July 2022 Reading Thread

[Dave Vicks]

Currently Nancy Kress, and Nora Roberts.

 

[Bick]

Currently Nancy Kress, and Nora Roberts.

?? What about them?

 

[Dave Vicks]

Novel HIDEAWAY BY Nora Roberts.

Bick who is that in your Avatar?

 

[Danny McG]

Bick who is that in your Avatar?

I think it's from The Fredric Brown book martians go home?

 

[Dave Vicks]

Up next Non-fiction Thom Hartmann.

 

[Bick]

I think it's from The Fredric Brown book martians go home?

Not a book, but a novella, but otherwise Danny gets a gold sticker.
It was the Kelly Freas cover to Sept '54 Astounding.

 

[Ellizze]

I'm reading Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman now. It's a collection of short stories so liked a few and disliked some.

And I've just started reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It is an investigation of rigid social hierarchies across times and cultures. It talks especially about caste as a rabid problem in India - 2000-year-old apartheid on the basis of a section of society they're born into.

 

[Bick]

Not a book, but a novella, but otherwise Danny gets a gold sticker.
It was the Kelly Freas cover to Sept '54 Astounding.

View attachment 91630

Please excuse the oddness of replying to one’s own post, but I just noticed Astounding managed to misspell Fredric Brown’s name on the cover! Danny got it right, as did the magazine in the contents page. What a gaff!

 

[Elentarri]

Just finished: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of An Empire by Kyle Harper.
A fascinating and fairly scholarly examination on how changing climate and disease effected the course of Ancient Roman history. Harper provides an extensive examination of Roman civilization in the face of changing climate, extending contact between different peoples and the spread of disease before, during and after the Antonine Plague (ca. 165 A.D.), the Plague of Cyprian (ca. 249-62), and Justinian Plague (ca. 541-43 A.D., and subsequent outbreaks to 749 A.D). If found the different disease ecologies to be particularly interesting, especially combined with changing climate and human behaviour. The "plagues" described in this book don't all refer to the same disease: - small pox, some sort of viral hemorrhagic fever makes an appearance, and then, of course, there is the bubonic plague. Harper makes good use of existing paleoclimate data, ancient texts, archaeological data, and modern data on disease microbes, to support his conclusions. The book includes a timeline and various graphs and other useful graphics. This is definitely one of the more interesting books about Ancient Rome I have come across, providing new information and a different perspective on an old subject.

Still busy with Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The book on Rome was apparently more interesting.

 

[Elentarri]

And finished the last 50 pages of Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky over lunch.

Children of Ruin is an entertaining and occasionally nail-biting dual story, with events described in the Past and Present. The Past deals with an Old Earth terraforming team, which discovers that their target planet has alien life. So they decide to terraform a water planet in the same system instead. One of the terraforming team has a fondness for octopus pets and genetic tinkering with the uplift virus. Of course, things don't work out as planned. The Present deals with an space exploration ship with a combined crew of uplifted Spiders, Humans and what remains of Old Earth human scientist Avrana Kern, who "has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants" that has arrived in Octopus space and blundered into a "situation". This is a novel about communication and working together. This is also partly a horror novel. The pacing of this novel is uneven, but I found the people (of all species) to be better written (or maybe just less obnoxious) than in the first book. Tchaikovsky also has a way with words, making amusing and pithy observations. I enjoyed Children of Ruin more than Children of Time, even though there weren't any novel features like the uplift virus and comes across as something on a "theme on variation" when compared to the first novel. I am curious about what happened on Old Earth, now. This is a lovely science-fiction romp.

 

[HareBrain]

Finished The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams.

This could have been a great fantasy novel, with some excellent world-building, fine dialogue and characterisation, and plenty of descriptive and imaginative brilliance. Its only real problem is that it's way too long, and often feels a trudge. I'm glad I read it again after 30+ years, as some of it was truly inspiring, but I'm not sure I can bear to revisit the rest of the million-word series, which I remember having been not as good and even more of a slog.

 

[Elentarri]

Tad Williams does tend to be long winded.

 

[Danny McG]

I've started a long overdue re-read of LOTR but, within the first few pages, I stopped, sighed, closed the fellowship and began it all again with the Hobbit

 

[Extollager]

I’ve wanted to read Browning’s “historical novel” in poetic form The Ring and the Book for years and have started it. This is going to be slow but worth the time and effort.

 

[Bick]

I’m now starting Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I thought I’d read it, many decades ago, but now I start it, I’m not convinced I ever did. In which case, that’s a glaring omission in my SF reading that certainly needed addressing, so glad I picked it up.

 

[HareBrain]

Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong.

 

[Randy M.]

I’m now starting Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I thought I’d read it, many decades ago, but now I start it, I’m not convinced I ever did. In which case, that’s a glaring omission in my SF reading that certainly needed addressing, so glad I picked it up.

I was late to it, too. It's worth the time and effort. Now I've got to squeeze in The Dispossessed at some point.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Poul Anderson "The Avatar" (1978)
Disappointing. I was bored for lengthy passages. Also, for me, characters that speak an Irish brogue don't read well (usually) in print. Plus (sigh) too much of the book got bogged down in Anderson's wishful thinking on sexual relationships.
However, it's still Poul Anderson....

Yeah, I didn't care for this one at all. Besides everything else, my copy repeated several pages and left out several pages. That made very little difference in the plot, which is a pretty damning indictment of the book.

 

[Vertigo]

I was late to it, too. It's worth the time and effort. Now I've got to squeeze in The Dispossessed at some point.

I found, and still find on rereading, The Dispossessed to be the better book, though they're both good.

 

[AE35Unit]

I have a book on Wales I must get round to reading...