July 2022 Reading Thread

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I'm making good progress through This Corner of the Universe by Britt Ringel. This is a first rate military SF. A story of a young rookie captain of a Corvette sent to investigate some perhaps suspicious activity in another star system. So far I'm really impressed. It's a hardish SF with a few handwavems, like FTL and inertial compensators, but beside that it has well thought out consequences and tactics, with a very likable main character and a crew. I'll read more of this series for sure.
 
J.G. Ballard "Vermilion Sands"
Nine stories first published 1956- 1970.
Wonderful imaginative vistas set in and around the faded resort of Vermilion Sands. Uniquely Ballard.
I'd only come across two of these before and hadn't realised there was a continuity linking this series of stories.
Many thanks for the recommendation @hitmouse
 
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This past week and a bit, I've finished:
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman (pretty good);
Adult Assembly Required by Abbi Waxman (so-so);
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black (more-or-less-non-fiction, different but superficial);
and my first John Scalzi - The Dispatcher and Murder by Other Means (interesting concept and fun to listen to; audio book narrator Zachary Quinto did a good job).

I started Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The novel was starting to get really good at the point when the octopi were running (swimming?) riot, but then Tchaikovsky moves to the spiders and my interest took a nose dive. I would rather read about cephalopods (or any other molluscs for that matter) and strange new worlds than arachnids.
 
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Started Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson. I picked this up when it was new in 2014 and it's been haunting my bookshelf and TBR list ever since.

This is in reaction to the astonishingly bad Brent Weeks debut The Way of Shadows that I've been working my way through in my library ereader app, which I finally DNF'd about 2/3 through after wringing out any hope of finding a redeeming quality and realizing even the perverse pleasure of witnessing a trainwreck isn't worth the time to finish the thing.

I'll say more about Unwrapped Sky when I've actually read more than a few pages but it's looking promising so far.
 
tachyon said:
This is in reaction to the astonishingly bad Brent Weeks debut The Way of Shadows that I've been working my way through in my library ereader app, which I finally DNF'd about 2/3 through after wringing out any hope of finding a redeeming quality and realizing even the perverse pleasure of witnessing a trainwreck isn't worth the time to finish the thing.
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Join the club! My comment here back in June 2021:

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. I forced myself to get to p494 out of a total of 645 pages and it was excruciatingly slow getting that far (writing poor, characters worse) and though half of me would like to know what happens/how it ends, I really don't don't know if I can be bothered to finish it​

I've not picked it up since, but it's still lurking in my Not Yet Finished box, waiting for liberation, if only to a charity shop.
 
The Judge said:
Join the club! My comment here back in June 2021:

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. I forced myself to get to p494 out of a total of 645 pages and it was excruciatingly slow getting that far (writing poor, characters worse) and though half of me would like to know what happens/how it ends, I really don't don't know if I can be bothered to finish it​

I've not picked it up since, but it's still lurking in my Not Yet Finished box, waiting for liberation, if only to a charity shop.
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So many glowing reviews, quite a long wait for it to come available from the library, I was expecting good things.

Unwrapped Sky is a second-world fantasy with an assassin MC so I thought it would be a good followup. It seems also to be written for grownups.

Funny thing, I pulled it off the shelf yesterday because I saw an article about Fonda Lee's new upcoming book Untethered Sky, which aside from the obvious title similarity, has a very similar cover - it must be the same artist.

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Just finished The American, the Penguin Classics version for 35 years or so ago. I enjoyed it quite a lot. The fifth of his full-length novels that I've read, but I haven't read any of the famous possibly hard-to-read late ones such as The Ambassadors.

I've started a second reading of the Kalevala, this time in Magoun's translation; 20 years ago I read Bosley's verse translation (World's Classics) and liked that. Twenty years already. For part of that time of reading, I who don't travel much, don't much like flying, etc. was on a Horizon Airlines flight, I think from somewhere to Medford, Oregon, and was served complimentary beer for the first and last time that I remember. The napkin is still tucked in my copy of Bosley's Kalevala. There's some excuse for mentioning this because beer is to the Kalevala as wine is to the Odyssey, or even moreso.

The Kalevala: Rune XX. The Brewing of Beer.

The Kalevala, by John Martin Crawford, [1888], full text etext at sacred-texts.com
www.sacred-texts.com

Just a picture I found online ...
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Finished reading

beautiful man.jpg


This is a dark mystery of the urban fantasy variety, and therefore not really in my reading zone. But I read it in a night and found it interesting and never predictable. If you like urban fantasy you might like this a lot. And it's written by our own @Mouse
 
I should have explained that the airport in my photo above is the Medford airport, and the airplane is an Alaska-Horizon Airlines craft -- so it did kind of make sense to include the photo with that posting.
 
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