What else are you reading - May 2022

[Rob, Roberator]

May is upon us. What other books are reading this month?

[Chris K.]

I'm reading Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society. It's a very fast read so far. Not great, but a lot of fun.

I'm also reading Vivid Tomorrows: On Science Fiction and Hollywood by David Brin. Pretty interesting.

[Ian (RebelGeek)]

I'm going to listen to a couple Marvel Doctor Strange audiobooks,
The Fireman by Joe Hill,
The Dead Djinn Universe short stuff,
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman,
The Rats by James Herbert.

[Brad]

I’m trying to read The Path of Daggers (book 8 of The Wheel of Time) again. I’m 6 pages in and I’ve seen about 50 different names already. Robert Jordan really liked to be as confusing as possible by completely overwhelming with names and terms didn’t he?

[Rick]

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is on deck and I think I'll do Harrison's Viriconium too. Reading a few comics since I finally got the iPad repaired. Death of Doctor Strange was last night.

[John (Taloni)]

Read a medical-related book recently, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. I read a lot of these books following Jason Fung's books The Obesity Code and The Diabetes Code which greatly improved my life. There's always something more you could learn that can help.

Bernstein is a Type 1 diabetic who found he was being given lousy advice about his condition and researched ways to improve it. He succeeded, but found such resistance from the medical bureaucracy that he went to medical school in his 40s to get the MD he needed to be taken seriously.

This book is more geared towards Type 1 than Type 2 diabetics. There is a wealth of information, but I could only use a small portion of it. The most puzzling part is that he examines the same evidence that Dr. Fung did and came to advice contrary to Dr. Fung, advice I followed in the past and found counterproductive. Anyhoo, not to be coy, Bernstein says eat six times a day to keep insulin surge down. Dr. Fung concluded the exact opposite and said to fast. It's intermittent fasting that put my diabetes into remission. Well, at least they both agree on restricting carbs.

I found Dr. Bernstein a bit full of himself. Well, he earned it, but after his epic tale of personal transformation, he may have gotten to the point where he just thinks everything he concludes is correct. And to be fair his record is far better than the medical establishment. Anyhoo, one example. Bernstein is talking about his physical therapy regimen which is, briefly, resistance training to exhaustion, short rest, continue on anaerobic. At one point he goes on a run with some other doctors at a conference and outdistances them all. They are regular runners, he is not. Bernstein concludes his exercise regimen is superior. I was a runner and noticed that short, skinny people do distance running best. Bernstein's growth was stunted by diabetes and he is short and skinny. I conclude it's his body type and not his training regimen.

One of the oddities of the weight / diabetes self help books is their different conclusions. Dr. Fung can point to an overwhelming success rate using intermittent fasting. It's literally hundreds of thousands of people when you consider the indirect reach (books) along with the direct (his clinic.) I've experienced the benefits myself. So I find other books may have interesting information, but I'll stick on the Fung plan.

[John (Taloni)]

Also read the latest St. Mary's time travel book, A Catalogue of Catastrophe. It's a bit of a departure from previous books as Max is now working with bounty hunters getting time-escapees out of the timeline.

There's some shenanigans as well regarding the time travel. It's not just "go to past, something bad happens, recover" of other books.

Overall enjoyable, but a little difficult to follow. TBH I didn't recall exactly where Max was at the end of the previous book and took a while to reorient.

There's a bangup ending, which made me both laugh with and laugh at the characters. (view spoiler)[Max doesn't do anything for the ending, just sits there and observe events she's set in motion. (hide spoiler)]

They address a big bugaboo that's been hanging over the initial premise, which is that history heals and if you try to mess with it you get hurt. So why does St. Mary's or the Time Police have to stop people from messing with the timeline? There's an interesting answer coming. The book also makes reference to a previous short story and ties that into the explanation. Nicely done.

Anyhoo, the premise is running a bit thin, and yet there I am preordering the book. Thirteen books and multiple shorts...yep, just gimme more.

