What have you read lately?

[ergative]

Now we're reading another of the newer sci fi books I got him for his birthday: Red Rising (Pierce Brown).  We just started, but it sounds interesting [took the Amazon blurb out from my previous post] and is the first of a series.  I fell asleep during the first chapter so will have to catch up on the reading.

We finished the book last night, and I fell asleep during the final two or so pages.  Despite bookending the read with me being asleep, it was a pretty engaging story, and we will be reading the sequel sometime soon.  There were some interesting takes on power, in particular.  The main character/narrator seems a bit full of himself given the number of fairly obvious reveals he does not catch onto very quickly.  Aside from some minor eye rolling here and there, we thought it was a fun and intriguing story.  Perhaps not the best to read right now given the recent government events, but we did not anticipate those specifics when we started.

Tonight we will being the second book in The Expanse series, Caliban's War (Corey).   It seems to have gotten good reviews, so we'll see where it takes things from Leviathan's Wake.

I find this maddening! I just finished Juliet Marillier's The Harp of Kings, the first in her 'Warrior Bards' sequence. Warrior Bards--what's not to like? Also, I imprinted hard on her Sevenwaters trilogy when I was a teenager. But it had a similar problem, and I really dislike books where the characters are dense as to the plot of their own stories.

[mamselle]

But that is sort of true-to-life.

People who are full of themselves are usually tone-deaf, clueless, and egocentric. They don't pick up nuance and they don't learn interpretive logic.

Rather like a certain president I can think of at the moment...

M.

[ergative]

But that is sort of true-to-life.

People who are full of themselves are usually tone-deaf, clueless, and egocentric. They don't pick up nuance and they don't learn interpretive logic.

Rather like a certain president I can think of at the moment...

M.

Remember, you're talking to someone whose favorite genre involves dinosaur wizards flying spaceships. I tend to prefer my fiction untrue to life; an improvement on the original, if you will.

[apl68]

Saints and Strangers, by George F. Willison
Mayflower Lives, by Martyn Whittock
Plymouth Adventure, by Ernest Gebler

Three different ways of looking at the same story.  Willison's classic follows the settlers of the Plymouth Colony from the origins of the sect that founded the colony to its eventual absorption by Massachusetts in the late 1600s.  They were a blend of idealists hoping to build their idea of an ideal society in the New World and economic migrants hoping to gain a more prosperous life.  The whole venture was seriously underfunded from the start, had a lot of hard luck, and never really overcame that.  Then again, it's truly remarkable that the initial settlement survived at all.  Along the way Willison chronicles constant quarreling with rival interloping settlements, with the exploitative businessmen who bankrolled the project, with the natives, and with each other.  The idealists among them were forced into what must have been some very tough compromises with their principles. 

Whittock's much more recent history--published only last year--tells the story of Plymouth through the lives of several of those who were there.  They include such standard, familiar figures as William Bradford, Miles Standish, John and Priscilla Alden, and Squanto (Tisquantum).  There are also some less familiar stories--such as the four indentured children who turn out not to have been orphans.  They were packed off on the one-way voyage across the Atlantic in a shocking act of vindictiveness stemming from a dysfunctional family situation.  The different stories, taken together, do a lot to illuminate the Plymouth story.

Gebler's historical novel (Made into a 1952 Technicolor spectacular that I saw some years ago--now I'm curious to see it again) is a meticulously-researched fictionalization that employs a novelist's liberty to speculate to try to bring the story alive.  I tend in principle to dislike subjecting real historical actors, who are no longer around to defend themselves, to this level of speculation about their personalities, actions, and motives.  For what it is, though, it's very well done.  It at least tries hard to be plausible, and the author clearly knows and respects what could be known of the true story.  Historical novels very often feature major characters with anachronistically modern viewpoints in conflict with others who have more period-accurate attitudes, or caricatures of the same.  Generally the anachronistic "moderns" are made out to be the heroes.  Here it's the other way around--the character who's made to represent the modern inability to comprehend the the idealism of the Pilgrim Fathers comes across looking rather ignoble compared to their flawed but noble humanity.

All of these books have a great deal that fits into the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category.  If any one of several improbable things had not happened, it's unlikely the Mayflower settlers would have made it.  It's no wonder some of the hardy survivors believed that they had been preserved by divine providence.

[mamselle]

I expect you'll re-read Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish" next.

(I know where one of their descendants' gravestones is sort-of 'hidden in plain sight'...)

