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Thread: The Book Thread

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    Default The Book Thread

    So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.

    In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

    So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.

    Megacorps run the world. Costa Rica earns 90 percent of its taxes from a single company, which farms algae in vertical towers. The US has restructured its government so that every company share is a vote, not every person. India has restructured into a corp called Indiastries. Overpopulation is massive. The proletariat live 30 a room in hotbunks, and work 12 hour shifts at jobs they are indentured to. There's even SINs that determine the amount of rights you have, straight out of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. Ads constantly running on TV screens are absolutely everywhere, plastered on every surface. In the dorms, in transport shuttles, at work places, even inside the "fancy" one-room corpo apartments. Corporate feuds are legally regulated and regularly leave a few dozen employees dead when one company loses a contract to another.

    What sets it apart from other Cyberpunk and makes it more of a satire is that the main character is a Corpo. And not just any Corpo, a major ad executive, an utter scumbag and a true believer. Exploit more natural resources, increase the population, create more consumers, create more demand, create bigger markets, expand the consumer base again, rinse and repeat. Good for everyone. His job is writing raunchy limericks to sell coffee. Not just coffee, Coffiest! Everything you love about coffee, plus several new addictive chemicals which are totally harmless!

    The plot starts when he is given the new and totally impossible job of selling people on being Venus colonists. Six months aboard a spaceship, followed by living in a tiny bunker for the rest of your life, being slowly cooked alive and poisoned. For no good reason, since there's nothing on Venus anyone wants.

    I had to check the front page about once a chapter to make sure this was really written in the 50s.

    It's also cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for inventing the terms "3D", "soyaburger", "RnD", "muzak" and "to survey (customers)" used as a verb. Which is astounding.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.

    In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

    So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.

    Megacorps run the world. Costa Rica earns 90 percent of its taxes from a single company, which farms algae in vertical towers. The US has restructured its government so that every company share is a vote, not every person. India has restructured into a corp called Indiastries. Overpopulation is massive. The proletariat live 30 a room in hotbunks, and work 12 hour shifts at jobs they are indentured to. There's even SINs that determine the amount of rights you have, straight out of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. Ads constantly running on TV screens are absolutely everywhere, plastered on every surface. In the dorms, in transport shuttles, at work places, even inside the "fancy" one-room corpo apartments. Corporate feuds are legally regulated and regularly leave a few dozen employees dead when one company loses a contract to another.

    What sets it apart from other Cyberpunk and makes it more of a satire is that the main character is a Corpo. And not just any Corpo, a major ad executive, an utter scumbag and a true believer. Exploit more natural resources, increase the population, create more consumers, create more demand, create bigger markets, expand the consumer base again, rinse and repeat. Good for everyone. His job is writing raunchy limericks to sell coffee. Not just coffee, Coffiest! Everything you love about coffee, plus several new addictive chemicals which are totally harmless!

    The plot starts when he is given the new and totally impossible job of selling people on being Venus colonists. Six months aboard a spaceship, followed by living in a tiny bunker for the rest of your life, being slowly cooked alive and poisoned. For no good reason, since there's nothing on Venus anyone wants.

    I had to check the front page about once a chapter to make sure this was really written in the 50s.

    It's also cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for inventing the terms "3D", "soyaburger", "RnD", "muzak" and "to survey (customers)" used as a verb. Which is astounding.
    Ok, i'll have to put that one on my list, it sounds quite interesting. Especially with that release year.

    I've been reading some non-fiction lately, after getting some recommendations from friends: the most recent one I finished was Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", which is a very interesting work on intrinsic bias in thinking, the systems of thinking, expert and layman intuition and such. A really interesting, and at times somewhat confronting, read, considering he makes a lot of use of small "tests/questions" to provide examples.

    Now working my way through Harari's "Sapiens", and.... I can tell that it's a quite well-written pop-science book, to the point where calling it pop-science feels slightly insulting, but it definitely wasn't meant for people with a background in history/archaeology or related fields. The biggest thing I got from it thus far, is the realization that a lot of what I saw in my (very) early bachelor studies is apparently "eye-opening" to people I know with the same amount of schooling, who recommended it. Feels arrogant to say, but it feels a bit surreal to find out that historical events and longue-durée themes that I consider basic knowledge is this interesting/novel to other people.

