July 2022 Reading Thread

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Hugh said:
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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Glad you enjoyed it.
Looking back, I see that, embarassingly, I have been banging on about Vermilion Sands on Chrons for the last decade.
 
hitmouse said:
Glad you enjoyed it.
Looking back, I see that, embarassingly, I have been banging on about Vermilion Sands on Chrons for the last decade.
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Well it wouldn't have occurred to me to read it without your recommendation(s) (of which I remember just two).
 
Following my dive into the massive volumes The Classic Horror Collection and The Classic Fantasy Collection, I complete a trilogy by starting The Classic Science Fiction Collection (2018.) As before, public domain stuff from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As before, anonymous editor and anonymous introduction. Included are H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rudyard Kipling, and a bunch of other folks.
 
Danny McG said:
Tonight I'm starting the new Dean Koontz book, The big dark sky.

(I wonder how many pages before a cute and smart doggie shows up)
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There is one but it's only mentioned in passing...a family are in Witness Protection

"Of course, I’m not at liberty to say where we put them.”
Artimis smiled. “Not even to me. I understand. I’m happy just to know they’re happy. Have they gotten a dog?”
“They have, yes. But I’m not—”
“—at liberty to say what breed. Dear, do you sometimes wonder if too much security is hampering us in this search for the Other?”
 
"Dorset Coast" interviews by James Crowden & Ruby Wright (2007)
A series of 38 interviews with old hands working the Dorset Coast from Lyme Regis to Mudeford Quay. Fishermen, fossil hunters, swanherds, divers, cafe owners, boat builders, beachcombers, quarrymen. An excellent feel for their ways of life, traditions and folklore. The interviews also manage to convey the manner of speaking of each individual, including the way in which they can wander off a subject then return to it. Well produced book with good photographs of each interviewee.

Particular memories from the book that stand out:
(1) A diver based on Portland Bill speaking about cuttlefish: "You can be diving and feel that someone is looking at you and you turn around and a metre away is a cuttlefish, just following you out of sheer curiosity. They are not dumb like fish. There is a form of intelligence and you can connect with them. They look like tabby cats and they change their colour. You can sometimes get to stroke them. They are fascinating".
(2) In the late 1960s, for three years I spent part of each summer on Portland Bill and it was dinned into me that while I was there I must never speak the name of a certain common animal (a small brown mammal with long ears, a bit longer than a foot) as it was worse than bad luck and would cause great offence. (I think this was connected with the local quarrying industry). I was pleased to be reminded of this when two of the Portland interviewees brought this up. Back then it was also pointed out to me that a number of houses had bay trees in the front garden as a guard against witches, but there was no mention of this in the interviews.
 
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Hugh said:
while I was there I must never speak the name of a certain common animal (a small brown mammal with long ears, a bit longer than a foot) as it was worse than bad luck and would cause great offence
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Sorry but I can't work it out
 
Hugh said:
(a small brown mammal with long ears, a bit longer than a foot)
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Wow, ears more than a foot long -- I'm struggling too.

As for my reading, just over halfway through The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams. I'm enjoying this so far (a reread after 33-odd years) but Lord it could do with trimming.
 
Sorry, I didn't mean to create confusion:

westbaycottage.co.uk

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

I read an Interesting Thing concerning rabbits and the Isle of Portland the other day. Good excuse to find and post a bunny picture I thought...
westbaycottage.co.uk westbaycottage.co.uk
 
The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian - This was probably the most disappointing of my recent Maturin and Aubrey books. This is the fourth book covering the same voyage started in The Thirteen-Gun Salute (book 13) and it doesn’t really feel like a story with a beginning, middle and end. Just lots of rather bitty goings on that all felt very middle and an exceptionally abrupt ending. I can’t really complain though; 16 books into the series with four to go and there have only been a couple of lesser books in there! 3/5 stars

The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov - It’s strange that I should have read Caves of Steel at least twice, with the first time being more years ago than I care to count, and yet I had never read The Naked Sun! Well, that’s fixed now! I find it suffers the same writing simplicity that I find in most classic SF as compared with more contemporary SF; backgrounds and characters are only roughly sketched in, motivations are very simple and often filled with holes, various plot elements were desperately implausible. Does Asmov really expect me to believe that the residents of a planet producing the most advanced robots in the galaxy can be fooled into believing Daneel was not a robot? Especially when all his dialogue is, frankly, so robot-like. And it became very frustrating how Baley is constantly being blind-sided by the attitudes of the population. Asimov explained them very well early on and each time whatever caught Baley out just seemed incredibly obvious to me. But still despite all that Asimov does still present another interesting flaw in the Three Laws that gave a creditable mystery to be cleared up. 3/5 stars

Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds - I approached Inhibitor Phase with some trepidation it being nearly twenty years since Absolution Gap was published. The Prefect (aka Aurora Rising) was written a little later and was set rather earlier than the main Revelation Space stories followed eleven years later by a rather weaker Elysium Fire and I was hoping not to have a repeat of that one. Fortunately, Inhibitor Phase proves to be a strong sequel to the previous books and, having set up an interesting premise, Reynolds kept this reader guessing almost to the end. My only real criticism is that, for Reynolds, this is a rather more simple linear plot than his normal fare. It is ultimately what I call a simple quest plot; There is a thing/action to be acquired/done and on the journey various interesting companions are acquired, and various interesting stuff happens, eventually leading to the completion of the quest. There’s little in the way of twists and turns but rather just a series of obstacles to be overcome. However, to be fair, there’s an awful lot of books that take this simplistic linear plot approach and often very successfully and this is another such. 4/5 stars.

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I generally read and buy books in batches of around 25 and many of them will be volumes in on-going series. Within each batch I usually only have one book from each series and one book from any one author. For quite some time now I have mainly been reading authors well known to me, which was beginning to feel a little unadventurous. There have been one or two exceptions where I have picked up new authors, like Emily St John Mandel recently, but I felt it was time to take some more chances so a little browsing of some of my favourite author’s recommendations on their pages on FantasticFiction.com, along with some recommendations from you lot has produced a number of new authors for me to pick up in my next batch. All a bit scary! Here are some of the new authors I shall (probably) be picking up (the referrers are in brackets): John Brosnan (Terry Pratchett), Robert A Metzger and Linda Nagata (Greg Bear), M A Rothman (Gregory Benford), Karen Osborne (Sue Burke), Robert Reed (Alastair Reynolds), Michael Cobley (Iain M Banks), Jeff VanderMeer and Zachary Mason (Emily St John Mandel), Allen Stroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky). Let’s hope there aren’t too many disappointments, I have found some author recommendations to be vastly inferior to the work of the referrer!
 
Vertigo said:
The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov - It’s strange that I should have read Caves of Steel at least twice, with the first time being more years ago than I care to count, and yet I had never read The Naked Sun! Well, that’s fixed now! I find it suffers the same writing simplicity that I find in most classic SF as compared with more contemporary SF; backgrounds and characters are only roughly sketched in, motivations are very simple and often filled with holes, various plot elements were desperately implausible. Does Asmov really expect me to believe that the residents of a planet producing the most advanced robots in the galaxy can be fooled into believing Daneel was not a robot? Especially when all his dialogue is, frankly, so robot-like. And it became very frustrating how Baley is constantly being blind-sided by the attitudes of the population. Asimov explained them very well early on and each time whatever caught Baley out just seemed incredibly obvious to me. But still despite all that Asimov does still present another interesting flaw in the Three Laws that gave a creditable mystery to be cleared up. 3/5 stars
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I read it for the first time this year, too, but I was happy with it right up until the denouement when as far as I'm concerned it all fell apart. I managed to suspend disbelief as far as Daneel's acceptance was concerned and Baley's inability to comprehend things, and though I was narked by Gladia's characterisation I could cope, but the motive behind the killing was just unbelievable and unless I missed something important, the events of and immediately after the murder had a plot-hole a mile wide! Interesting ideas but deeply flawed as a murder mystery was my verdict.
 
I finished a trio of novellas, first Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Well-Built. This tale of an itinerant tea monk in the middle of an existential crisis and the robot he unexpectedly meets in the wilderness is low-key in terms of plot but I liked the world-building and the interactions between the two main characters. Even if not a huge amount actually happens in it, it's a very likeable story.

After that I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race. I liked the premise, a younger princess from a feudal society who makes the bold decision to ask for the aid of a reclusive wizard to save the land from a demonic plague, much to the discomfort of the 'wizard' who is really an anthropologist from a spacefaring civilisation meant to be studying the society. It had an interesting portrayal of how difficult it is for the two characters to communicate despite challenges of linguistics and the vast difference in perspective and it was amusing how the anthropologist's attempts to explain how he's not a wizard make him sound even more like a wizard to his audience. The mystery of the nature of the threat that they are facing also helps make it a compelling story. I really liked this story, I don't know if any more stories are planned in this setting but I think there is potential for more.

Today I finished Alix E. Harrow's A Spindle Shattered. Revisionist fairytales seem to have been very popular in recent years, this one adds a novel element by adding a multiverse element into the story, as very different characters who have some affinity with the Sleeping Beauty myths come into contact with each other. At times the plot does strain credulity a bit (such as being able to get a mobile signal in a different Universe) but it's a fun story to read even if despite hinting at darker storylines it ends up feeling a bit Young Adult.
 
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