March's Marvellous Meanderings In Melodious Manuscripts.

[AE35Unit]

Ahem, we see to be discussing March's books and yet it's April.

Yes, it seems to have gone unnoticed...

 

[murphy]

Where's Gollum to change the month?

 

[Rosemary]

He's probably in the sun room reading his current book Well at least I hope that he is

Now, I am ashamed Am furiously trying to read through Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson before The Crippled God arrives.

Not sure what happened but when I went to re-read the last few chapters, I realised I hadn't read it at all

 

[Connavar]

Im reading the last pages left of Butcher's Moon by Richard Stark.

The story turned out to be a town of gangsters story like Red Harvest. Stark used his 300 words so effectivly that i felt like have been reading much longer story,two books in one. The economy of his words puts new crime authors with padded books to shame.

 

[Vertigo]

Really? I found it utterly ridiculous and just plain bonkers!

No, really. Yes it was bonkers but I found that to be its charm. It was a long time ago but I do remember thinking it was brilliant fun!

 

[Ursa major]

Last weekend, i.e. in March, I finished reading The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross, the third book in his The Merchant Princes series. I won't follow my usual practice of quoting (from) the first paragraph of the book, as the first chapter of this book is mostly devoted to bringing new readers (those who have read books I and II) up to speed.

Since my own readings of those two books, I found that that some people say that they were originally meant to be one book, but the publisher thought it too long. That would explain why they flowed so well into each other. The say seems to be true here: The Clan Corporate is only the first part of a longer book.

Okay, what's it like? Very enjoyable, in spite of the cliff-hanger ending (which means you really need book IV to hand). It's now clear to me that the basic premise - the ability to switch between parallel worlds, has a great deal in common with that behind the author's Laundry series (where complex mathemetical funtions perform the same function () as magical incantations do in straight fantasy). We even have non-paranormal spooks (but from the NSA, not MI whatever). Hoewever, the atmosphere of the two series is different. Where the Laundry series mixes pastiche with horror, here we have SF-influenced adventure mixed with "geo" politics and high-value crime.

To be fair, the adventure in this volume of the series is restrained: there is more politics. much of which goes over the head of the principal protagonist, to join a cloud of gloom caused by the unpleasant plans others have for her.

All in all, I enjoyed the book, but would advise others wanting to read this to read the first two books first.

 

[Ursa major]

Also last weekend (on Sunday, as it happens), I read book IV of the aforementioned series: The Merchants' War by Charles Stross. Some of you may have been led to believe that this was the second half of a manuscript, whose first half became The Clan Corporate. Unfortunately for me, this volume ended on a bigger cliffhanger than that book's, in the book ended half-way through a major incident; worse, I don't have book V to hand ().

Nevertheless, it's another good read with the plot becoming ever more complex and there's more overt action in this volume than the previous one.

 

[J-Sun]

I read Fritz Leiber's Changewar and The Mind Spider. These books have complicated and overlapping histories with varying tables of contents and varying titles and I've already read most of what was in them but not all and never in one flow. My versions are the 1976 Ace pb of TMS and the 1983 Ace pb of CW. TMS was originally the B-side of an Ace double with The Big Time and included 3 Changewar stories. This edition is independent and switches one Changewar story for one non-Changewar story. There wasn't really a bad story in them, though some were pretty minor. However, the best story in CW (which is also still in TMS) was "The Oldest Soldier". A simultaneously gripping suspense/thriller and philosphical/character study piece. The best in TMS (aside from "The Oldest Soldier") was the one that wasn't even in the original edition of that book: "Midnight in the Mirror World" was a fantastic (fittingly, as it was published in Fantastic) story of Gardnerian optical puzzles and Poe-like (Poe-etic?) macabre fantasy.

Two things that bother me about Changewar is that (1) I don't see how "A Deskful of Girls" relates to the Changewar at all and "When the Change-Winds Blow" seems only thematically related, but doesn't seem to involve Snakes and Spiders at all and (2) even the Snakes-and-Spiders stories don't really add up to more than the sum of their parts. They're individually fair to excellent and the whole (coupled with what I recall of The Big Time) is... somewhere between fair and excellent. I think the sequence of connected stories is about my favorite form but this doesn't really take much advantage of it. Still, both are pretty good collections just taken as random stories (which TMS is).

 

[bluespider100]

I've noticed that no one has still created a thread for this months(april) "what are you reading?" anyway, I have finished (at last) David Brins EARTH and it was somewhat lacking in ending and too many characters (IMO). now reading Game-Players of Titan by PKD which has a great start so far, PKD has a kind of style which can draw you in till the last page... an out of world experience and thinking which I really like.

 

[Hober Mallow]

I'm reading Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by PKD.