    Then again, this must be what (for example) the guy who does experimental particle physics must feel like whenever his field comes up in group conversations. It's just the first time I experience it this closely.

    After that, I'm looking to give Clausewitz' "On War" a try: I like political/war theory, and found Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and Machiavelli's "The Prince" quite interesting, so I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy it.

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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    My current non-fiction is The Ghosts of Evolution, which is about species that seemingly have symbiotic relationships with other species that have died out. Fascinating, but I'm not far enough in yet to comment much.
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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    Just reread Uprooted, a book that is unfortunately hard to describe without spoilers since (in my opinion) the best thing about it is the slow-burn reveal of what exactly is going on, who/what the antagonist is, and what they're capable of. This same quality meant that on a reread it didn't hold up quite as well as other works by the author (e.g. Deadly Education or Spinning Silver), but was still a fun read. The magic is flashy and cool, the characters are interesting and complicated, and the nearby eldritch location The Wood is intimidating as hell. Recommend this to people who like fantasy and/or fairy tales.

    Also recently read A Court of Thorns & Roses because one of its sequels was the most recommended fantasy book on Goodreads. Was heavier on romance than I was expecting, but still a fun read. A starving hunter kills a wolf that came between her and the first deer she'd seen in weeks. Unfortunately for her, said wolf was actually a fairy in disguise, and it's not long before his lord shows up at her family's doorstep. Instead of taking her life, he takes her back to his domain as a prisoner, and from there the plot is very Beauty & the Beast, culminating in her having to complete three trials to prove herself (which was a fun read).

    Spoiler: spoilers for the climax of A Court of Thorns & Roses
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    As an alternative to completing the three trials, the queen gives her a riddle to solve. However, the riddle was extremely obvious (at least to me). I don't have any trouble believing that the main character wouldn't be able to come up with the solution until the finale; she was under a lot of stress, and riddles did not feature prominently in her education. Where I have trouble suspending disbelief is that the evil queen would gamble her entire reign (and by extension her life) on such an easy riddle.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.
    Good idea but why confine it to books? I'm currently reading about six hours (+ or - 4 hours, depending on how much updates that day) a day of webserials, and pretty much nothing else.

    In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

    So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.
    There are two books I feel should be recommended on the basis of your liking this (which I don't remember reading and will read now), "Star smashers of the galaxy rangers", by Harry Harrison and "the Rediscovery of Man" by Cordwainer Smith (there are possibly homophobic aspects to the latter, but he has computers even though he was writing in the 1940s and '50s).
    Last edited by halfeye; 2022-05-03 at 05:13 PM.
    The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.

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    Quote Originally Posted by PoeticallyPsyco View Post
    Just reread Uprooted, a book that is unfortunately hard to describe without spoilers since (in my opinion) the best thing about it is the slow-burn reveal of what exactly is going on, who/what the antagonist is, and what they're capable of. This same quality meant that on a reread it didn't hold up quite as well as other works by the author (e.g. Deadly Education or Spinning Silver), but was still a fun read. The magic is flashy and cool, the characters are interesting and complicated, and the nearby eldritch location The Wood is intimidating as hell. Recommend this to people who like fantasy and/or fairy tales.
    Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.

    I should read more Novik. The later Temeraire novels kind of turned me off her, but her later books are really quite good.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.
    I found Deadly Education a bit too, I'm not sure of the word - fanfic-baity maybe? - for my taste. It was enjoyable enough, but I also had not a lot of desire to pick up the sequel.

    Recently finished the four main volumes of Margaret Weis' Star of the Guardians series. These are fun, and deeply, deeply odd. What starts as a straightforward Star Wars knockoff takes a violent left turn for parts unknown when it becomes very, very interested in the super-dramatic tragic romance between, basically, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan's sister, but also with loads of allusions to Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. I had a load of fun with these, particularly the fourth one, they're sort of like reading a 19th century Gothic novel version of space opera.


