January 2022 Reading Thread.

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AE35Unit said:
Starting the year with some David Attenborough, QUEST UNDER CAPRICORN 1963, first edition. Right from the opening chapter you get an idea just how vast Australia is! He begins in Darwin, right in the far north, and the nearest city (Adelaide) is further than the distance from London to the centre of the Sahara desert.
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Australia is certainly big, unfortunately, I think he's wrong. For one thing, Cairns is a city and is much nearer, and secondly Darwin to Adelaide is about 1600 miles, and London to the centre of the Sahara is about 1800 miles. Nonetheless, its nearly a very striking statistic.

Attenborough's books are great mind you.
 
Vladd67 said:
It would be nice to see more Victorian London crime stories that aren't sherlock Holmes or Jack the ripper based. Maybe something set in the earlier part of Victoria's reign rather than the late 1880's.
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I read Lisa Tuttle's The Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief and The Witch and Wayside Cross in the last couple of years and while they are set in the Holmes era and clearly have taken some inspiration from Conan Doyle they do have original plotlines.
 
Bick said:
Australia is certainly big, unfortunately, I think he's wrong. For one thing, Cairns is a city and is much nearer, and secondly Darwin to Adelaide is about 1600 miles, and London to the centre of the Sahara is about 1800 miles. Nonetheless, its nearly a very striking statistic.

Attenborough's books are great mind you.
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Attenborough was a huge influence on me as a kid, I have followed his work ever since I first saw Life on Earth. Natural history is a big part of my life.
 
I'm into the final stretch with Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I've reconciled myself to the magic and the story looks to winding up to a humdinger of a conclusion. Chief complaint now? We have at least 4 main characters always being written in the first person. Novik jumps between each of them without rhyme or reason. Usually these jumps occur every couple of thousand words or so. Perhaps aggravating to some, but that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that the characters are never identified at the switch. You have to deduce who the main character reporting is by context. I know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I have a very difficult time remembering names, but sometimes it takes me nearly 1000 words to figure out who and what is being written about here. It's a real frustration to me and I may have to down-rate the story because of it. What's really frustrating is that it would be such an easy fix! When you switch lead characters, give me a heading. It need be nothing more than the character's name: Miriam or whatever.
 
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Parson said:
I'm into the final stretch with Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I've reconciled myself to the magic and the story looks to winding up to a humdinger of a conclusion. Chief complaint now? We have at least 4 main characters always being written in the first person. Novik jumps between each of them without rhyme or reason. Usually this jumps occur every couple of thousand words or so. Perhaps aggravating to some, but that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that the characters are never identified at the switch. You have to deduce who the main character reporting is by context. I know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I have a very difficult time remembering names, but sometimes it takes me nearly 1000 words to figure out who and what is being written about here. It's a real frustration to me and I may have to down-rate the story because of it. What's really frustrating is that it would be such an easy fix! When you switch lead characters, give me a heading. It need be nothing more than the character's name: Miriam or whatever.
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I can't agree with you strongly enough here. Even if it's not explicitly flagged at least have some clear indicator; a Banks novel I read some years ago - Complicity - had one pov in first person and one in second person, so it was always very obvious where you were. Though at the end he flipped that but it was done for very specific reasons and was both very obvious and very effective.
 
Parson said:
I'm into the final stretch with Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I've reconciled myself to the magic and the story looks to winding up to a humdinger of a conclusion. Chief complaint now? We have at least 4 main characters always being written in the first person. Novik jumps between each of them without rhyme or reason. Usually these jumps occur every couple of thousand words or so. Perhaps aggravating to some, but that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that the characters are never identified at the switch. You have to deduce who the main character reporting is by context. I know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I have a very difficult time remembering names, but sometimes it takes me nearly 1000 words to figure out who and what is being written about here. It's a real frustration to me and I may have to down-rate the story because of it. What's really frustrating is that it would be such an easy fix! When you switch lead characters, give me a heading. It need be nothing more than the character's name: Miriam or whatever.
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I really liked the book, but now that you mention it I do remember getting confused at least a couple of times about who we were following.
 
Reading Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett. Best thing in it is this utterly unrepentant cad named Boghaz who serves as the hero's sidekick.
 
I had only one episode of confusion with Spinning Silver, and that was resolved pretty quickly, but I do agree that when there is such a simple solution to potential problems, and no downside to it -- it wouldn't have impacted in any way upon the narrative -- then it's remiss for the author and editor not to have dealt with it in advance.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the novel as a whole when you've finished with it, Parson.
 
