What have you been reading this June?

[[deleted user]]

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson was really disappointing. I look forward to KSR's novels as interesting Hard SF speculation. This has his usual Hard SF in the background, but the plot involving a murder at a Chinese moonbase and a Chinese political dissident on the run bounces aimlessly from Moon to Earth to Moon to Earth. The many competing Chinese factions vying for "dynastic succession" are never explained, and the plot became incomprehensible. KSR's going for some sort of "birth of a new economic order," but I was mostly just bored.

[Clare]

Andrea wrote: "My library finally got a copy and I couldn't ignore my compulsion to finish a series, so here I am reading Dragon's Code by Gigi McCaffrey. Already 100 pages in an..."

Thanks for the info... I haven't seen anything by this author, maybe she should be working on her own material and not Anne's for now. We all have to put in our hours of training, but it seems a shame to use the Pern canon that way.
Agreed that runnerbeasts are horses. Herdbeasts are cattle and sheep.

[Clare]

I just finished More Than a Game

A Russian RPG - lit. See my review. Okay read, but not much to keep me reading the series.

[Andrea]

Finished reading The Unicorn Dilemma, so far it's an ok series but not a great one. I'll be starting on Song of the Wanderer by Bruce Coville next. I hadn't actually planned to read this series since the last book, while published, is nearly impossible to find. However I did find it on OpenLibrary, so while I'll have to struggle through some epic typos (the epubs are generated by scanned images) for a middle grade book that's tolerable since they aren't that hard to figure out if a bit garbled.

I also finished The Lore of the Unicorn, which I started back in March. As someone pointed out it's pretty dry and not the easiest thing to sit down and read big chunks at a time, but was still an interesting exploration of the unicorn legend. To take it's place, I found my library had The Unicorn: A Mythological Investigation by Robert Brown which was actually referenced in The Lore of the Unicorn. The library even had the 1881 edition, which makes it kind of exciting to be reading a nearly 150 year old book. I expect it to be pretty dense too but it's 1/3rd the length of Lore so I should get through it quite a bit faster. Either one of those will fill in the BINGO slot for pre-1950.

Finally on my eReader I'll be reading The Unicorn Thief by R.R. Russell which will complete one of the series I started this year.

Oh...and I'm starting the Sandman series with Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes - 30th Anniversary Edition by Neil Gaiman. I was checking out the new books my library had picked up recently I saw this 30th anniversary edition and figured it was finally time to get around to this famous series. Apparently I also like to read the same things as Patrick Rothfuss, he does an intro for this one, as well as for The Last Unicorn :)

[Tony]

I finished Dead Energy, which reads more like a geopolitical thriller than a science fiction novel. I'm about to start Cold Energy, which is the second book in The Alex Cave Series

[Mary]

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

[Barbara]

Audrey wrote: "I had no idea Never Let Me Go was a movie. How did that turn out?
."

The movie follows the book fairly closely. I find them both not satisfying in that neither addresses the morality of creating people for the sole purpose of being organ donors; and the donors never question their fate.

As Noor mentions, the movie has good acting. 😊🥀⭐

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

G33z3r wrote: "Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson was really disappointing. I look forward to KSR's novels as interesting Hard SF speculation. This has his usual Hard SF in the backgro..."

KSR reminds me of Tom Clancy, who started off as a writer of technothrillers but morphed over time into a verbose egotistical blowhard who spent 90% of his pages writing about his overly simplistic political ideas.