October 2015: What are you reading?

[soulsinging]

No, no, no, no, no. You Americans...( ) it must be Magician's first because it's the first book of the story. Where else can you put it? It makes no sense anywhere else. I think we have Horse as number 4 but I think it's pretty fluid. But I read Lion's first and was glad I did. In fact, as I type this I think Magician's could be either 1 or 7 and nothing in between.

Fight?

Clearly you've never seen a Quentin Tarantino film or read the brilliant Catch-22. Chronological order is unnecessary. How many people here read the Silmarillion before LOTR or the Hobbit? Sometimes, the best place to begin a tale is the middle, adding some of the beginning later only when the context is necessary

To Dusty... yes, I do see it the second way in sets here, with Magician's nephew being numbered first. In fact, that is the ONLY way it is sold here now, unless you can find an old set from the 80's. Seems to me like the international view is to preserve the original release order and have the tale unfold as Lewis and his publishers deemed best, whereas America had to put them in the "right" order to avoid being confused. Kind of like changing Harry Potter's stone from being a philosopher's to a sorcerer's because US kids would assume the former was boring... nobody goes broke betting on American stupidity.

 

[Randy M.]

Thanks for the info Randy, I much appreciate it. Cerf, eh? Wonder if she's related to Bennett somehow. Anyway it's on my radar. Sounds like the horror version of Adventures In Time And Space.

You're welcome, Dask. Checking Google, she was Cerf's wife at the time. Bennett's Famous Ghost Stories is pretty good, too.

Randy M.

 

[Mark Ragland]

Finished Robert Ludlum's The Janus Reprisal by Jamie Freveletti. Good read. Lots of action.

Started The Holcroft Covenant by Robert Ludlum.

 

[Perpetual Man]

While I have had my head down, patently not reading a lot (but a bit), I've read the excellent Inish Carraig by Jo Zebedee and the love poem to Vincent Price movies, The Nine Deaths of Dr Valentine by John Llewellyn Probert.

Following that up with The Thirteen Ghosts of Christmas from Spectral Press, an anthology title no less.

 

[tobl]

Finished Robert Ludlum's The Janus Reprisal by Jamie Freveletti. Good read. Lots of action.

Started The Holcroft Covenant by Robert Ludlum.

he is the máster.
here are some more authors, in the real world so to speak: jack higgins (sean dillon series), ken follett; Frederik forsyth; the old don pendlenton books, alexandre dumas, etc...
For everyone here looking for good books please check my list of all the autores i read in the last 4 years :
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/11232/page-7

 

[Mark Ragland]

he is the máster.
here are some more authors, in the real world so to speak: jack higgins (sean dillon series), ken follett; Frederik forsyth; the old don pendlenton books, alexandre dumas, etc...
For everyone here looking for good books please check my list of all the autores i read in the last 4 years :
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/11232/page-7

Agreed. Ludlum was great!

Thanks for the author list. Much appreciated!

 

[Bugg]

I'm about 130 pages into The King Must Die by Mary Renault. It's blimmin' marvellous so far

 

[Vertigo]

I really enjoy the Wooding series. It gets compared to the tv show Firefly a lot, which I think is fair. If you're big on minutely detailed world building then this series probably isn't for you. If you like a good swashbuckling adventure you'll have a blast.

I read a thread or two on here about the order to read the books and Chasm City was a popular starting place. However, I have started Revelation Space before and got about 100 pages in and am inclined to pick that up again rather than start anew. I didn't find it a struggle really, though I do get the impression I quit right before it really sinks its hooks into people. I'm weird about reading books in the "right" order (I still refuse to buy any copies of the Narnia books until they are numbered in the original order I remember from youth) so my OCD wants to start with RS then go on to CC. I have a bit of time to decide though!

I enjoy both styles: sometimes I'm in the mood for a minutely detailed Peter Hamilton, other times I thoroughly enjoy a bit of swashbuckling, so long as it doesn't get too tacky.

On the ordering I can be a bit OCD in the opposite way. I always try to read in chronological order if I can (and it makes sense). That said I seem to remember reading Revelation Space first then Chasm City (and deciding it would have been better first) and then reading the rest, including the shorts of Galactic North, the two novellas Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days and the other stand alone The Prefect, in as close to chronological order as I could manage.

 

[Allegra]

Finished P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. Now reading No Name, a great one by Wilkie Collins.

