April Reading Thread

[hitmouse]

Nerves (1942) by Lester del Rey. Short novel about an accident in a nuclear power plant. Obviously highly speculative since such things did not exist in 1942. One can
perhaps excuse the laughable science, but not the interminable dialogue-driven story about a medical team stuck in the plant after the accident.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Dean Koontz , Seize the Night.1998.

 

[Dave Vicks]

OT :There making a documentary film about Carl Sagan.

 

[Elentarri]

Gremlins Go Home by Ben Bova & Gordon R. Dickson

Little green aliens are real! Humans having been calling them leprachauns and gremlins for centuries. But now they want to go home, and the scheduled rocket launch to Mars is the perfect opportunity. They just need the help of a boy and his dog (who is the only sensible one in the whole group). Gremlins Go Home was a faintly amusing, easy going, children's urban fantasy book (novella?) with something of a pulpy science fiction feel. A fun and light-hearted evening's diversion.​

 

[Danny McG]

Rereading Good Omens by Pterry and Neil Gaiman

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Continuing my mini-marathon of biographies for nerds, I have started Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel (2021) by Stephen Budiansky. Starts with a depressing anticipatory look at the great mathematician sunk into mental and physical illness, then flashes back to his birth in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It gave me pause to realize that somebody could live from well before the First World War to the post-Watergate era, and made m wonder what great historical, technological, and cultural changes I have experienced myself (roughly Eisenhower to Trump eras, so far.)

 

[pogopossum]

Re-reading Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell. (known here for her prize winning winning The Sparrow)
I recommend it highly to anyone interested in a dense, extremely readable account of the west as it actually was. Tombstone and events et alia.
Russell takes literary license to portray characters in more detail than is recorded in the historical record. However her book gives an absolutely true account of the facts of the gunfight at the OK Corral. (Which actually was nearby, not in the Corral) and the lives of the Earps, Doc Holliday and their opponents. Both the well known and lots of ancillary characters live in this excellent novel. As does the society, politics and grit of Tombstone and the west generally. The book does not stop with the fight or Wyatt Earp's subsequent vendetta, but goes right up to Earp as a friend of Tom Mix, in Hollywood.
Russell had a personal interest in getting the facts correct. Doc Holliday was her several times removed uncle.
She wrote a prequel Doc, which also received rave reviews.

 

[Vertigo]

Rereading Good Omens by Pterry and Neil Gaiman

I love that book; been too many years....

 

[Bick]

I’m giving up on Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton - DNF for me. Im reminded why I’ve read so little by him. It’s structured dreadfully, and soon becomes boring. We start with a great concept of an alien craft on a distant world and a group is sent to check it out. All good. Then we go into the future from there and get treated to 15 pages of pointless description of some kids playing a made up SF sports game, told in great detail, yet still impossible to follow, and there’s no apparent point to it. Then we go to the past for a bit of backstory for two of the team who have gone to check out the alien craft. This backstory is supposed to be exciting, but is actually dull, told in great detail with masses of info dumps, and is unrelated to the main story and takes… 100 pages! I’ve not read a book more in need of editing in 20 years.

It’s funny - I thought I ought to read more best-selling modern British space-opera, but seeing as books and series by Hamilton, Reynolds, Asher and Tchaikovsky have all been DNF for me, maybe I shouldn’t.

 

[Bick]

So now a mental palette-cleanser in the form of a re-read of Asimov’s Foundation and Empire.

 

[AE35Unit]

More high literature
Witches Abroad (1991)by Sir TP, which was actually the very first Pratchett book I read, and is a hardback first edition (3rd impression)

 

[Vince W]

So now a mental palette-cleanser in the form of a re-read of Asimov’s Foundation and Empire.

I have Foundation on the go before bed at the moment, but my main read now is the Robert Silverberg collection The Colgomeroid Cocktail Party. If you’ve not read read much Silverberg you need to rectify that.

 

[Rodders]

I've only read two Silverberg books. Both were quite excellent and i do need to read more.

 

[Bick]

I have Foundation on the go before bed at the moment, but my main read now is the Robert Silverberg collection The Colgomeroid Cocktail Party. If you’ve not read read much Silverberg you need to rectify that.

