What Have You Read Lately?

[Parasaurolophus]

Before I forget, here was July:

Martin J.S. Rudwick - Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World: An in-depth survey of the first thirty-ish years of palaeoart by a historian and philosopher of science. It's pretty comprehensive, impressive, and informative, even if this isn't really the most interesting period in palaeoart (in many respects, however, it's one of the weirder ones).

Lilian Brown - I Married a Dinosaur: Picked this up because I was looking for some kind of narrative report on Barnum Brown's digs. It's written by his (second) wife, about their work in India (mostly). It's a fun read, although it's much more a travelogue than an after-action-report, so I was left wanting rather more bones than I got. Also worth noting that Brown presents a completely fictional account of her meeting and marrying Brown (she'd been pursuing him for years, but here writes that they met on the boat to India when she left convent school).

Robert T. Bakker - Raptor Red: The story of a year in a Utahraptor's life, told from her perspective. It's reminiscent of Riley Black's Last Days of the Dinosaurs. Bakker is a competent fiction writer, but Black is better, I think (and Bakker better on the non-fiction side). The story is compelling and does a good job of mobilizing one's emotions, and investing the reader in the story, but there are so many anachronisms in the descriptions that it's a little distracting. (Avoiding those is a serious challenge, of course, and I don't mind that Bakker couldn't always. But he absolutely should have nixed the giraffe comparison he makes in the first few pages!)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Tiger and the Wolf: Prehistoric shapeshifters. This is the story of a young girl who doesn't quite fit in her home tribe, and her attempts to just be left alone. I put off reading this series because it didn't sound too promising (shapeshifters is just asking for boring D&D campaigns or cookie-cutter fantasy/gothic), but I was wrong. It's great, and highly reminiscent of Riddley Walker. It's an interesting world, and one which I suspect is not quite as it seems.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Bear and the Serpent: A fun sequel to The Tiger and the Wolf, this one has more than a whiff of Alfred the Great. A lot more fighting, as Morden said above, though somewhat curiously it's pretty much all single combat. I don't mind that, but it's a sharp contrast from all the running in the first.

[Morden]

Hi everyone,
Para, I recommend the third installment of the Echoes of the Fall series: The Hyena and the Hawk. Tchaikovsky really does seem to finish off his series nicely.
I've been reading Cherryh's Foreigner series--here is someone who doesn't finish off her series. I think #22 is coming out this fall (7 trilogies and counting). I have enjoyed the books, but I find the earlier ones more satisfying in part because of the pace. How many books do you need to describe a fictional year?
I also read David Brin's The Postman, a dystopian novel written in the 1990s. Apparently it was made into a movie with Kevin Costner. The premise is interesting--a drifter finds a postman's bag and winds up taking on the role in post-Apocalyptic America, but the writing seemed a little flat to me.
And I just started a Birder Murder mystery by Steve Burrows. It's too early to tell yet if it's a series I'll want to continue with.

[ab_grp]

Hi everyone,
Para, I recommend the third installment of the Echoes of the Fall series: The Hyena and the Hawk. Tchaikovsky really does seem to finish off his series nicely.
I've been reading Cherryh's Foreigner series--here is someone who doesn't finish off her series. I think #22 is coming out this fall (7 trilogies and counting). I have enjoyed the books, but I find the earlier ones more satisfying in part because of the pace. How many books do you need to describe a fictional year?
I also read David Brin's The Postman, a dystopian novel written in the 1990s. Apparently it was made into a movie with Kevin Costner. The premise is interesting--a drifter finds a postman's bag and winds up taking on the role in post-Apocalyptic America, but the writing seemed a little flat to me.
And I just started a Birder Murder mystery by Steve Burrows. It's too early to tell yet if it's a series I'll want to continue with.

Have you read any of Brin's other books? I also thought The Postman had a neat premise but felt flat.  But I've read two others of his (unfortunately, I think I reviewed them in more detail on the old site) that I thought were great: The Practice Effect, Kiln People.  The first one is a really fun (and funny) adventure into a land where some laws of physics are different, leading to various consequences.  The latter is a bit more serious but centers on the ability to make clay copies of oneself to perform different types of tasks.  One type is a good learner, one might be more suited to errands.  Their memories can be incorporated back to the human if not too much time has passed so that there isn't much divergence in their experiences.  It brings up a lot of ideas including about the "lives" these copies lead and was IMO surprisingly moving.  Anyway, these are very brief recaps, but I think these books also have really interesting premises but deliver much better.  I'm sure opinions are mixed, of course, but I figured I'd mention them in case you hadn't checked them out (can't remember if we've already discussed them).  They are some of my favorite books, I think.