    Now on to Tanith Lee's extremely oblique and very long The Blood of Roses, another of her sort of vampire novels. The novel is one of her more difficult works, things frequently dip into surreal dream logic without warning, the plot seems to hardly exist beyond a method to do horrible things to the characters and move them between strange and beautiful and often terrible imagery, and I couldn't for the life of me guess where this thing is going. There seems to be something going on with a religious schism, or a new belief papered over an old, but it's very background to the surreal dreams cape of the main plot. So far I like it, but it wouldn't be my top pick for Lee in maximally weird mode; the Lionwolf trilogy has a stronger plot, and, although still a challenging read, is less baffling than this seems to be.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    I found Deadly Education a bit too, I'm not sure of the word - fanfic-baity maybe? - for my taste. It was enjoyable enough, but I also had not a lot of desire to pick up the sequel.

    Recently finished the four main volumes of Margaret Weis' Star of the Guardians series. These are fun, and deeply, deeply odd. What starts as a straightforward Star Wars knockoff takes a violent left turn for parts unknown when it becomes very, very interested in the super-dramatic tragic romance between, basically, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan's sister, but also with loads of allusions to Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. I had a load of fun with these, particularly the fourth one, they're sort of like reading a 19th century Gothic novel version of space opera.
    Does anyone else think that the books that Cervantes is railing agianst in Don Quixote sound like fine modern fantasy novels?

    Now on to Tanith Lee's extremely oblique and very long The Blood of Roses, another of her sort of vampire novels. The novel is one of her more difficult works, things frequently dip into surreal dream logic without warning, the plot seems to hardly exist beyond a method to do horrible things to the characters and move them between strange and beautiful and often terrible imagery, and I couldn't for the life of me guess where this thing is going. There seems to be something going on with a religious schism, or a new belief papered over an old, but it's very background to the surreal dreams cape of the main plot. So far I like it, but it wouldn't be my top pick for Lee in maximally weird mode; the Lionwolf trilogy has a stronger plot, and, although still a challenging read, is less baffling than this seems to be.
    I like The Birthgrave, I found the satanic stuff boring, if she's moved on I'd probably like that.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.
    I firmly believe the Scholomance is not intended to be read straight. It's tons of fun because it's absurd - the math fail at the center of the whole premise being a critical indicator - and the protagonist's first person narration clearly leans into this element. The series unfolds as an absurdist black comedy and so long as the reader recognizes this the darkly amusing approach works. Any time the novels present a serious point, the spell breaks and they grind to a halt, but so long as the madness continues to unspool it works. I worry about the third book though.
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    I'm re-reading Charles de Lint's Moonheart after over ten years. Still as enjoyable as I remembered it to be.
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    Ironically, I have never gotten less reading done than since I became a librarian. One way I try to make up for it is by listening to audiobooks. Also, as a teen librarian a lot of what I do read is young adult.

    The book I most recently finished is You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao. It's about a teen girl named Julie whose boyfriend Sam recently died in a car crash. Desperate to hear his voice, she calls his phone... and he picks up. Though he really is dead, Julie is able to regularly converse with Sam during the rest of her senior year, which helps her with the grieving process. It's an interesting bit of magical realism, and while I do have a few minor complaints I mostly enjoyed the book. The narration is also pretty well done.

    In between other reads I'm trying to make my way through Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson, but it's an enormous book and as I mentioned I don't find a lot of time to sit and read, so it's been very slow going so far. Doesn't help that it's been a few years since I read the previous books so I'm having to try and remember names, and sometimes look them up as I go along.


    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    I should read more Novik. The later Temeraire novels kind of turned me off her, but her later books are really quite good.
    I kind of agree. The early Temeraire novels were amazing, but somewhere along the line it got away from the "Napoleonic wars with dragons" premise and became "contrive excuses for Lawrence to travel to different parts of the world and show how nearly every other society better integrates dragons."
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    I progress further into The Blood of Roses. This novel is weird. The plot seems to focus on the machinations of a (sort of) vampire, who I think is motivated by some sort of religious dispute or schism. The whole thing is one Lee's sort-of middle ages settings, with an approximate Christian church, which is in opposition to some sort of strange folk tradition underlying it, the details of which are unclear. A motif of a tree keeps appearing, but what exactly it means, and which religion it belongs to, I don't understand yet.