;--}

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

Hmm, I never reported on December:

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin: This was a really great sequel to Children of Time. It was compelling from the start, beautifully written, and full of really exciting changes of pace and tone (including an interlude clearly inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, one of my favourite films). The introduction of cephalopods was fantastic, and seemed like a clear nod to Peter Godfrey-Smith's excellent Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which makes the point (among others) that cephalopods are about as close as we're likely to come to intelligent aliens. Such great execution!

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Ironclads: A pretty compelling novella set in a dystopian corporate future. One part Heart of Darkness, one part something-I've-forgotten (J.G. Ballard, maybe?) two parts not-so-subtle satire. I found myself wanting to know more about this world and how it got that way, but I also think that a novella is about as much of it as you'd want, so that it's over before it strays into more boring cookie-cutter territory.

Steve Brusatte - The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: I'm glad I finally made it to this one! Thank you, fora! It was an easy, engaging read, and it was great to get a bit of an update on my dino-knowledge before my own egg hatches. I think I would have liked a little less emphasis on Tyrannosaurids, however, especially when it came to size comparisons and talking about the largest predators, etc. It's not that I'm not into that--on the contrary!--but that web is a lot more tangled than I expected, and kind of confusing since there's a lot of contrary information out there. Plus, spinosaurs didn't even rate a mention (there's just one instance of 'spinosaurids' early on), even though it seems pretty clear they were much larger than Tyrannosaurs. I guess because they were probably semi-aquatic? Shrug. I also didn't really dig the fictionalized interludes (the autobiographical interludes, by contrast, were great!). But all the same, it was such a fun read, and educational, too!

Stephanie Kelton - The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory: I've been hearing a lot about MMT, so figured I'd pick this up. It's clear and accessible, and does a good job of driving its main points home over and over (which is what you need in a popular work). I think it gave me a decent idea of what MMT is all about, although it was surprising to learn that so many questions I've had about economics seem not to have really registered for so long. It was nice to have some answers, although I was left with some fairly basic questions which I'd have liked to see answered (e.g. why would anyone abandon their monetary sovereignty to form a currency union?), and which may, I suppose, hint at some important lacunae. I can guess at the outlines of answers, but I'd have liked to see them tackled. Weirdly, leaving out those basics made it feel a bit dumbed-down for my taste. Also: I'm afraid it's not terribly well-written. It's passable and fine, and certainly not terribad, but there are a ton of weird constructions in there, and sections where meaning is obscured.

Bernard Cornwell - War Lord: I saved this one for when I was done with my classes, since it's the last in the series. I cried, of course, because it's the end of a series I've loved for sixteen years. There's no question that Cornwell does this thing better than anyone, and I hope this isn't his last effort at this type of historical fiction. This was a fitting end to the series, a glorious return to properly historical fiction, anchored with some real-life set-piece battles. It was really good--frankly, one of the best in years--and I was swept along for the duration, even though Uhtred is abominably old by the end. (I forgive it its small cinematic foibles!) The myriad allusions to Beowulf were both fun, and reassuring (in view of Uhtred's advanced years). I look forward to finally having the chance to read all of these novels in a row sometime in the near future, without having to wait a year between installments!



At 43 books in 2020, this looks like my smallest haul of pleasure-reading since I started keeping track back in... 2015 or so? I guess, partly, I was busy writing stuff up, and didn't really stumble upon a really long and compelling series which could help me rack up the numbers.

[apl68]

Steve Brusatte - The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: I'm glad I finally made it to this one! Thank you, fora! It was an easy, engaging read, and it was great to get a bit of an update on my dino-knowledge before my own egg hatches. I think I would have liked a little less emphasis on Tyrannosaurids, however, especially when it came to size comparisons and talking about the largest predators, etc. It's not that I'm not into that--on the contrary!--but that web is a lot more tangled than I expected, and kind of confusing since there's a lot of contrary information out there. Plus, spinosaurs didn't even rate a mention (there's just one instance of 'spinosaurids' early on), even though it seems pretty clear they were much larger than Tyrannosaurs. I guess because they were probably semi-aquatic? Shrug. I also didn't really dig the fictionalized interludes (the autobiographical interludes, by contrast, were great!). But all the same, it was such a fun read, and educational, too!

That was a fascinating book.  I'm going to have to try to re-read it some time this year.

