April Reading Thread

[Bick]

The Black Book by Ian Rankin. The fifth Rebus novel.

 

[biodroid]

I gobsmacked by the ending. I couldn't imagine what she could do to keep the powers which be at a distance and being a straight laced person myself her choice of journals hit me upside the head. (She was 8? It's been decades since I've read it. If you would have asked me to guess I would have said 12 or so.)

As SK portrays her she is basically a doomsday device packaged as a little streetwise girl. But she seems to be able to control it.

 

[Simbelmynë]

Finished Jane Eyre - thoroughly enjoyed the literary style and perceptiveness but always find myself flagging with any novel of the period when it starts to focus on high society. Great plot, with characters both enigmatic and endearing. Glad I got round to this classic I’ve neglected for so long.

Started The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I’m near the half way point and I’m gripped.

 

[Extollager]

Jane Eyre -- for some readers, a good gateway book into the Victorian novel.

 

[Randy M.]

Jane Eyre -- for some readers, a good gateway book into the Victorian novel.

Pssssst ... hey! You, Simbelmyne! I got somethin' here you'd like. It'll help ya after ya start comin' down from Eyre. Sorta hair of the dog, if ya know what I mean, heh, heh. Call it a different sorta high, or height. Ya, a Height, Wuthurin' even. Wutherin' Heights, heh, heh. Yeah, 'cause everbody wanna get Heights. That's it. And if that won't do the job, I got some Austin, too. And some James, but, boy, that's maybe for later. Much later. Too soon an' it can close a gateway fast ...


[Randy M.]

 

[Vince W]

Pssssst ... hey! You, Simbelmyne! I got somethin' here you'd like. It'll help ya after ya start comin' down from Eyre. Sorta hair of the dog, if ya know what I mean, heh, heh. Call it a different sorta high, or height. Ya, a Height, Wuthurin' even. Wutherin' Heights, heh, heh. Yeah, 'cause everbody wanna get Heights. That's it. And if that won't do the job, I got some Austin, too. And some James, but, boy, that's maybe for later. Much later. Too soon an' it can close a gateway fast ...


[Randy M.]

Please, please tell me you carry these in a trench coat.

 

[Simbelmynë]

In about the last twelve to eighteen months or so I’ve read The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations and David Copperfield (the latter being my fav of the three), The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (will have to come back to this one day, in fact I didn’t finish the final book), Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and some short stories by Poe and Tolstoy. I’m definitely getting a taste for 19th century literature. Jane Eyre was the most accessible, I can tell why it’s still widely read and preferred to Dickens. I find Dickens’ voice a real joy myself, but I can understand why some may find it tedious waffle. It just does something for me. Perhaps it’s the eccentricity.

I plan to hit plenty more “lines” of the hard stuff Randy, don’t worry. I had planned to read Wuthering Heights, and I’m interested in Austen and Elliot also.

 

[Simbelmynë]

In about the last twelve to eighteen months or so I’ve read The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations and David Copperfield (the latter being my fav of the three), The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (will have to come back to this one day, in fact I didn’t finish the final book), Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and some short stories by Poe and Tolstoy. I’m definitely getting a taste for 19th century literature. Jane Eyre was the most accessible, I can tell why it’s still widely read and preferred by a lot of people to Dickens. I find Dickens’ voice a real joy myself, but I can understand why some may find it tedious waffle. It just does something for me. Perhaps it’s the eccentricity, but I got that giddy, racy feeling across huge chunks of Copperfied. Writing like that puts me in a kind of trance sometimes... ever had that?

I plan to hit plenty more “lines” of the hard stuff Randy, don’t worry. I had planned to read Wuthering Heights, and I’m interested in Austen and Elliot also.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'm currently reading A Prince of the Captivity, by John Buchan. It is a cracking read, I read this some time ago, however I couldn't remember it.

 

[dask]

Wow, Extollager. That book sounds rather awesome. Enough so that I am off to see if Amazon has it.

Had the same idea after I read his post.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I find Dickens’ voice a real joy myself, but I can understand why some may find it tedious waffle. It just does something for me. Perhaps it’s the eccentricity, but I got that giddy, racy feeling across huge chunks of Copperfied. Writing like that puts me in a kind of trance sometimes... ever had that?

I feel the same way about Dickens myself. You express the feeling well.

 

[Bick]

In about the last twelve to eighteen months or so I’ve read The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations and David Copperfield (the latter being my fav of the three)

You need to get yourself over to the Dickens thread on the Literary Fiction subforum, Simbelmyne. Oh, and I would rate Copperfield below Great Expectations - I feel Copperfield is somewhat flawed structurally (see my comments in the aforementioned thread), but I'm another lover of Dickens books. There are several here who have read them all (I'm not one of them, but I'm making my way through slowly, and I'll probably read another soonish).

