March 2022 Reading Thread

[Danny McG]

United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas

Alt history where America surrendered to the Japanese back in WW2 - now there's giant mech robots!
Good fun so far, the first of a trilogy

 

[williamjm]

Idea for a story:
Aliens- people of earth we have killed all your liders and are taking over the economy.
Earth people - Oh My GOd! Thank you, thank you, thank you
Aliens - what?!

 

[worldofmutes]

I’m having the damndest time finishing a book this month because of family matters.

Gonna pick up a christmas book. No idea what its about, a detective mystery I suppose. Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer.

Found in a little free library.

 

[BAYLOR]

I’m having the damndest time finishing a book this month because of family matters.

Gonna pick up a christmas book. No idea what its about, a detective mystery I suppose. Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer.

Found in a little free library.
View attachment 87862

Under detective fiction

Pietr The Latvian by George Simeon Theses fist of the long running Maigret detective series.

Night Has A Thousand Eyes by Cornell Woolrich a terrific novel . This \the man who wrote The Rear Window which was the basis for the classic Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Yes, Envious Casca is a mystery novel. A murder mystery in fact. I haven't read it in years, but I seem to remember it as one of Heyer's more entertaining detective novels.

 

[Danny McG]

I recently used a photo of Mark Lester in the thread "whose face is this?"
So now I'm reading Oliver Twist

 

[Danny McG]

I recently used a photo of Mark Lester in the thread "whose face is this?"
So now I'm reading Oliver Twist

I wish he'd desist referring to Charley Bates as Master!

Extract from the book:-
The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat-sleeves tucked up, and his hat cocked, as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them,

 

[tobl]

apparently there's going to be a new laurell hamilton and a new david golemon this year... i truly hope so, or this is year is really going to suck.
at least there's a new jack campbell coming out in june

 

[tobl]

by the way john ringo was supposed to launch some time ago, some continuations of some of his favorite works. does anyone has any news about that?

 

[AE35Unit]

I wish he'd desist referring to Charley Bates as Master!

Extract from the book:-
The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat-sleeves tucked up, and his hat cocked, as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them,

We had a head master with that name. You can imagine the school kids reactions...

 

[Danny McG]

by the way john ringo was supposed to launch some time ago, some continuations of some of his favorite works. does anyone has any news about that?

I saw, last summer, that he was working on another book in his Troy Rising series, but now there doesn't seem to be any updates

 

[Parson]

Finished The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. I am sad to say that it did not hold a candle to my memory. I remembered a taunt mystery. Reading it 40 years?! later it seemed obvious, even plodding dealing with a lot of mundane stuff that I either didn't remember or wasn't bothered by before. For me this didn't hold up nearly as well as David Weber's early Honor Harrington books. Every time I read them I find myself liking them even more than than I remembered.

Also finished a lesser book by my go to author for good positive stories, Laurence E. Dahners. This is a new series which I am sorry to say is a lot less scientific than his previous stuff, Fast-Time at Aldmont High. It is much more of a fantasy that S.F. It's the story of a teenager who learns that he can change the flow of time around him by thinking about it. And then I am reading a few of his short stories in a book entitled Six Bits. This has some of his earliest writing and it's interesting to see how went about developing some of his ideas first in the short story form. I may or may not read all of the shorts. Next up will likely be It Ain't Over by Robert M. Kerns.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

Reading The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, edited by Steve Roud and Julia Bishop.
A very interesting read.

 

[Montero]

Continuing my way through Victoria Goddard's work - and I really like the way she lays the seeds for a plot twist. I'm currently working through her Greenwing and Dart series and information on and skills of one of the main characters that was first introduced in book 1 and was one of his obsessions that get mentioned in book 2, just played a really pivotal role in book 3. So nice one there.
She also must have done a great deal of planning on her world building to get some of the intersections she does. These books, and the Hands of the Emperor books are set in the same world, but different parts of it, though all connected through some major events and she does a really splendid of job of setting up "aaah so that is the other side of what was happening there" moments. Or just having characters from one series encounter characters from a different series in transit - it is amusing to the reader who is in the know. She also has a nice touch of humour - not slapstick or large and obvious, but smiling humour and observation of people and absurdity.
Having said that, I am going to very cryptically say that the fight scene at the end of book 2, Bee Sting Cake, is really, really funny. Genuine danger, heroism and skill, but is not the classic fantasy duel.
She also has her characters interacting with their relations and there is the connectedness of society in there, for good and ill - even though at times there is a "quest" feel to some parts of the plots, they are never in isolation from the wider world.

Oh and this is fantasy with magic, in a vaguely 18th century setting.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I am well into On the Fly! Hobo Literature & Songs 1879-1941 (2018) edited by Iain McIntyre. It's a thick book of short pieces by folks who rode the rails during that time period. (My first surprise is that the hobo culture started so early, although its peak was during the Great Depression. The second is how incredibly dangerous stealing a ride on a train was. An estimated 24,000 railroad trespassers were killed between 1901 and 1905, and a similar number injured.)

 

[Randy M.]

I've picked up and put down a couple of novels lately, not quite in tune with either and I think that's more me than the books themselves.

Anyway, taking on leadership in a group discussion on GoodReads about it, I've started The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald. This will be my ~4th read of the novel, one of the author's best. At about 250 pages in mass market pb (233 in the hardcover omnibus I'm reading) I'm reminded early on how spare and concise his writing was. Looking for a missing boy of 10, Lew Archer, the detective protagonist, says of a distant fire in the California mountains, "Under and through the smoke I caught glimpses of fire like the flashes of heavy guns too far away to be heard." Without saying it directly, little touches like that reinforce that Archer is moving toward danger and in the context of traveling this route with the boy's mother in the car, that the stakes are rather higher than just his own safety.

I admire and enjoy Chandler and Hammett, but over the course of writing novel after novel, neither equaled Macdonald, espeically I think in his work from the late '50s into the early '70s.

 

[Danny McG]

Live free or die, book one of the Troy Rising series by John Ringo.
I've read them all before but they're good fun, aliens with a maple syrup addiction.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Bedtime reading this month- re-reading a collection of 3 of Ursula le Guin's early SF novels. I've finished "Rocannon's World" and "Planet of Exile"; just started "City of Illusion." One thing that strikes me is that the first two play epic fantasy tropes a lot closer to straight than any of her fantasy does.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Read Susan Sontag. Now reading Shirley Jackson short Stories, a Wonder Woman comic book,and the Comic Book Ghost in the Shell.

 

[kythe]

I haven't checked in here in a long time. In the last few months, I have listened to Audible's The Sandman, parts 1&2 by Neil Gaiman. I have always enjoyed his works. He brings metaphysical concepts to life and makes them relatable characters. Part 3 of The Sandman is scheduled to come out this summer.

I also have read J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. As an adult, I still see the magic of childhood fantasy. However, the story does present an interesting subtext about motherhood and the role of women of the time. I can see that being my grandmother's "world".

Also, one of the earliest Star Trek books, Dwellers in the Crucible by Margaret Wander Bonanno. It has some very good original characters and depiction of Vulcan, but a plot that doesn't hold together.