November 2021 Reading Thread

[HareBrain]

Maybe I'm thinking that Germany as a separate country didn't exist?

It didn't before 1870, no. There were a load of electorates, principalities, dutchies etc, parts of which were in the Prussian Empire at various times IIRC.

 

[AE35Unit]

It didn't before 1870, no. There were a load of electorates, principalities, dutchies etc, parts of which were in the Prussian Empire at various times IIRC.

So is it right to mention Germany in a book based in roman times?

 

[AE35Unit]

When you realise the book you're reading involves war and horses being killed.

 

[HareBrain]

So is it right to mention Germany in a book based in roman times?

Yes, I think it was called Germania Major and Germania Minor. I guess it was like a vase, smashed to pieces by the Roman withdrawal and then stuck back together centuries later.

 

[Danny McG]

Today I'm reading Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

[Rodders]

My next book, Danny. Let me know how you get on.

 

[Danny McG]

My next book, Danny. Let me know how you get on.

I started reading it originally back in May, however it was a somewhat dodgy pirate download and there was too many fuzzy blocks of text, so it was DNF. (A valuable lesson!)

Now I've got a proper paid for Amazon version so I'm going afresh and with a pure heart

 

[elvet]

I took the plunge. Started The Eye of the World . It is my first read of The Wheel of Time.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I have started The Dream Machines: A Pictorial History of the Spaceship in Art, Science, and Literature (1993) by Ron Miller, a big, thick, encyclopedia-style timeline of the subject.

 

[Randy M.]

Finished Murder and Magic by Randall Garrett -- good fun collection of Holmesian fantasy (or s.f., sort of). Lord Darcy isn't really given room to be as charismatic, and Master Sean leans toward stereotype, but of the four stories, only one was really weak. The longer stories were quite engaging.

Next, just started another Holmesian fantasy, The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison (a.k.a. Sarah Monette). ONly ~25 pages in, but I'm already impressed with how she captures the tone and feel of Victorian prose.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'm currently reading Dune, by Frank Herbert.
I want to read it before people start talking about the film. Somehow I don't think the film will live up to the book. Hardly any film does.

It's funny how a book changes or is it us. I read this book 10 years ago and loved it, however now I just can't get into it. I read 150 pages and now it is a dnf. Really weird that.

 

[hitmouse]

It's funny how a book changes or is it us. I read this book 10 years ago and loved it, however now I just can't get into it. I read 150 pages and now it is a dnf. Really weird that.

I was less impressed than I remembered when I reread it recently.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Just finished Merlin Sheldrake's book on fungi. Ace.

 

[Danny McG]

Fear no Evil - the latest Alex Cross thriller by the writing conglomerate that goes by the name of James Patterson

 

[tobl]

Fear no Evil - the latest Alex Cross thriller by the writing conglomerate that goes by the name of James Patterson

there's just one series by him i like. the cop

 

[Danny McG]

Fear no Evil - the latest Alex Cross thriller by the writing conglomerate that goes by the name of James Patterson

I got irked at this deux ex machina!
Why would some minor golf club have additional cameras?

Mahoney lowered his phone. “We’ve got a break. Whoever hacked the security system at the Congressional Country Club didn’t know about a battery-operated night-vision still-photo camera independent of the system and mounted overlooking the terrace. It caught one of the killers. They’re sending over the picture now.”

 

[HareBrain]

Now reading Treacle Walker, a strange little book publish by Garner this year.

Took me a few days to get round to finishing this. I'm not sure what I think of it. It'll probably need another reading (which will be easy enough to do -- it's novella length). It's evocative and peculiar and probably only Garner could have written it (or maybe only he could have got it published).

 

[soulsinging]

Finished "The Galaxy and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers. (Who, as I've said before, is one of those Marmite authors- most people seem to either love or loathe her work.) It's a quiet, character-led story. Five people, three of them interstellar travellers, are stuck waiting in a small habitat dome during a disaster. What fills me with delight is the fact that this is a novel where none of the main characters are human. They're also not what you might call stereotypical members of their various species, which makes their interactions less predictable than they could have been.

This sounds really interesting. It looks like it's #4 in a series. Do you need to have read the first 3?

Nearing the end of Elizabeth Moon's Sheepfarmer's Daughter, which has been great so far. I don't much care for military fiction or books with really long into training sections, but Paks has been a fascinating character, and I like that despite regularly acknowledging the grunts generally have little idea who they're fighting for or why, it doesn't descend into jaded relativistic cynicism. Rather than defeating eternal evils, they just want to make sure the person next to them on the line gets to go home safe too (well, some of them).

Hopefully it finishes as strong as it's been so far, as I have the next 2 ready to go.

 

[Vertigo]

This sounds really interesting. It looks like it's #4 in a series. Do you need to have read the first 3?

Nearing the end of Elizabeth Moon's Sheepfarmer's Daughter, which has been great so far. I don't much care for military fiction or books with really long into training sections, but Paks has been a fascinating character, and I like that despite regularly acknowledging the grunts generally have little idea who they're fighting for or why, it doesn't descend into jaded relativistic cynicism. Rather than defeating eternal evils, they just want to make sure the person next to them on the line gets to go home safe too (well, some of them).

Hopefully it finishes as strong as it's been so far, as I have the next 2 ready to go.

I read these a long time ago when I was still reading some fantasy and I thought this one in particular stood out for it's very down to earth approach to, as you say, the life of the grunts. Something about it felt very honest and I really enjoyed it. I was slightly less enamoured of the following books which felt somehow more run of the mill fantasy though I did still enjoy them; Moon is a solid wordsmith. But this was around the point when I was becoming somewhat disillusioned with fantasy in general. I now get that sort of reading from historic novels - Roman, Saxon etc. - and the realism of this first book felt, in many ways, similar to a good historic book.

 

[Foxbat]

Re-reading Dune for the umpteenth time.