[Colin]

Getting super frustrated at the lack of reading I’m getting through this year. New job, new routines and I’m just not finding the time. 😢

It took me fully two months to get through Quantum of Nightmares: Book 2 of the New Management, a series set in the world of the Laundry Files and I didn’t even enjoy it that much. I couldn’t keep any of the characters and their super-powered abilities straight in my head. Not sure if they were under-developed or if my piecemeal reading just broke the flow of the story. At the end I had no emotional attachment to any of them so didn’t really care whether the big bad of the story was vanquished or not.

Moving on to Amongst Our Weapons which I already know will be populated with characters that I do give a damn about.

(And also making decent progress through the audiobook for Machinehood.)

[David]

Just finished all the Dead Djinn stuff. Burned through it quite quickly. Looking forward to following this series.

Now I'm reading Jack in the Green from the Hunt for Jack Reacher, spin-off series.
Otherwise, it's what books on my Libby hold list come available soonest. Looks like I may get to finally read The Fallen Star by Claudia Gray.

Plus I want to complete the Hugo short stories and novella finalists.

[John (Taloni)]

I read the book of the month, Machinehood, and found it so thoroughly depressing that I think I'll leave the monthly discussion threads to those who enjoyed it more.

The unremitting dystopia got on my nerves. Then there's the lack of a regular plot. Events seemed to exist just to allow characters to pontificate on philosophy. Then there's (view spoiler)[ two major instances of unfired Chekov's gun: The MC never goes to Maghreb, and we never meet a sentient AI. (hide spoiler)]

I hope other people have a better time reading. It's certainly well reviewed and from a respected author. But this one is not for me.

[Silvana]

April was dismal in terms of books finished. Anyway, now I am reading some horror Valley of Terror and might read Project Hail Mary near the end of the month. I hope I could squeeze Machinehood in between.

[Joseph]

Started Swordsmen from the Stars, a collection of three early (1950s) sword & planet adventure stories by Poul Anderson.

[Ian (RebelGeek)]

The audiobook for Project Hail Mary is excellent! There is a sound component to the story that is included.

[Sheila Jean]

Reading the final Chorus of Dragons book, The Discord of Gods by Jenn Lyons, and listening to Seasonal Fears bySeanan McGuire.

[John (Nevets)]

Ian (RebelGeek) wrote: "The audiobook for Project Hail Mary is excellent! There is a sound component to the story that is included."

Agreed. It surprised me at first, but I really liked it. I think it added to my enjoyment of the story overall. And I liked the story as written as well.

[Rick]

got sidetracked from the Harrison I listed above into Paul McAuley's Into Everywhere which is a lot of fun. He's an author that can be slower paced, but this is moving pretty well.

Oddly, it's a little like Harrison's Nova Swing in that one of the two story threads follows someone affected by alien artifacts and who now has... something... sharing her mind. The something doesn't really play an active role (yet), but it's there... and is it influencing Lisa (the protagonist)? Maybe....

[John (Taloni)]

Read Kaiju Preservation Society and found it an excellent pop-sf read. The beginning is hilarious as is the "explanation" of how the Kaiju work. It's about on the level of the Austin Powers bit where the scientists says about time travel, "don't think about it too much."

I'm a bit surprised Trike didn't love it. The MC may as well be Trike, all we need is some discussion of how warp engines turn SF into Fantasy.

Pacing, good, reveals well placed. Some of the action is a little forced. Actually, there's not much in the way of plot until the 3/4 mark when it starts to come together. Didn't matter to me, there was too much fun stuff going on to worry.

I was thinking that this was refreshingly free of politics for a Scalzi story, but nope, he had to get his slams in at the end. Welp, it's not like Scalzi is undercover about his beliefs. His points about business and corruption in government contracting seemed dead on to me.

Villain was a little weak and cardboard cutout, but made a decent vehicle for the story and its setup points. Certainly orders of magnitude better than "somehow, Palpatine returned."