 

[Extollager]

Oscar Parland's The Year of the Bull. I wasn't sure right at first if I was going to like this rereading after almost 20 years as much as I'd like to. But now I like it very much, about halfway through.

Prize-winning author Parland narrates events of a tumultuous 1918, between WWI and the Russian Revolution, from the viewpoint of six-year-old Riki in this strong intensely imaginative novel. Barricaded on a Finnish farm in a lovely, ghost-haunted countryside, along with parents, aunts, uncles and godlike Grandmother - whose thundered warnings from vengeful biblical texts create a frightening childhood mythology - Riki confuses Baal, devourer of children, with Bull, the lordly animal who bellows and rampages in a nearby field. Parland suggests the wartime brutality through Bull and the deaths of helpless creatures. - Publishers Weekly.

“Barricaded” is misleading....but a good short novel.

 

[Simbelmynë]

Oh, and I would rate Copperfield below Great Expectations - I feel Copperfield is somewhat flawed structurally (see my comments in the aforementioned thread), but I'm another lover of Dickens books.

I actually feel that the three I’ve read we’re all flawed but I enjoyed and was moved by most of each enough not to be too bothered by those flaws. I’d agree that the plot of Great Expectations is better, and Miss Havisham is one of the greatest literary creations I’ve come across, but I found myself more swept away with Copperfield, and that’s entirely subjective - sometimes it can be about my current mood and circumstances when I read a book as much as the book itself. I also had already seen an adaptation of Great Expectations, and be as cynical as you like about the “spoiler alert” culture, a new story thrills more than one where the twists and turns are already known.

But I’ll save any more of these thoughts for the Dickens forum! Thanks for directing me.

 

[Danny McG]

Providence by Max Barry

The spiel from Goodreads:-

It was built to kill our enemies. But now it's got its own plans.

In the future, the war against aliens from the dark reaches of space has taken a critical turn. Once we approached the salamanders in peace... and they annihilated us. Now mankind has developed the ultimate killing machine, the Providence class of spaceship.

With the ships' frightening speed, frightening intelligence and frightening weaponry, it's now the salamander's turn to be annihilated... in their millions.

The mismatched quartet of Talia, Gilly, Jolene and Anders are the crew on one of these destroyers. But with the ship's computers designed to outperform human decision-making in practically all areas, they are virtual prisoners of the ship's AI. IT will take them to where the enemy are, it will dictate the strategy in any battle, it will direct the guns....

The crew's only role is to publicize their glorious war to a skeptical Earth. Social media and video clips are THEIR weapons in an endless charm offensive. THEIR chief enemies are not the space reptiles but each other, and boredom.

But then everything changes. A message comes from base: the Providence is going into the VZ, the Violet Zone, where there are no beacons and no communications with Earth. It is the heart of the enemy empire - and now the crew are left to wonder whether this is a mission of ultimate destruction or, more sinisterly, of ultimate self-destruction

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

During my usual week away from the computer, I worked my way through some stuff from a small "alternate" press -- they seem to mostly put "zines" together into tiny little books -- which varied from brief nonfiction (what it's like to work at a bookbinder) to what I can only call graphic nonfiction (the artist's day-by-day diary in comic strip form.)

I also looked at (rather than "read") a book of magnificent photographs of animals, all taken on a blank white background, entitled Creature (2007, photography by Andrew Zuckerman.)

I also made my way through a couple of odd reference books. American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny by Christopher Miller (2014) was a surprisingly thick and detailed list of things considered humorous from about, say, 1900 to 1950 (e.g. hillbillies. The Encyclopedia of Misinformation by Rex Sorgatz (2018) was a guide to just about everything fake in the world, from deliberate propaganda to parodies.

I continued with nonfiction with But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman (2016), which tries to imagine what folks in the future might think of the things we now believe to be true.

Next, back to fiction with No Sleep Until Doomsday by Laurence MacNaughton (2018), third in a series of romantic comedy/urban fantasy hybrids; very light reading.

 

[Paul_C]

I enjoyed On A Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard and followed it with another novella, Sisters Of the Vast Black by Lina Rather - nuns in space !

Aliette de Bodard has given away a collection of Xuya universe short stories to read during the lock down called The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun which I'm going to read next.

 

[Bren G]

I just started The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I read it in high school English class and really liked it. I seem to pick it up every ten years or so. I have this thing where film and novel plots fade from memory after 2 years and evaporate near 5!

 

[Hugh]

I just started The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I read it in high school English class and really liked it. I seem to pick it up every ten years or so. I have this thing where film and novel plots fade from memory after 2 years and evaporate near 5!

One of my longstanding favourites. At my last re-read I'd forgotten much of it.

 

[Bren G]

One of my longstanding favourites. At my last re-read I'd forgotten much of it.

Maybe time to dust it off again Hugh?