    Beyond that it's also very interested in characters remaking and transforming themselves, often literally - we're up to three people who have created new physical versions of some aspects of themself for some purpose or other, in at least one case without knowing it. Remaking oneself isn't a new theme in what I've read of Lee's work, but this is definitely a different take on it, both in how literally the text treats it, and in how ambiguous to downright negative the text is about doing so; here it appears less a tool of self-actualization than self-abasement or self-escape or perhaps self-manipulation. The effect is very strange, and I'm interested to see where the story goes with this theme.

    Also the second quarter of the novel is mostly a prequel/retelling of the first quarter, but from a different character's perspective. This makes certain things in the first section make, well, not exactly sense, but seem less inexplicable. Lee's really outdoing herself with the prose on this one, there's been a couple passages that are just devastating in how perfectly they capture the emotion of an event.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    My current audiobook is a YA sci-fi horror thriller called Every Line of You by Naomi Gibson. My feelings on it so far are kind of all over the place.

    The premise is that main character Lydia has poured all her time and energy into creating an AI named Henry, which is named after her younger brother who died in a car crash a couple years before. Her father abandoned the family, her mother is a nonfunctional wreck who can't even take care of simple tasks like putting money on Lydia's school lunch account, and her former best friend Emma (who was also in the car crash and survived with scars) now hates her guts, so Lydia is basically alone, friendless, and relentlessly bullied. Henry becomes her only confidante, and eventually more than that as he is transferred to a chip and implanted directly in Lydia's body.

    I can see a whole lot of influences on this story. The premise definitely borrows from Frankenstein. The entire first act is basically Carrie but with magical computer hacking powers instead of pyrokinesis. Henry can quickly teach himself new skills similar to the "I know kung fu" thing in The Matrix. I've even seen some comparisons to parts of the movie Heathers, though I haven't seen that so can't really speak on it.

    It requires a lot of suspension of disbelief and a fairly high tolerance for characters making bad decisions (though in fairness, I think most of the bad decisions are believable for these teens in these circumstances).

    I've also learned about some accusations of plagiarism about this book, which is sad if true. I am mostly enjoying this book, even if I do notice a few flaws and even though I'm not loving the audiobook narration.
    Last edited by Velaryon; 2022-05-09 at 10:20 AM.
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    Been working my way through Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu, and while enjoying it, finding it a much slower read than his Earth's Remembered Past trilogy. Part of that might be the more technical aspect of the science being presented, where in ERP it was more philosophical with a sci-fi back drop. Whatever the case, still finding it to be a fascinating read, and looking forward to seeing where the rest of the book goes.
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    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post


    I like The Birthgrave, I found the satanic stuff boring, if she's moved on I'd probably like that.
    The Birthgrave was one of her very first published novels, way back in the 1970s, so she grew as a writer quite a bit after that (although I did quite like The Dragon Hoard, which is a very early YA book she wrote). My personal favorites of hers also tend to be some of her earlier works, but I haven't done a re-read recently to see how well they've held up now that I'm older, have read more widely, and have access to a wider and more current range of Queer Stuff, which was otherwise not easy to find in the early 1990s when I found Tanith Lee books originally. (Tanith Lee was one of the first authors I read from the "adult" side of the library starting at around age 11 back in the early 1990s, which gave me some rather odd ideas about "typical" SF/fantasy genre fiction to the occasional consternation of anyone reading my WIPs back in middle school. She also was one of the first authors I read who ever dealt with any kind of Queer stuff or Gender stuff at all, since that was much less present in genre fiction at the time, particularly YA-ish or classic/older stuff which was most of what would get recommended to me.) My favorites from my teen years were the Tales from the Flat Earth Series, Cyrion, Don't Bite the Sun, Volkhavaar, Dat by Night, and the short stories "Crying in the Rain" and "By Crystal Light Beneath One Star". I probably haven't read any of them in the last decade or so, though. Lee always seemed like an author who was at her best at the short story length and many of her longer works either were really compilations of short stories with some kind of framing idea around them.

