks up then great, but I hope you won't force yourself to slog through it just because you can't bear to not finish a book once starting. I used to be that way, but I've gotten over it thanks to some truly awful books.

[Seerow]

Been cherry picking my way through rereading the Riftwar Cycle from Feist. Currently making my way through the Serpent War Saga (what I consider the high point of the series); about midway through Rise of a Merchant Prince. Once I finish these I'll probably double back and read Krondor's Sons. After that it's a toss up if I'll press forward into the later series that I'm pretty "meh" about or move on to something new, but with Christmas right around the corner New seems more likely.

[Wookieetank]

I'm currently reading through the Titus Crow series by Brian Lumley and I'm on book/novella 2 The Transition of Titus Crow. Its a bit like HP Lovecraft meets Doctor Who. Particularly now that the main character is running around in a grandfather clock shaped time machine that is larger on the inside fighting elder evils. Along with any number of other parallels/allusions, I'm pretty sure Lumley was an avid watcher of Doctor Who while writing this series, and I'm loving it.

[Eldan]

Of course, the Doctor has himself fought several of Lovecraft's Old Ones on occasion, including Yog-Sothoth, which was, I think, a recurring bad guy. And he met Lovecraft. (Well, a name-changed obvious Lovecraft expy named something like "Philip Loveless" or something similar. I don't quite recall.)

[Celestia]

I recently got Archie vs. Predator for my birthday. It was totally messed up. Seeing the Predator drawn in classic Archie style is creepier and more unnerving than the way it normally looks, and the way the Archie gang sociopathically deal with him is terrifying. I don't want to spoil anything, but it ends with the Predator in tears. :smalleek:

[rooster707]

I recently got Archie vs. Predator for my birthday. It was totally messed up. Swing the Predator drawn in classic Archie style is creepier and more unnerving than the way it normally looks, and the way the Archie gang sociopathically deal with him is terrifying. I don't want to spoil anything, but it ends with the Predator in tears. :smalleek:

So I just looked it up... that's actually a thing? Seriously!? :smallconfused:

Anyway, if comics count, I've been reading The Sandman (just finished volume 3, waiting to get more from the library) and I just finished The Multiversity (confusing, but kind of awesome).

[Wookieetank]

Anyway, if comics count

If its in comic book form, I'd consider it legit. Webcomic or comic strip on the other hand... :smallwink::smalltongue:

[Celestia]

So I just looked it up... that's actually a thing? Seriously!? :smallconfused:
Yep, and I strongly recommend it.


If its in comic book form, I'd consider it legit. Webcomic or comic strip on the other hand... :smallwink::smalltongue:
What about webcomics that have had print releases? :smallwink:

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Velaryon
Thankfully, I still have audiobooks for my commute, which is where I get my reading done anymore.

I'd been forgetting to mention my audiobooks.

I've just finished The Letter of Marque by Patrick O'Brian, which is about midway through the Aubrey-Maturin novels; it has some excellent naval action and an interlude in Sweden. Now I'm starting an audiocourse on the history of espionage.


Originally Posted by Velaryon
Life is too short, and there are too many good books to waste your time on one you're not enjoying. If it picks up then great, but I hope you won't force yourself to slog through it just because you can't bear to not finish a book once starting.

Well, The Age of Vikings did pick up slightly with the chapter on ships and seafaring, but it still has plenty of issues, and there are places where the author seems entirely out of his depth.

He describes dugout canoes as "logs that have been hollowed out to a thin skin that could be stretched to form a hull." This is absurd. Wood doesn't stretch when it's sliced thin, and dugout canoes aren't cut especially thin to begin with. Either the author is confusing two different kinds of early boat, possibly dugouts and curraghs, or he simply doesn't have a clue.

He's also conveniently inconsistent when it comes to accepting the testimony of sagas and other literary sources. He often dismisses written accounts because, he claims, they were set down hundreds of years after the actual events and shouldn't be relied upon. And yet he breezily accepts the word of the sagas when it suits his purpose, such as his claim that "sailing instructions written down in Iceland in the early fourteenth century…surely reflect the navigational practices of the Viking Age."

At this point I'm mainly reading it to glean ideas for my campaign, and for references from the bibliography. I can't trust the author's expertise and certainly can't recommend the writing, so this book is definitely not a keeper.

[Velaryon]

I recently got Archie vs. Predator for my birthday. It was totally messed up. Seeing the Predator drawn in classic Archie style is creepier and more unnerving than the way it normally looks, and the way the Archie gang sociopathically deal with him is terrifying. I don't want to spoil anything, but it ends with the Predator in tears. :smalleek:

This sounds amazing. I must read it!

[Mith]

Just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. I really enjoyed it. My only complaint is that I would have liked him to have included an appendix with all the calculations he did for some of his tasks throughout the book.

[warty goblin]

Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, died this week. So that's going right to the top of the reading list, just as soon as I get back to my place and dig out my copy. I might also get ambitious and take another run at Shardik, which is a sort of very long parable about a divine(?) bear.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, died this week. So that's going right to the top of the reading list, just as soon as I get back to my place and dig out my copy.

Whoof. I hadn't heard about that. The news has been too full of some 80s rock star to make room for a literary loss.

And I've never actually read Watership Down, so I think that needs to go on my list.


Originally Posted by Mith
Just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. I really enjoyed it. My only complaint is that I would have liked him to have included an appendix with all the calculations he did for some of his tasks throughout the book.

Apparently he wrote an app (https://www.wired.com/2014/02/the-martian-software/) that helped him calculate orbits and the thrust from ion engines. That could be a place to start.


Originally Posted by warty goblin
…right to the top of the reading list….

As it happened, yesterday I found two books at my library bookstore which have languished on my Amazon wish list for months, if not years. They've been just outside my bargain budget--and I picked them up for 50 cents apiece.

The first is The Voices of Morebath, an in-depth look at a tiny English parish from the 1520s through the 1570s, as recorded by a chatty, opinionated parish priest who was evidently quite a character. It looks to be a great source on village life in that period, plus an enjoyable read on its own. I first spotted this book while riding the D.C. Metro a number of years ago, and I've been keeping an eye out for it ever since. (Sadly, it's become harder to kibitz other peoples' reading since Kindles became more popular.)

The second is The Web of Empire--which is not based on an obscure 80s boardgame, but instead on how the English explored and interacted with the wider world during the later 1500s and early 1600s. It looks slightly less readable in terms of prose, but a fascinating topic nonetheless.

Meanwhile I'm still grinding through The Age of the Vikings--at least technically, although I haven't touched it in days. I've just finished a chapter titled "Coins, Silk, and Herring" which, as near as I can tell, only mentions herring in a single phrase, and only spends two paragraphs on silk out of thirty-one pages. It should have been titled "Viking Coins and the Stuff They Bought With Them, When They Weren't Just Raiding and Smashing ****, Which Was Totally Okay Because They Were Vikings and ******* Metal."

--Oh, fun fact: "herring" doesn't even appear in the index, and according to the Amazon preview it only shows up twice in the entire text--one of which is that passing mention in the chapter with "Herring" in the title. That's what happens when an author submits an outline and doesn't stick to it, but an editor uses the original chapter titles anyway.

[2D8HP]

Though I've read it at least twice before, I'm re-reading "The War Hound and the World's Pain" by Michael Moorcock (the author of the more famous "Elric" series).

http://www.multiverse.org/imagehive/var/resizes/bookcovers/books/mikebooks/twhatwp/twhatwp_poc85.jpg?m=1403983306


https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fQoYy76dkSk/V_Rj3h3jKXI/AAAAAAAADdg/G7dupaLPOfwpC29y5Ig1eWPaZ9QKGdg1ACLcB/s280/around.jpg

I'd actually read the sequel "The City in the Autumn Stars" first, back in '86, but I single out "War Hound" as one of Moorcock's better fantasies (or as he labels it "A Fable"), possibly equal to the "Corum" novels, and I find it more compelling than the "Elric" stories.

The "hero" Ulrich von Bek is more human than Corum, Elric, etc. (but still badass and self pitying), and the story is almost a cross between Arthurian Grail Quest tales and "The Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain.

In common with the fantasies "Stardust" by Gaiman, "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" by Clarke, and "A Darker Shade of Magic" by Schwab (all of which I also recommend), "WHatWP", has scenes both in historical Earth, and "beyond the fields we know", unlike those works, WHatWP is told via first person narrative, and is a bit harder edged.


Being the true testimony of the Graf Ulrich von Bek, lately Commander of Infantry, written down in the Year of Our Lord 16580's by Brother Olivier of the Monastery at Renschel during the months of May and June as the said nobleman lay upon his sickbed.

(This manuscript had, until now, remained sealed within the wall of the monastery's crypt. It came to light during work being carried out to restore the structure, which had sustained considerable damage during the Second World War. It came into the hands of the present editor via family sources and appears here for the first time in a modern translation. Almost all the initial translating work waa as that of Prince Lobkowitz; this English text is largely the work of Michael Moorcock. )

It was in that year the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifiction of peasant children, but a similar fate for their household animals, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me.
Until May of 1631 I had commanded a troop of irregular infantry, mainly Poles, Swedes and Scots. We had taken part in the destruction and looting of the city of Magdeburg, having somehow found ourselves in the army of the Catholic forces under Count Johann Tzerclaes Tilly. Wind-borne gunpowder had turned the city into one huge keg and she had gone up all of a piece, đriving us out with little booty to show for our hard work.
Disappointed and belligerent, worried by the business of raping and slaughter, quarreling over what pathetic bits of goods they had managed to pull from the blazing houses, my men elected to split away from Tilly's forces. His had been a singularly ill-fed and badly equipped army, victim to the pride of bickering allies. It was a relief to leave it behind us.
We struck south into the foothills of the Hartz Mountains, intending to rest. However, it soon became evident to me that some of my men had contracted the Plague, and I deemed it wise, therefore, to saddle my horse quietly one night and, taking what food there was, continue my journey alone.....

[Lethologica]

I tripped in a bookstore while waiting for a party to start across the street and ended up with my nose in a copy of Small Gods, which I had read before.

I missed the party.

[Velaryon]

I've been listening to the audiobook of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal for a few days now, and while it's taken me awhile to get into, I'm enjoying it now.

Meanwhile, I finally actually did a (very) little bit of print reading as well. There's a short story anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois called Rogues that I checked out of the library and have been meaning to dig into for months. It was due back today after I had maxed out my renewals, and I finally managed to get started on it. I finished the first two stories.

Joe Abercrombie has a fun little one about a city full of thieves, thugs, and killers where a MacGuffin is passed from one hand to another. It doesn't do anything new or revolutionary, but it's a fun little read.

Gillian Flynn's story about a sex worker-turned-fortune teller who gets in way over her head when she performs a spiritual cleansing for some rich lady's house was downright excellent. Even though it's outside my usual wheelhouse, I'm doing to have to read more of her works if I can find the time. Gone Girl was surprisingly good, and it's starting to look like it wasn't her only good work.