[Parasaurolophus]

Hi everyone,
Para, I recommend the third installment of the Echoes of the Fall series: The Hyena and the Hawk. Tchaikovsky really does seem to finish off his series nicely.

I'm 3/4 through! :)

[apl68]

World Fire:  The Culture of Fire on Earth, by Stephen J. Pyne.  Pyne's thesis is the generally well-documented idea that, for most of prehistory and history, most cultures around the world have used deliberately-set fires to manage their landscapes.  Hunter-gatherers burn to improve their hunting and gathering.  Pastoralists burn to stimulate the growth of pasture and keep it clear of unwanted woody plants.  Early agriculturists practice slash-and-burn.  Cultures in Europe and East Asia were historically the exception in practicing intensive agriculture and forestry, and trying to eliminate fire for the most part.  European and European-descended colonists exported this model to large regions where it was previously not practiced.  In North America we also developed a concept of fire-free "wilderness" in which humans weren't allowed to live.

But fire is a part of nature, and can't be banished from the landscape altogether.  Modern fire suppression has led to fewer fires, but bigger ones when the accumulated fuel loads do finally catch fire.  The results have often not been good.  It's an interesting story, vividly told.  Maybe sometimes too vividly--Pyne gets carried away with clever rhetorical allusions and such.  The book could have been shorter without losing much.

It's also a timely story, for reasons that are all too obvious in these years of ever-more-catastrophic fires around the world.  Global climate change, which Pyne, writing in 1995, didn't spend too much time on, has resulted in fires that he probably didn't even dream about at that time.  Preventive fire management to head off catastrophic blazes is now theoretically best practice in most places now.  In practice nobody wants to see it happen in their back yards, it's potentially dangerous and hard to get right, and the awful fires we're seeing now leave little attention to spare for that sort of prevention.  Environmentalists would like to create forests in which nothing ever burns again, the better to sequester more carbon.  The world just doesn't work that way.  And it's getting to where we can't control fire anymore, no matter how hard we try.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Canary Girls by Jennifer Chiaverini
During WWI, a group of young women go to work in an arsenal outside London.

[Morden]

Have you read any of Brin's other books? I also thought The Postman had a neat premise but felt flat.  But I've read two others of his (unfortunately, I think I reviewed them in more detail on the old site) that I thought were great: The Practice Effect, Kiln People.

Thank you for the recommendation. I will look for those books.
I just read two books by Arkady Martine, a historian turned sci-fi novelist. A Memory Called Empire is sort of a murder mystery/political thriller set in the Teixcalaan galactic empire, and A Desolation Called Peace is a first contact novel. Both were very enjoyable.
I also read Steve Burrow's A Siege of Bitterns. A reluctant Canadian detective (he'd rather be birding) moves to the salt marshes of Norfolk. It was also very good, so I have picked up another birder murder mystery

[apl68]

London:  A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd.  This is a humongous study of the city from earliest times through the end of the 20th century.  It's largely thematic, with dozens of chapters on the city's streets, sights, smells, assorted aspects of its culture, the city's now-buried rivers, and much, much more.  It amounts to a huge collection of antiquarian data of the sort that goes at least back to John Stow's famous Elizabethan survey of London. 

Ackroyd has obviously done a formidable amount of research.  I suspect that a lot of the facts he relates may be tall tales that nobody now can prove or disprove for certain.  To the extent that there is a thesis here, it seems to be that London is a fundamentally pagan, unruly place that resists efforts to tame it and reduce it to a plan.  Collections of historical stuff like this are always fascinating, although the sheer size can make it into something of a slog to get through.  I read it in pieces over a period of months.

[apl68]

The Hollywood Posse:  The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History, by Diana Serra Cary.  The author was a child film star in the silent days under the name of "Baby Peggy."  She lived to be over a hundred, and was thus the very last surviving silent film star.  I saw a most interesting documentary on her on TCM some years back.