    I haven't read The Blood of Roses yet - I'll have to pick up a copy when I have the energy for that kind of thing again. (The last vampire books by Lee that I remember reading were Dark Dance, Personal Darkness, that series...I think that was back in the 90s?) I've liked most things she wrote, although I was unable to get through The Gods Are Thirsty because it had too much tendency to laspe into French-language poetry. I suppose I could give it another try one of these years.

    In terms of what I'm actually reading right now, I think the only "new" book I've had the energy for so far this year (as opposed to a re-read) is Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire back when that came out in January. I'm currently re-reading Barbara Hambly's Darwath books yet again since I just don't have the energy for books with surprises in them right now. When I have slightly more energy this summer, I discovered recently that some, but not all, of Jim Kjelgaard's works have somehow escaped to the public domain (someone must not have bothered to renew the copyright on some of them at some point back when that was a thing?) so I'm going to read several books of his that my local library didn't copies of when I was growing up but which I can now get as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg. He's certainly From A Different Time in terms of sensibilities than a lot of other stuff I read, but I always enjoyed his books as a break from heavier stuff when I was in middle or high school (and otherwise mostly reading Tanith Lee) so I suppose I'll probably enjoy more 1940s books mostly about animals and/or hunting even if they probably don't really hold up in some ways.

    I'm also debating buying a Worldcon supporting membership so I can get the Hugo packet and read through all of that this summer before voting. I last did that for 2020 and enjoyed most of it, but it's a big project and I'm just not sure I'm up for that much new stuff this year.

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    It's odd, and probably mostly a sign of own blinkered perspective, but I never really think of Lee's work in terms of queerness. I don't mean that I don't see that it's there - I can't see any way to read parts of Flat Earth and not pick up on that - but for me as a reader it always felt less compelling than her prose, occasionally brilliant plot twists, and overall aesthetic, particularly the stories that stray well outside the bounds of the human. Like I said, this is probably just my own limited self reading her work in a limited, not enormously interested in gender way. That said, I still appreciate that she remains one of the only authors I've read who can render the make body as erotic, though this probably has a lot to do with my not terribly wide reading.

    Though I do want to grab a copy of the lesbian erotica she wrote as/in conversation with her nom de plume Esther Garber, simply because having a dialog with your own pen name is a marvelously intriguing piece of metatextual fiction, and I love it when Lee goes fully metatextual.


    Finished the first volume of Blood of Roses (its one book, Immanion Press just split their reprint into two volumes). There is a ton going on here, mostly touching on religious themes that I can't begin to comment on here, and also because a lot of it is still extremely oblique. The first section (the book is divided into sections based on viewpoint character) becomes almost completely incomprehensible as anything but a series of apparently random and inexplicable things happening, until the end of the next section which sort of explains them. Though since those explanations are things like that side character being the daughter of the spirit-clone of a previously dead but now re-living woman who was herself an empty vessel created as an Eve figure by an immortal vampire moth, they only make sense in a fairly loose way. This seems to be a pattern continuing into the second volume, that the story is sort of narratively backwards, things happen for reasons that ate explained later but occurred earlier. You, the reader, are adrift in a strange dreams dreamscape world, where anything is possible for their own inscrutable reasons.

    I'm also reading an anthology called New Eves, which is a 1990s collection of sci-fi short stories by women, organized by decade. This is a lot of fun, both because it's a nice way to experience some very early amd now hard to find female authors from the 20s 30s and 40s, but also as a look at how the genre has evolved over time. I found the early pulp stories a real ripping good time in the maximally enthusiastic way of good pulp sci-fi. I'm up to the seventies now, and I find the stories are starting to lag a bit. They aren't as fun as the pulps, being more politically focused have aged worse than pure adventure, and most of them feel like a set-up for a novella or full novel that just magically ends at like 12 pages because it's a short story. Still a worthwhile read, and the nice thing about short story anthologies is that even the lousy entries are short enough they aren't generally unpleasant enough to spoil the pudding.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    I tried so hard to enjoy Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight but I just can't.
    Off to second hand books it goes.
    I am back to nonfiction. Currently reading The New Map, Yergin.
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    I just chewed through Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. Two of the most unique, delightful, and evocative books I've ever read. Must-reads for anybody who likes fantasy. Truly exquisite sensory descriptions. Exactly the right tone of sass mixed with seriousness.

