May 2021 Reading Discussion.

[Vertigo]

Not so good this one, every character (and I mean every character) had a secret past and had a name change at some point in their life, and they all had increasingly unlikely connections with each other

I hate that sort of formulaic crime thriller. My mum is addicted to Midsomer Murders reruns and it seems to me that pretty much every week everyone bar Barnaby, his wife and his sidekick always have murky pasts and motive to do the killing. It just gets boring! Admittedly I suppose that series ran for so long it must have been pretty impossible not to get formulaic!

After the first two books, I'm taking a break from Murakami's 1Q84 (which I'm loving) and have read Greg Egan's Teranesia (not his best) and am now reading a new author to me; C S Friedman's This Alien Shore which is turning out to be very good - sort of what I had hoped A Memory Called Empire would be but, for me, completely failed to be.

 

[Dave]

That's a genre of it's own isn't it? The Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Columbo whodunit, sometimes an inverted detective story, but which always ends with a locked room full of suspects, anyone of whom had a motive?

 

[Montero]

I've just started The Halcyon Fairy Book by T Kingfisher, which is a combination of her annotated fairy tales and Toad Words (already published as a collection). Her annotated fairy tales are really funny. It started with her reading a fairy tale as a calming thing in the middle of the night, and then starting to think about all the implications of the story and commenting on it as she goes. Comments about the King in a story that he was a **** and the like. And querying why the princess would actually marry that prince after he'd done x, y z. Quite a few of them are ones I'm not familiar with, though they fall in the usual category for fairy tales (the originals are not nearly as nice as Disney makes them). Altogether enjoyable snort fodder.

 

[Danny McG]

Just finished an enjoyable re-read of The Puppet Masters
I've read it a good few times over the years

 

[tobl]

Just finished an enjoyable re-read of The Puppet Masters
I've read it a good few times over the years

the movie is interesting too

 

[Dave]

Just finished an enjoyable re-read of The Puppet Masters
I've read it a good few times over the years

I found the casual sexism very cliché-ridden even for its time. It was as if someone told him he was writing a trite stereotype, so he just went full-steam ahead anyway to spite them. Therefore, I thought the idea was better than the story itself. It may have even put me off reading more Heinlein, some of which is quite probably much better.

 

[Vertigo]

I found the casual sexism very cliché-ridden even for its time. It was as if someone told him he was writing a trite stereotype, so he just went full-steam ahead anyway to spite them. Therefore, I thought the idea was better than the story itself. It may have even put me off reading more Heinlein, some of which is quite probably much better.

I seem to hit this every time I read or reread a Heinlein these days. I think what shocks me the most is how I never really noticed when I was first reading him as a teenager!

 

[Montero]

I noticed some as a teenager. But even so I will always be glad I read Citizen of the Galaxy. That is a good, warm adventure read with several different sf settings. (And from memory that is one of the less sexist ones or possibly even not. Not re-read in a while.)

 

[Danny McG]

I found the casual sexism very cliché-ridden even for its time

What happened? Did he diss a few chicks or something?

 

[Vertigo]

What happened? Did he diss a few chicks or something?

It's not so much dissing them as a very patronising attitude and the assumption that all women need a man to protect them etc. and a touch of their main contribution just being a pretty face. Or that seems to be my take away on most of my more recent Heinlein reads. I would add that he's by no means alone in this but I do find him one of the worst offenders. But it's not misogyny; he seemed to absolutely love women... so long as they leave the decision making to the men.

(ETA: sorry missed the irony!!!!)

 

[Danny McG]

(ETA: sorry missed the irony!!!!)

That was my intention, being ironic

 

[Wayne Mack]

I've been rereading some Alistair Maclean: "Ice Station Zebra," "The Satan Bug," and "When Eight Bells Toll." He was the first author in my childhood that I made an effort to collect his work. The three listed above are the survivors after my Mother, years ago, tried to clean out the family collection of books through yard sales. One of the surprising revelations I made was how many of the writing rules that I have learned that he violated. I found the stories, though, to still be quite readable and enjoyable.

 

[Vertigo]

That was my intention, being ironic

Yeah, I wrote my post and then reread your post and thought "Ah, I'm being thick!!" (It happens a lot! )

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

The book I'm currently reading has had some great reviews Making It, by Jay Blades.

From what I have read so far it's a cracking read. Over a hundred pages in.

