October 2019 reading thread

I am about to start The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen (1928) by Sinclair Lewis, which consists of six monologues by the character named in the subtitle, the intent being a satiric portrait of a certain kind of American of the time. I was curious about the character's last name, since it is Yiddish for rendered chicken fat, and slang for something that is excessively sentimental, but this does not seem to be deliberate. The character, like others created by the author, is a Midwestern WASP, and the slang meaning of the word, according to my research, did not emerge until the 1930's.
 
Currently reading The Shadow Over Innsmouth which I believe I have read before a long time ago but forgot most of it (except the fish-man bus driver).
 
I've been dipping into a Robert E. Howard collection: the first volume from the Del Rey Conan collection, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. This volume collects the first thirteen Conan stories, presented in the order they were written. I'm enjoying them a good deal; Howard has real verve when it comes to writing action and mood. He doesn't waste many words either and gets to the crux of things efficiently.

The stories I've read so far are:

The Phoenix on the Sword
The Frost Giant's Daughter
The God in the Bowl
The Tower of the Elephant
The Scarlet Citadel
Queen of the Black Coast

I've enjoyed The Tower of the Elephant best so far, I think. I hadn't remembered the titles, but I realised as I read them that I had previously read The Frost Giant's Daughter and The God in the Bowl. Queen is very enjoyable too.

I have two other volumes of Howard winging their way to me; these are volumes one can dip into between novels.
 
Roger Zelazny's second Amber series.
I'm afraid I found these five books disappointing, though probably less so than the first time round. It helped that I read them soon after the first five so there was good continuity for me in the characters from the first series, and initially I thought I was going to really enjoy them. However, in truth I struggle with most SFF series, finding it totally frustrating when I find myself so totally sucked into the story-line that I can think about little else and have no option but to keep reading even though I'm finding it interminable. When I began the last volume, "Prince of Chaos", I thought "Aha! this may tie things up nicely", but again ended up feeling let-down.
The trouble is that it could have been so much better. There are all the ingredients for something really good. However, I should give Zelazny some slack here. He was probably putting his kids through college at the time and may have had many demands on his creativity. A writer is not obligated to his public, the more so when he's probably received a fat cheque just for putting pen to paper. Besides, though Zelazny was very appreciative of Amber, he never (as far as I know) listed it among the books of which he was most proud.
I've always thought that the first two books of the first series were truly original for their time with the concepts of Tarot-type Trumps though which you could communicate and teleport, the whole idea of manipulating your landscape imaginatively to move through different realities, and of course the initiation of walking the "Pattern". I'll always appreciate those.
One footnote: this series does of course contain the occasional dreadful Zelazny pun, presumably retained against editorial advice. Some website somewhere probably has a list of these.
 
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I finished Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was ok. Lawrence deserves credit for making what were probably quite subversive points, but he does make them for a long time. The characters go on about sex an awful lot. The ending is quite good and surprisingly sensible. I'd let my servants read it.

I read The Cockroach by Ian McEwan. I've never really got on with his writing. This was a riff on Kafka (I'm not sure why) about a cockroach that becomes a human. It was basically a satire on Brexit, which feels pointless, like satirising a man headbutting a brick wall.
 
Toby Frost said:
about a cockroach that becomes a human
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In the spirit of self-promotion, you might be interested to know that McEwan wasn't the first.

JUNE 2010 Writing Challenge -- HareBrain wins by a landslide!

The Hunt Jebediah’s breath passed silently over his lips; his motions were slow and deliberate. Deer were easy pickings during mating season. His grin cocked to one side with malicious intent; his gun barrel cocked to the other. His finger squeezed and the shot fractured the air, hitting...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com
 
Finished the Adrian Tchaikovsky and was rather lukewarm about it. While it wasn't a DNF, it really never hooked me and I frequently had to drag my mind back to the story line.

Finished the latest Toby Daye book and this one may be the best yet in a very good urban fantasy series.

I've also gotten through the first three books and am listening to the fourth book of the The Guild Codex: Spellbound series by Annette Marie. These books aren't literary works of genius nor are they clever or terribly original. What they are is a wonderful urban fantasy romp through Vancouver B.C., f I haven't mixed up Stanley Park with another one somewhere on the west coast since Vancouver is never mentioned explicitly.
 
Darkfall aka Darkness Comes by Dean Koontz - Little critters everywhere, I thought I would go back to reading some older DK that I haven't read before. And because I can't find anything remotely interesting to read, for some reason Stephen King's The Institute has put me off reading his books for a while and I just could not get into the Ember Blade by Chris Wooding.
 
Still working my way through Dominic Sandbrook's mammoth (900+ pages in hardback) Who Dares Wins. Witty and non-partisan, and highly recommended for anyone who lived in Britain during the period (1979-82).
 
I finished Kellanved’s Reach. I didn’t think it was as good as the first two books in the trilogy. There was a lot more crammed into the last few pages, as if every POV needed a tidy-up. What I did like is
how it tells the story of the beginning of the relationship of Kellanved and the Imass, and introduces the Crimson Guard in their heyday.
I’m definitely going for the reread.
 