    Both of them start off a little slow, but it doesn't make them boring -- just digestible. And as a result, the climax of each novel feels like a massive payoff. Both times, I read through the first half at a decent clip, but devoured the second half.
    Last edited by Ionathus; 2022-06-28 at 03:35 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ionathus View Post
    I just chewed through Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. Two of the most unique, delightful, and evocative books I've ever read. Must-reads for anybody who likes fantasy. Truly exquisite sensory descriptions. Exactly the right tone of sass mixed with seriousness.

    Both of them start off a little slow, but it doesn't make them boring -- just digestible. And as a result, the climax of each novel feels like a massive payoff. Both times, I read through the first half at a decent clip, but devoured the second half.
    It's funny you bring those books up today. I read them, loved them, I've been participating in the fandom on Reddit a bit. I've read the first two chapters of Nona the Ninth that've been previewed on Tor.com and Gizmodo/io9.

    ...and just today, Amazon made a preview available, including a very interesting prologue. Their page for the book is here, click on the cover to see the preview.
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    I just read Wylah - the Koorie Warrior book 1: Guardians by Jordan Gould and Richard Pritchard. It was quite good for a fantasy book for kids.

    The premise: Wylah is an aspiring art teacher 40 000 years ago (in what is now known as south western Victoria in Australia), when megafauna roamed and animals spoke directly with humans. Disaster strikes her village, and she must take up the totem of the Koorie Warrior to rescue her mob.

    It's a good introduction for kids to Australian First Nations culture, with sprinklings of Peek Whurrong, the language of the Gunditjmara/Maar Nation, painting a picture of an established culture of many tribes. Followed the usual "hero gathers her allies and learns her strengths" structure that you get in many fantasy stories, in such a straightforward way that it was kind of visible to me as an adult how this had been imposed on the narrative. But the characters were well delineated with clear voices and decent amounts of fun. I actually bought this for my 8yo a few weeks ago, and yesterday she finally got to reading it. Afterwards she brought it to me and asked me to read it, and then spent some time with me, reading long passages out loud to me as I went along. She usually hates reading out loud and has to be coaxed, so something about the text seems to have appealed to her.

    I am also enjoying The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers, which I first read as soon as I could get my hands on it in February and re-read whenever I want comforting science fiction. It's the final book in her Wayfarer series, set in a universe where humans are relative newcomers to the Galactic Commons; this final book actually has no humans among its main characters, although we do meet one late in the story. Instead we have three travellers of different species stopping at the Five-Hop One-Stop on Gorr, when a planet-wide disaster interrupts their journeys.

    There are too many ways to say why and how much I love this series. It's basically wish-fulfillment for those of us who want to have respectful discussions about interpersonal and cultural issues. In the Galaxy where we meet the crew of the Wayfarer in the first book, there may still be wars over territory, there may still be minorities treated unequally for whom society pays only lip service to their rights. But the characters of these books are mostly mature adults who know how to behave around people of different cultures and species, even if they don't fully understand one another. This default to respectful interaction certainly doesn't solve anything by itself, but it does make it easier for the characters to listen to each other and engage with these issues. And while each novel may not be a grand adventure or a huge drama, the characters each find something changed and something to change themselves.
    I'm pretty much the opposite of concise. If I fail to get to the point, please ask me and I'm happy to (attempt to) clarify.

  21. - Top - End - #21
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    ElfPirate

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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    My love of urban fantasy is well documented, and I've found a new werewolf series to read, the Kitty Norville books. I give them a solid 4 stars so far; entertaining reads, fast paced and pretty light reading, but they don't have that certain something that pushes them into being favorites. Maybe it's humor; most of the other urban fantasy I read goes out of its way to have funny moments and lines mixed in with the drama and fantasy.