So in conclusion a fun, silly SF story about Kaiju, with enough drama to hold it together. I would read a sequel in a heartbeat.

[Joseph]

Reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven for the first time in many, many years.

[John (Nevets)]

So just finished listening to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City today. And I dug it big time. Now I’m also very predisposed to liking this sort of book, being a Mechanical Engineer by degree, and liking realistic fantasy. I can also totally see how this would not be everyone’s thing. There is very little character development in this, and the main POV character is a bit of an a$$. But for me it worked. The ending was a bit weak, but you sort of knew it had to end something like that as well. While I haven’t read it in 30+ years it sort of reminds me of a grown up version of the book I absolutely loved as a kid.

[Joseph]

John (Nevets) wrote: "There is very little character development in this, and the main POV character is a bit of an a$$...."

That seems kind of applicable to every K.J. Parker novel I've read. This is not a criticism! And based on what you say there, I think you'd like just about any of his novels.

[Joseph]

Since it was May the Fourth last week, I started Star Wars: The High Republic: Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule, the first of the High Republic novels (set a couple hundred years before the events of the movies).

[Ian (RebelGeek)]

Joseph wrote: "Since it was May the Fourth last week, I started Star Wars: The High Republic: Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule, the first of the High Republic novels (set a coup..."

I enjoyed it, but probably not as much as I would if I was familiar with the characters. I also read the 1st bunch of the comics. I wish I had done that 1st for the imagination aid.

[Ruth]

I haven’t been reading nearly as much as normal this month because of problems with my vision, but I’ve now seen the optician and got some new contact lenses which will hopefully help.

In the meantime, I’ve finished the audiobook of She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan which was an excellent epic historical fantasy. My new audiobook is non-fiction: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz.

Getting stuck back into eyeball reading, I’ve picked up from the library a couple of Rivers of London graphic novels, starting with Rivers of London: Body Work, #1 and I’ve also recently started The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu.

And I’m joining in the Dracula Daily read along with rest of the internet. (I posted about this in Quick Burns but ICYMI here’s a link to an article about it: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/drac...)

[Phillip]

I'm prepping for Jurassic World Dominion. I recently read The Lost World and now will go backward to Jurassic Park for a reread. After that, I guess I have to watch all five movies.

[Oaken]

Amor Towles “The Lincoln Highway”. I loved his “A Gentleman in Moscow” from a few years back.

[[deleted user]]

Also reading along with Dracula Daily thanks to Ruth's mention in quick burns. It's not something I've never really been interested to read but this breaks it down enough to make it easy.

Almost finished Redwall with my son and I think I've finally got him to agree to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings next.

And I think I'm going to kick off Wheel of Time. I enjoyed the first season of the TV show so it seems like a good time to finally dive in.

[Brad]

I’m 100 pages into The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan and not a single thing has happened. How did this even get published? This is maybe the worst thing I’ve ever read.

[Ruth]

Malcolm wrote: "Also reading along with Dracula Daily thanks to Ruth's mention in quick burns. It's not something I've never really been interested to read but this breaks it down enough to make it easy.
.."

Excellent… *steeples fingers* welcome to Transylvania…

[Oaken]

Re: Robert Jordan. I’ve wondered the same about him. He is apparently very polarizing. People live his work or they hate it.

[Brad]

I’ve thought his stuff up to this book was very middling but everyone talks about how amazing it gets so I keep giving it a shot (especially with Sanderson finishing it), but it just gets worse the more I read.

[Ruth]

Oaken wrote: "Re: Robert Jordan. I’ve wondered the same about him. He is apparently very polarizing. People live his work or they hate it."

I read the first few books of Wheel of Time and found it… fine? Enjoyed the books I read but not enough to want to read another ten books in the series.

[Gordon]

Just read (audible) “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado-Perez. Non-fiction, but really enlightening to me. Had heard of it before, but it does leave me staggered at some of the current systems in place with regard to health, medicine and product design. As an engineer, I would have looked at making something to suit the average human, without realising it was for the average man.