I'm not familiar with Matt Hughes, but his short story "The Inn of the Seven Blessings" seems interesting. I wasn't able to finish it before the book had to go back, and I didn't even get far enough to understand the name, but so far there's a thief possessed by a magic idol that connects him to a god who forces him to go and rescue a man kidnapped by half-human cannibals. I really hated to put the book down, but it was time for work.

I'm really looking forward to the contributions by Steven Saylor, Neil Gaiman, and Patrick Rothfuss, and I'm sure plenty of the other authors that I'm less familiar with will be great as well. These anthologies are always excellent (though I still wish GRRM would spend less time on them and more on his own writing). :smallwink:

[warty goblin]

Whoof. I hadn't heard about that. The news has been too full of some 80s rock star to make room for a literary loss.

And I've never actually read Watership Down, so I think that needs to go on my list.

Watership Down is, I think, one of the best pieces of fantasy of the 20th century, and just a truly marvelous story in so many ways. The prose is rich, gorgeous, sophisticated, and completely rural in its outlook. It's not simply cute pastoralism, but extremely erudite, with some excellent metaphors that work to make the story both incredibly universal, and extremely intimate, but it's always rooted in characters moving and living within a huge and indifferent, perilous, wondrous and beautiful landscape. The characters are excellently drawn, and perfectly manage the balancing act of being both sympathetic but not human, and the mythology is itself wonderful, and woven through the story and characters with a deep naturalism. There are certainly fantasies where you know that the characters believe in their gods, but very few where the divine and supernatural are so perfectly worked into the very fabric of their worldview.

Plus the entire thing is a retelling of the Aeneid, but with rabbits.

[Knaight]

Watership Down is, I think, one of the best pieces of fantasy of the 20th century, and just a truly marvelous story in so many ways. The prose is rich, gorgeous, sophisticated, and completely rural in its outlook. It's not simply cute pastoralism, but extremely erudite, with some excellent metaphors that work to make the story both incredibly universal, and extremely intimate, but it's always rooted in characters moving and living within a huge and indifferent, perilous, wondrous and beautiful landscape. The characters are excellently drawn, and perfectly manage the balancing act of being both sympathetic but not human, and the mythology is itself wonderful, and woven through the story and characters with a deep naturalism. There are certainly fantasies where you know that the characters believe in their gods, but very few where the divine and supernatural are so perfectly worked into the very fabric of their worldview.

Plus the entire thing is a retelling of the Aeneid, but with rabbits.

I'd agree with all of this. It's also the thing that made me have such high hopes for Plague Dogs, which turned out to have been sadly misplaced.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Watership Down is, I think, one of the best pieces of fantasy of the 20th century, and just a truly marvelous story in so many ways….

Plus the entire thing is a retelling of the Aeneid, but with rabbits.

This sounds lovely, thanks. Not sure how I missed this one when I was a kid.

Definitely on my short list, and I'll be looking out for a copy.

.

[Eurus]

Just finished City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett, working on American Elsewhere. This guy is quickly becoming one of my new favorite authors. The Divine Cities series is one of the most unique fantasy series I've read in a very long time, with its... Indian/Russian setting, and political chaos. City of Stairs was solid and interesting, but City of Blades seemed like it had a more focused tone and stronger cast, and it just really impressed me in general.

American Elsewhere is looking to be great so far, if you like a sort of modern American gothic-slash-eldritch horror. Not entirely sure what to count it as, but it's definitely interesting.

[random11]

Finished all three books of the "Spells, Swords, & Stealth" series by Drew Hayes

When a group of adventurers die in a tavern, four NPCs plan to replace them to save their town from a mad king.
The four NPCs start by pretending to be adventurers only to later actually take the roles for real.

Recommended to anyone who ever played any role playing game, and especially for GMs frustrated by players who are determined to ruin the game.

First book was good, but the series gets even better in the second and third.

[Corlindale]

I'm reading Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson - the third volume of the Malazan series.

I had read various recommendations of the books - on this site and elsewhere - but I must admit it took me a while (and two attempts) to get properly into them. Erikson really doesn't hold your hand when the books begin, so everything is extremely confusing for a long time.

Once you do get into them, they are really rewarding. The world is interesting and the books have a ton of memorable characters, gods, demigods, mages and mortals, all involved in factions within factions with loyalties shifting all over the place.

Book 2 was alright, but I missed some of my favourite characters from Book 1 - thankfully they have all returned in Memories of Ice. I almost sat up in my chair and cheered when Anomander Rake reappeared - he is just so unbelievably cool. Him and Quick Ben are tied for my favourite character, I think.

I will probably have to take a break from the series soon, though, since I need to read both Cal and The Green Mile for work (I have students who did their assignments on those books).

[BWR]

I'm just about to start on "Poe and mesmerism", a case study of pseudo-science in Nineteenth century American literature. "Enchanted Glass" by Diana Wynne Jones may sneak in ahead of it.

[factotum]

I'm almost finished the first book of Song of Ice and Fire now. Took me a while to get going, but I'm enjoying the storyline and the writing. I only wish the story was told slightly differently, because I find it a bit annoying that it keeps jumping between multiple POV characters--makes the story harder to follow, and sometimes you get a situation where a character is in deadly peril at the end of one chapter, and we don't find out what happened to them until another chapter 50 pages later--it's almost as if George R.R. Martin wrote it with one eye on turning it into an episodic TV series!

[Palanan]

With a grinding effort of will, I’ve finally finished The Age of the Vikings, which remained scattershot and superficial to the very end. After the infamous herring chapter, the author gives a haphazard and almost incoherent account of the transition from chieftains to kings; then he goes on a whirlwind tour of domestic life, followed by an exceptionally superficial look at Viking religion.

The author’s last chapter—on skalds, runes and kennings—is more interesting and almost convincing, and I might have accepted some of his speculations if I hadn’t just read the previous two hundred pages. As it is, the chapter only leaves me wanting to find a more thorough and reliable source on sagas and runestones. The brief Epilogue stays true to the book’s superficial tone—and like most of the preceding chapters, its final paragraph is the sort of condensed summary of main points that you’d expect from a high school term paper.

The entire book feels rushed, with some remarkably sloppy and imprecise writing on the sentence level, and I have a feeling it was hurried along to capitalize on the popularity of the Vikings show on the History Channel. I did get a few interesting glimpses of specific moments in Scandinavian history, and the occasional idea or two; but the suggestions for further reading are more useful than most of the actual text. The author clearly has a sense of scholarship in the field, but unfortunately he’s done a very poor job of synthesizing it for a general audience.



On the audiobook front, I’ve recently started a short course on The Second Oldest Profession: A World History of Espionage, which sounded both fascinating and extremely cool.

Unfortunately I struck out with this one as well. The professor narrating the course is an expert on Russian intelligence in the Soviet era, and his perspective on modern spycraft is no doubt well-informed. But this audio course is a historical survey of espionage beginning in the ancient world, and time and again he shows his lack of grounding in premodern history.

As one example, he describes the founding of Constantinople as “around 400 AD” (actual date, 324 AD) and claims that at that time it faced unfriendly Islamic powers on its borders. The problem here is obvious—there were no Islamic powers until more than three centuries after Constantinople was founded. This might simply have been poor phrasing, but this sort of thing keeps coming up. In a later segment, describing how supposedly backward Western Europe was in 1492, he draws comparisons with other civilizations around the world—including “Tokugawa Japan.” Yes, he compares Europe in 1492 to a Japanese dynasty that wasn’t established until 1600.

Beyond these and other factual errors, many of the lectures tend to be very compressed retellings of historical incidents in which spycraft played some role, rather than a detailed examination of how the actual spycraft was conducted. He does have some interesting comments about spy networks in ancient Rome, but his treatment of later periods tends to focus on narrative rather than technique. It’s a fair point that many of these techniques aren’t well-attested, but the fact is there are other sources which go into better detail, in particular The Codebreakers by David Khan.

I stopped listening after his mention of Tokugawa Japan. The second part of the course, dealing with spycraft in the twentieth century, is closer to his professional expertise and most likely more accurately presented; but I’ll be skipping the rest of this one.

[warty goblin]

On the audiobook front, I’ve recently started a short course on The Second Oldest Profession: A World History of Espionage, which sounded both fascinating and extremely cool.

Unfortunately I struck out with this one as well. The professor narrating the course is an expert on Russian intelligence in the Soviet era, and his perspective on modern spycraft is no doubt well-informed. But this audio course is a historical survey of espionage beginning in the ancient world, and time and again he shows his lack of grounding in premodern history.

As one example, he describes the founding of Constantinople as “around 400 AD” (actual date, 324 AD) and claims that at that time it faced unfriendly Islamic powers on its borders. The problem here is obvious—there were no Islamic powers until more than three centuries after Constantinople was founded. This might simply have been poor phrasing, but this sort of thing keeps coming up. In a later segment, describing how supposedly backward Western Europe was in 1492, he draws comparisons with other civilizations around the world—including “Tokugawa Japan.” Yes, he compares Europe in 1492 to a Japanese dynasty that wasn’t established until 1600.

Beyond these and other factual errors, many of the lectures tend to be very compressed retellings of historical incidents in which spycraft played some role, rather than a detailed examination of how the actual spycraft was conducted. He does have some interesting comments about spy networks in ancient Rome, but his treatment of later periods tends to focus on narrative rather than technique. It’s a fair point that many of these techniques aren’t well-attested, but the fact is there are other sources which go into better detail, in particular The Codebreakers by David Khan.

I stopped listening after his mention of Tokugawa Japan. The second part of the course, dealing with spycraft in the twentieth century, is closer to his professional expertise and most likely more accurately presented; but I’ll be skipping the rest of this one.

To the true modern historian, history before the French Revolution is more or less entirely flat. Socrates invented being smart, Plato wrote it down, nobody really paid attention and everybody was dumb until Leonardo da Vinci rediscovered intelligence. But really everything stayed basically the same everywhere until the French Revolution invented historical change. So those three hundred odd years between the founding of Constantinople and Islam doesn't actually matter, because nothing happened in that time period anyway.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
To the true modern historian, history before the French Revolution is more or less entirely flat. Socrates invented being smart, Plato wrote it down, nobody really paid attention and everybody was dumb until Leonardo da Vinci rediscovered intelligence. But really everything stayed basically the same everywhere until the French Revolution invented historical change. So those three hundred odd years between the founding of Constantinople and Islam doesn't actually matter, because nothing happened in that time period anyway.

This certainly seems to be the attitude of a lot of today's academics, who are of course completely enlightened and impeccably correct in all the ways that matter.

Sadly, I've also seen claims from physical anthropologists about the supposed mental limitations of premodern people, which hardly squares with just about anything that premodern people have actually written. But some of these academics clearly haven't read much Erasmus, to say nothing of Martial or Bashō.