I have just finished The Bear Pit by SG Maclean. It's the third book in a series about Captain Damien Seeker.
He is a captain in Oliver Cromwell's army. What a man he is. He is now my favourite hero of all time.
He has even displaced Fitz and the Fool from my one and two spots.
I have read all three books so far and the historical research the author has done is a credit to her.
I read and thoroughly relished these stories. I believe there is another book out now,which I shall obtain as ASAP.
 
I finished Phillip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth. Overall, I liked it a lot, although not without a few reservations. It is a long book, I think significantly longer than any of the previous books in the world but it does move at a good pace. However, it is almost the least stand-alone of the books since it ends abruptly without any plot resolution. The book picks up about 6-7 years after the end of The Amber Spyglass, which is a long time for a young person and Lyra has definitely changed a lot in the intervening years, throughout the events of His Dark Materials I think she managed to keep a sense of optimism despite all the terrible things happening around her, but here she is much less sure of herself. She is often a less likeable character, but probably a more interesting one. I've always thought the daemons are the most fascinating part of Pullman's world and it feels like we learn a lot more about them here, in particular about how the mental turmoil of their humans might reflect in their relationship. It's also good to see a grown-up Malcolm a couple of decades after the events of La Belle Sauvage, and although plenty of things have changed over the years he does still feel like the same character.

Although the early portion of the book mostly takes place again in Oxford over the course of the book we do get to see a lot more of the world than we did before. The book does feel quite episodic with a lot of subplots as Lyra and Malcolm journey across Europe, but although the subplots sometimes don't have much to do with each other I think they do fit together thematically. Pullman includes his usual themes of fighting against authoritarianism, and includes some fairly clear (possibly slightly heavy-handed) parallels to current problems in our world, most obviously a refugee crisis caused by turmoil in the Middle East.

The thing I liked least about was a potential romantic relationship, which felt a bit creepy from one character's perspective and I hope doesn't come to anything.

I thought it was a good book, although it's so incomplete that it's a bit difficult to really judge it properly without seeing the conclusion.

I've now moved on to starting a series that I feel I should probably have read many years ago but never got round to - Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's got a big reputation and it's been good so far.
 
dask said:
Never heard of it but it sounds really cool. Going to have to check it out.
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All Quiet on the Orient Express is a strange and wonderful book. These are a couple of comments from GoodReads reviews that I heartily agree with:

"A masterpiece. Kafka would have been proud. Wondering why I was reading this bizarre tale of everyday Lake District life, I kept waiting for something substantive to happen and when it did, it hit like a sledgehammer. Rarely has a book had that impact: A collision with my sensibilities and my world perception which lingered for an age afterwards. I simply could not stop thinking about it. Parable, metaphor, allegory, or shaggy dog story. I simply don't know. I spent the following month wondering how he did it."

"One of the most uncomfortable reads I've had in a while. It is like a slow motion train wreck. Everything is perfectly friendly on the surface but you are cringing as the narrator moves closer and closer to tragedy through a series of benign events."

"Without a doubt, this is a modern masterpiece. An unnamed narrator on a camping holiday in England's Lake District gets entangled in an extended Kafkaesque morass. What starts as a simple trade of painting a gate in exchange for a week's free camping turns into what looks to be a lifetime in purgatory... It's a deadpan, darkly humorous book, somewhat akin to one the Coen Brothers' films."

Carey Harrison in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, "It's not out of idle amusement that the sweetly fiendish author has named his book All Quiet on the Orient Express. This marriage of famous titles hides from view (yet points to) its dark, telling twin: Murder on the Western Front. Not since Kafka has an author lured his audience so innocently, so beguilingly, into hell." Nanja Labi in Time wrote, "In this creepy, deadpan novel by a nominee for Britain's Booker Prize, nothing much happens—except that one man slowly, painlessly, surrenders his life"

Do give it a go - I'd be interested to see what you think.
 
Bick said:
All Quiet on the Orient Express is a strange and wonderful book
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I wasn't aware this book existed, I read The Restraint of Beasts by the same author a few years ago. It seems somewhat similar.
The protagonists are living in a squalid caravan on a run down campsite and putting up a fence in the earlier book.
 
dannymcg said:
I wasn't aware this book existed, I read The Restraint of Beasts by the same author a few years ago. It seems somewhat similar.
The protagonists are living in a squalid caravan on a run down campsite and putting up a fence in the earlier book.
Click to expand...
Yes - really quite similar. The Restraint of Beasts won the Booker, I think. It is black humour, and very good, but I'm not sure it's actually quite as good as All Quiet which seems to be more than just black humour. The latter has a sense of impending doom, and a depth in its allegory and purpose that sets it apart. All Quiet was nominated for the Booker but didn't win, but I feel the awards should have been reversed really. If anyone's interested in other books by this author, I've read 6 or so Mills books. They are all worthwhile, but he's not yet reproduced a book of the quality of All Quiet imho.
 
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