Re: What Have You Read Lately? (2024 Edition)

[Sun_Worshiper]

I'm about three quarters of the way through Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris. Basically it is about a big shift in the sorts of films coming out of major studios in the late 1960s, led by films like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and In the Heat of the Night. I think fans of film and Hollywood will enjoy it - I certainly am.

[Parasaurolophus]

Wow, I've fallen way behind on my reporting again. Geeze.

I'm steadily ploughing through Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, reading a couple hundred pages a month before setting it aside for lighter reading. I'll be done eventually, but it has definitely slowed my progress.

Anyway, here's February-May:

Daniel Pinkwater - Borgel: I bought this over twenty years ago, after a pleasant flirt with someone who enthused about it. It's okay--mildly amusing, very much in the vein of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but nowhere near as good as that. Basically, it's about an elderly time-travelling gentleman who shows up one day and stays with a family, then years later takes the youngest child on an adventure to find The Great Popsicle. On a whim, I read it to the toddler a couple of months before he turned three. He loves it, despite the lack of pictures. So, you know. Now it's a permanent fixture on our shelves.

Catherine Storr - The Complete Polly and the Wolf: My partner randomly got this for the toddler (and doesn't even remember doing so). I love, love, love these stories. I can't even begin to express how much they delight me. Basically, a wolf who reads too many fairy/folk tales tries to re-enact them to catch a little girl and eat her. But over time, they develop an antagonistic friendship. The toddler, of course, adores them (we started on a day he was quite I'll, so maybe that helped!). We've been reading several stories first thing in the morning for months.

Alastair Reynolds - Machine Vendetta: The concluding novel in the Prefect Dreyfus trilogy from the Revelation Space universe. Honestly, I thought it was pretty weak. I don't really remember the events of the previous two at this point, but this one seemed really stapled together, and the underlying "mystery" doesn't really make much sense, narratively.

Simon Scarrow - The Honour of Rome: Macro marches on, sans Cato. The fighting is fine, as usual, but this is another one of those novels that's pure fantasy, not at all grounded in historical set pieces, and it suffers as a result. It's also shockingly shoddily put together. An absolutely crucial plot point is that Macro is caught between two gangs, one of which threatens his business and the other of which wants him in their ranks. One of them kicks the shit out of him, and that's the catalyst for the rest of the story--except that Scarrow attributes the reasons for doing so to the wrong gang. So that makes no sense whatsoever. And then in the books last third, stuff happens that seems entirely disconnected from where the previous novel left off (which caused me all kinds of stress for the character, because it activated my OCD big time).

Simon Scarrow - Death to the Emperor: I can't decide if this is worse than The Honour of Rome, or better. On the plus side, we're back to being anchored in history (the Boudiccan Revolt). On the minus side, the start of the novel doesn't match up with where we left things in The Honour of Rome at all at all at all. Everyone seems to have forgotten the last three pages of the previous novel. I'll keep reading what he churns out in this series, because how can't I after twenty-odd of them, but he really needs to just stop. The decline in their quality has been precipitous.

John Scalzi - The Collapsing Empire: Imagine a Dune-style corporate space empire, but without FTL travel apart from wormholes. Now imagine that the wormhole network starts to collapse, leaving systems permanently isolated from one another. What's an emperox to do? Great premise, good execution, fun novel.

John Scalzi - The Consuming Fire: A strong follow-up to The Collapsing Empire. This one is basically all political machinations, which is fun (if not necessarily the most subtle of machinations).

John Scalzi - The Last Emperox: And a strong finish to the series. Lots more political intrigue, and a fairly satisfying wrap-up. Really, this is a fun series. I recommend it.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Alien Clay: A penal colony story set on a distant planet where natural selection was short-circuited. Stories like this are always fun. I think Cage of Souls was much stronger and more interesting (it does a better job of Heart of Darknessing), but this is still a good novel. He produces so much these days that it's really a wonder that none of it is filler. As with everything he writes, I recommend it.

Emma Newman - Planetfall: OMG. Surely this is my favourite thing I've read (/will read) this year. The basic premise is that a cult has discovered FTL travel, and sends a generation ship to find God. Only the cult leader dies once they make planetfall (not a spoiler), so they have to cope. The heart of the story, though, follows someone with OCD. As someone with OCD--and her particular problem, among others--I found it very, very difficult to read, because my heart would just clench tight. That's a really good thing, though; Newman has really captured what makes those of us with that particular affliction tick.

Emma Newman - After Atlas: Basically a police procedural, set on Earth around the time of the events in the first novel. This time, however, the theme is trauma and PTSD. This is a good novel, although the mystery at its core doesn't really make sense when you look at it too closely.