[Feytalist]

I'm reading Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson - the third volume of the Malazan series.

Oh man, you're in for a ride. The whole series is great, but Memories of Ice is probably my favourite of the bunch.

I'd recommend a short break between the books, yeah. The books are weighty and can get a bit much. But not too long a break, there's a lot of stuff to remember and you don't want to forget characters and events! The series is so incredibly interlinked; seemingly small and throwaway events have big repercussions later on. Relevant to you: you're going to come back to that prologue in Memories of Ice a couple of times again at least. It's a Big Event.

It's a big series, but it's worth it. Probably, overall, the best books I've read so far.

[Mith]

While I appreciate Malazan's book of the Fallen, I remember being thankful to reach the end. Warrens are my favourite system of magic in general, but I would have kept the Houses as God/ruler and Mortal Champions personally. Not the 5-7 per House/Warren.

I wonder if massive series like that would be better of done as mini series, with each individual series being a focus on a specific story line. You still have the hints of things moving on the horizon, but the focus of each series remains much smaller.

I may be wrong, but it would potentially keep the mental juggling to manageble levels.

[Eldan]

Was given Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman for Christmas. Read it last week. It has a Hugo and a Nebula and was nominated for a Locus, how bad could it be?

So bad. So, so bad.

Now, a good part of that must be the translation. My parents don't understand that I prefer original language. The German version is full of basic grammar errors, typos and even editing errors (I found two unnecessary paragraph breaks, one in the middle of a sentence.) But even with that, the writing is just terrible. I'm usually not the strongest opponent of telling instead of showing, but Sweet Isaac Asimov. You can't just say that someone is a bad person. Or end half the chapters with cliffhangers on the level of "But of course, I would soon find out that this was wrong" or "However, our problem was not solved yet". That doesn't cause tension if there isn't any tension to begin with. And the bad guys are such strawmen that scarecrows would tell them to dial it down. A christian doomsday cult, of the kind who can in all seriousness say things like "Yes, I tortured and raped this child, but it was FOR GOD."

It's utterly terrible, really. At least it was over quickly.

[Lethologica]

That's a pity. Forever War...I can't say I thought it was sequel bait, but since it got a sequel it deserved a good one.

[Feytalist]

While I appreciate Malazan's book of the Fallen, I remember being thankful to reach the end. Warrens are my favourite system of magic in general, but I would have kept the Houses as God/ruler and Mortal Champions personally. Not the 5-7 per House/Warren.

I wonder if massive series like that would be better of done as mini series, with each individual series being a focus on a specific story line. You still have the hints of things moving on the horizon, but the focus of each series remains much smaller.

I may be wrong, but it would potentially keep the mental juggling to manageble levels.

Nah, no way. Part of the pull of the series is the incredible sprawl of the world. While reading any particular book, you're acutely aware that there are other events happening off-screen, that this is only part of the story. And most of the discrete storylines do intertwine in some way later in the series. Splitting up the storylines would negate some of that impact, I think.

If it matters at all, I read the series over a period of about 18 months, with some breaks between, and I never really had much issue keeping track of everything. Each book's glossary and Dramatis Personae tends to help in that regard.

Also, if you're up for it, remember that there's a lot more stories left in Malazan :smallbiggrin: Ian Esslemont's books on the Crimson Guard are much easier reading, then there's two prequel trilogies in progress, one on how the Empire got it's start, and one on how the Tiste race got to where they are. Both are really good.

[Palanan]

So, last night I started reading Watership Down.

Only a few pages in, but it's lovely, a perfect blend of whimsy and the natural world.

.

[Gnoman]

That's a pity. Forever War...I can't say I thought it was sequel bait, but since it got a sequel it deserved a good one.

The sequel to Forever War is Forever Free. Forever Peace is entirely unrelated. I found it quite decent, but Eldan's criticism is entirely reasonable.

If you don't want to bother reading it:

The plot revolves around a soldier that is part of a super-high-tech commando unit that uses neural interface technology not only to remote control their combat drone but to mind-link the entire squad together to an astounding degree - it is mentioned, for example, that when the female squad member hits her cycle, all six experience the symptoms.

In this particular version of the future, there is a religious group commonly referred to as "enders" that believe that God has ordered the End Times and sent them to carry it out.

At the same time, there is a plan to use nanobot manufacturing to build a massive particle accelerator around Jupiter, which the protagonist learns will be energetic enough to create a second Big Bang and destroy the universe (other scientists disagree, concluding that it will "merely" destroy the Solar System).

They also figure out that "jacking" squads together will eventually render a person to be fundamentally incapable of violence due to the increased empathy, and set out to stop the Jupiter Project and force every human being on the planet to start jacking to end the concept of war forever.

Meanwhile the Enders are delighted to learn that the means of destroying the universe appears to exist, and set out to fulfill their divine mandate.

[warty goblin]

So, last night I started reading Watership Down.

Only a few pages in, but it's lovely, a perfect blend of whimsy and the natural world.

.

Ooh you're in for a treat. The whole book's excellent, but it just keeps getting better as it goes.

[Eldan]

The sequel to Forever War is Forever Free. Forever Peace is entirely unrelated. I found it quite decent, but Eldan's criticism is entirely reasonable.

If you don't want to bother reading it:

The plot revolves around a soldier that is part of a super-high-tech commando unit that uses neural interface technology not only to remote control their combat drone but to mind-link the entire squad together to an astounding degree - it is mentioned, for example, that when the female squad member hits her cycle, all six experience the symptoms.

In this particular version of the future, there is a religious group commonly referred to as "enders" that believe that God has ordered the End Times and sent them to carry it out.

At the same time, there is a plan to use nanobot manufacturing to build a massive particle accelerator around Jupiter, which the protagonist learns will be energetic enough to create a second Big Bang and destroy the universe (other scientists disagree, concluding that it will "merely" destroy the Solar System).

They also figure out that "jacking" squads together will eventually render a person to be fundamentally incapable of violence due to the increased empathy, and set out to stop the Jupiter Project and force every human being on the planet to start jacking to end the concept of war forever.

Meanwhile the Enders are delighted to learn that the means of destroying the universe appears to exist, and set out to fulfill their divine mandate.

Oh, there were interesting bits and pieces and the groundwork for a very interesting novel in there. I just found it very badly written on a technical level.

[warty goblin]

Oh, there were interesting bits and pieces and the groundwork for a very interesting novel in there. I just found it very badly written on a technical level.

The only Haldeman I've really read is The Forever War, which I liked a lot. But it didn't strike me as particularly well written, so much as a really brilliant use of sci-fi to look at some of the personal, political and cultural fallout of Vietnam. Scalzi's Old Man's War for instance is 95% the same book and was undeniably better written. Which doesn't make it a better book in my eyes, since I found it overly smug and lacking both spine and point.

[Mith]

Nah, no way. Part of the pull of the series is the incredible sprawl of the world. While reading any particular book, you're acutely aware that there are other events happening off-screen, that this is only part of the story. And most of the discrete storylines do intertwine in some way later in the series. Splitting up the storylines would negate some of that impact, I think.

If it matters at all, I read the series over a period of about 18 months, with some breaks between, and I never really had much issue keeping track of everything. Each book's glossary and Dramatis Personae tends to help in that regard.

Also, if you're up for it, remember that there's a lot more stories left in Malazan :smallbiggrin: Ian Esslemont's books on the Crimson Guard are much easier reading, then there's two prequel trilogies in progress, one on how the Empire got it's start, and one on how the Tiste race got to where they are. Both are really good.

I read the entire series over the course of 8 months. My problem was more that I would lose track of plot threads. Hence my idea of focused series. It makes finding details easier.

I do appreciate the world building of the world, anc he is much better at "show, do not tell" and have thereader understand what is going on.

[(-_-)]

Ooh you're in for a treat. The whole book's excellent, but it just keeps getting better as it goes.

it gets more exciting and violent, too. amazing how much

tales from watership down is a good way to unwind after finishing the novel, too. you can hop right back into the world you just left to mollify the anguish of the book being over, but it is all about world building rather than darkness so it leaves you feeling at ease when you do have to leave the bunnyverse for good

[Themrys]

Just finished The Masked City.

A very action packed book. Almost a bit too exciting for my taste. Considering that the protagonist is a librarian, that is rather unusual. (Of course, "librarian" here is code for "book thief working for a library that aims to collect the unique books from all parallel universes in existence", so perhaps it is not so unexpected.)

[Remmirath]

There was a long spell where I had sadly little time to read, but I'm mostly past that now, so I've been working through my rather large backlog of books that I was given. I finished Dracula by Bram Stoker (never had read the full thing before) as well as The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, and am now working my way through Tolkien's translation of Beowulf. I finished the translation proper two nights ago, and am now on the commentary.

I'm also re-reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, being most of the way through. I believe that since I have last posted here I also read the Cyteen trilogy by C.J. Cherryh and Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard, as well as possibly The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. If I recall correctly, I was still reading The Faded Sun trilogy by C.J. Cherryh when last I replied to this thread. I have, of course, since finished it; quite possibly the most enjoyable of those I've listed here, and I liked all of them.

It's been rather a long time since I last read Watership Down, but I remember it fondly. I may have to pick it up again if I find the time.

[Lethologica]

The only Haldeman I've really read is The Forever War, which I liked a lot. But it didn't strike me as particularly well written, so much as a really brilliant use of sci-fi to look at some of the personal, political and cultural fallout of Vietnam. Scalzi's Old Man's War for instance is 95% the same book and was undeniably better written. Which doesn't make it a better book in my eyes, since I found it overly smug and lacking both spine and point.
I confess, the more I remember Old Man's War, the more my impression comes to be dominated by its unvarying tone of world-weary wisecracking, and the less charitably I can regard it.

ION: Finally dragged my way through Second Foundation. I don't know, something about the start of each section left me a little distant. The twists are more elaborate than previously, which is likely in part a consequence of the battlefield being more of minds than of less personal socioeconomic forces. The powers exercised belie more than ever psychohistory's supposedly statistical effects--I'm not sure whether I like or dislike the tension between that central narrative device and Asimov's desire to tell tales of Great Men.

And women--they got more play in this book. Even if only as tools, in the end--but who wasn't a tool, really? That was something I had trouble with--the resolutions are too pat by half. I did like that Asimov was honest about it, though. Many events that seemed contrived when revealed turned out to be deliberately contrived--and what's more, the contrivance was discovered by the characters themselves, albeit they generally fell into a deeper deception afterwards.

Now that that's done, I'm going to start on The Shockwave Rider. Saw it at the Computer History Museum, and remembered Dad had a copy I'd passed over many times when looking for something to read. Then I forgot about it, until I saw it at home and remembered I'd seen it at the museum. Having completed the loop, I was obliged to finally give it a go.