In later life she wrote a number of insider books on Hollywood's history.  This one is about the real-life cowboys who became Hollywood stuntmen and mounted extras in the silent days and throughout Hollywood's studio "Golden Age."  Her father was one of them.  Again, I can't help wondering whether there are some tall tales here, but there's no denying that those movie cowboys included some genuinely colorful and daredevil characters.  If Cary is to be believed, they apparently talked in real life much as cowboys in old westerns talked.

The Hollywood cowboy old guard was passing away by the 1950s.  Some of them spent their later working years in appropriate roles at Disneyland.  Cary's father apparently liked to watch old Hopalong Cassidy westerns on TV because he recognized all the guys who did the stunts.  For all Hollywood's reputation for wealth and glamor, it's evident that most of the uncredited talent--stunt riders, extras, etc.--had a hardscrabble life during the 1920s and 1930s. 

And of course those movie stunts were dangerous.  Nowadays pretty much all the derring-do onscreen is CGI animation hacked out by hordes of people sitting at computers (Although movie sets can still occasionally be hazardous--just as Alec Baldwin).  It's both impressive and sobering to recall, whenever one watches a really old movie, that real human beings were really out there risking their lives.

[hmaria1609]

The Beauty Trials by Dhonielle Clayton (YA)
Latest and 3rd installment in the "Belles" series. The novel has a new lead character although characters from the previous 2 books make an appearance.

[apl68]

Getting Out of Saigon:  How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians, by Ralph White.  In the spring of 1975 South Vietnam was collapsing.  Saigon was about to fall.  Chase Manhattan Bank sent the author to Saigon to close out its branch there before the North Vietnamese Army rolled in.  He was also tasked with helping to evacuate senior Vietnamese staff members who would likely face punishment as bourgeois enemies of the people if they didn't flee. 

Between staffers and their immediate family members, White found himself responsible for well over a hundred people.  The U.S. Ambassador, rather like the administration of many a failing college, was refusing to face reality and kept hoping the tide would turn rather than facilitate the evacuation.  Fortunately some of the Ambassador's staff were running a major evacuation effort behind his back.  White learned about this effort, and was able to use it to get the people he was responsible for out in what turned out to be just the nick of time.

As White tells it, it's quite a wild-and-wooly story.  He portrays himself running around Saigon in the last days carrying a bunch of cash and a concealed weapon, gathering information and doing deals like some kind of movie spy.  The frequent verbatim reconstructions of almost half-century-old conversations and some of the incidents give the impression that the story may well have grown in the telling.  Then again...the broad outline of it is very much a matter of record, and White does seem to have gone to some lengths to track down surviving participants to double-check some things.  Whatever inaccuracies there may be due to the passage of time and the vagaries of memory, this is clearly an extraordinary true-life story.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: The Virginian by Owen Wister
First published in 1902, the novel remains a classic. It's been adapted as a movie several times and provided inspiration for the long running TV series from 1962-71.
I'm reading the Penguin Classics edition.

[spork]

Getting Out of Saigon:  How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians, by Ralph White. 

[. . .]

You might like The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War, by Ralph Wetterhahn.

I recently read And Finally, by Henry Marsh, a British retired neurosurgeon diagnosed with prostate cancer. I thought some chapters more profound than others, but it's a short book and was good enough for me to request one of his earlier books from the public library.

[downer]

I listened to Meryl Streep performing the new Ann Patchett novel, Tom Lake. Also listened to Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Both novels have adult women looking back on their lives and families. Patchett is a better writer, and being about theatre, it is quite high culture. Maybe it helps to know "Our Town" which plays a central role in the story (and I have not seen it). The book was enjoyable but rather safe, even conservative. Garmus was more ambitious but also more didactic and clumsy. It is very focused on 1960s feminism and the repressive culture. It's already been made into a series for Apple TV, and it reads like it was designed to be made into a TV show. But it was also provocative and memorable.

[Morden]

I've been reading Ann Leckie (sci fi Ancillary series & Provenance) recently. And I've been thinking about the power of pronouns. One of the dominant cultures, the Radch, has a language that doesn't signal gender; Leckie uses female pronouns/referents for all. And I imagine all of them as female--even when they are also described elsewhere as brother or grandfather.