January 2021 Reading Thread.

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Dave Vicks said:
Might read the new Susan Clarke novel if it gets a good review. Opinion please.
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I really liked Piranesi. It is very different to her Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, it is a simpler story (it doesn't even have any footnotes) but I found it compelling.
 
Danny McG said:
I enjoy that one every time I reread the trilogy..
I could never understand why the BBC dramatised book one and book three back in the seventies but missed out THS!
Alec Guinness really was George Smiley IMO
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yes, my H.S. is my favorite Le Carre novel for sure. I read it in college and it really captured my imagination about Hong Kong. I had been reading Richard Hughes articles (in the Economist) around the same time and only many years later did I find out that Le Carre's character Craw was actually based on Hughes. The collection of Hughes writing, Foreign Devil, is a fun read, too.
 
currently reading Josephine Saxton's "Power of Time," as well as Alec Nevala-Lee's "Astounding," and "The Meursault Investigation" by Kamel Daoud. Also started "Mexican Gothic," by Silvia Moreno-Garcia which is interesting.
 
Danny McG said:
I enjoy that one every time I reread the trilogy..
I could never understand why the BBC dramatised book one and book three back in the seventies but missed out THS!
Alec Guinness really was George Smiley IMO
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OK, you guys sold me. It's time for me to think outside of the BBC box and actually read the middle story, instead of merely intending to read it one of these days whenever my le Carré collection's grabbed to pull a juicy quote from either the first or third story.

Although Guinness' elocution in the BBC production is superb, Rupert Davies, in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, may more closely physically resemble the brainy, overweight, chain smoking George Smiley imagined by le Carré.

smiley.png
 
In other matters, I'm in the process of re-reading Outbreak by Cook as I simultaneously write my review of it. A second read is mandatory in order to properly remember even the smallest detail.
 
Okay, that’s my next purchase sorted, then.
 
I’ve bolted through the first 300 pages of Charles Gannon’s Fire with Fire - that’s about half-way through. It’s excellent, at least so far. Exciting, intelligent, well written, inventive SF plot. I’ve not enjoyed a book so much for some time. (Danny, I’m sure you’d love it).
 
Hope Mirrlees "Lud-in-the Mist"
A mixed experience. I'm glad I read it, but I'm delighted it's just 264 pages long and not 674. I wish I'd come across it sometime age 11 - 14 as I might have enjoyed it most at that time, and I'm surprised I didn't come across it then in some library or relative's bookshelves.
For a start I found the prose just on the edge of frustrating. I wanted to like it, and at times I really did, but then I'd find my attention slipping, and my mind glazing over. Close to being good to read, but not quite. In contrast Neil Gaiman has described her writing as "elegant, supple, effective and haunting". So that was a bit disappointing.
I had a similar experience with the plot and storyline. It took me a while to get into, and at times I felt very interested, but overall it felt like a book that the writer had stopped and started and in the restarts had not backtracked and rewritten. The ending feels very sudden, as if the author's just had enough, and much is not explained. In books that tell a story of the realm of fairy alongside ordinary reality, I usually feel some sympathy for fairy, but here this was minimal. Fairy is never really explained and those involved with it are unpleasant.
That said, there is definitely still something in the book that I enjoyed and appreciated though I'm not sure what exactly. Perhaps at times the prose and storyline do come together enough to draw me in.
Thanks to @The Judge and @Victoria Silverwolf for their comments in these Reading threads that generated enough interest in me to want to read it.

It's tempting to see the book in terms of the cultural norms of the time (the 1920s). Much of the book centres around forbidden fairy fruit which cause those who consume it to long to eat more and more of it while becoming outcasts of society.
Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) seems to have been a very interesting and talented individual. It's a pity she did not write more along these lines. The book was published in 1926, but her partner/close friend of the previous fifteen years died in 1928 and she doesn't seem to have written much thereafter.
 
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Hugh, your ambivalence about Lud-in-the-Mist very much mirrors my own both about the writing and the plot/storyline. It felt to me as if she was writing for the sheer enjoyment of various scenes and characters, so less -- to her -- interesting aspects or scenes were ignored and she had no concerns about it forming a coherent whole. Yet, despite all my reservations I, too, enjoyed it and it's a book I think I'll read again in a few years to see if the magic enfolds me a little more.
 
AE35Unit said:
Sorry Heinlein but Glory Road is boring me to tears. No plot, no story, no point going any further. First DNF of the year.
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it's not for everybody but honestly there's only one book i found truly strange from him: job a comedy of justice
 
I got 'Secrets of a Devon Wood' by Jo Brown for Christmas and read it in a day (it's mostly artwork). I know there's a few nature lovers here, so here's a link if you're interested: Secrets of a Devon Wood by Jo Brown | Waterstones

Here's an example page:

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I also got 'Kaleidoscope: The Secret Life of Britain's Butterflies' by David Measures which I'm currently reading. And is like this inside:
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And, less nerdy, 'Once Upon a Tyne' the Ant & Dec autobiography, which I'm also currently reading. You don't need/want inside pictures of that one.
 
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