The Sword and Laser discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
What Else Are You Reading?
>
What else are you reading - June 2023
message 1:
by
Rob, Roberator
(new)
Jun 01, 2023 04:56AM
Mod
reply
|
flag
Just finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Not an SFF book but definitely one I’d recommend: a modernised retelling of David Copperfield set in the midst of the opioid crisis in Appalachia.I’m now starting The Confession by Jessie Burton.
Also starting Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb as my Realm of the Elderlings re-read continues.
Currently:Notes from the Burning Age
The First Covenant
On deck:
The Mimicking of Known Successes
The Dauntless
I finished The Blue Sword, a YA fantasy from the 80s. I had started to read it years ago to my daughter, but she bounced. Recently I saw that Robin McKinley won the "Grand Master Nebula", so I thought I'd give it another shot. It was pretty good for what it was. Something to be aware of: a strong "white savior" vibe. I don't have a big problem with that, as some incredible works such as Laurence of Arabia and Dune have a similar theme, but something to be aware of for sure.Next up, Witch King.
I finished 
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Rating: 5 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Timothy wrote: "LOTR for grown-ups...https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..."
I suspect many people in this group might take exception to the implication that LOTR is not for grown-ups...
An embarassment of riches! Gail Carriger's Divinity 36 just got bought by LAPL and apparently I was in the first group of recommenders because I got it. Am currently reading Half Way Home again in advance of the anthology, and also have Piper Drake's Wings Once Cursed & Bound. Fortunately these are all three week loans!And then there's the three books I finished recently...more on that later today. Probably. If I don't free-associate off into a reading froth.
I just finished reading Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor and WOW, that was a beautiful book. Absolutely stunning. I was so in love with the characters and the setting and the whole complicated fascination of it all. I highly recommend it.Next up is Ann Leckie’s Translation State. Very excited to get started on this one…but I think I need to let my mind wander in Strange for a little longer right now.
Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth wrote: "Next up is Ann Leckie’s Translation State. Very excited to get started on this one…."I have that one lined up to read next on audiobook. I’m excited to return to the imperial Radch universe.
Soooo recent books. Read three within the last few weeks.First up: Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra. I've been finding the Flandry books curiously unappealing. Of the seven "Polesotechnic League" books I enjoyed the first three, of the "Merchant Kings" era even tho I mostly loathed the character of Nicholas Van Rijn. Good space adventure, libertarian ethos, I'm in.
Flandry, though...he is a career intelligence agent dedicated to slowing the decay of the Terran Empire. Not because it's great, but because everything else is worse, and Terra at least keeps the peace and promotes civilization. It's all very much Cold-War-US by way of Rome, with the lizard-race empire of Merseia standing in for Russia.
Flandry does things in a space context that are thinly veiled actual situations on Earth. Not quite a space James Bond but close. I know we did some repugnant things in opposition to governments that killed their own citizens by the millions or tens of millions. That's the realpolitik of the cold war. I just don't see the need to celebrate it in fiction.
This is the last of the books that I recommended to the LA Public Library so when they came in I felt duty bound to read even though the broad strokes became obvious two books back. Welp, I'm done now. No need ever to revisit.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, one of the big appeals of a Poul Anderson story is the attention he pays to astrophysics. His worlds are realistic, the aliens adapted to them. The science is on point. That's all here. It just wasn't enough.
Next up, Fenton Wood's latest, Hacking Galileo. I got his first book, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves, in a group sale some years back. That one was a Bradbury-style boy's tale set in an alternate Earth. The differences creeped on slowly as the boys went about setting up a pirate radio station. Pretty good novella.This latest is also an alternate Earth. It starts out in a far north suburb of LA, with some late-elementary-school hackers. They engage in a wide variety of early hacking. We're talking Wargames era stuff, with whistling phone access and the like. You aren't even sure it's an alt Earth until about a third of the way through when they make reference to stuff that you know never happened.
The main plot has to do with, natch, hacking the Galileo space probe. There's a Deep Dark Reason for doing that which I won't spoil. Orbital mechanics abounds, as do the methods for calculating orbits back then.
The adventure spans years, up to the end of high school. The book is a slow burn, and about 40% of the way in I started wondering, "when do we get to the main action?" Then a few other things happen and you realize you've been in it for a while. It builds and builds from there, to the point where I was practically screaming "yes, YES!" towards the end.