Silverberg’s finest writing period was between the years (approx) 1969-1975. I think I’ve read all his novels from this period with one or two exceptions and the following all are excellent, to be honest:
The Man in the Maze (1969)
Nightwings (1969)
Downward to the Earth (1970)
Tower of Glass (1970)
The Second Trip (1971)
The World Inside (1971)
A Time of Changes (1971)
The Book of Skulls (1971)
Dying Inside (1972)
The Stochastic Man (1975)

 

[Extollager]

I’m giving up on Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton - DNF for me. Im reminded why I’ve read so little by him. It’s structured dreadfully, and soon becomes boring. We start with a great concept of an alien craft on a distant world and a group is sent to check it out. All good. Then we go into the future from there and get treated to 15 pages of pointless description of some kids playing a made up SF sports game, told in great detail, yet still impossible to follow, and there’s no apparent point to it. Then we go to the past for a bit of backstory for two of the team who have gone to check out the alien craft. This backstory is supposed to be exciting, but is actually dull, told in great detail with masses of info dumps, and is unrelated to the main story and takes… 100 pages! I’ve not read a book more in need of editing in 20 years.

It’s funny - I thought I ought to read more best-selling modern British space-opera, but seeing as books and series by Hamilton, Reynolds, Asher and Tchaikovsky have all been DNF for me, maybe I shouldn’t.

"I've not read a book more in need of editing" -- I see that elsewhere, as I review some books of Inklings scholarship. It seems "editors" too often nowadays are people who specialize in "acquisitions," not in the better tradition of editing. University English departments may have some responsibility for this. Interested people might look up an article in The New Yorker earlier this year, "The End of the English Major."

 

[pogopossum]

More high literature
Witches Abroad (1991)by Sir TP, which was actually the very first Pratchett book I read, and is a hardback first edition (3rd impression)

Strange coincidence. I had been trying to get the daughter, who from a young age was a reader, interested in SFF with little success. Left a copy of Witches Abroad out on a chair by the bathroom. Since it was something that I had not pushed, she picked it up. Since then she (now 42) has always loved Pratchett. She polished her French before a junior year in France by reading him in French, has turtle t-shirts and lots of turtley sculptures in her house. Only downside is that I have few pterrys at home now. She stole all of them.

 

[pogopossum]

Excellent Silverberg list Bick.
I'd add A Time of Changes (1969), Up The Line (1969), and perhaps Across A Billion Years (1969).
He got nominated for the Novel Hugo all but one year from 68-73,one year twice. I was thinking that he was robbed - but looking at the lists, the winners were almost all also among my favorite novels - all time. Over the years he received nine Hugo novel noms, with no wins.
Looking athe competition over all the years, I would have to say that he was robbed.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Up next either William S. Burroughs or Patricia Cornwell.

 

[Elentarri]

Read two disappointing books:

A horror novella: Festival by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon
Great concept, juvenile execution. This reads more like a YA urban fantasy romance (with gore) than a horror story. Stilted dialogue, bland characters,too much filler / "internal monologues"... and an unresolved ending. I can't believe such accomplished authors as Golden and Lebbon couldn't write an atmospherically creepy and terrifying story with a host of murdered, angry and vengeful viking ghosts to work with.

Troy: A Retelling of the Siege of Troy by Stephen Fry
Fry's rendition of the Legend of Troy is a lack-luster, simplistic, long-winded and turgid rendition. The simple vocabulary, immature dialogue and basic writing style make me think this book was possibly meant for children? But I suspect they would find it boring. There is none of the drama associated with Homer's Iliad. In addition, I suspect a large portion of this book is a rehash of Fry's Mythos and Heroes novels, if the plethora of "see Heroes" or "see Mythos" footnotes are anything to go on. The reader only gets to Troy somewhere around page 100. Everything before that is an exceptionally tedious info-dump of whose who of Greek mythology that might have some vague relevance in the Troy story, followed by the "see Heroes" or "see Mythos" footnotes. Considering there is an extensive glossary of characters, this 100 page info-dump of vaguely important people and their ancestors seemed particularly redundant, and really should have been incorporated within the story, if and when necessary. A mediocre version of a classic tale.

 

[Hugh]

William S. Burroughs

It's strange I've read all the biographies etc etc. A very interesting individual. I even turned up at a book signing once (didn't buy a book). But I can't read most of his prose, only the very few straightforward narratives.