[nebo113]

Carl Hiaasen's Squeeze Me.  Location is an estate in Florida referred to as Casa Bellicosa, owned by the Mastodon and his willowy wife Mockingbird.

Light reading.....and as with all Hiaasen, amusing.  Biting.  Satirical.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Don Quixote by Cervantes, English translation by Edith Grossman
Thought I'd give this great novel a read!

[FishProf]

Just finished Brace New World by Aldous Huxley.  Disturbingly prescient.

Now I'm reading The Lost Continent - Travels in Small Town America by Bill Bryson.  Also, disturbingly prescient.

[Langue_doc]

Er, um, don't you mean Brave New World?

I first read it when I was an undergrad, and remember staying up most of the night because I found it so engrossing.

[ergative]

Er, um, don't you mean Brave New World?

I first read it when I was an undergrad, and remember staying up most of the night because I found it so engrossing.

I remember loving that book when I was in high school, but I haven't read it since. I still remember the puzzling over the use of 'pneumatic' as a descriptor of a woman's body and resorting to asking my mother to explain it to me. I also remember being unconvinced by that particular metaphor, and thinking that the author was trying too hard to be clever in his use of language.

I'm adopting Parasaurolophus's practice of reporting monthly. Here's January's reads:

The Provincial Lady Goes Further and The Provincial Lady in America, by E. M. Delafield. These are sequels in the Diary of a Provincial Lady series, and they are all delightful. It's the form of a diary kept by a 1920s-1930s era English woman, who has to run a country house with servants and so on, perpetually strapped for cash, with rambunctious children and snotty neighbours, and all sorts of domestic and village-life responsibilities that harass her and frustrate her, and she reports on them to her diary with a wonderful snarky wit.  In the later books she gets a bit of money and moves to London to write, and eventually even goes on book tour in America, but she's constantly suffering from imposture syndrome and the need to be polite to people she doesn't like. It's all very fluffy and fun and charming.

The Bone Ships, by R. J. Barker. This is a great secondary world fantasy book about a disgraced sailor in the disgraced sailors' navy, who meets a new captain who strips his ship from him and then gives him lessons in leadership and strength of purpose as she takes his disgraced ship and turns around the sailors and takes them on a mission. The worldbuilding and politics are great, but it's really the sort of grudging mentorship relationship that made this book work for me.

Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, by Ruby Ferguson. This is a book written and set in 1930s-era Scotland, in which a group of American tourists tour a big old Scottish house and learn all about the glory days of the last family to have lived there, with the little girl growing up, being presented at court, marrying, having children, and living this golden girlhood that eventually morphed into something less and less golden as the strictures of Victorian womanhood constrained her life. Structurally I could see what was being done, but the goldenness of the girlhood was much too tiresome and twee, and the disillusionment as she discovers the constraints of Victorian womanhood were so predictable that they were boring; and the final twist that unites the past and the present narrative was also predictably boring. I was left utterly cold.

The Harp of Kings, by Juliet Marillier. This was fine. I loved Marillier's original Sevenwaters trilogy when I was a teenager, and I adored Foxmask, but everything else she's ever written has been some variant on 'eh, it was fine'. This, too--eh, it was fine. I rather enjoyed the twist that the young people who are trained as warriers must show their worth by pretending not to be warriors, because refraining from defending yourself when you are quite capable of doing so takes its own kind of strength. But the final reveal was perfectly obviously clear from the clues we'd seen along the way, so needing to have our heroine sit down and get someone to lay it all out for her just made her seem slow and stupid.

The Lefthanded Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix. I picked this up because of its outstanding title, but it was a real disappointment. Nix is trying to pull a Jo Walton here: He's set his story in the 1980s and peppering all the settings with specific details about books and authors from the era, in what I can only assume is a nostalgic paean to his youth. The problem, though, is that the book is clearly a YA story: It's about a teenager looking for her father, and the plotting, dialogue, and characterization have the sort of straightforward simplicity that are characteristic of many YA novels. (Not all! The Chaos Walking series avoided it, and Frances Hardinge is incapable of simplicity.) But teenage readers are not going to have the nostalgia for the 1980s he's trying to evoke, and adult readers (like myself) are going to find the shallowness of the story tedious. I didn't finish it.

Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo. This was great! It's about a girl who can see ghosts, and on the strength of this ability she's been inducted into a secret society of magical policemen who keep watch over all the other secret societies based around the Yale campus. While she's there, things go very badly wrong, and she has to figure out which magical societies have been engaging in which magical nefariousnesses, pulling together a wonderfully unwilling rag-tag team to help solve crime. This is one of the only books I've read that successfully manages to skip around from time period to time period ('last winter', 'last fall', 'this spring', 'last summer') without interrupting with the flow of the narrative, because every time the time period shifts backward, it's to give us a vital piece of information that informs what's happening later.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt: This was lots of fun. She writes very engrossingly, and it was very reassuring to remind ourselves that a particularly horrible character was going to end up dead (not a spoiler here--we learn he's doomed in the first sentence). It was a particularly great illustration of the academic cult of personality that can spring up around a particularly charismatic professor, who seems so smart to the teenage students who revere him, but whose 'wisdom' is complete bullshit when you look at it.

The Vela: Salvation, published on Serial Box. I really loved the first season of The Vela when I listened to it last year, but this was very disappointing, I think because the writing team changed completely. Instead of Becky Chambers and Yoon-ha Lee and S L Huang and Rivers Solomon, it was a bunch of people I'd never heard of, and the change in quality showed. Lots of plot holes, big ol' deus ex machina, none of the complexity of motivation and loyalty that made the first season so satisfying. Meh.

Planetfall, by Emma Newman: This was great! It's about a religious cult that follows a cult leader to establish a colony on another planet, but then the cult leader disappears and they all decide that she's gone to commune with God in 'God's City'--a mountain-sized aggregate of alien tentacles and mucus that they build their colony next to and occasionally go spelunking in. So the colony is happily waiting for their leader to return, but in fact the situation is not as they believe it is, because our POV character who knows what is actually what happens to be engaged in shenanigans, and things develop in very excellent ways that culminate in a wonderful one-two punch at the ending. My only criticism is that I wanted some more spelunking in the mucus city.

Truthwitch, by Susan Dennard. This was fine. It was a very standard kind of secondary world fantasy, with some great female friendships and a nice magic system and some carefully thought out politics and a nice map and history and everything, but it didn't really go beyond my baseline expectations of competent fantasy. I'd probably bring its sequels on an airplane, because it's fun and undemanding and doesn't seem likely to hurt or challenge me in any way (unlike, say, Planetfall or Ninth House, or the first season of The Vela, which get real dark). But I was left a little unsatisfied when I was done reading it.

[FishProf]

Just finished Brace New World by Aldous Huxley.  Disturbingly prescient.

The story of a young girl tormented by misaligned teeth, and her obese friend who can't keep his pants up....

[Langue_doc]

Not sure if this is the right place for an obit, but here is Sharon Kay Penman's: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/books/sharon-kay-penman-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

I didn't realize that she was a NYC/NJ girl, considering the topics and language of her novels. I think it's time for me to reread "The Sunne in Splendour".

[Parasaurolophus]

January:

Chris Beckett - Dark Eden: This was great! Space colony with two twists: (1) it was founded by just two people, one male, one female, with no backup embryos or anything, and (2) it's on a planet with no sun. It's actually quite reminiscent of Riddley Walker, in terms of the narrative and plot (not so much the language; lots of people have mentioned the language in their reviews, but it's really nothing remarkable, whereas Riddley Walker's language...). The world-design was really good and imaginative, too, IMO. I quite enjoyed the alien biology. And the parallels to the Adam and Eve story are fun, too. I can't wait to finally get the next one, which should arrive any day now!

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold: This was pretty good. It's a good (and very ambitious) first novel, but starts out pretty slow and only really gets going 100 or so pages in. It's a clever attempt at high fantasy, although it smacks of video gamery at times and the combat and armour are kind of nonsensical. I'm also not really a fan of steampunk and steampunkery. But it's enjoyable enough that I'll pick up the next instalment at some point, and I'll enjoy that, too. Not a patch on his later work, but we all have to start somewhere!

Robert J. Sawyer - Calculating God: I tried reading Hominids years ago and gave up because of the piss-poor rendering of a French Canadian character and his use of both French and English. This was much more palatable. Full of CanCon, which is nice, and surprisingly compelling for a book that's essentially just a dialogue between a theist alien who's found proof of God in the fossil record, and an atheist paleontologist. I have to say, however, that those conversations were cringeworthy, and would have benefitted from a better background in the philosophy of science. I suppose that makes the book truer to life, but the art suffered for it. Even so, however, it was a fun read, and I'll try him again in the near future. I'm not sure about the last act, however.