In some ways it's a cyberpunk dystopia as well, with heavy Libertarian leanings. The government exists mainly to be corrupt and heavyhanded. The book opens in the future where the narrator (not the MC) lives in a rural house and writes using an air-gapped laptop with glasses on phase while a movie runs on it as cover for his actions. The citizenry is on permanent lockdown, far too believable given the past few years. There's a reason for the extra surveillance he is under, but that's part of the story and only explained at the very end.
So if you want a cyberpunk Libertarian dystopia with heavy hacking and a strong anti-government message along with loads of orbital mechanics, this is your book. Narrow focus but if that's what you want, this book is red meat.
And thirdly, Before the Coffee Gets Cold. This one came in on a one-week loan while I was waiting for other books. Fast read at 200ish pages, I read it in three days.This one is literary SFF, with a cafe that allows time travel under very strict conditions. You can go back, but only to the same cafe and only while sitting in a specific seat, which is usually occupied by a mysterious figure. And, you can only stay as long as the coffee is warm.
Amusing setup, used for four vignettes of lit-style emphasis. Most are themes of family and relationships. One is a heartbreaking tale of a mother hoping to meet the child she knows she will not see to grow up.
Overall pretty great. It's translated from Japanese and sometimes shows it. Parts were odd, like when they referred to the temperature being 86 degrees, which a Fahrenheit user wouldn't do, but that's 30 degrees Celsius. Sentence structure can be a bit abrupt. The translation could be better. It detracts a little but not too much.
Anyhoo, good read (thanks Trike) and there's two sequels. I'll likely get to them eventually.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Parts were odd, like when they referred to the temperature being 86 degrees, which a Fahrenheit user wouldn't do, but that's 30 degrees Celsius."This makes me wonder if the translator was British, because that sounds perfectly normal to me. As with so many things here, we do like to mix things up, so whilst we predominantly use celsius, when we get one of our unusually hot days, we like to break out the farenheit. That was a rare occurrence of me not having to struggle to convert f to c to figure out how hot/cold it is, because you regularly see folk talking farenheit when it hits the 80s (we NEVER talk about farenheit for cold weather though - fun quirk of the English). I’m sure I’ve heard people saying 86 degrees here. I certainly wouldn’t have found that strange. What would strict farenheit users say?
Okay I looked up the translator, and found that he’s a guy called Geoffrey Trousselot and he’s Australian. Any of our Aussies care to tell us if that is a thing you guys say? (still struggling to think how else to communicate 86 degrees!)
Mod
I wouldn't find it unusual if someone mentioned the temp in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius.
I'd have a problem if they were talking Kelvin though 😉
Tassie Dave wrote: "I'm not sure what part you find unusual."I think it's just that someone would be specific to 86, rather than, say, 85 degrees. 30 C is a nice round number and 86 isn't. 86 wouldn't be weird to say when checking on the weather, but if the situation is someone describing a room as generically hot, I'd more readily say 85, or mid-80s than 86.
Finished the audiobook of Cranford which was a charming interlude in 19th century England.Now onto the audiobook of Translation State, the latest from Ann Leckie.
Finished Witch King, Martha Wells' latest. I really enjoyed it. She really likes writing strange, non-human protoganists!I'm reading River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile now; despite being non-fiction, it reads similar to some fantasy I've read recently!
Next SFF for me: I'll probably join the Ruths and read Translation State.
Ezekiel Boone. Found a "trilogy" about spiders! The Hatching was just the right mix and good story so...onward! Later.
Seth wrote: "Tassie Dave wrote: "I'm not sure what part you find unusual."I think it's just that someone would be specific to 86, rather than, say, 85 degrees. 30 C is a nice round number and 86 isn't. 86 wou..."
Okay, I guess that makes sense. I think being used to celsius, being specific seems normal. If someone wanted to know the temperature in fahrenheit, I’d say whatever the temperature was - I wouldn’t think to round up or down. For example, where I am is currently 69 degrees F which I had to look up and is apparently around 20 degrees C, so quite warm.
I also feel like the major advantage of fahrenheit is that it’s so specific, so if makes me sad to know you guys aren’t even taking advantage of the best thing about it!
As we use Celsius here, and I don't use a calculator to change that to Farenheit, I'm very non-specific when talking to my US counterparts. "It was 30 here. Uhm, that's like almost 90 for you guys."I use an incorrect-but-close-enough-for-horseshoes and weather forecasts: x 2 + 30 formula.
Don't know the context but I don't think C or F matter if you're talking casually that it's hot. If you were in a situation where it was hot but you didn't know the exact temp wouldnt you say something "Wow, it's hot, has to be at least 30" vs "It's 30"? In the same vein, I might say "Wow, it's hot, has to be at least 85" though I might also say "it's in the 80s" if talking more generally, i.e. about typical temps in July.
