What Have You Read Lately?

[FishProf]

In continuing my "Sword and Sorcery" theme, I picked up the audio book of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus.  It is a complete collection of the original works by Robert Howard, arranged chronologically with a biographical and critical introduction to each tale.  There isn't a coherent overarching story (these were originally published as stand-alone tales in magazines in the 30's and 40's), and about halfway through, I ran out of steam.  Now, in between other books, I listen to a Conan tale for fun.  And they are fun, exciting adventures, but not (at least yet) anything approaching great literature.

Altered Carbon and Broken Angels by Richard K Morgan¹, which are the first two books in the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.  The first is a Blade Runner-esque dystopian future story about humans who, when killed, or damaged beyond use, have their consciousness 'resleeved' into a different body.  The fist body is a murder-mystery, and the second is a futuristic alien artifact Indiana Jones type adventure.  Both deal with issues of personality, biological and psychological determinism (if you change sleeves, which parts of you remain?), and the dangers of technology.  I just learned that the first book is now a Netflix series.

I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy (now, a Major Motion Picture! Well, in 2009).  A very stark, bleak, story of a father and son trekking across a post-apocalyptic world.  Very beautifully written, but so thin on exposition that the end felt like "Wow! That was great!  Wait, but what happened??"  This is my first book by McCarthy.  I am interested in more by him.

¹ Also write the "A Land Fit for Heroes" series I previously read and greatly enjoyed (The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands  and The Dark Defiles)

[spork]

In continuing my "Sword and Sorcery" theme, I picked up the audio book of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. 
[. . .]

You might like the works of Harold Lamb, who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Here is an overview of some of his pulp magazine tales: Khlit the Cossack. His histories of the Crusades and people like Genghis Khan are quite good.

[FishProf]

In continuing my "Sword and Sorcery" theme, I picked up the audio book of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. 
[. . .]

You might like the works of Harold Lamb, who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Here is an overview of some of his pulp magazine tales: Khlit the Cossack. His histories of the Crusades and people like Genghis Khan are quite good.

Thanks for the tip!

[hmaria1609]

From the library: The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle by T.L. (Tendai) Huchu
New and #3 in the "Edinburgh Nights" series

[apl68]

Structures:  Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, by J.E. Gordon.  This is a highly accessible introduction to the principles behind structural engineering.  The author explains the forces that act on all sorts of structures and materials, whether man-made or in nature, including living structures like trees and blood vessels.  It's a very interesting and readable book, with lots of understandable diagrams and other illustrations. 

Structures has dated somewhat since it was first published in the 1970s, but it's still informative.  Don't hold the fact that Elon Musk is reportedly a fan of it against it. 


Salvage, by Roger Vercel.  This is the story of a French captain of a seagoing salvage tugboat.  The first two-thirds of the novel deal with his crew's efforts to salvage a Greek freighter in distress whose captain and crew prove worse than uncooperative.  The final third abruptly shifts to more of a focus on the captain's domestic issues.  It's a fast-moving and intermittently gripping tale.  The English translation of the French original, entitled Remorques, gives the descriptions and dialog a kind of 1930s British hard-boiled quality.  The author evidently did not think very highly at all of Greeks.

I found this 1936 edition last year for three bucks at a used book place in Fort Smith.  It's one of those hole-in-the-wall bookstores where you can find an amazing variety of random, borderline-junk books.  You can make some interesting discoveries in places like that.  I see from searching online that Vercel's novel was made into a movie in France starring Jean Gabin.  It had the misfortune to be completed during the Occupation.  After the war it was apparently released in the U.S. under the title Stormy Waters.  I'm now curious about that movie.

[downer]

Just finished "Strange Sally Diamond" by Liz Nugent. It has strong echoes of "Room" by Emma Donoghue, but goes off in a different direction.

The Nugent novel is good, with strong psychological themes. I liked it, but also found it a bit annoying. It had a bit too much of a horror feel to it. The evil actions were certainly portrayed with a banality that was striking.

[Morden]

Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem; The Dark Forest; Death's End.
I haven't read any Chinese Sci-fi before, so I don't know if this is a different aesthetic. But I found these books odd. They were enjoyable enough that I kept going, but the pace was very different--excruciatingly slow in parts and yet at an enormous scale. There was also a lot of exposition, and I didn't really care about any of the characters. So I'm trying to figure out why I kept going for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I was curious about his (really bleak) vision of the universe. I heard that Netflix is going to adapt the Three-Body Problem: I cannot imagine how that would work.

[secundem_artem]

Just finished Libra by Don DeLillo.  Never had much interest in serious fiction.  Then read White Noise and  and DeLillo changed my mind.  Gradually working my way through his oeuvre.  Read Silence this spring. Now on Zero K with Underworld on deck. Looking forward to all of it.

