May 2021 Reading Discussion.

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Finished the 6th of the Murderbot Diaries, Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. And this continues the tradition of being smart and thought provoking. We see Murderbot now living on "Preservation Station" with her friends. (I see I still understand Murderbot as female. It is an it, but I can't call it an it, because it's just too human, so she.) Anyway in this story she becomes a "detective" and starts to become more of an individual. It's wonderful. But as usual it's short and expensive. I'll buy another if that means anything.

I've now started another book in a favorite series. The Navy of Humankind: Wasp Squadron .... Indomitable it's following the life of a young woman who takes the call sign of Fire Ant. It's pretty topflight. I'm happy that Amazon reminded me of it.
 
I finally finished The Stand by Stephen King. That took me so long! Not because it wasn't an easy read, but it was just so very long! I'm now reading the much more compact, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Since this frequently appears on the best science fiction and fantasy lists, I thought it was high time I read it.
 
dask said:
Still reading and enjoying Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves.
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That's one of my favourite Asimovs but it's unusual for him in that it requires some significant effort on the part of the reader. Which is a complement not a complaint; I found it quite mind stretching!

Dave said:
I finally finished The Stand by Stephen King. That took me so long! Not because it wasn't an easy read, but it was just so very long! I'm now reading the much more compact, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Since this frequently appears on the best science fiction and fantasy lists, I thought it was high time I read it.
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That's one I've had on my TBR pile for ages but I keep putting it off since, in these modern times, I so often seem to struggle with old classic SF in a way I never used to in my youth.
 
Danny McG said:
The last watch by JS Dewes

www.grimdarkmagazine.com

REVIEW: The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes

The Last Watch is the debut novel from author, cinematographer, and video editor J.S. Dewes and is the first book in a new series called, The Divide.
www.grimdarkmagazine.com www.grimdarkmagazine.com
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It sounds interesting but a little formulaic (bunch of misfits, heir to the empire hiding his identity, romance? etc.) I'll be interested in your views.
 
Vertigo said:
It sounds interesting but a little formulaic (bunch of misfits, heir to the empire hiding his identity, romance? etc.) I'll be interested in your views.
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DNF, way too much non relevant info dumping, leading to monster sentences that read like tech instructions.
A Roman army based structure but they used Latin phrases too much.
Plus the characters really didn't grab me!
 
I'm having a try at this one now
Screenshot_20210505-134804.jpg
 
Just finished The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, which I'd recommend unreservedly. Well, that may be a slight exaggeration: There is a scattering of scenes which might be strong for the squeamish, but are crucial to the story he tells and have a strong effect because Jones' portrayal of his characters gets under the reader's skin.

Now, for change of pace, I'll dip into Zenna Henderson's The Anything Box for awhile.
 
Danny McG said:
DNF, way too much non relevant info dumping, leading to monster sentences that read like tech instructions.
A Roman army based structure but they used Latin phrases too much.
Plus the characters really didn't grab me!
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Those all sound like things that would give me problems, too! Thanks!! :D
 
(Brought over from the April reading discussion. Why? Because I read this in May and was not paying attention to where I'd posted it.)

Finished the 6th of the Murderbot Diaries, Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. And this continues the tradition of being smart and thought provoking. We see Murderbot now living on "Preservation Station" with her friends. (I see I still understand Murderbot as female. It is an it, but I can't call it an it, because it's just too human, so she.) Anyway in this story she becomes a "detective" and starts to become more of an individual. It's wonderful. But as usual it's short and expensive. I'll buy another if that means anything.

I've now started another book in a favorite series. The Navy of Humankind: Wasp Squadron .... Indomitable it's following the life of a young woman who takes the call sign of Fire Ant. It's pretty topflight. I'm happy that Amazon reminded me of it.