Emma Newman - Before Mars: I was wrong about Planetfall; this is my favourite book of the year. It's brilliant. It has us following the Mars Colony at about the same time as book 2. As with book 2, we begin with a mystery--but this one makes for a super-compelling psychological thriller. And our protagonist is someone wrestling with pretty bad post-partum depression. The treatment of the post-partum depression is just so true to life (from what I've observed and what my partner reports), and so nuanced in its treatment, that it's just... not a joy to read, exactly, but just so... I dunno. I'm not sure how to characterize it, save that it's just excellent.

Emma Newman - Atlas Alone: The concluding Planetfall novel, set just after the events in book 2. It's kind of a devastating novel, really. PTSD is the background bogeyman once again, only more so. I can't say much for fear of spoilers, but I can confirm that it was an absolute joy to read.

Emma Newman - Before, After, Alone: A Planetfall Universe short story collection: These were every bit as good as I hoped, and they did a fine job of exploring hidden/background aspects of the Planetfall novels. Plus, the Q&A at the end is both interesting and illuminating. It's a crime that her publishers aren't interested in more Planetfall, and that this collection had to be self-published. She's a very, very talented scifi writer.

[apl68]

I've never read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould.  Just enough to know that he was a very good writer.  I've seen him cited as an example to follow.

[Parasaurolophus]

I've never read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould.  Just enough to know that he was a very good writer.  I've seen him cited as an example to follow.

His popular science work is clear and engaging. This book is not popular science, though, and it's quite dense a d technical (very informative, of course, but perhaps overly so). It's also something like 1500 pages long. It's not for the faint of heart.

[Langue_doc]

The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester.  As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary.  The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work.  Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries.  Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project. 

...

Sounds like this is a retitling of The Professor and the Madman which I enjoyed a while back!

I'm rereading The Professor and the Madman because of the current lexicography exhibit Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography at the Grolier Club. There was an hourlong walkthrough of the exhibit by the curator, some of whose dictionaries were on display. I think he mentioned that he had several thousands of them--I forgot the exact count, but it was well over 45000.

You can also see the exhibit online: click on each of the topics on the right. During the walkthrough the curator spent some time entertaining us with the antics of Noah Webster (see the two sections "Linguistic Independence & Its Sequelae" and "Lexical Warfare" in the middle of the list).

[Myword]

I enjoyed reading All My yesterday's   a novel of lady Macbeth.  A prequel to the play based on historical research of Scotland.  By Morris
Also a antiromance novel.    Acts of Desperation by Margaret Nolan

[apl68]

The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester.  As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary.  The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work.  Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries.  Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project. 

...

Sounds like this is a retitling of The Professor and the Madman which I enjoyed a while back!

I'm rereading The Professor and the Madman because of the current lexicography exhibit Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography at the Grolier Club. There was an hourlong walkthrough of the exhibit by the curator, some of whose dictionaries were on display. I think he mentioned that he had several thousands of them--I forgot the exact count, but it was well over 45000.

You can also see the exhibit online: click on each of the topics on the right. During the walkthrough the curator spent some time entertaining us with the antics of Noah Webster (see the two sections "Linguistic Independence & Its Sequelae" and "Lexical Warfare" in the middle of the list).

Looks like a fascinating exhibit.  And a fascinating place.  Now I wish I could visit NYC to see the Grolier Club!

Didn't know about all the drama and litigation surrounding the use of the Webster's name over the years.

I encountered the 1989 edition of the OED in grad school.  It had only recently come out, and the university library had a pristine set of the whole thing.  I may have been one of the few people there actually to use that huge, wonderful collection of print.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: But First, Champagne: A Modern Guide to the World's Favorite Wine by David White, 2nd ed. (2023)
An accessible guide to Champagne and leading label makers. The award winning wine author is locally based.

[apl68]

Predestined, by Stephen French Whitman.  This novel was evidently both popular and praised for some years after its original publication in 1910.  F. Scott Fitzgerald went on record as praising it in the early 1920s.  It's the sort of story Fitzgerald might write--all about a young man from a rich family who loses his inheritance, goes to New York City to make a name for himself as a writer, and trifles his life away.  Ironically-named protagonist Felix loses his heart to multiple women in succession--their names provide the titles of the book's sections--receives and fails to follow some good advice, meets various other lost souls, and becomes a hopeless alcoholic.

Fitzgerald would have told the story so much better.  A stereotypical minor Victorian novelist could hardly have stuffed so much in the way of purple passages, learned allusions, and melodrama into one book.  The main character somehow manages to be even more shallow and self-absorbed than the typical Fitzgerald character.  He's a hopeless romantic in every sense of the word.  The reader keeps wanting slap some sense into him.  One wonders whether much of Fitzgerald's work was a result of his reading this novel, saying to himself "I could do better than this," and then proceeding to do it.