So many degree/college courses could make good use of this.

Apologies if this seems like mansplaining.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

I started reading the Science-Fiction classic


Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

I finished the excellent "weird" short story collection


The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

and I started reading the critically acclaimed science-fiction collection


The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

[John (Taloni)]

Read Lockdown Tales by Neal Asher. Worthwhile reading for Polity fans, but may be difficult to follow for others. It's six novellas shoved together to make one book. All were written during Covid lockdown during which time Neal apparently had trouble concentrating on full length books. (He wrote one during that period, Jack Four, which I found mostly incoherent.)

Some of the novellas have little point beyond painting a backdrop to the overall Polity universe. One seemed to exist solely to put the character into a specific pose by the end of the story. Otherwise interesting story but a bizarre ending.

It's amusing to see these essentially non-edited stories. Asher's books are usually very tight with hardly any typos. This book was awash with them. He also could have used someone to tell him, "Hey, these stories need to have a point."

It also seems Asher has abandoned the Polity as he tells the story of its dissolution in the first novella. That's too bad, I felt there were plenty more tales he could have told.

[Ian (RebelGeek)]

Finished The Fireman (5 Stars!)
Starting Salvage by Duncan Ralston today.

[Stephen]

Finished the latest Rivers of London. Now on to the BOM Machinehood in audio, Also reading winner of SPFBO 7 Reign & Ruin which squeaked by my personal favorite Legacy of the Brightwash for the win.

[Brad]

I’ve been having a hard time paying attention to books lately so I started reading If It Bleeds by Stephen King. I can always count on Stephen King to hold my attention and this book is no exception.

[Brad]

It’s pretty funny how characters in the first story in this book are discovering things on the internet in 2008 as though they were revolutionary at the time. Someone discovers a stock ticker app on iPhone and acts as though there weren’t dozens of ways to see a stock ticker before that. Someone finds a movie previews website as though Apple hadn’t been purveying high quality movie trailers online for at least a decade prior. It seems kind of goofy, almost like it was written by a zoomer and not a boomer.

[Colin]

Making slow progress through Amongst Our Weapons but in the meantime have finished the audiobooks for both Machinehood and Dead Beat.

Thought that Dead Beat was among the strongest of the Dresden books I’ve read so far, returning to them after a 3 year gap. A good, self contained story and a few nuggets for the bigger story arc of the series. I’ll try not to leave it so long until the next one.

[Ian (RebelGeek)]

I loved all the Dresden books! I’m excited to read the short story in Heroic Hearts!

[Calvey]

Finally started The Chronicles of St. Mary's Series #1-6, finished book 1 and moving on to #2. Bummed my library doesn’t have any more in series.

[John (Taloni)]

^ Not sure where you live, but in the US any big city library will give you a card for living in the state. I don't think you would even have to go in. I get lots from Los Angeles Public Library ebooks even tho I don't live in the city.

[Calvey]

I’m in SE Florida about an hour fromMiami. I should check again, i have county reciprocal that I have to pay $100 but maybe I should check MIA. Thanks for reminder!

[Seth]

Calvey wrote: "I’m in SE Florida about an hour fromMiami. I should check again, i have county reciprocal that I have to pay $100 but maybe I should check MIA. Thanks for reminder!"

You could always ask for interlibrary loan of physical books too, if you don't mind it in paper.

[Ruth]

Finished the next stage of my full Discworld read, Mort. This book is where Pratchett really hits his stride.
Started the heist story Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li, all about a group of young Chinese-Americans who are recruited to steal back looted Chinese artefacts from western museums.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

I finished the pulp-era Science-Fiction tale


Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown
Rating: 3 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Joseph]

Reading Guy Gavriel Kay's brand new one, All the Seas of the World.

[Joseph]

Finished All the Seas of the World, which was deeply good, and started Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which I've inexplicably never read before.

[Joseph]

Started Volkhavaar by Tanith Lee.