November 2022 Reading Thread

[Randy M.]

Conference with the Dead by Terry Lamsley

Good collection of ghost stories, well-written and Lamsley was strong at setting up a situation in which believable characters face the supernatural. It's interesting that most of these stories deal in some way with family relationships, many of which are sour if not broken. It's a collection that suggests a future reread might unearth more thematic connections between stories than a first read will note.

 

[Dave Vicks]

MURDER SHE WROTE TV show novel.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I am about to start Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz (2016), in which several artists provide their own drawings inspired in some way by the classic comic strip.

 

[Elentarri]

Finished: On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard. SF novella with a Vietnamese flavour. I like the world building and the writing style, but the plot was a bit thin. I wanted more.

 

[CasualDebris]

Conference with the Dead by Terry Lamsley

Good collection of ghost stories, well-written and Lamsley was strong at setting up a situation in which believable characters face the supernatural. It's interesting that most of these stories deal in some way with family relationships, many of which are sour if not broken. It's a collection that suggests a future reread might unearth more thematic connections between stories than a first read will note.

Just looked it up. Much lauded & accoladed book. I've added to my tbr list--loves me a good ghost story. Thanks for the incidental recommendation!

 

[Randy M.]

Just looked it up. Much lauded & accoladed book. I've added to my tbr list--loves me a good ghost story. Thanks for the incidental recommendation!

Happy to be of help.

 

[dask]

Finished Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber. Never felt compelled to read this, just didn’t look or sound interesting but since it was serialized in Marvel’s Haunt Of Horror I decided to get it over with. Sometimes I ain’t too smart. This novel was no chore, but an impressive (and at times knuckle biting) example of superior fantasy/horror storytelling, doing for witchcraft what Richard Matheson so memorably did for vampires. Now it’s Groff Conklin time:

 

[Danny McG]

This, by the author of Six days of the Condor, I'm enjoying it a lot.

 

[dask]

Started to read Six Days Of The Condor back when the Robert Redford movie came out but couldn’t get into it but this one does sound interesting. Evidently I read Five Unearthly Visions maybe a year or two ago but had forgotten (don’t ask me how) so started this which has been sitting on my bookshelf since 1981:

 

[Danny McG]

Started to read Six Days Of The Condor back when the Robert Redford movie came out but couldn’t get into it but this one does sound interesting

The same protagonist 'Condor' appears in this book but only at the very start - well he doesn't really appear, he's a voice the other inmates occasionally speak with through a tiny grill in his padded cell.
He's permanently locked up in there, he has maybe six or seven sentences of dialogue in chapter one.

 

[Elentarri]

Finally finished: Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes. Interesting, but organisation is erratic and the author hangs all his book on a collection of famous Russian novelists, poets and composers. The little people get much less text space.

 

[chongjasmine]

I am still reading crossroads of twilight, and stuck at it.

 

[Danny McG]

The little people get much less text space.

That's always what happens to Time Bandits

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Finished re-reading "The Fatal Eggs" by Mikhail Bulgakov, AKA "The Red Ray." Quality stuff. Soviet-era satirical SF novel about a biologist who discovers a growth-accelerating ray with some unfortunate side-effects. Goes from manic and wired to downright savage. The satire ranges from "what on Earth was he getting at?" to "how on Earth did the Soviet authorities not just drag him outside and shoot him for this?"

 

[The Judge]

I picked up a cheapish hardback of The Betrayals by Bridget Collins (2020). It's promoted as a fantasy novel, but it's one of those with no actual fantasy elements save for an invented country in the middle of Europe, though a quasi-(Francophone)Switzerland, rather than Germanic Ruritania. It's apparently heavily indebted (ie a complete rip-off of the main idea) to The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, in which a remote male-only scholastic establishment is fixated on the “national game” in which mathematics, music, art and literature are joined into a whole which is somehow shown via gesture. Lots of deliberate echoes of the 1930s with a Nazi-style nationalist party, intent on purity and removing undesirables but in this case Christians rather than Jews, and wanting to use the game as propaganda, with the warping of humanity as accommodation is made with evil in order to survive. Betrayals of all kind are made, but the two big reveals were obvious from the start, which rather undermined the tension of the plot, and despite some luminous writing, there's rather a hole where the "game" itself should be. Interesting but not wholly satisfying.

 

[dask]

Never gave Hesse a second glance, too popular with students who used to wander around campus saying "poly-sci" rather than political science. Yeah, real interest grabbing. But The Glass Bead Game sounds cool. Worth checking out? Hesse write any short stories?

 

[The Judge]

Can't help you there, as I've never read any Hesse. My comment arises from what Collins has said in an Author's Note where she confirms that her grand jeu "has a lot in common with the Glass Bead Game as Hesse conceived it: an elusive game that combines maths, music and ideas in an atmosphere of meditation and is overseen by the Magister Ludi" and that "The Betrayals is set in a very different world -- and is a very different kind of book -- but nonetheless it owes a huge debt to Hesse's masterpiece."

 

[Extollager]

Never gave Hesse a second glance, too popular with students who used to wander around campus saying "poly-sci" rather than political science. Yeah, real interest grabbing. But The Glass Bead Game sounds cool. Worth checking out? Hesse write any short stories?

I'm sure Hesse wrote some short pieces, but I haven't read very much by him.

 

[HareBrain]

Hesse wrote "Born to be Wild" about two guys called Sid and Arthur.

And since that almost certainly doesn't justify a post to itself, I'm reading The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Up next Suspense novel byJD ROBB.