    The books focus a lot on the political and legal implications of people in the modern day starting to realize that things that go bump in the night are very much real. The main character is unintentionally right on the edge of that, running a talk show that blows up as a place for supernatural creatures and people associated with them to talk about their problems and be heard by someone that won't assume they're crazy.

    First book is Kitty and the Midnight Hour.
    Last edited by PoeticallyPsyco; 2022-07-22 at 06:00 AM.
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  22. - Top - End - #22
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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    Been reading the Elric books in vacation. Sometimes you read a fifty-is year old book, and it feels pretty modern. This is not one of those times. The distant and terse prose, the frequent characterization through what can only be described as telling, not showing, and the feel of the books are definitely not modern.

    This is by no means a complaint, I honestly love this sort of arch descriptive language,
    and for stories with themes as cosmic and weird as this it works fantastically. There's a sense of the world as both incredibly vivid and also unfixed and malleable at the edges. Overall I'm having a real blast with these, and will need to track down the rest of them when I return from foreign lands.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

  23. - Top - End - #23
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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    Haven't been going hard at it, but In the Court of the Nameless Queen, which is transgender lesbian monster- ****er erotica; the main character is the Chief Consort (after the first story) to the Nameless Queen, an incarnate goddess shaped like a drider who, at the end of the first story, has placed a number of eggs in her transwoman consort. By the second story, the consort has given birth to 236 spiders, now about the size of horses. I haven't gotten around to the second story... like the Nameless Queen, one has to take it in small doses.

    It's by the same author who did The Last Girl Scout, which is communist trans lesbians fighting vampires and fascists in a post-apocalyptic America. It is as wild as it sounds.
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  24. - Top - End - #24
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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    About to re-read Cursed World: Initial Sparkswhen I get some extra time.

    Just going to post the author's summary

    In a small town far to the north, a young girl wakes up for what will be the start of the most important week of her life. Join our heroine Rei Scios as she deals with transfer students, romance, ruffians, and the encroaching realization that the supernatural is probably very, very real. Adventure awaits as Rei's small town life is slowly turned on its end. Will she find love? Will her birthday go off without a hitch? Will she and her friends survive? There's only one way to know for sure...
    Has a neat magic system, and characters' actions have very real consequences that don't get walked back.
    Last edited by Mystic Muse; 2022-07-22 at 03:58 PM.

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    I've been enjoying the audiobook of Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko, the sequel to Raybearer. I think I can honestly say these are the best YA fantasy I have read since Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. I dig the African-inspired world, and unlike Children of Blood and Bone (which similarly draws influence from west African mythology), it doesn't feel like the same old story I've read 100 times before, just with a new coat of paint. Also, the dialogue is about 50 times better.

    While it's not completely devoid of standard YA fantasy tropes, Raybearer forgoes the dreaded love triangle (in fact shutting it down so conclusively that even shippers can't resurrect it), and what tropes it does use it handles skillfully rather than making a cookie-cutter teen fantasy. There's also a lot of good political-social themes that I like, but I didn't see them as direct analogues for any real-world issues, and more importantly I never felt beaten over the head with them. I think it's entirely possible to miss or ignore that layer entirely and still enjoy this quite a bit.

    Tarisai is a great protagonist, and while I'm still fairly early in book 2, so far it seems to be a worthy sequel to my favorite book of 2020 (even over the two Dresden books we got that year).
    Last edited by Velaryon; 2022-08-02 at 09:54 PM.
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  26. - Top - End - #26
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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    Reread time now:

    The Guns of August
    You should read this book. It's a genuinely masterful telling of the first month of World War 1, focused on the British, French and German perspectives, and it is absolutely captivating. Seriously, this is one of the most suspenseful books I have ever read, and it remains so on rereading it. Many books benefit from not knowing what happens next, I think it takes a rare mastery to deliver a book that becomes more poignant and involving when you know exactly what inevitably happens next, but remain impaled on all the moments where it could have gone differently.

