It's October. What are you reading?

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Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster is now finished. A Cracker Jack ending which I didn't see coming. (although in retrospect I probably should have, that seems to me to be the best kind of ending for a mystery/lawyer style novel) I have Hidden by Kendra Elliot about a third listened to, (It helps me on my 90 min. jog each morning to have something to listen to).[Not to mention the 2 hour round trip to the hospital.]

I also bit the bullet and purchased David Weber and Timothy Zahn's A Call to Duty. I'm about 50 pages deep and so far it holds my interest. I'm not big on stories set in the past of a previous story line, a prequel if you will. But this one is distant past and so far it has little to do with the Honor Harrington series that I am so fond of.
 
Ptolemy's Gate, last of the Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud. If you had told me I'd find myself intrigued by a story that includes a first person account from a smart-ass djinn, with footnotes, I'm not sure I would have believed it.

Also audio-booking The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. I always found it interesting that folks who only know the movie don't realize that the book goes well past the re-naming of the Childlike Empress in story.
 
Been busy with all sorts of life stuff so not been posting far a little while during which time I have read:

The Crow Road by Iain Banks - Far more accessible than Banks' usual fare but for me that made it a little less satisfactory. More here.
Hornblower and the Atropos by C S Forester - brilliant again despite being a little lighter on actual sea battles. If you are a science fiction reader rather than a historical one then consider thinking of these books as low tech space opera! More here.
Child of the River by Paul J McAuley - disappointed by this one - excellent setting but much of the book was aimless meandering and ended up feeling like little more than a prologue to the other two in the trilogy. More here.
Quarantine by Greg Egan - brilliant but unless you love your science fiction hard then I wouldn't recommend it. More here.
 
On the second Honor Harrington book (Honor of the Queen, I think). Liking it more than the first, which I quite enjoyed.
 
Just finished Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. A little bit of a chore to get into, because one had to work out the odd personality/gender stuff. However, it was worth persevering. Terrific and very interesting SF. I have pre-ordered the sequel.
 
I just started "The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham. So far so good - it actually seems very much in the style of H. G. Wells.
 
kythe said:
I just started "The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham. So far so good - it actually seems very much in the style of H. G. Wells.
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Just read (and loved) that one very recently and I can see how one might find the slightly stilted and very English style rather reminiscent of Wells.
 
Encounters with Nigel The H'mm Foundation. A collection of encounters with Nigel Jenkins, who died of pancreatic cancer last January. Interesting to think that I have spent the last few years working less than half a mile from him, and I must have seen him many times without realising. Pity I will never meet him now. He was the director of the creative writing programme at Swansea University. He was also a political activist, a very funny and ribald poet (his verse is stuck to buildings all around Swansea), and a skillful writer of Haiku:

brickies droop with fags,
their half-built house
vaulted by rainbows

the barmaid I once
craved – creased now, like me,
and double chinned

‘cancer…’ she enquires,
noticing my weight loss,
‘or a woman?’

half a dog-turd
bejewelled by a feasting
blowfly

He was a principle editor of The Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales. I first came across him when I read his brilliant book Real Swansea, trying to understand this strange city having just moved here. This is billed as a psychogeography: a rambling wander through the city, explaining the new and old and forgotten bits, and the history, tales, and urban legends that accompany the place. Swansea beyond Dylan Thomas. A good example of how to write a book that gets to the heart of a place. He also wrote a very interesting travel/history book, Gwalia in Khasia, about Welsh missionaries in Assam in the 18th and 19th century.

The Encounters book makes it clear that he was a colourful and interesting man who liked to cook and drink and swim in the sea at all times of the year. He is possibly best known for his irreverent phonetic take on the Welsh National Anthem Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, for non-Welsh Speakers:


"My hen laid a haddock, one hand oiled a flea
Glad farts and centurions, threw dogs in the sea
I could stew a hare here and brandish Dan's flan
Don's ruddy bog's blocked up with sand

Chorus

Dad! Dad! Why don't you oil Auntie Glad?
Can whores appear in beer bottle pies
O butter the hens as they fly!"
 
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This forum...there are just no books around that interest or stimulate me at the moment, I'm suffering from a general autumn ennui I think :confused:

Edit: here's an example of why - part of the blurb for a new sci-fi book by Gillian Anderson:

"Renowned child psychologist Caitlin O'Hara is a single mum trying to juggle her job, her son, and a lacklustre love life."

I mean, YAWN. Give me something new and interesting, FFS :mad:
 
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Currently reading Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K.Dick, which surprisingly I have never read. It's his usual fayre of an everyman being swept along by events out of his control and him glumly accepting his lot in life.

So far it is anyway. Obviously there's a plotline that makes it more interesting than some miserable sod moaning that his life is crappy (unlike my own life!)
 
Just finished Reaper's Gale last night. I wanted something a little lighter. So, I picked up one of the recent Forgotten Realms books. Time to see what good ol' Drizzt Do'urden is up to.
 
Early this morning I finished Straws and Prayer-Books... certainly one of the oddest books I've ever read, right up there with the first book of the "Biography", Beyond Life, in that it is chiefly an essay or monologue... or is it? And at first its relation to the "Biography" seems quite tenuous (as with the first book), but it addresses the very heart of the thing, only from a quite different perspective than before. Definitely one that is going to require both a reread or two and plenty of time to digest properly, but quite good.

And now I'm moving on to the final volume of the set, Townsend of Lichfield, which is a sort of appendix of miscellaneous matter which is related to the "Biography" overall, to one degree or another (two of the stories here, for instance, are part of the "Witch-Woman trilogy" which began back with "The Music from Behind the Moon" in the volume Domnei, the fourth in the set), while others are only tangentially connected to the main body of the work; and yet others -- such as "Taboo", which is an account (sort of) of the controversy and legal trial surrounding Jurgen, or "Evolution of the Biography" -- are more in the nature of commentary on this or that aspect of the work.
 
Gramm838 said:
Yes - she was at Waterstones in Piccadilly last Friday doing a signing
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I had the hots for her during the X-Files, I hope her writing isn't going to stymie my feelings of lust!
 
The Republic of Pirates. Interesting NF historical. Pity the tv dramatization was canceled as it was one of the better dramas I've seen made from a NF book. I had thought giving Blackbeard a submarine was going a little OTT in the tv show but lately I've been reading about the first sub made just after the ACW and background on it makes it seem as if the idea wasn't completely unknown even in the early 1700's

Space Captain Smith, by Toby Frost. Genuinely funny book. Much reminding me of Harry Harrison's comedy in spots. I just love the Klingon substitutes actual language
 
Just finished Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Not really sure what to say about it, except that it provides an insight into a time and social group I'm glad I never inhabited. Very good though.
 
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