 

[Toby Frost]

I finished Walter Moseley's Little Green and was pretty disappointed. The interesting aspects - the private eye mystery, the injured hero and the viewpoint (an older black man in 60's hippie culture) were overshadowed by the writing style and a lot of bits about the hero's family. It felt like a late-in-series novel. Perhaps the earlier ones are better.

I'm considering re-reading either Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake or What's Left? by Nick Cohen, both of which are excellent in very different ways.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Twelve Years a Slave (which I believe I mentioned I was reading some time ago, maybe in the September thread) was fascinating. The author manages to describe things quite calmly, even though he experienced horrors almost beyond imagining. He bends over backwards to be fair to "good" masters who treated their slaves with some minimal amount of decency. In addition, he also provides a detailed account of how cotton and sugar cane were raised in the Deep South prior to the Civil War.

I have just started Pink Think by Lynn Peril (2002), a look at the various kinds of cultural propaganda used to promote "femininity" in the USA, particularly from post-war 1940's to pre-feminist 1970's. I've just read the introduction and already it's both hilarious and terrifying.

 

[J-Sun]

Just finishing up Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's my first time reading one of his books. I could really do without the thousands of words dedicated to pH balances in soil, the AI musing about greedy algorithms and halting problems, the ultra-detailed descriptions of how the ship's biomes function, etc. It's hard SF, I understand that, but I think there are ways to convey technical information without completely derailing the narrative and going on pages-long information dumps.

I had very similar complaints about his Red Mars Book.

It's because he's not actually a "hard SF" writer in a certain sense. He's a liberal arts humanities guy who seems to have an actual anti-science agenda and has to do a lot of research not innate to his psyche in order to attempt the hard SF aspect and it comes out very ill-digested. A form of I've suffered for my Art (and now it's your turn). A lot of hard SF writers do a lot of infodumps which are merely highly concentrated expositions of "lived" information that actually fit the context of the type of story they're writing. Robinson's stick out so badly because they are still acquired rather than having become "lived" and because they don't match everything else he's really about, what he's doing, how the stories are structured and focused. IMO.

 

[Vertigo]

You may well be right @J-Sun. Certainly the end result is that I'm not inspired to buy anything from him again. I must admit I have come across this sort of thing before where it feels like research has been done to give a strong background to a story but then, instead of just calling on that research for occasional background info in the narrative the author feels obliged to info dump their entire research. With such books I keep finding myself asking 'why are you telling me this? Maybe it'll be important later' and by the end of the book you realise that it wasn't important and was just a heavily overworked detail.

 

[Bick]

So I really liked Raft, by Stephen Baxter - terrific hard SF. I've not read many better in that sub-genre tbh.

Now - which of the following should I read next:
The Warriors Apprentice
Fleet of Worlds
1632

I have all 3 sitting staring at me and I've whittled my current reading whim down to them.

 

[Mark Ragland]

Just finished Robert Ludlum's The Holcroft Covenant.

Started Brad Taylor's The Insider Threat.

 

[ratsy]

I'm juggling a lot of things right now, but reading Stephen Moss' Fear the Sky, which is quite good so far. Also reading some anthologies, Dark Beyond the Stars, a great SF collection, and the contributor copy of Young Adventurers, which includes a little something by me

I have an ever growing list of books to read!

 

[tobl]

Just finished Robert Ludlum's The Holcroft Covenant.

Started Brad Taylor's The Insider Threat.

like i said before really don't like brad thankfukky thre's the new mitch rapp book tried the furies of calderon but didn't liked. jim, sorry but for me just the Dresden files are worth

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I am about to start the graphic novel (or, I suppose, the graphic memoir) Are You My Mother? (2012) by Alison Bechdel, the follow-up to her famous previous memoir Fun Home (2006). (To my amazement, the latter of which is now a hit Broadway musical, winner of multiple Tony awards, including Best Musical.) Just as the first one was largely about her father, this one seems to be larger about her mother.

Years ago, when I discovered the very funny comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" in some alternative newspaper or other, I had no idea the talented artist who wrote and drew it would go on to be the winner of the MacArthur "genius" award.

 

[Vertigo]

I finished Childhood's End. It really turned to something weird at the end!

I've started Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It seems a little bizzare but then again, I'm only 30 pages in so far.

How did you get on with this in the end, @ratsy? I've been wondering about but have heard mixed reports.

 

[Bugg]

Currently 200 pages into The Tropic of Serpents, the second of Marie Brennan's 'Lady Trent' books. Loving this series so far.