-----

Now finished Indomitable. I am much pleased with this series. It made sense all the way through. And the ending was a much more realistic ending than so many I read. I was really rooting for the "Fire Ant" because she felt like someone I could easily meet on the street in her concerns and fears and commitment to those whom she loved. I highly recommend the series. My only quibble was that the last book came in at slender 148 pages. But unlike The Murderbot Diaries these are all available via Kindle Unlimited, and so I didn't feel cheated and the author wrote what seemed to him (John Brazee) as the right length for the story.

Moved out of S.F. now and am reading Runaway Justice (a David Adams Novel) by Chad Zunker. This is the second in the series and I find them very solid stories. The first story provides the background to how a top of the class Sanford law school grad goes from a high paying corporate lawyer to a struggling defense lawyer struggling to make ends meet as he defends the least connected people in the American society. I'm 22% through and liking it a lot. --- I now note that it too only has 225 pages maybe there's a trend here?
 
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Danny McG said:
A very annoying trend IMO
Maybe we've just got too used to monster sized tomes
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That might be so, back in the last eon when I was a teenager most books (at least the ones I was reading) only had between 250 & 350 pages. Some of David Weber's later works could have been much better at 350 pages (a subtraction of about the same number).
 
The size of books probably needs a thread of its own. I quite like a book of 150-300 pages that can be finished in one sitting - maybe a sitting in the garden on a summer's day with a beer to hand. The problem is the cost. That single book usually costs exactly the same as something 1320 pages long, that could keep me occupied for a month. Ultimately though, it's down to the story and author. Is that 1320 pages just tedious waffle and filler?
 
Dave said:
The size of books probably needs a thread of its own. I quite like a book of 150-300 pages that can be finished in one sitting - maybe a sitting in the garden on a summer's day with a beer to hand. The problem is the cost. That single book usually costs exactly the same as something 1320 pages long, that could keep me occupied for a month. Ultimately though, it's down to the story and author. Is that 1320 pages just tedious waffle and filler?
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I agree. A proper old fashioned 1970s sized paperback with a pint of warm ale as the summer evening shadows lengthen over the village cricket pitch.
 
Groff Conklin "13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction" (1960)
Thirteen stories first published between 1946 and 1957. None that outstanding, but there were three or four I enjoyed:
Wyman Guin’s "Volpla!”: the story of the creation of the Volpla and of their creator in sunny California
Lion Miller’s “The Available Data on the Worp Reaction”: a six year old who collects objects from the dump behind his parents' house
Theodore Sturgeon's “The Skills of Xanadu”: a clash of different cultures
Richard Gehman’s “The Machine”: a man gets bored with his job pushing buttons.
 
Dave said:
Ultimately though, it's down to the story and author. Is that 1320 pages just tedious waffle and filler?
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This is exactly right! I absolutely love a really long well-written book that I can completely immerse myself in but only if it deserves to be really long, and I absolutely loathe a long book that is just filled with fluff and padding. I get a little annoyed by people who say that all books should be short as in the 'golden age' of SF and yet happily read a series with an single story arc that might extend to 10 books or more. What is a ten book series but a very long book that the reader has to buy (expensively) in instalments? Okay I accept that's a somewhat simplistic view but my point remains that a book should be exactly as long as the story requires, whether that's 100 pages or 1000.

PS I have recently completed Musashi which comes in at around 1000 pages and I'm currently reading 1Q84 which comes in at around 1300 pages (depending on edition). The former could probably have been shorter but having originally been written and published over several years in instalments would make such editing difficult, and the latter feels to me to be a case of being similar to a painting where the technique and colours are almost more important that the overall picture.
 
As though having three other books on the go wasn't enough. yesterday I bought and started Land of the White Horse: Visions of England by David Miles, about the White Horse of Uffington (and, it seems, horses in general). Good so far.
 
biodroid said:
Redemption by David Baldacci. Liking this author a lot lately, are there any other authors similar to his style?
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i love the memory man series. at last a character that actually uses his brain.
similar authors... i think you might have to be a bit more specific but you have kyle mills, daniel silva, jack higgins, robert ludlum, vince flynn
 
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