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. What I just posted at GoodReads:
A book about books, a story within a story, and I'm already drawn in, make both stories murder mysteries and I can't put the book down. I found Magpie Murders engaging enough that I greatly anticipated getting back to it when I had to set it aside. Horowitz's prose is smooth and pushes the story along at a rapid clip, his insights into the cathartic qualities of mysteries interesting and nicely offset by contrasting fictional murders against real-life murders. On the whole, an elegant and neatly orchestrated mystery novel.

Really, an exemplary bit of plotting and an interesting consideration of how a writers' life may be reflected in his fiction
 
Just started a Nero Wolfe run, last month I read book 1 and this month just started book 2. I found the tv series on YouTube and decided to check out the source material.
 
I went with none of the books I planned to read in my last December post and am now nearing the end of Deacon King Kong by James McBride. It's been excellent so far. Funny, a great cast of characters, a touch of biting snark, and even a melodramatic romance or two. I struggled through his last book so this has been a nice surprise.

Alongside that I've been wading into Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin and will finish it once this one wraps up to complete my reread of the original Earthsea. Not sure if I'll tackle the later volumes, though I do have Tehanu on my shelf.
 
I'm currently reading Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn. Life in the Post Human Landscape.
It is about abandoned buildings, cities and islands that has been overtaken by nature. It includes Chernobyl, and uninhabited Scottish islands.
 
Just finished the last volume of Charles Stross Merchant Princes series, Invisible Sun.
The series and to some extent the book has already been mentioned numerous times.

Due to multiple deaths and things that the entire world is experiencing, the publication of both this book and its predecessor was delayed by years. I remember the series well, but the details of what happened in vol. 8, three years back, returned to me slowly as I read this 376 page work. Having been in an odd corner of the book business (librarian for 35 years) I notice things like type size and paper weight a little more than many. They didn't cheat. It's a hefty 376 pager.
Stross took good advantage of his delays, to write in asides and threads about American elections, surveillance technology, and even a comment that Elon Musk offerred to handle a rocketry project for (relatively) cheap.
Stross is a craftsman. In an afterward he says that he learned a lot about writing in the 20 years since he started volume one. He certainly throws in more twists and plot developments, here occurring on two primary world lines and at least four subsidiaries, than I have seen in any one book. Usually I do not like an overabundance of complications outside the main thread of the story, but the glee with which he presents what is going on with major characters, and his skill at interworking them, certainly carried me along.
Some characters come across as good guys n' gals, but they are equalled by the capabilities of their opposition. Who are generally presented first person. You see where they are coming from.
In a previous sentence I said guys n' gals. Not a misstatement, but the bulk of the action is carried by women. A tendency that shows increasingly in all of Stross' various series.
Both here and elsewhere, he not an optimist about where technology and politics are taking us. The ending does tie it up but with a little bit of a deus ex machina feel to it. He does not back off from his general cynicism.
Absolutely read it. The earlier volumes are lighter, sort of an adult portal Narnia. By #9 it outpaces Le Carre in its realpolitic convolutions. The overall word count is greater than War and Peace. It's easy for me to recommend because I did spread it out over more than a decade. But it was worth it.
 
Hagakure by Yamamoto Jōchō (Tsunetomo)

This is basically the code of the samurai, a collection of anecdotes, poems and general instructions assembled in the 17th century.

A typical extract:-
11-74. Matsudaira Izu-no-Kami said to Mizuno Kenmotsu “You are an expedient man, but it is a pity you are so short.”
Kenmotsu retorted: “Indeed it is true. Some things turn out contrary to one’s liking. I would be a little taller if I was to chop your head off and attach it to my feet, but I am unable to have it my way.”

(I think I'll be dipping into this tome for many a month!)
 
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Just finished Childhood’s End and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has dated slightly but only in terms of some current technology. What hasn’t dated is that it is still a well told, damn fine science fiction novel. That quality is timeless.

Next: I came to a realisation recently that all I’ve read from Brian Aldiss is the Helliconia trilogy and a few of his shorts. That’s about to change as Frankenstein Unbound is next.
 
Just starting Something More than Night by Kim Newman. How can anyone resist a book set in the late 1930s, early '40s, starring William Henry Pratt, a.k.a. Boris Karloff and Raymond Chandler, who is also the narrator? Only 25 pages in, but Newman isn't doing bad at capturing Chandler's voice with his rapid-fire similies.
 
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