    Time of the Twins
    Yep, it's Dragonlance time again. The new book apparently takes place just after Legends, which I have not read in many years now. Seems to be holding up pretty well, all things considered. Weis & Hickman do pretty 2D characters, but they're strongly drawn, and they're clearly having just a great time telling the story. Which is good, because I'm having a great time reading it.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

  27. - Top - End - #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    Reread time now:

    The Guns of August
    You should read this book. It's a genuinely masterful telling of the first month of World War 1, focused on the British, French and German perspectives, and it is absolutely captivating. Seriously, this is one of the most suspenseful books I have ever read, and it remains so on rereading it. Many books benefit from not knowing what happens next, I think it takes a rare mastery to deliver a book that becomes more poignant and involving when you know exactly what inevitably happens next, but remain impaled on all the moments where it could have gone differently.
    It's a very good book, although the focus on the Western Front somewhat limits it as a work of history, IMO. I've recently been rereading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, on the factors that lead up to WW1 in the previous couple of decades; it's a fascinating insight into how basically all the countries involved had multiple factions advocating and setting different policies, the complexity of the interactions of different foreign policies, and the various contingent factors that could have lead to very different outcomes in 1914.
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    I've been on a reading kick recently!

    I recently lost a bet and had to read a romance/crime paperback from the 90s as a result. It was unbelievably dull - not even entertaining in its badness, merely bad in its badness. The whole thing felt like the author had sleepwalked her way through writing it...but without any of the interesting hallucinations, sadly.

    Even more recently, I had the pleasure of reading Rise of Kyoshi, a novel (not a graphic novel, just a straight-up book) set in the Avatar universe and covering Avatar Kyoshi's formative years. It was fantastic! In particular I loved the characters, the setting, the light political intrigue, the dialogue, and the worldbuilding. The writing was crisp and the descriptions of the bending fights were more evocative than I was expecting.

    That last part is really important to me: I had worried that a prose medium would be unable to capture the show's fluid visuals and martial arts movement, but it was still a ton of fun to read the action scenes and imagine them in my mind's eye. It honestly did a better job at the action scenes than the Avatar graphic novel I read (The Promise - I'm interested in trying the others too).

    On the whole, I would highly recommend it to any fans of the Avatar universe! While the storytelling wasn't quite as magical as the original series, I would place it at or above my experience watching Legend of Korra. Looking forward to the second book in the series!

    (Nota bene: The book's violence is not family friendly like the shows'. There are several extremely violent deaths and the book explores an overall much grimmer tone than either cartoon does. It's not bleak or grimdark, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone under 13.)

  29. - Top - End - #29
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    Continuing the Dragonlance Legends reread, now about halfway through War of the Twins. These remain a lot of fun for me, and I think better than I would have credited them for based on memory alone. Structurally the series is substantially more complex than I recalled, with good use of flashbacks and dramatic revelations.

    It also makes good use of having multiple characters, and cuts between them regularly, often between paragraphs rather than chapters. This lets the narrative show things from the most interesting point of view, and integrates the characters' actions and thoughts into the action, rather than in a flashback later on. I miss books doing this, it lets the character development and action flow much more smoothly than the current vogue of max 1 PoV per chapter. That can work, don't get me wrong, but it isn't the only good solution.
    Last edited by warty goblin; 2022-08-16 at 03:24 PM.

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    Default Re: The Book Thread

    So, in my quest to read more from famous authors of bygone decades that I haven't read yet, I picked up Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, because the name kept showing up on lists of best SciFi authors and I haven't read anything by him.

    It's... weird. And not necessarily in a good way. The plot summary, the few chapters in that I am, is Unreliable Narrator confusedly wanders through city where weird things happen/have happened. Which should be something I'm all over, I love that kind of stuff, but it's also really, really slow. And I usually don't hate slow, but this book lacks a good hook to pull me in. The weird stuff that is happening is not that interesting, the unreliable narrator doesn't seem that unreliable, the conversations that people are having are incredibly mundane for what seems to be a city in the middle of a localized apocalypse in the middle of the US.

    It's a slow read. I manage a chapter or so a night, before I have enough. I'll struggle on for a few more, but if nothing interesting happens, this is probably a pass.
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