It its hot, I look up the temperature to see how hot it is. If it’s cold, I look up the temperature to see how cold it is. Sometimes I check to decide if it’s reasonable to be feeling hot or cold, or if I might be ill, so I will also check if the weather is so so. Basically, I just like to know. I liked to keep thermometers about in the past, and these days I mostly just ask google.When I want to convert c to f, google does that for me too. I have no concept of fahrenheit outside of the 80’s, so I couldn’t even guess, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to work that out. I just type something like 24 c to f and google does the rest.
Back to reading....I finished Clive Barker's first novel, the Faustian homage
The Damnation Game by Clive Barker
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading
The Wolf's Hour by Robert R. McCammon
Finished up Half Way Home by Hugh Howey. It's a dystopian YA adventure set on a Burroughs-Venus style planet. A mind-split AI starts destroying a colony and then stops partway through. The inhabitants were intended to live in tanks to the age of 30 while being trained for their colony roles; they have a rude awakening from their tanks at the age of 15, barely trained.Then it's bizarre AI instructions from the formerly killer intelligence, and if you don't follow, no food. So some escape into a forest of gigantic trees (the Venus aspect) and eventually a riff on Dune's sandworms.
Howey apparently wrote this partly in tribute to his gay uncle who was disinherited by Howey's grandfather. Howey wanted the MC to be gay, but have that be only one aspect of his life and not the main focus of the book. He succeeds - from my first read 8 or so years ago, I remembered the AI, the trees, various plot points, and not the MC's sexuality. There were some interesting "love triangle" bits where the MC is trying to reassure someone he isn't interested in the other guy's love interest - which is obviously true to the reader as the MC is interested in the guy and not the girl, but everyone else is oblivious.
Well anyway, fun book, short read, I read it in three days. Some great scenery. Easy borrow from a major library or get it at Amazon. As Silo takes off on Apple TV, have a look at this and other of Howey's non-Silo works.
To Shape a Dragon's Breath is really excellent. A dragon bonds with a young indigenous woman (named Anequs) in an alt-history, but still colonized, North America. Sent to a dragon school where she's expected to learn the skills necessary to control her dragon, Anequs finds that her presence (and even existence) has lit a match on a number of simmering cultural disputes between natives and colonizers, and within each group as well. It's a great world with cool steampunk/dragon-enabled technology, lots of chemistry-driven magic, and a main character who is earnest and intelligent. The pace of it is a lot like The Goblin Emperor, with lots of incidents, but without a central, propulsive plot-point, making this a nice slow read.
After blasting through the entire* John Carter of Mars series in about two weeks, I'm starting my vacation reading a couple days early -- this year it's Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate cycle, beginning with Dragon Wing.*These days, I skip "John Carter and the Giant of Mars", the first half of John Carter of Mars, because it was apparently ghost-written by his son, is canon-breaking, and is kind of terrible.
^ You're a better man than I am if you were ever able to get through Giant. I gave up after a few pages. Obviously not Burroughs.The Tarzan books are also fun to read. The first trilogy is done more seriously and the others either skirt or go whole hog into camp. I did love the "lost Italian outpost" one. They all have their charms.
I read a lot of Burroughs when I was younger -- John Carter was always my favorite, with Tarzan and Pellucidar jockeying for second place.When ERB, Inc., started rereleasing the Tarzan novels in nice hardcovers a few years back I started picking them up and have reread the first eight in the series (for the first time in something over 30 years) and was pleasantly surprised by how well they held up, assuming you're willing to accept certain ... unpleasant ethnic portrayals, as was the style at the time.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Death Gate Cycle. I'm about 60% done with Divinity 36. Very good so far.I just started (only 6%) Magic Claims. This is one of my favorite urban fantasy series.
Started a new non-fiction book: Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back which should be interesting, especially with the writers’ strike now ongoing.
I finished Translation State and loved it. Not quite to Imperial Radch level, but those books are special to me, but it’s not far off. I instantly love Qven, and I was really happy when (view spoiler)Next up is Witch King by Martha Wells, which I am liking muchly so far, even if it lacks the delightful and very strong voice that murderbot has.
I finished The Cartographers. I generally liked it - the writing, the magic concepts, the setting (who doesn't like the New York Public Library?) It was a little predictable (of course its a personal line between being excited "Oh! I figured it out!" and disappointed "I could see that coming a mile away.")I feel like some of the plot holes were pretty huge though. The decisions that were made 30+ years ago (really, that's your solution? who would do that?) and the inaction in the intervening 30 years (or the author choosing to relegate any action to the dustbin where she doesn't cover it at all).