The main thing keeping this readable is many vivid, though often overwritten, passages depicting life in the Big Apple in the years before World War I.  Somebody at Southern Illinois University Press decided in the 1970s that Predestined would make a worthwhile addition to a reprint series they were doing at the time.  The effort to lift Whitman from obscurity evidently failed.  I haven't even been able to find a Wikipedia article on him.  I've got half a mind to go over to NeglectedBooks.com and recommend this.  It might be right up their alley.

[apl68]

Nonstop, by Brian Aldiss.  I've been interested in the concept of the "generation ship"--a star ship that takes centuries to get to its destination, as whole generations of its crew live out their lives sealed within it--ever since I read Clifford B. Simak's "Target Generation" as a kid.  I saw Nonstop mentioned a couple of years after that while reading a book about science fiction.  Last month on vacation I found an early American edition of Nonstop under its American title, Starship, and finally got to read it.

Generation ship stories almost always show things going badly wrong aboard ship.  Understandable, when one considers all the many things that could go wrong with an enterprise like that.  In Nonstop the ship's hydroponics have mutated and turned it into a jungle that the remaining crew members must survive in.  It's a very readable sci-fi adventure story, written back before Aldiss decided to make his work completely unreadable.  The main shortcoming, aside from the way some things have become dated in the past 65 years, is that he seems to have done much of the writing in a hurry and by the seat of his pants.  There's a satisfying twist later in the story that I failed to see coming.

[hmaria1609]

A Deceptive Composition by Anna Lee Huber
New and #12 in the "Lady Darby Mystery" series. The Gages are investigating the death of a family member in Cornwall.

I preordered the novel when Barnes & Noble had a promo for members.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Finally getting around to The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which I've been meaning to read for about 20 years. So far (about 50 pages in) it is an interesting read.

[apl68]

The Oxford History of the French Revolution, by William Doyle. I love Oxford Histories for getting a handle on major periods and events.  This is a good example of how to treat a decade or so's worth of epochal, complex events in a few hundred pages in a way that's reasonably readable.  It's not as colorful and vivid, or well-illustrated, as Simon Schama's Citizens, but there's something to be said for this sort of very straightforward account.

Even this more dispassionate account of the French Revolution conveys something of the sheer, breathtaking violence and savagery that accompanied so much of it.  It's hard to credit what bottomless wells of murderous hatred and resentment there must have been in pre-Revolutionary French society for things to erupt the way they did.  Despite the best efforts of the white supremacists, the identity politicians, and certain strains of misandrist feminism, we just don't seem to hate each other the way the French did back in the day--we're not literally tearing each other limb-from-limb in the streets and parading around with heads on pikes.  We don't have political factions executing enemies real and perceived by the hundreds after show trials, or no trials at all, and scheming to exterminate rival factions before the rivals can exterminate them.  We don't have armed mass rebellions in sections of the country, with genocidal efforts to put them down as in the Catholic Vendee.

I really hope we don't ever have these sorts of things happen here.  What happened to France in the final decade of the 1700s is a warning to us all about how quickly the veneer of civilization can come off when chronic political, social, and economic issues all line up just so, and order collapses.  It's also a reminder of how the most "enlightened" ideas about human liberty and progress can mutate into the most awful tyranny when they get out of the academy and into actual revolutionary politics.

[treeoflife]

I am reading The Law of the Peoples  by John Rawls, I must say that reading this after twenty three years I can't understand why we were so enamored by him in undergrad.

[FishProf]

The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay.  I picked this up as it was recommended because I'd been reading the Harry Dresden books.  That was a poor recommendation, as they only matchup as detective-esque stories. 

Nothing magical about this.  The main character (Marc Genovich) is a South Boston PI who was in a horrific accident, and is now narcoleptic and suffers hypnogogic hallucinations.  So its a detective story, involving something from his family's mysterious past, but the biggest mystery is the stuff Marc forgot while we was asleep but apparently awake (which is when he met the person hiring him for a case).  Its an interesting and quirky premise that....works, for the most part.  There is one sequel, but I am not inclined to read it.

I listened to the audio book, and it was fun hearing the story about places I am familiar with in Massachusetts.
However, when the narrator kept mispronouncing Whitey Bulger incorrectly (like the wheat, instead of Bul-Jer), it dropped me out of the immersion.  It was especially odd after getting all the Mass town names essentially correct, which is a harder task.

I also listened to The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) which, once it got going, was very good.  I think even five years ago, I would have found it an unlikely albeit entertaining dystopian novel.  Today, it was terrifying, as "That could never happen here" has turned to "Sounds like Alabama/Mississippi/Louisiana/Texas/Oklahoma etc."