[factotum]

and am now working my way through Tolkien's translation of Beowulf. I finished the translation proper two nights ago, and am now on the commentary.

I'm also re-reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, being most of the way through.

Not directly relating to you, but these comments brought a question to mind: how do people read multiple books simultaneously and not get lost or confused between them? I like to start one and read through to the end (or give up on it entirely, depending how good a book it is) before moving on to another one.

[Themrys]

Not directly relating to you, but these comments brought a question to mind: how do people read multiple books simultaneously and not get lost or confused between them? I like to start one and read through to the end (or give up on it entirely, depending how good a book it is) before moving on to another one.

How? Easily!

I just remembered that I have started "The Little Paris Bookshop" last year and not yet finished it. I will not confuse that with Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia series, or the series of librarian adventures. They are all very different.

Perhaps if I read two very similar books at the same time, I'd get confused, but with very distinctly different protagonists, that's not a danger.

[BWR]

I rarely if ever confuse what is happening in the several books I read at one time. I used to have 4-5 books going at once, but cut down to 1 for many years. now I'm back to 4-5, mostly because I start then read so slowly I don't finish them in a year or more (yay, depression), but the books are never similar enough that they are easily confused.

Take my current list: Varney the Vampire, African Myths and Legends, an omnibus of Lovecraft, a collection of Kipling's stories, a dissertation on pseudo-science in 19th C American literature, RLS' "The Master of Ballantree", "Enchanted Glass" by Diana Wynne Jones, and the Darth Revan book I'm about to start on.
None of these are similar enough to confuse with the others. I may lose a few details and have to re-read some things to get into the flow of the story again (Varney), but there's no way I'm going to think Varney is the child of Ngewo, fought to reclaim Ballantree while corrupting the locals with the Necronomicon he wrote, detoured through India and annoyed the Raj before settling down in Melstone to practice the homeopathy and phrenology he learned from Revan during the Mandalorian Wars.

[Knaight]

Same here. I rarely have more than two going at once that aren't textbooks, but even if you exclude them there's generally enough variety to prevent confusion. Recent books, with varying degrees of overlap have included:


Skunk Works
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Zoe's Tale
Web of Deceit
Environmental Biotechnology: Principles and Applications
Polymer Chemistry


So we've got a memoir of someone's engineering career, a nonfiction book about a naval disaster, an offshoot of a military scifi series, a more historically rooted Arthurian Fiction novel following Merlin in the days before Arthur, and two textbooks (among others, those were the more interesting ones). I'm not too likely to get any of these confused.

[GloatingSwine]

it gets more exciting and violent, too. amazing how much

tales from watership down is a good way to unwind after finishing the novel, too. you can hop right back into the world you just left to mollify the anguish of the book being over, but it is all about world building rather than darkness so it leaves you feeling at ease when you do have to leave the bunnyverse for good

Watership Down is responsible for the tramatic end of innocence of an entire generation of British children. There's an animated adaptation of it, and parents look at it and see "animated show with bunnies, evidently suitable for unsupervised children".

And then the carnage.


Just finished The Masked City.

A very action packed book. Almost a bit too exciting for my taste. Considering that the protagonist is a librarian, that is rather unusual. (Of course, "librarian" here is code for "book thief working for a library that aims to collect the unique books from all parallel universes in existence", so perhaps it is not so unexpected.)

Coincidentally, I have just finished The Burning Page, the new one in that series.

[warty goblin]

I confess, the more I remember Old Man's War, the more my impression comes to be dominated by its unvarying tone of world-weary wisecracking, and the less charitably I can regard it.


Yeah, that's pretty much been my take, although I recall souring on Old Man's War somewhat before I reached the end of it. The wisecracking beginning was fun, the wisecracking middle started to wear, and the fact it never bloody stopped made the wisecracking end dissappointing. That, and the entire thesis of the book, which basically boiled down to colonize first, colonize hardest, murder everything in the face was kinda squicky once you thought about it for a second. If I wanted to read colonial apologia, I'd just read Churchill or Kipling and be done with it. With the added benefit that they were vastly better writers.

(Interestingly, I picked up Old Man's War several years before I read The Forever War. I'm not entirely sure I didn't have the two confused at the time, since I knew the rough idea of The Forever War, and the two are pretty similar if you've only got a second hand plot summary vaguely remembered to go on. Which left me slightly baffled, wondering what all the fuss was about, since great anti-war story Old Man's War certainly is not.)

[GloatingSwine]

That, and the entire thesis of the book, which basically boiled down to colonize first, colonize hardest, murder everything in the face was kinda squicky once you thought about it for a second. If I wanted to read colonial apologia, I'd just read Churchill or Kipling and be done with it. With the added benefit that they were vastly better writers.


PS you are not entirely supposed to sympathise with the colonial authority. This is not a series where the common assumption that humans=good guys holds true.

They're not quite the Imperium of Man, but they can see it on a clear day.

[Lethologica]

Books 2-3 are where most of that message comes from IIRC.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Ooh you're in for a treat. The whole book's excellent, but it just keeps getting better as it goes.

I’m just getting started, but so far each chapter surpasses the last. I’m just past the point where they crossed the little stream, with Fiver and Pipkin floating on the plank, and had their first encounter with a crow near the beanfield.

I love the unfolding interpersonal dynamics, and Hazel’s early development as a leader, trying to balance Fiver’s intuition with Bigwig’s bluff practicality—all of this in the context of rabbit behavior. And I love the rabbit-legends and the creation myth. All of it is so beautifully and earnestly done.


Originally Posted by What Seems Like Half the Playground
*WATERSHIP SPOILERS!!!*

Could I ask that any spoilers, even general ones, go into spoiler tags? I’d like to keep following other discussions in this thread, but I only have this one chance to read Watership Down for the first time.


Originally Posted by Lethologica
I confess, the more I remember Old Man's War, the more my impression comes to be dominated by its unvarying tone of world-weary wisecracking, and the less charitably I can regard it.

Oddly enough, I just came across my copy a couple days ago during some house-cleaning. A friend of mine recommended it years ago, and I got it but never actually started.

I looked through the first couple pages when I came across it this weekend, and it seemed like a wisecrackier version of Starship Troopers. I find that long bouts of yelling from tough-as-nails drill sergeants can get tedious fast, so I’m not seeing much reason to dive into this now.


Originally Posted by Knaight
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Warship Essex

I think you mean “Whaleship Essex,” from the book by Nathaniel Philbrick. A fast and absorbing read.

[Knaight]

I think you mean “Whaleship Essex,” from the book by Nathaniel Philbrick. A fast and absorbing read.

That is definitely what I mean - how that typo happened, I don't know.


Yeah, that's pretty much been my take, although I recall souring on Old Man's War somewhat before I reached the end of it. The wisecracking beginning was fun, the wisecracking middle started to wear, and the fact it never bloody stopped made the wisecracking end dissappointing. That, and the entire thesis of the book, which basically boiled down to colonize first, colonize hardest, murder everything in the face was kinda squicky once you thought about it for a second. If I wanted to read colonial apologia, I'd just read Churchill or Kipling and be done with it. With the added benefit that they were vastly better writers.

There is a lot of wisecracking, but as far as the colonial apologia goes there's some definite subversion. It shows up more later, and the decision to have the wisecracking go with what is effectively an unreliable narrator is an odd one, but that particular flaw vanishes quickly in a larger context. It's one of the reasons I like the series as much as I do - there's not a lot of military science fiction that doesn't have something annoyingly objectionable, from obvious real world political allegory that takes me out of the narrative and into commentary on how the allegory is horsecrap to a ridiculous level of worship of military institutions*. I'll forgive a fair amount of writing flaws in exchange for a critical lens on that sort of thing.

*I mean, there's The Damned Trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_Trilogy), but one can only read that so many times.

[warty goblin]

That is definitely what I mean - how that typo happened, I don't know.
Whales are one of the greatest threats to civilization known, we only exist thanks to the tireless work of the whaleships which, locked in endless combat with those terrible leviathans of the deep, are sometimes also called warships. This confusion with the more mundane ships used to fight against other humans is understandable, but fails to communicate the true magnitude of the threat from the deep. Should our gallant naval protectors ever fail, the streets of every coastal city will run red with the blood of the countless children gnawed and gnashed in the great maws of the deplorable cachelots. This is why our ongoing efforts to understand giant squid are of such utmost importance, for without the aid of the noble krakens of the abyss, we should all soon be devoured by those despicable brutes.




There is a lot of wisecracking, but as far as the colonial apologia goes there's some definite subversion. It shows up more later, and the decision to have the wisecracking go with what is effectively an unreliable narrator is an odd one, but that particular flaw vanishes quickly in a larger context. It's one of the reasons I like the series as much as I do - there's not a lot of military science fiction that doesn't have something annoyingly objectionable, from obvious real world political allegory that takes me out of the narrative and into commentary on how the allegory is horsecrap to a ridiculous level of worship of military institutions*. I'll forgive a fair amount of writing flaws in exchange for a critical lens on that sort of thing.

*I mean, there's The Damned Trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_Trilogy), but one can only read that so many times.
Could be I just missed it. I only read the one book, it was a good number of years ago, and I'm not the best at sussing out unreliable narrators.

[Eldan]

Whales are one of the greatest threats to civilization known, we only exist thanks to the tireless work of the whaleships which, locked in endless combat with those terrible leviathans of the deep, are sometimes also called warships. This confusion with the more mundane ships used to fight against other humans is understandable, but fails to communicate the true magnitude of the threat from the deep. Should our gallant naval protectors ever fail, the streets of every coastal city will run red with the blood of the countless children gnawed and gnashed in the great maws of the deplorable cachelots. This is why our ongoing efforts to understand giant squid are of such utmost importance, for without the aid of the noble krakens of the abyss, we should all soon be devoured by those despicable brutes.

Brb, writing new BBEG for my Greek Heroic Age naval campaign.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Knaight
…there's not a lot of military science fiction that doesn't have something annoyingly objectionable, from obvious real world political allegory that takes me out of the narrative…to a ridiculous level of worship of military institutions….

It’s been years since I read it, but Armor by John Steakley seems to avoid both of these extremes.


Originally Posted by warty goblin
…gnashed in the great maws of the deplorable cachelots.

Which, these days, is more often spelled cachalot. :smallsmile:

Every time I see this word it reminds me of the first time I saw it—on the cover of the novel (https://www.amazon.com/Cachalot-Alan-Dean-Foster/dp/0345280660/) by Alan Dean Foster. Read it when I was a kid and loved it…although, like a number of other books I read as a kid, there were certain aspects I didn’t catch onto until later.


Originally Posted by Eldan
Brb, writing new BBEG for my Greek Heroic Age naval campaign.

Whale jokes aside, please tell me this is a campaign you’re actually running.

Because I would just about emigrate to Switzerland to play in that campaign.