I've finished The Ferryman. I liked it. Even though I did figure out the twist about half way through the book.I also finished Divinity 36. Loved it. Can't wait for book 2 in August.
I just started Broken Light. Harris writes in such a variety of genres. She's always an interesting read.
I read Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner, set in the same world as The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry which we all read a year or two ago. It's in the same vein, but I think I liked it even better.
I just finished Lessons in Chemistry. This book is about a female chemist's struggle to be taken seriously in the early 1950s. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would highly recommend it even though it is not a fantasy or science fiction. I thought it was really well written. It has a little bit of everything in it.
Dana wrote: "I just finished Lessons in Chemistry. This book is about a female chemist's struggle to be taken seriously in the early 1950s. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would highly recommend it even though it i..."I’ve got this book on my TBR shelf, I’ve heard good things about it before.
Read Wings Once Cursed and Bound. Gail Carriger recommended it after she and the author did a signing together.I knew it was a romance going in so no surprise when the MCs start talking about how hot they are for each other but! Alas and Alack! They just can't be together. For...reasons. Anyway, not near the sophistication that Gail brings to her books. Also the MC is Thai, as is the author, and I kept expecting some actual Thai mythology to enter into the plot or even the worldbuilding.
Nope, the book was pretty much a standard vampire romance with a little extra flavor thrown in. Plus Werewolves and Fair Folk and Witches, Oh my! It seems to be the setup for a series, so maybe there will be more Thai mythology in the next books. I likely won't find out as book 1 didn't inspire me to read more. It was competently if mechanically constructed, adequate insomnia reading, but not inspirational.
And on that note, the third book in the Jessie Mihalik "Hunt the Stars" series came in off library hold, "Capture the Sun." I'm good for SFnal romance but didn't really want to do three in a row, having read Fourth Wing right before Wings Once Cursed and Bound. But it came in unexpectedly as LAPL bought a large number of copies, and there it was in my queue. Just a few hours later Tom announced the July pick, Planetfall, and there was one available. I nabbed that and got started reading.It's got a space colony! And 3D bio printers! And a Big Deep Dark Mystery! This will be a nice change of pace. I should be able to read both well within the three week borrow window.
John (Taloni) wrote: "And on that note, the third book in the Jessie Mihalik "Hunt the Stars" series came in off library hold, "Capture the Sun.”"Ha! Guess what just came up off hold from my library too!
I’ll be reading it next, and am also listening to Fake Dates and Mooncakes, which seems to be a cute and cosy romance - Only a couple of chapters into that one, but so far so good.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Just a few hours later Tom announced the July pick, Planetfall, and there was one available. I nabbed that and got started reading.It's got a space colony! And 3D bio printers! And a Big Deep Dark Mystery! This will be a nice change of pace."
I predict you will like it. Excellent character work, interesting world.
Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth wrote: "John (Taloni) wrote: "And on that note, the third book in the Jessie Mihalik "Hunt the Stars" series came in off library hold, "Capture the Sun.”"Ha! Guess what just came up off hold from my libr..."
Already 23% into Capture the Sun, and loving it. These books are so much FUN!!! Also, I thought the dedication at the beginning was cute.
Just started the final Cradle book, Waybound. It begins right where the previous book left off. Sad to see the series end. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this series. I see that Will Wight has a new book out called Captain The Last Horizon. I will be reading it soon.
June was a rough month. I read The pick of the month which I was not one of my favs, plus I soldiered on through The Butlerian Jihad which was better, but not a whole lot more so. So to get the taste of those out of my mind, I started:The Book Eaters
by Sunyi Dean and Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy.
Good luck on Blood Meridian. Here's some reading tips by Ben McEvoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If1Su...
Currently listening to The Blood Trials. If you were fine with the way death was handled in the dragon academy in Fourth Wing, then you’ll like this. Can’t do 400 push-ups? The upperclassmen murder you.I’m starting to think this is a feature of these “New Adult” books.
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
The Sword and Laser
Books mentioned in this topic
Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 (other topics)Space: 1999 Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual (other topics)
Star Trek Designing Starships: Deep Space Nine and Beyond (other topics)
Alien: The Blueprints (other topics)
Traverse: Vehicles from the Outer Rim of Imagination (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Ann Leckie (other topics)John Scalzi (other topics)
Ann Leckie (other topics)
C.M. Waggoner (other topics)
Margaret Weis (other topics)
More...
