July 2020 Reading Thread

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If I'd have realized how much interest there was in Master & Commander, I might have gone to that next. I am starting (18%) another book recommended to me by @martin321 up thread. Mainline by Deborah Teramis Christian (I understand that now she mostly goes by her middle and last name). It was written in 1996 and renewed in 2019. In Amazon there are only 17 reviews of it, Good Reads has a more respectable 154. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but find it disconcerting that her chosen occupation is "assassin."
 
Vertigo said:
Ah no, sorry, I was missing your point a little! However what I would still say is I've been buying them as ebooks in the UK since 2015 and throughout that time I've been paying no more than £3-£5 for them. However, @Parson seems to be facing much higher prices for them in the USA. That's what I see as odd. The ebooks have been cheap in the UK for years so I don't see why they should be so expensive over there.
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Cost $8 for me on my kindle as well. But I didn't want to be left out!

Finished If Beale Street Could Talk and loved it. I've really been missing out on James Baldwin my whole life. This is the first book I ever read where NYC seemed like a place people actually lived.

Now I'm double-fisting (to use a college-drinking term) with Master and Commander just started on the Kindle and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave in print.
 
I've started Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It's good so far and very engrossing. There's quite a bit of simple "telling" in the writing: Follett often seems to say "Bob felt X because he did Y" but I don't mind that. So far, Follett has done a really good job of making the medieval characters both weird and sympathetic.
 
Yeah, sometimes having a simple transfer of what is going on, without having to deduce it yourself, is restful. I think it depends on how much and whether you feel like you are getting hit over the head by the obvious.
 
Toby Frost said:
There's quite a bit of simple "telling" in the writing: Follett often seems to say "Bob felt X because he did Y" but I don't mind that.
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I've long felt the absolutism of the "show don't tell" mantra is exaggerated. You show people pictures, you TELL people stories. If "telling" is so blasphemous, such critics need to have a word with Dickens and Dostoyevsky, who spend hundreds of pages telling us about their characters' backgrounds, incomes and thoughts. "Showing" has led to a huge swath of cleverly written but utterly meaningless "literary" novels that are little more than vignettes with no real plot, purpose or direction. They do show how boring fiction is when it's as purposelessly episodic as our real lives.

No, you shouldn't write a novel in 2nd-grade level prose like "then Joe did this and then he said that because he was this," but if you're writing like that, then "show don't tell" probably isn't going to be enough to save you. To me, it's always meant something more like don't show your character or world operating in a way you've already told us isn't true. You can't cut to a scene in Raskolnikov's university class where he is the class clown or president.

Now, to totally undercut my rant here... I enjoyed Pillars of the Earth when reading it but after I finished, it faded pretty quickly from memory. Maybe the telling did come at the expense of some depth :)
 
soulsinging said:
I've long felt the absolutism of the "show don't tell" mantra is exaggerated. You show people pictures, you TELL people stories. If "telling" is so blasphemous, such critics need to have a word with Dickens and Dostoyevsky, who spend hundreds of pages telling us about their characters' backgrounds, incomes and thoughts.
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This!!! I can't agree with you more. Balance is needed. For me, as a reader, I find too much telling is tedious, but too little is exhausting.
 
Bick said:
I’m now starting Neptune Crossing, by Jeffrey A. Carver.
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@Bick

I've had that maybe three years as a ebook, I keep meaning to start reading it but there's always a new hyped up genre book looming in front of me that demands attention.
Your thoughts on it when finished would be helpful :)
 
soulsinging said:
I've long felt the absolutism of the "show don't tell" mantra is exaggerated. You show people pictures, you TELL people stories.
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Yes, and when you do so, you often say "so and so, you know, the one with the sticky-up hair and the two frightful children" there's lots of telling out there.
 
dannymcg said:
@Bick

I've had that maybe three years as a ebook, I keep meaning to start reading it but there's always a new hyped up genre book looming in front of me that demands attention.
Your thoughts on it when finished would be helpful :)
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No problem Danny. I’ve not finished it yet, I’m about 100 pages in, but so far I’d say it was terrific. The main SF device is a well worn trope (alien in human’s mind), but it is done quite nicely, the concepts are good, it’s well written and it’s very well paced and very readable. Carver has some nice ideas, and thus far I’m a fan. I suspect from your thoughts of other books that you’d like it.

I find it interesting that there are books and authors out there who are (or were)read by relatively few readers, but which are pretty good. I understand that since his books mostly went out of print he’s recently been self-publishing them to get them back out there. He’s also going to be “at” the Worldcon next week, which I’m “attending” virtually, so perhaps I’ll get to chat with him.
 
Well I'm 100 pages into Pillars of the Earth and what interests me, apart from the story and period, is what Follett chooses to say and not say. So far, the action boils down to "Someone left a baby with some monks", but Follett has already told several interesting stories about the people involved. Whether they'll be of greater relevance, I don't know.

There's quite a lot of summarised action, for want of a better word: a couple of pages explaining a character's life that, in other circumstances, could be the basis for a whole novel. It's very interesting stuff. I instinctively lean towards describing what a character is doing right now in some detail, and this seems like a very different technique. I rather like it.
 
Alan Garner "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen"
It's been a good few years... at first I thought I was going to find this disappointing, but then it held my attention. He manages to pull "a Tolkien" in that these characters keep appearing that give the reader (me) a sense of epic history that lies outside this particular story but still percolates throughout, infusing it with life and meaning. The only thing I have against it is that it gives crows a bad name.
 
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie - a very good last book in her Imperial Radch trilogy. More here.
Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear - a very good but very different sequel to The Forge of God. More here.
 
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