.

[factotum]

Every time I see this word it reminds me of the first time I saw it

Pretty sure the first time I ever saw that word was when reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne--probably not too surprising it shows up in that, given the sea bias and Verne being French, of course!

[BWR]

It’s been years since I read it, but Armor by John Steakley seems to avoid both of these extremes.



It's been years since I read it as well and I do believe you are right.

[Palanan]

Because man cannot live on rabbits alone, I’ve also started The Emergence of Rus 750-1200, a history of the early origins of Russia. After reading the superficial book on Vikings, my interest followed them westwards to the Volga, where they were “invited” to rule over local Slavic tribes.

The book I've started is a dense professional synthesis, but also wickedly funny in a rather arid academic way. In their page for Acknowledgements, the last line reads as follows: “Last and least one should mention the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), without whose multiple initiatives the book would undoubtedly have been finished sooner.”

I’ve never seen an acknowledgement so pointedly sharp before, although maybe they strop their blades more loudly in the humanities. Other quotes are more wryly amusing, and the book promises to be a quirky and fascinating read.

[Wookieetank]

Just finished reading Duma Key by Stephen King this past week, and despite being a 600+ page book, felt like a rather quick read. Probably helped that the story never seemed to stagnate *coughcough looking at you The Stand coughcough*. Construction dude/Architect gets into an accident on a job site losing his arm, wife and mental faculties in the process. Ends up moving to sunny Duma Key off the coast of Florida to recover and rediscovers his talent for art from his younger years. Makes friends with the locals and deals with Evil!(tm) forces. Like many of King's works, the bad guys lose, but the good guys can't be said to have won. Definitely worth checking out if you like King's writing.

Now I've finally picked up Outbound Flight, and am reminded why I like Timothy Zhan's Star Wars books so much. Much as I enjoy some of the other EU authors, Zhan seems to be the only one (for me at least) who is able to capture both the essence and feel of the original movies in book form. I wouldn't complain about reading a Zhan book that wasn't about Thrawn (this one is Thrawn the younger years, the duology is Thrawn the clone years), but when you've made one of the most memorable SW villians, you might as well write what you know I suppose. Overall enjoying myself so far. Its great fun watching Palpatine's 2nd in command be played for a dupe by Sidious, thinking he's working under Palpatine's radar, the irony is delightful.

[Gnoman]

Just reread The Caves Of Steel and The Naked Sun. Caves gets worse every time I read it, as not only does Asimov's persistent problem with numbers annoy me but more and more I notice inconsistencies in the internal logic of the work that just hurt it. Sun, on the other hand, stays solid.

[factotum]

Caves gets worse every time I read it, as not only does Asimov's persistent problem with numbers annoy me

What's his persistent problem with numbers that annoys you so?

[Gnoman]

What's his persistent problem with numbers that annoys you so?

Asimov's population figures are almost always far too low for the situation he describes.

I can ignore the idea that Earth will be facing imminent starvation at 8 billion people, as that was a serious fear of the time. But the vast human warrens Asimov describes in Caves just don't add up to the population density that he's describing. His version of New York is described as extending from the surface (very high ranking officials have natural skylights for their "Solariums") down a full mile underground, and spread so far that it has encompassed most of the states surrounding real New York. In this massive human warren, so densely packed that their equivalent of the upper middle class lives in a apartment tiny by the standards of Tokyo or RW New York and nobody has a private bathroom, there live ...twenty million people. This is an area dozens -if not hundreds- of times the size of the real New York, but has a little over twice the population. To match the descriptions, you would have to add at least one zero, maybe two, to the given population.

Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire in the Foundation series, has the same problem. An entire planet converted into a city that holds (but can not support, and is entirely dependent on food imports) only forty billion.

[factotum]

Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire in the Foundation series, has the same problem. An entire planet converted into a city that holds (but can not support, and is entirely dependent on food imports) only forty billion.

Let's see...if Trantor is about the same size as Earth then its total surface area is around 500 million square kilometres, so a population of 40 billion would work out as a density of 80 people per square kilometre. The population density of the city I live near (Manchester, UK) is around 4,500 per square kilometre, while the most densely populated city in the world (Manila, Phillipines) is nearly ten times that...yeah, doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it. Mind you, I always remember the spoof of Trantor in "Bill the Galactic Hero", where he pointed out that it isn't just food you'd have to import--with no flowering plants on the surface you'd need to import oxygen as well!

[warty goblin]

I was feeling historical again, so I dived into A World Undone: The Story of the Great War by G.J. Meyer. So far I'm up to early September 1914, and it's pretty good. The sections I've been through so far are basically a poor man's The Guns of August, but it seems pretty unlikely that anybody's going to surpass Tuchman's treatment of the subject in anything even resembling a 'popular' history. My only substantial disappointment is that it has, so far, almost entirely neglected the portions of the war involving Austria-Hungary, aside from the occasional mention of how the utter ineptitude of Conrad von Hutzendorf impacted German strategy. Perhaps it will backtrack, or at least start covering the Balkans in more detail.

One substantial virtue of the book is that it does much more establish a deep historical context than many comparable books, via short sections giving some detail on the past - remote or immediate - of various countries, which are interspersed in the main narrative. Interestingly, they also use a slightly different font. The prose is also quite good overall, so far I've only encountered one truly tortured sentence in a hundred plus pages. So far at least I'd recommend it if anybody's looking for a decent overview of the entirety of WWI, but if you're interested specifically in the opening months, stick with The Guns of August. I don't know how Tuchman makes events whose outcomes I know suspenseful, but she does it. Meyer gives a readable account, but it lacks the knife-to-the-throat tension of Tuchman.


This is sort of a break from Throne of Glass, my current bad fantasy series. I'm somewhere in the middle of the third book, and it's sort of a slog. The series has shown a commendable ability to change up the setting and scope of the action from book to book, which is a trick more fantasy series could learn. Unfortunately the theme of the third book appears to be that the main character is clinically depressed, in extremely boring fashion for hundreds of pages. There's some plotting involving assorted past love interests, which moves at about the rate of a sleepy glacier, and fails to have any particularly compelling stakes. There's another plot involving some truly and delightfully monstrous witches, which would be a very nice sort of evil seasoning in small, punchy doses, but again seems to just crawl along. '

Part of the problem is that the series has worked hard, and done pretty well at establishing the heroine a super-badass can kill nearly anybody sort of warrior. The overarching plot revolves around a super-evil king. Whom she never considers killing. Not writes it off as undoable, nobody even considers just stabbing the bastard. I don't usually mind a bit of fridge logic, and would happily accept any number of fantasy nonsense explanations, but the total omission seems pretty glaring. The other problem is that a huge amount of the emotional stakes revolve around the death of a particular side character, about whom I never really cared all that much. So the endless moping sort of doesn't work, particularly since first (and a large portion of the second) book didn't really operate much in the realm of super-emotional and realistic characters, so the sudden shift is kind of jarring. And I liked the earlier gleeful lack of terrible psychic damage books, because they were fun and pacey and things bloody happened.

[Palanan]

So, in addition to rabbits and Rus, I’ve also started Russian Folk Belief by Linda Ivanits, which is a fairly readable synthesis of early Slavic beliefs and their survival into the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century. It’s not a collection of fables and folktales themselves, but rather a survey of the folklore and its many creatures, from banniks to vodyanoi.

Thus my reading is now a lovely trifecta of rabbits, Rus, and rusalkas.




Originally Posted by warty goblin
I was feeling historical again, so I dived into A World Undone: The Story of the Great War by G.J. Meyer.

For years I’ve been wanting to read a good single-volume history of the First World War, but either I’m too busy reading other things or I find myself unwilling to plunge into such prolonged and pointless horror.

I’ve read extensively about World War Two, and there were so many worlds’ worth of ugly brutality in that conflict that I’m not drawn to the Great War. —And yet, its importance is such that I feel I should read something comprehensive, as painful as that would be.


Originally Posted by Remmirath
If I recall correctly, I was still reading The Faded Sun trilogy by C.J. Cherryh when last I replied to this thread. I have, of course, since finished it; quite possibly the most enjoyable of those I've listed here….

In better news, I meant to comment on this earlier. Very glad you enjoyed this one. :smallsmile:

[warty goblin]

For years I’ve been wanting to read a good single-volume history of the First World War, but either I’m too busy reading other things or I find myself unwilling to plunge into such prolonged and pointless horror.

I’ve read extensively about World War Two, and there were so many worlds’ worth of ugly brutality in that conflict that I’m not drawn to the Great War. —And yet, its importance is such that I feel I should read something comprehensive, as painful as that would be.


This is, unfortunately, probably not the one-volume history you're looking for. It's quite good for the western front, but I'm up to January 1915, and so far it's total commentary on literally the rest of the war is about one paragraph summarizing the catastrophic implosion of the Austrio-Hungarians, a couple sentences on the Serbs, and about three total sentences to the non-European war. What it is is a good operational history of Germany, mostly on the western front. And even then it sort of just throws up its hands occasionally, and basically goes "yeah, First Ypres was complicated"

[Lethologica]

Do androids dream of electric sheep? I guess I'm going to find out. Then maybe I'll rewatch Blade Runner, it's been a while.

[BWR]

For years I’ve been wanting to read a good single-volume history of the First World War, but either I’m too busy reading other things or I find myself unwilling to plunge into such prolonged and pointless horror.

I’ve read extensively about World War Two, and there were so many worlds’ worth of ugly brutality in that conflict that I’m not drawn to the Great War. —And yet, its importance is such that I feel I should read something comprehensive, as painful as that would be.


Not a book but ...The Great War (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar)
WWI week by week, including specials about all aspects, civilian, military, technological, cultural etc. of the war, those who fought, those who didn't and notable figures. The downside is that since they are doing it week by week to match with the war, it's not finished yet.

[2D8HP]

I'm reading
Welsh Legends and Fairy Lore by Daniel Parry-Jones

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51oAjDNhmYL._SY400_.jpg

I find that I often don't have the patience for novels but that I enjoy what are effectively really old Fantasy short stories.

Or are they histories?

In a similiar vein, Katharine Briggs British Folktales and An Encyclopedia of Fairies have provided good reading.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by 2D8HP
I'm reading Welsh Legends and Fairy Lore by Daniel Parry-Jones….

And this just went on my list. :smallsmile:

[GloatingSwine]

Do androids dream of electric sheep? I guess I'm going to find out.

If you're reading a Philip K. **** novel the last thing you're going to find out is a straight answer to a question...