 

[Parson]

I would hold that Heinlein had a complex view of women. My dusty and assuredly faulty memory seems to recall that in some of the books women were more, shall we say, ornamental. But others, Friday comes to mind, they, like Friday, had a whole lot of agency and were beyond doubt the drivers of the story. I've always been much more concerned about his cavalier treatment of fidelity and commitment in covenantal relationships.

 

[soulsinging]

I seem to hit this every time I read or reread a Heinlein these days. I think what shocks me the most is how I never really noticed when I was first reading him as a teenager!

Had the same experience recently re-reading Catch-22. I still love it and think it’s hilarious, but boy was I oblivious to some of its lesser traits in my teens.

 

[Bick]

I would hold that Heinlein had a complex view of women. My dusty and assuredly faulty memory seems to recall that in some of the books women were more, shall we say, ornamental. But others, Friday comes to mind, they, like Friday, had a whole lot of agency and were beyond doubt the drivers of the story. I've always been much more concerned about his cavalier treatment of fidelity and commitment in covenantal relationships.

I’m more in agreement with this view. In older books he often had strong and capable women too (e.g. The Rolling Stones).

Also, I think one must be careful not to cast aside authors who wrote in other times, when other general views prevailed, who (some of the time) wrote works in line with the zeitgeist that we now view as inappropriate. It strikes me as ironic that in our more enlightened times we cry out against intolerance of every possible description, with the exception, perhaps, of intolerance of our own past.

 

[Extollager]

Not reading anything sfnal or fantastic right at the moment, but interesting enough. There's Joan Bennett's Sir Thomas Browne: "A Man of Achievement in Literature" (quotation marks in original subtitle), a biographical and critical study of the 17th-century author of Religio Medici, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall, etc. Bennett reports that Browne participated in a trial for witchcraft and I've found that archive.org has a source she cites, Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, Vol. 6, so I'm printing the relevant pages for reading offscreen. (The account starts with column 687, each page having two columns of small print.) In the Religio, Browne said he'd always believed witches could be real and now knows it to be true. It needs often to be pointed out that it was not the Middle Ages that were the great period of witchcraft trials but that that came later (this one is in1665). If I had more time and interest, one thing I would be curious about is the methodology of the trials. How often were "confessions" obtained after torture? In popular imagination today, about 100% of the time, but I'm not so sure about that.

Then I'm also reading Charlie Pye-Smith's The Other Nile, a volume in the Penguin Travel Library, and Doyle's penultimate Sherlock Holmes book His Last Bow. And Voddie Baucham's Fault Lines, a critique of "antiracism" and critical race theory, which this Black author sees as being basically a cult. I read three stories in Robert Coates's All the Year Round, which were entertaining but nothing like so appealing as "The Hour After Westerly," Ray Bradbury reprinted in Timeless Tales for Today and Tomorrow, I believe.

 

[Dave]

Also, I think one must be careful not to cast aside authors who wrote in other times, when other general views prevailed, who (some of the time) wrote works in line with the zeitgeist that we now view as inappropriate. It strikes me as ironic that in our more enlightened times we cry out against intolerance of every possible description, with the exception, perhaps, of intolerance of our own past.

I read fiction mainly for enjoyment. I can read whatever I like, but I prefer to read what I like to read. I don't have the time to read everything. I'm certainly not stopping anyone else from reading them. The problem I have with Puppet Masters is that is set in 2007. Heinlein's view of what 2007 would be was clearly quite wrong, it was instead 1951 on steroids, or what he would like it to be like in 2007. Authors are free to put their political and socio-political views in books, and many do so, but I don't need to agree with them, and I may not enjoy them. As I already said, I do regret that Puppet Masters "may have even put me off reading more Heinlein, some of which is quite probably much better" and I also said that I thought it was "very cliché-ridden even for its time" and in my view, it was deliberately so. Therefore, there is no "casting aside of authors who wrote in other times" by me. In which case, I'm not sure why you thought it relevant to point out the above to me.

 

[Extollager]

Oh -- I see I was likely to have created a false impression, that it was after his participation in a witch trial that Browne wrote the Religio Medici and said he knew "now" that witches could be real. He wrote that book before appearing at the trial. I don't think any other of the great English authors actually participated in a trial for witchcraft.

In fact -- did any of the other standard authors participate in a profile for any serious crime or trial with serious consequences? They might write about them, but actually participate in them as witnesses, attorneys, judges, or jury members?