[FishProf]

I finished the Takashi Kovacs Trilogy (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) (audiobooks), which I mentioned earlier in the thread (on 30 August 2023, 14:33:17 if you care).

The third book has a different narrator which was really jarring for the first half of the book.  The third book was yet another take on the world, with a different style, and an entirely new cast of characters (except the Protagonist). 

I really enjoyed this series, but there were loose ends that I wanted the author to tie up.  I felt the same way about his "A Land Fit for Heroes" series, so maybe that's just him. 

[Parasaurolophus]

August:


Lilian Brown - Bring 'Em Back Petrified: Another adventure travelogue from Barnum Brown's wife. This one features a lot more fossil hunting, making it more satisfying (although I'll still just end up buying some account drawn from his field notes at some point). She's a skilled writer, so it's fun. This time they're in Guatemala, and mostly stay in place. Plenty of casual racism in there, and some behaviour that is hard to believe they thought was okay, like a half-hearted attempt to take a child for their own. She keeps up the pretence that she and Barnum met at sea on the way to India.

Suzanne Collins - Catching Fire: A solid sequel. The Games are the best part, and I wasn't so keen on the rebellion arc that took over the last act. That's basically what I was expecting, however. It doesn't really lend itself to a sequel/trilogy, otherwise. Still, it was good fun.

Suzanne Collins - Mockingjay: I'm simultaneously of two minds about this one. On the one hand, it features no Games at all, just the rebellion stuff, so it's automatically less interesting. And the more I learn about Panem, the less the logistics make sense--to say nothing of the war itself and the tactics on the ground. None of that makes any sense. For one thing, why the fuck would they defend the city with 'pods'? For another, where the hell are all the force fields? And the character development doesn't really make all that much sense (e.g. Finnick). But whatever, that's no big deal, really. On the other hand, none of that is what this book is about; what it's about is PTSD. And on that front, Collins does something very clever and very brave: she keeps presenting narrative threads that look like they're building towards something, usually of the bog-standard action hero type. And then they fizzle out, and you're left with people being used and discarded, and left to wrestle with their trauma so that they can build up to the next action hero thread, which fizzles out and... etc. I imagine this didn't play all that well with the fans. Or maybe it went over everyone's heads. But it's really quite clever, and well executed.

Harry Turtledove - Herbig-Haro: Just a short story, set several hundred years after the one about the aliens who have FTL but invade Earth with muskets. I liked it very much. On the strength of these stories, I'd like to read some longer-form scifi from him, though I still am not very interested in his alternate history novels.

Becky Chambers - The Galaxy, and the Ground Within: This is the last of her Wayfarers books. It's good, as they all are; Chambers writes well, and it's an enjoyable read. But man, this is all-in on the "hopepunk" schtick, and as a result it's really just infuriatingly mundane. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, and enjoyed reading it, but... I dunno. I guess nothing really measures up to A Closed and Common Orbit.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Hyena and the Hawk: A fitting conclusion to the trilogy. I had more thoughts at the time, but I took so long to write this up that I've mostly forgotten now, unless someone says something that jogs something loose. As before, the organized group-fighting/warfare doesn't make great sense, but that's not such a big deal. This series does a lot of neat things, and does them in an unusual way. It was cool.

Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem; The Dark Forest; Death's End.
I haven't read any Chinese Sci-fi before, so I don't know if this is a different aesthetic. But I found these books odd. They were enjoyable enough that I kept going, but the pace was very different--excruciatingly slow in parts and yet at an enormous scale. There was also a lot of exposition, and I didn't really care about any of the characters. So I'm trying to figure out why I kept going for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I was curious about his (really bleak) vision of the universe. I heard that Netflix is going to adapt the Three-Body Problem: I cannot imagine how that would work.

Yeah, I read The Three-Body Problem a few years ago. My report is lost on the old forum somewhere, but it was basically "meh".

[apl68]

The State Must Provide:  Why American Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--And How to Set Them Right, by Adam Harris.  Mainly this is a history of how American higher education became racially segregated, how it was legally integrated, and how a high proportion of black students nonetheless still have little choice but to go to HCBUs--which are often still scandalously underfunded.  Harris tells an ugly story in a straightforward manner, without recourse to a lot of rhetorical excess and intersectional jargon.  He also shows an understanding of the complexity of many of the historical actors' motivations.  If more Black Studies work would just go ahead and tell the story like this, the necessary message would get out without making the whole idea of Black Studies suspect and vulnerable to attack by opportunistic politicians in so many quarters.