[Tom Tearcamel]

I'm a huge Abercrombie/Butcher/Rothfuss/Sanderson/Weeks fan and plenty of people in these treads have suggested their works. And I agree. A book I've found recently that I hadn't heard about is Jay Kristoff's Nevernight. I kinda liked his Stormdancer trilogy (Gryphon riding rhonin woman in a Steampunk dystopian feudal Japan analog) that I found from a Pat Rothfuss blurb add on Tor.com, but it had some problems with me. (not enough to prevent me from buying and enjoying them all) I LOVED Nevernight. Basically the main character is a post-pubescent Arya Stark with shadow magic and a Snarky-Shadow-Cat familiar. She lives on a planet (plane?) with 3 suns that rarely ever set. She is set off to join a cult of assassins and goes to Magic-MurderHogwarts-Mountain. Deadly hyjinx ensue.

[Velaryon]

I've been working my way through the three Discworld novels following the character Moist von Lipwig. I enjoyed Going Postal well enough, and Making Money was alright. I'm about to start Raising Steam. I know these aren't the ones that he's known for, but they give a nice window into Pratchett's world, and the narrator is pretty good too.



I wouldn't complain about reading a Zhan book that wasn't about Thrawn (this one is Thrawn the younger years, the duology is Thrawn the clone years), but when you've made one of the most memorable SW villians, you might as well write what you know I suppose.

Have you read Zahn's novel Allegiance (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Allegiance_(novel))? It's about as far away from Thrawn-related things as he gets. You'll still have some appearances from familiar Zahn Wars characters (I'm pretty sure Mara Jade is in it), but the focus is on a group of stormtroopers.

[Wookieetank]

Have you read Zahn's novel URL="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Allegiance_(novel)"]Allegiance[/URL]? It's about as far away from Thrawn-related things as he gets. You'll still have some appearances from familiar Zahn Wars characters (I'm pretty sure Mara Jade is in it), but the focus is on a group of stormtroopers.

Not yet, but its now on my list, thanks! Not even sure if I own this one yet (60+ stack of star wars books, it is easy to lose track of what I have at this point (the list of unowned books at this point is shorter XD)).

Started reading Tales of Trenzalore over the weekend (because apparently reading 1 book at a time is for other people). I'm always impressed by how well so many of the DW book authors manage to capture the feel of the TV show in novel form.

[mikelala]

If the TV series is anything like the book I can understand why it's got a reputation for nudity and gore!

[Knaight]

Remember when I said one could only read The Damned so many times? Well, that's getting incremented up by one. Again. It's the sort of light fiction that's really enjoyable when the bulk of your reading is dense textbooks.

[wardeng]

I read a lot of different things simultaneously because I lose concentration/interest fairly quickly. Here are the highlights.

Playing at the World - Jon Peterson - I'm constantly reading and re-reading this academic tome, annotating and finding new minutiae. It is a largely dry reading concerning the hardcore history of Dungeons & Dragons. I dare to assume this community is well familiar with the volume.

How Computers Work - Roger Young - Attempting to build a computer from scratch from the logic/circuits stage and building up. This volume concerns processors and memory.

Production Pipeline Fundamentals for Film and Games - Renee Dunlop - As a burgeoning video producer and game maker, I have a major hard-on for efficiency and this book is all about efficiency and maximizing time spent working.

The Elements of Computing Systems - Noam Nisan - More about how computers work

Dissolution - Richard Lee Byers - I'm not sure why I believe this will be any better than the later Drizzt novels. I starting bouncing off of Forgotten Realms books a few years ago, but I tend to keep giving them new tries.

Designers and Dragons - Shannon Appelcine - More concerning the history of RPGs, specifically the 70s.

So, yeah...lots of good stuff.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by wardeng
Playing at the World - Jon Peterson - I'm constantly reading and re-reading this academic tome, annotating and finding new minutiae. It is a largely dry reading concerning the hardcore history of Dungeons & Dragons. I dare to assume this community is well familiar with the volume.

I’ve never heard of it before, but this sounds like the sort of detailed history of RPGs that I’ve been wanting to see for years.


Originally Posted by wardeng
Designers and Dragons - Shannon Appelcine - More concerning the history of RPGs, specifically the 70s.

This is apparently a series of books, each one covering a decade of RPG history. Seems less rigorous than Jon Peterson’s book, but the reviews are pretty strong.



For my part, I’m most of the way through Russian Folk Beliefs, which is both comprehensive and remarkably readable for an academic book. And I’m continuing to take my time with Watership Down, while dancing among several other titles on early Russian history.

That includes Armies of the Volga Bulgars and Khanate of Kazan, an Osprey book on some of the neighbors of the Kievan Rus’. Sadly, the book falls into a standard Osprey trap: the attempt to cover centuries of history in 48 pages, including abundant illustrations, leads to a painfully superficial and extremely spotty survey. But there’s a good section on river pirates, so the book was at least worth the ILL postage.

[2D8HP]

I'm on page 200 of The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman, which I'm finding very page-turning.

Some hints of Doctor Who, Poul Anderson's struggle of Law vs. Chaos, the old "Avengers" TV show (with both the Emma Peel and John Steed type characters gender reversed), various literary "Easter eggs", and a lot of hints of the old gaslamp fantasy/steampunk Castle Falkenstein RPG (since the author's bio says "previously worked as a freelance role-playing game writer", and a mention is made of "I see little reason why the Iron Brotherhood would be interested in book of fairy tales. They tend more towards technological paradigms. Now, has it been one of the lost notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci....", I'm sure that deliberate).

Realistic and gritty?
Hardly.

Over the top?
Wonderfully so!

Just amazingly geared to "push my buttons", and get me to keep reading.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing (and I do).

[factotum]

Just finished that read of Song of Ice and Fire I was doing. Now in the same situation of waiting for Winds of Winter, and realising it'll probably be another 6 years after that comes out before the final book hits bookshelves, but I want to know how these stories play out *now*, darn it! Can't rely on the TV series because there are important differences between the books and it:


To name just two, Catelyn isn't brought back from the dead in the TV series, which must completely change how the Jaime/Brienne story plays out, and Tyrion never even got to meet Daenerys before she flew off into the Dothraki Sea on her dragon, so that dynamic will be different too.

[SaintRidley]

Not presently on my reading list, but they got put next in line (currently working on A Dance with Dragons during plasma donations and Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death a couple nights a week right before bed.

We had a reading by Mark Z. Danielewski tonight, from book 4 of The Familiar. I figured it would be a great opportunity to get my copy of House of Leaves signed, so I went. He borrowed my copy to read the Yggdrasil page from the end of the book, and eventually signed it by drawing the tree around the text. I also wound up buying all four volumes (so far) of The Familiar, which I plan to start once I finish the Okorafor book.

Delightful reading. I was very tickled when a question about the meaning of something in House was asked, and his response was "I'm honored you think I'm such an expert on House of Leaves. [...] You should ask the House: it has all the answers."

[factotum]

I read the first Harry Potter book last week and I'm not really certain about it. I realise it's her first published novel and so there's a deal of room for improvement, but I found some of the things that happened in it to be a bit...well, "authorial fiat". Example:


Harry, Hermione, Draco and Neville are given detention for being out after lights out. The form this detention takes is sending them into the Forbidden Forest--which as far as we can tell is forbidden because it's *dangerous*, even in the normal course of events--to find some creature that's capable of killing unicorns. This is patently absurd to start with--it would be like sending someone given detention at a regular school to work on a building site! As if that wasn't daft enough, Hagrid tells them they'll be safe if they're with him or Fang, despite Fang being an abject coward who runs away at the first sign of any problem. Then, when Draco and Neville run into difficulties, Hagrid leaves Harry and Hermione *alone* while he goes to investigate. How does any of this make any sense at all? It seemed to me that the author needed to get Harry into the forbidden forest and just had the most unlikely sequence of events occur to make that happen, regardless of logic.

[GloatingSwine]

I read the first Harry Potter book last week and I'm not really certain about it. I realise it's her first published novel and so there's a deal of room for improvement, but I found some of the things that happened in it to be a bit...well, "authorial fiat". Example:


Harry, Hermione, Draco and Neville are given detention for being out after lights out. The form this detention takes is sending them into the Forbidden Forest--which as far as we can tell is forbidden because it's *dangerous*, even in the normal course of events--to find some creature that's capable of killing unicorns. This is patently absurd to start with--it would be like sending someone given detention at a regular school to work on a building site! As if that wasn't daft enough, Hagrid tells them they'll be safe if they're with him or Fang, despite Fang being an abject coward who runs away at the first sign of any problem. Then, when Draco and Neville run into difficulties, Hagrid leaves Harry and Hermione *alone* while he goes to investigate. How does any of this make any sense at all? It seemed to me that the author needed to get Harry into the forbidden forest and just had the most unlikely sequence of events occur to make that happen, regardless of logic.


Whilst the series has a tendency for things to happen because the plot requires it, there are a couple of supporting principles behind what's in that spoiler.

1. Magical society has a blasé (pre-Victorian) attitude towards child safety (and health and safety in general).

2. Hagrid is easily distracted and not particularly smart or responsible (and has an unconventional perspective on what constitutes danger, especially wrt. animals).

Quite a lot of things in the books happen because magical society is insular, recondite, and backwards.

[2D8HP]

I'm on page 200 of The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman, which I'm finding very page-turning.....
......Recommended if you like this sort of thing (and I do).


Just started Chapter 13 of The Burning Page, the third novel in the series after The Invisible Library, and
The Masked City.

The main off-notes are occasional "re-caps", which are there to fill in some details for those who hadn't read the earlier two books.

I like it!

[Mith]

I have been following the Song of Ice and Fire thread on this forum and am strongly considering picking up the series again.

[Cyrion]

I'm in the middle of The Night Circus and really enjoying it. In principle it's about two magicians having a magical contest without knowing the rules. Much of the action takes place in a quietly fantastical circus with some very interesting people. It's quite good in a Neil Gaiman meets Joanne Harris kind of way.

[2D8HP]

...It's quite good in a Neil Gaiman meets Joanne Harris kind of way.


I've liked some Gaiman, but I'm not familiar with Harris.

Recommended?

[Feytalist]

My friend, who's a new father, recently handed me Dr Seuss' Oh, the Places You'll Go saying "you have to read this..." - he intends to give it to his daughter when she's older. It's a surprisingly poignant little book. I've never been as enamoured of Dr. Seuss as many other people; I guess I never read his works when I was growing up so the nostalgia factor isn't really there for me. But I must say I found this really moving. Apparently it's even a common graduation gift for students, and I can totally see that. At 30-odd years, even I found it really quite uplifting.

[Cyrion]

I've liked some Gaiman, but I'm not familiar with Harris.

Recommended?

I've certainly enjoyed most of her stuff. She's the one who wrote Chocolat on which the movie was based. As always, there are some important differences between the book and the movie. In much of her work magic is understated and sometimes its actual existence is a bit ambiguous, leaving you the reader to decide whether it was magic. Notable exceptions are "Rune Marks" and "The Gospel of Loki" which are both firmly in the realm of Norse mythos.

