July 2020 Reading Thread

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My favorites of Poe's poems are probably
Annabel Lee and The City in the Sea.
 
John D. McDonald wrote three SF novels and a fair number of SF short stories. All good. Re Gold Watch, I liked the book better than the movie.
 
I finished How Long 'til Black Future Month? last night, really enjoyed it.

Next up is Aliette de Bodard's latest novella Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders.

My order of Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet never arrived :cry: so I spent part of the refund on M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again which will probably be next, unless I go for An Unkindness Of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon.
 
I had a look at James Maxwell Kindle samples but he seems to be tell and not show in his style which was quite weird coz I have never experienced that before, so I won't be reading him. I am mulling over The Dark Half by Stephen King. Transfer of Power by Vince Flynn is a whole lot of sitting around in a terrorist captured White House doing nothing but waiting for orders. So I am stopping that for now. I feel like reading a fantasy book that is good, has adventure but is not cliched, just don't know what to look for. I am bored with Joe Abercrombie (it's me not Joe) and I really like his books.
 
HareBrain said:
Just started First Light by Geoffrey Wellum, WWII Spitfire pilot, after hearing a bit about him during a middle-of-the-night World Service prog.
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This is brilliant. Somehow (magically?) gets across how it must feel to fly a 1930s aircraft. Interestingly, though written many decades ago, it uses the now-trendy first person present tense; but unlike many current offerings, it really does make it much more immediate (especially in the flying sections, where it mostly uses a shortened "note style" prose).

He doesn't seem to have made any deliberate attempt to get across emotion or tension; it just happens naturally as a consequence of what he's writing about. His first solo night-flight, for example, is almost unbearable, even though it lasts only a couple of sparse paragraphs and we know full well he survives.

You can see where a fiction writer would have felt tempted (probably irresistably) to add dramatic "beats", and their absence is refreshing.
 
tobl said:
jim butcher peace talks is out yupi
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Yes, I was straight to the Kindle Store - seems like eons since there was a full-length Dresden novel. Perhaps now Jim Butcher can concentrate on getting Book 2 of the Cinder Spires series out...
 
As well as my Kindle read, First Light, I started David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue (out today) after seeing some better reviews of it. The story of a late-sixties psychedelic band, the first couple of pages are a bit period-detail-bingo, but it quickly settles down to feel like a real cracker.
 
Jack Williamson "Terraforming Earth"
The only other Williamson solo fiction that I've read has been stuff from the 1940s/ early 50s, so it's been interesting to read this work, published in 2001 when he was just 93 years old.
In fact it's a series of five vignettes covering millions of years involving the same characters: initially bored, I became more involved as the book progressed. My main memory is of a forest of wonderful conscious singing trees (sadly only really featuring in one vignette). While Williamson is not the first to write of singing/musical trees, I thought these particularly well imagined.
 
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