And it is a heartbreaking story about one of many ways in which black Americans were reduced to second class (at best) citizens for no better reason than caste.  One of the saddest stories is about how Berea College in Kentucky offered racially integrated education back in the 1800s, only to end up forbidden to do so by later segregationist legislation.  Berea College founder John G. Fee is quoted as justifying racially integrated education by reminding people that the New Testament says plainly that God "Hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."  In other words, there is no Scriptural justification for segregation and treating some races as "higher" than others.  The segregationists were violating the scriptures that they professed to follow, and refused to listen when people like Fee called them on it.

Harris only chokes toward the end, when he describes the need to boost funding for HCBUs as a matter of "reparations."  He had done so well at avoiding the jargon up to that point!  It would really have been better to make the case that state-funded HCBUs need to be better funded as part of an effort to correct problems and inequities in the here-and-now.  "Reparations" draws resistance in that it sounds so much like punishing people today for things done in the past, before living memory.

Regarding the under-funding of HCBUs--a friend of mine in grad school who I kept in touch with for some years got a teaching job at an HCBU.  Fresh from grad school at an R1 university, he tried assigning his students to do one-page annotated bibliographies on historical topics of their choice.  He was startled to learn that the school's library had such limited resources that for most historical topics an assignment to write a one-page annotated bibliography had essentially one right answer....

[downer]

The Centre: A Novel by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Stunning debut. High brow but also visceral. Largely about language and culture. A highlight of the year so far.

[apl68]

Science Fictions:  How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, by Stuart Ritchie.  Ritchie here examines the evidence that a disturbingly high percentage of scientific research has been undermined by the assorted issues mentioned in the subtitle.  He describes some of the perverse incentives that lead to this--publish-or-perish, conflicts of interest, political biases, etc.--and ways to fix the problem by dealing with the perverse incentives, reforming some aspects of academic publishing, and providing for greater transparency regarding data.

It's a hugely important subject.  We hear all the rhetoric about the need to "follow science," but it can be honestly hard to persuade members of the public to do so when many scientists themselves have done so much to undermine public trust in their own disciplines.  Unfortunately we live in a world where virtually all of our institutions have done much to squander public trust in them.  Scientific disciplines are no exception (Nor, sadly, are some libraries and library professional associations).  A healthy society needs to be able to trust its institutions, and for that they need to police themselves in order to remain trustworthy.  This goes for all sorts of institutions--governments, schools, colleges, churches, and scientific disciplines.  Scientists have no more business than anybody else pretending that they somehow are above the human tendency to act in a less-than-trustworthy manner if they aren't careful.

[apl68]

The Typhoon, by Melchior Lengyel, adapted by J.W. McConaughy.  This is a 1912 novelization of a 1909 play.  It's a murder thriller.  A Japanese scholar, working undercover as part of a subversive Japanese network in the U.S., jeopardizes his team's mission when he lets himself be seduced by a Western adventuress and murders her in a jealous rage.  A junior member of the team volunteers to make a false confession and take the punishment for the crime.  Will they get away with it?

The author was a Hungarian playwright who later went to Hollywood.  He had a hand in film classics like Ninotchka.  The xenophobia in this early work toward the scheming Japanese is thoroughly cringe-worthy today--though around 1941 it would have looked awfully prescient.  It must be said that Lengyel does not dehumanize the Japanese.  The story is told mostly from their point of view, as they struggle melodramatically with the tension between emotion and stern duty to country.  The Japanese are treated more sympathetically here than the Germans in any number of World War II thrillers.  Most of the story's white characters don't come out looking any too well either.

Publisher ads in the back indicate that this was one of publisher Grossett & Dunlap's series of "Dramatized Novels."  It's illustrated with vintage black and white photos of a production of the play.  At least some of the players appear to have been actual Asians.  All in all, this is quite a bizarre historical curio.



The Land of Deepening Shadow:  Germany At War, by D. Thomas Curtin.  Another historical curiosity.  Curtin was an American journalist with extensive experience in Germany.  He covered the early years of World War I as a neutral journalist.  By early 1917, when he was writing this--it probably went to press right around the time the U.S. was declaring war--he had become seriously disillusioned with Germany and its leaders.  There's a pronounced bias against Germany here, and a lot of speculation that always assumes the worst about Germany.

It can't, however, be written off as mere wartime propaganda.  Much of what Curtin says about wartime Germany's ruthless suspension of civil liberties, shortages of food and materials, and failures to develop an equitable rationing system, is confirmed by modern histories of the German home front.  This makes me ready to credit Curtin's overall portrayal of wartime Germany, within the limits of the author's perspective, as essentially truthful.  Contemporary accounts such as this of major historical events often hold a lot of historical interest.  I stumbled across a 106-year-old printed copy; it's also available at Project Gutenberg.

[downer]

Finally read Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1996). I had started before but put it down. This time I listened to the audiobook. Interesting as an historical novel depicting NYC in the early 20th century. Less successful as a tale of existential despair and the emptiness of rampant capitalism, though it had its moments.