I just finished Night Circus, and would definitely recommend it. A couple of the tents gave me some fun inspiration for game encounters/settings. Now I've just started "Lettere dal Buio" (Letters from the Darkness), an Italian easy reader designed to help Italian language skills.The first story was an interesting twist on the "you have to choose which one of you dies" trope. My only knock against it so far is that the English translations in the back don't quite match the Italian. I'm still learning a lot, but there have been several places I've thought "That's not what they said!!"

[Lethologica]

Got waylaid by Sir Terry again. Thud! is vintage Pratchett and surprisingly topical.

Now it's back to Soon I Will Be Invincible. We'll see about that.

[NecroDancer]

I'm 20% through Terry Pratchet's "Soul Music".

[2D8HP]

This week I finished The Burning Page, the third and last novel in a series after The Invisible Library, and
The Masked City.

It was AWESOME!

Now I'm about to start A Conjuring of Light, the third novel in a series after A Darker Shade of Magic, and
A Gathering of Shadows, which I've been eagerly awaiting the publication of FOR TOO LONG!

The first sentence reads:

"Delilah Bard - always a thief, recently a magician, and one day, hopefully, a pirate - was running as fast as she could.



Meet you later, I'll be reading!

[Mith]

Finished Outlander recently as part of a book borrowing circle my friends and I are doing. Decent book. Probably isn't everyone's cup of tea. I managed to get through the 800 odd pages over the course of two days. Not sure if I would necessarily follow up with the other books in the series though.

[Knaight]

I've jumped on the Watership Down train, but in the meantime have also almost finished The Winter King. I'm liking them both, though every reviewer who emphasized how incredibly historical The Winter King is will now be summarily ignored on the matter of historicity.

[Lethologica]

Soon I Will Be Invincible was...entertaining, I guess. But it left me kind of cold, never moving past deconstruction--never really going anywhere, for that matter. Not clever enough for its cynicism.

On to Virtual Light.

[Eldan]

Finished a re-read of The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince, just started part three, The Causal Angel.

These books just have a wonderful way with poetry. And the best first sentences.

As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
and
On the day the Hunter comes for me, I am killing ghost cats from the Schrödinger Box.
and
Alone on the timeless beach, Joséphine Pellegrini finds herself disappointed with the end of the world.

[thirsting]

Rajaniemi has also published a collection of shorter standalone stories called Invisible Planets: Collected Fiction. Most of the stories are just as quantumpunk (is that the word?) as Quantum Thief trilogy. Just finished reading through them today. Recommended, and not just for those who have read his earlier books!

[Wookieetank]

Not presently on my reading list, but they got put next in line (currently working on A Dance with Dragons during plasma donations and Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death a couple nights a week right before bed.

We had a reading by Mark Z. Danielewski tonight, from book 4 of The Familiar. I figured it would be a great opportunity to get my copy of House of Leaves signed, so I went. He borrowed my copy to read the Yggdrasil page from the end of the book, and eventually signed it by drawing the tree around the text. I also wound up buying all four volumes (so far) of The Familiar, which I plan to start once I finish the Okorafor book.

Delightful reading. I was very tickled when a question about the meaning of something in House was asked, and his response was "I'm honored you think I'm such an expert on House of Leaves. [...] You should ask the House: it has all the answers."

I would love to meet Mark Z. Danielewski. Color me 9 kinds of green right now, but grats on the autograph. Was going to read Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker after finishing my re-read of Under the Dome by Stephen King, but I may be breaking out my copy of House of Leaves instead. So much for working on my backlog XD

[warty goblin]

Finished A World Undone last night. It improved substantially once it got into 1915 and 1916. Overall I'd recommend it if you want a fairly general history of the first world war. If you're interested in any particular aspect of the war, it won't do you much good. But it does a good job of laying out the politics, the principal actors, and in general both what the war was, and why it was that way. The last chapter in particular does a very good (if brief) job of highlighting just how much of the modern world is a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles, and stays very far away from the usual hagiographic portrayal of Wilson as holding out for a non-punitive peace.


I think the number that's going to stick with me is this: Over the course of the war, on average 55 German soldiers died every hour. One every 65 seconds. 1300 a day.

[Mith]

Finished a re-read of The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince, just started part three, The Causal Angel.

These books just have a wonderful way with poetry. And the best first sentences.

As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
and
On the day the Hunter comes for me, I am killing ghost cats from the Schrödinger Box.
and
Alone on the timeless beach, Joséphine Pellegrini finds herself disappointed with the end of the world.

If one is left with a "Enjoyable, but mildly unsure about continuing the series" feeling at the end of The Quantum Thief, do you still recommend continuing the series? I am certain that I got the world building sorted out by the end of the first book, but it took me a while to sort it out.

The only thing I am uncertain about:

The Virtue Bullets at the end were keys to the prison that were supposed to make a personal palace, but using them would have killed his friends? The fight with Le Roi was a bit disorienting. What I got was that in the end, Le Roi was trapped in a Dilemma Prison, as Oubliette was a precursor to the Dilemma Prison from the beginning of the novel.

[Eldan]

The bullets would have killed his friends, yes. It was mentioned in one character when Isidore examined them that the seven buildings were incredibly information dense under his zoku magnifying glass. What the buildings were was all the things Le Flambeur had stolen, encoded in crystalline matter.

The Oubliette was a prison, but that wasn't what caught hte thief. Remember that when Jean le Flambeur broke out of the prison, the Archon running the prison was following them and infecting the ship, Perhonen. Jean defeated it by putting it in a simulation, where the archon thought it had won, and then slowing that simulation down until the archon was basically frozen. That simulation was kept inside his body.

When he faced Jean le Roi, he restarted the Archon and let it free. The Archon recognized Le Roi as a version of one of its prisoners, so it rebuilt the dilemma prison right there and caught Le Roi in it.

The Fractal Prince is very, very good. It shines a light on Sobornost and their motives, making them very interesting. It's also strongly reminiscent of The Thousand and One Nights, featuring characters who tell stories about characters who tell stories about characters who tell stories... also jinn, cities that were once in the sky and fell to Earth, dreaming sand, body thieves, dragons, angels and gods who are children.

[Mith]

That makes sense. I had forgotten that part. That scene is very packed in a few pages

When I get a chance, I will pick up the next book.

Talking with the person that lent me QT, I said that it might be one of those stories better lent to film, as you experience exactly what the characters are, and associate the word with the phenomenon on screen, instead of slowly building an incomplete picture from subtle details and have it explained chapters after you likely needed it.

I do not always have the best mental imagining of things in my head, so that may be part of the problem for me.

[Eldan]

I loved the book for exactly that. You might not like Fractal Prince as much, then. It does a lot more of the vague descriptions, slow build and brick joke solutions.

[Mith]

I will still give it a shot. It would be good practice for me if nothing else. I am not saying it is unenjoyable, but some details I feel could have been confirmed when they are part of day to day life of the characters.

That being said, doing this as a movie would be grand if done properly. The lack of "handholds" for the viewer really adds to the alien nature of the setting.

[Knaight]

Plowed through Throne of the Crescent Moon yesterday. It was a good book, and while I normally dislike magic showing up in fantasy novels the differences in cultural traditions behind it made it work in this case.

[warty goblin]

Started up on an anthology of Fred Saberhagan's first three Swords novels last night. Not very far in, but its good stuff. I'm about thirty pages in, and instead of being all scene-setting, things are happening. I like that in a book.

[Eldan]

I will still give it a shot. It would be good practice for me if nothing else. I am not saying it is unenjoyable, but some details I feel could have been confirmed when they are part of day to day life of the characters.

That being said, doing this as a movie would be grand if done properly. The lack of "handholds" for the viewer really adds to the alien nature of the setting.

I'm halfway through The Causal Angel now, which features more Zoku.They are hilarious.

For those who haven't read these books, the Zoku are a lose group of collectives going back to the first people who uploaded their minds to computers: giant nerds.

There's the usual subgroups you'd expect in a far future setting: engineering zokus, spy zokus, etc. And then there's those that consist entirely of tons and tons of references. So far, among those who have been mentioned, there were raiding Zokus (with epic mounts), collector Zokus, Japanese High School Zokus and at least one Zoku that produces spam and promises "Life-sized replicas of imaginary 20th century starships made from Notch Cubes".

As the proverb of the ancient Zoku ancestors goes: Epic Win.

[warty goblin]

Started The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor, which is a (sort of) history of the amazons.

So far as I can parse it, the basic argument seems to be that the amazons of Greek, Roman and other myth should be associated with Scythian tribes around the Black Sea. Apparently this is supported by agreement between Greco-Roman sources both mythic and at least quasi-historical and the archaeology of Scythian burials. There may also be some linguistic evidence. I find the historical basis of various

Unfortunately, at 45 pages in, I can't say the author has done a particularly good job of presenting any evidence in sufficient detail to be particularly convincing. Mayor states repeatedly that there is evidence, and occasionally gives a very brief summary of some author from antiquity, or a few sentences stating that there is archaeology. But there's very little so far in the realm of detailed examination of archaeological sources, and lots of statements about how sexually liberated the Amazons were. And I mean over and over and over again, an endless parade of Amazon sex hagiography. This rapidly becomes tedious.

To her credit, she does spend some significant time going over various early Greek and Roman sources for all things Amazon. However, rather than present these as assorted ancient thoughts about Amazons, she starts with the assumption that the Amazons corresponded to Scythian horse nomads (sexually liberated of course), the Greeks and Romans wrote X or Y about them based on rumor, so we can conclude Z about sexually liberated Amazons. For instance, she spends quite a while on determining whether Amazons hated and never had sex with men, and concludes probably not based on some linguistical points, taking as more or less given that Amazons were real, and ignoring the obvious point that an iron age society sans heterosexual intercourse lasts about 20 years, tops.

It seems rather backwards. Either summarize the myths, then present the archaeology, and wrap up by showing how the two intersect and what we can therefore deduce about Scythian gender relations, or just start with the archaeology, show that it demonstrates a society of surprising sexual equality, and argue that this corresponds to the Amazons of legend. This is essentially the course taken in Joachim Latacz's Troy and Homer: Towards the Solution to an Old Myster, which lays out an extremely archaeological case for the Trojan War being real, makes a linguistic argument for the partial veracity of Homer, and leaves you with the logical conclusion that the Trojan War happened, and much of Homer probably dates from that period. I can understand why, given the relatively greater obscurity of Amazon mythology, an author would choose to begin by summarizing it, but the order of assumptions seems very strange to me.

It's not that I find the case for historical Amazons weak - Mayor manages to be convincing almost in spite of herself - it's that I find this history badly argued.

[Quild]

This morning, I started to read La Part de l'autre written by the French Author Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt and published in 2001.

Surprisingly, this book was translated in German, Corean, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Norvegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Vietnamese, but... Not in English yet!

This books alterns a fictionalized biography of Adolf Hitler and a uchrony of what could have happened if Adolf H. had been received to the Acadamy of Arts of Vienna.
I have only read a few pages so far but I'm glad to see that the character is already despicable in both stories. I was afraid that the fictional one would indulge him too much, so far so good.
I had started to read "Mein Kampf" two years ago but couldn't go far because of how many fallacies there were in his mind. It's very interesting to find again the same state of mind in Schimmt's book and clearly easier to read.

I wonder if I'll figure later on why it's not translated in English :smallconfused:

[Velaryon]

I finished Foundling by D.M. Cornish a few days ago, the first book in the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy. It was interesting. Didn't blow my mind with its awesomeness, but it has a few things going for it:
-it's a YA book, but avoids a lot of the horribly overused tropes of books aimed at that age range.
-it's fantasy, but has a different feel to it than most. It's not medieval sword & sorcery, more like a 17th-18th century type of setting with magicked-up alchemy.
-the protagonist (at least so far) isn't a special chosen one. Heck, he doesn't even have any powers. So far, he's been more of a Samwise Gamgee type than a normal hero. He spends more time running away or being the sidekick than anything else. The most heroic things he's done so far are drag a wounded warrior to safety and insist on freeing a captured monster that treated him kindly, even though most people in this world would leave it to suffer or kill it outright.

Sadly, my library doesn't have print copies of the next two books, so it's either downloadable audiobooks (yuck!) or trying to get it through Interlibrary Loan.

In the meantime, I'm slowly going through The Bonobo and the Atheist by Franz de Waal, in which he argues that by observing certain animals (in this case the bonobo), we can see evidence that morality is innate to us, rather than being handed down by a deity. His ideas are interesting, but his biases show pretty clearly even though he seems to think he's laying them aside.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Started The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor, which is a (sort of) history of the amazons.

oh gawd.

I’ve almost read this book several times, and in fact I almost bought it a few weeks ago, but the issues you’ve mentioned have been touched on in a number of reviews, and that was always enough to put me off.

It sounds as if some of those reviews may have been too kind, with Mayor’s apparent overemphasis (= obsession) on how man-hating and sexually liberated they supposedly were. Seems like an overwhelming case of author bias to me.

I’m less convinced with the historical case, because I gather that Mayor makes some breezy assumptions about grave goods, and whether people buried with certain grave goods actually used those items in life. That assumption has been made in the Scandinavian context in support of the shieldmaiden legends, and I’m extremely skeptical of such a convenient leap of logic.

And I can’t help but note that Mayor is a classicist, rather than an archaeologist, which puts me all the more on guard; and neither is she a linguist, which makes some of her supporting claims suspect as well.

For me, it all adds up to a vaguely intriguing premise with very little detailed evidence or rigorous analysis—instead generously leavened with personal bias, smothered in a spicy glaze and baked much too long.

Unless it has hidden qualities not yet apparent, I think I’ll pass on this one.

[warty goblin]

oh gawd.

I’ve almost read this book several times, and in fact I almost bought it a few weeks ago, but the issues you’ve mentioned have been touched on in a number of reviews, and that was always enough to put me off.

It sounds as if some of those reviews may have been too kind, with Mayor’s apparent overemphasis (= obsession) on how man-hating and sexually liberated they supposedly were. Seems like an overwhelming case of author bias to me.

I’m less convinced with the historical case, because I gather that Mayor makes some breezy assumptions about grave goods, and whether people buried with certain grave goods actually used those items in life. That assumption has been made in the Scandinavian context in support of the shieldmaiden legends, and I’m extremely skeptical of such a convenient leap of logic.

And I can’t help but note that Mayor is a classicist, rather than an archaeologist, which puts me all the more on guard; and neither is she a linguist, which makes some of her supporting claims suspect as well.

For me, it all adds up to a vaguely intriguing premise with very little detailed evidence or rigorous analysis—instead generously leavened with personal bias, smothered in a spicy glaze and baked much too long.

Unless it has hidden qualities not yet apparent, I think I’ll pass on this one.

It does start to improve. The introduction bit is pretty decent, and leverages the Atalanta myth to pretty good effect for an exploration of Greek interest in warrior women. Plus, I object less to people talking about their conclusion as already proven in the intro; it's not my favorite style, but it's a perfectly reasonable choice.

The second chapter is fairly dreadful, and honestly could simply be skipped. Or preferably just deleted. It presents no evidence worth mentioning, and spends a drearily long time yammering about sexually liberated Amazons.

I haven't gotten much farther than that, since it isn't exactly a great read, and all the Greek myth bits just made me want to reread The Song of Achilles*, but Chapter 3 does eventually get around to some actual bloody evidence. Mostly summaries of Greek and Roman authors, so far there's not a hint of archaeology, and a grand total of one stanza from an orally transmitted epic from around the Black Sea that mentions a female warrior named Amezon, but at least it's something.

And as an aside, it's really not particularly well written. Listing off a bunch of interpretations of fragmentary evidence, then literally starting the next paragraph with "Conclusion" is clunky. Doing it repeatedly throughout the body of a chapter is just bad style, which I suspect would cause my historian sister to go slightly berserk.

But yes, unless the later portions are simply amazing, I think this one's eminantly skippable. Which is a damn shame, because I suspect there is an argument to be made here, one that's worth making, but done better.

(Another interesting point of comparison is The Woman who would be King, by Kara Cooney, which is a history of Hatshepsut. Cooney does go a bit down the rabbit hole of wanting to make Hatshepsut an essentially modern woman, but only in the intro and conclusion, the speculation is generally pretty clearly labeled as such, and she makes sure to lay out the evidence in a clear and very thorough fashion. In other words Cooney does a very good job of letting the evidence speak for itself, and for the people it involves. This leads to the odd effect of the body of the text essentially overwhelming the more modernist interpretation Hatshepsut presented in the intro and conclusion. Since I don't think modern western thought processes are particularly accurate representations of people who think they are literal gods and who derive no small part of their power from performing sexual ceremonies on statues of gods, this seems very much the correct balance.)

*Which is still fantastic even the third time through. Best novel of the decade so far, in my eyes.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
But yes, unless the later portions are simply amazing, I think this one's eminantly skippable. Which is a damn shame, because I suspect there is an argument to be made here, one that's worth making, but done better.

Agreed on both counts—that this book sounds thoroughly skippable (not to mention close-early-able), and that there’s an interesting argument on the topic still waiting a better advocate.


Originally Posted by warty goblin
Another interesting point of comparison is The Woman who would be King, by Kara Cooney, which is a history of Hatshepsut. Cooney does go a bit down the rabbit hole of wanting to make Hatshepsut an essentially modern woman, but only in the intro and conclusion, the speculation is generally pretty clearly labeled as such, and she makes sure to lay out the evidence in a clear and very thorough fashion.

This is another one I’ve looked at several times, and on your recommendation I’ll add it to my list. Good to know the author is someone who can separate personal speculation from objective evidence.


Originally Posted by warty goblin
...I don't think modern western thought processes are particularly accurate representations of people who think they are literal gods....

It often frustrates and amazes me how easily, and uncritically, so many of today’s writers superimpose modern thoughts and emotions onto people who grew up hundreds or thousands of years ago in a fundamentally different mental universe.

And this same process, projected in the other direction, often frustrates me with science fiction as well—especially when writers impose their own ideals of social perfection onto future human societies, or even worse onto alien races whose superiority ends up being a convenient justification for the author’s own beliefs.

To me, this is equal parts lazy and self-indulgent. The greater challenge is to imagine, not some rosy future where some of today’s political issues are enshrined as enlightened wisdom, but a completely foreign set of issues arising naturally from the circumstances and technologies of that future age.

[2D8HP]

Bought Neil Gaiman's Norse Myths on Thursday.

A random sample (page 120):

"A tray of pastries for the womenfolk was placed in front of Loki and Thor. Loki carefully picked out the smallest pastry. Thor just as carefully swept the rest of the pastries up, and they vanished, to the sound of munching, under the veil. The other women, who had looking at the pastries hungrily, glared, disappointed, at the beutiful Freya.

[warty goblin]

Slogged a few sections farther into The Amazons. After apparently getting amazon sex out of her system for the time being, Mayor gives a pretty OK seeming summary of Greco-Roman authors and what they say about Amazons. She never particularly argues why we should believe these authors aren't making stuff up, which seems like a thing that should be argued. Then, 60 pages into the sodding book, she finally gets around to the actual archaeology, which is fascinating. It's not like the basis for warrior women is two graves somewhere, but hundreds, over hundreds of years, including multiple skeletons buried with weapons and showing signs of having been wounded or killed in combat. Why this wasn't chapter 1 I have no idea, because that would lend itself very well to a structure of showing that female warriors were common around the Black Sea in antiquity, here's why we know this and what we can deduce from burials and grave goods. Here's why we can reasonably associate these women with amazons in Greco-Roman history and mythology, and here's what those sources tell us. Here's Persian, Chinese etc references as well, which are also consistent with the archaeology.

But of course that wouldn't have allowed her to open with those really vital pages on amazon sex, which are apparently the important point?

[Tom Tearcamel]

Tor.com is having a special tomorrow (March 23) letting you download an Ebook copy of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings for FREE (If you're American/Canadian) If anyone was thinking to start/continue reading some Cosmere, or just want the EBook. Super ready for book 3 to come out in the fall. the cover looks sweet.

On-topic, I haven't been reading much lately. (too much WoW) Did re-read Max Gladstone's Full Fathom Five. I'd Highly recommend his Craft Sequence books. They take place in a modern world where the Tech is run by contract-magic and runs on soul energy. Many of the major magic users are either necromancer-lawyers or priests. Also, in the backstory instead of WW2, they had the Godwars where they literally killed off tons of gods and set up the current political socio-economic climate.

[Velaryon]

Tor.com is having a special tomorrow (March 23) letting you download an Ebook copy of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings for FREE (If you're American/Canadian) If anyone was thinking to start/continue reading some Cosmere, or just want the EBook. Super ready for book 3 to come out in the fall. the cover looks sweet.

Thanks for the heads up! I have already read the book, but I have a friend I'm trying to get into Sanderson, so it was helpful to be able to pass this on.


I've been trying to brush up on my young adult lit in case I'm able to land a teen librarian job, so I recently completed Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys, in audio form. Four narrators for one book isn't too common, and it's definitely a little jarring at first in his book because of the frequent perspective changes (too frequently at the beginning, IMO). But the story is a solid one, and highlights an often overlooked nautical disaster in WW2 that I found fascinating and tragic to read about.

Now I've started Eragon, which I've been curious about for years specifically because I know its reputation for being derivative and not particularly good. So far it's hit every single box of the Hero's Journey checklist; I'm pretty sure that anyone who has seen Star Wars: A New Hope can predict the entire plot of this book. So far it hasn't really deviated at all. Also, the narrator's voice he does for the dragon is really, really bad. But I've read worse.