June Reading Thread

[Elentarri]

Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse by Jane Yolen

This is a fun little novel, written in verse, about a modern girl who runs away from a troubled home and ends up on everyone's favourite Russian witch Baba Yaga's doorstep. Yolen incorporates various elements of Slavic myths, Russian folklore and fairy tales into a contemporary poetic novella that explores the idea of family. I especially loved Baba Yaga teaching the girls how to drive the mortar and pestle. Interesting concept, engaging execution.​

 

[Vince W]

Starting The Tenth Planet by Edmund Cooper.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

A book I started and finished last week, but didn’t have time right then to put down my thoughts, is Scarlet, by Genevieve Cogman. This is a fantasy reimagining of one of the Scarlet Pimpernel novels. The fantasy element is that vampires openly exist among the aristocracy of England and France. The English vampires seem fairly benign: they feed on blood, but don’t kill, instead drinking small amounts of blood provided by their human servants who (unknowingly) are under a light compulsion to cooperate.

The French vampires, on the other hand, are everything one has ever read about the arrogance and the abusiveness of the worst kind of French aristocrats, in novels by writers like Orczy and Sabatini—only more so. The few that are encountered during this story are cruel and vicious and frankly horrifying. The swashbuckling gentleman of The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel do not initially know this. They rescue vampires as well as other aristocrats, and count members of the vampire aristocracy as allies (although they later find out otherwise).

But this is the story of Eleanor Dalton, servant to an English vampire countess, Eleanor whose chance resemblance to a certain important someone startles the visiting Sir Percy Blakeney (as those who have read the original books will know, he’s the Pimpernel) and inspires him to devise a plan to recruit her to the cause and use her as a decoy in order to rescue Marie Antoinette and her children. For much of the story, he keeps Eleanor in the dark about who they are rescuing and exactly what the plan is, because she’s just there for the one mission, and I suppose it wouldn’t do to let her in on too many secrets. But this causes problems when Eleanor is separated from the rest of the party, and forced to make her way to Paris on her own. Also, the scars on her arms from years of bloodletting make her an object of suspicion in Revolutionary France.

It’s not a deep book by any means, but the adventure made for enjoyable light reading. Eleanor starts out as relatively sheltered. As an English servant, she knows little of the world except for what her “betters” tell her, and what her limited experiences have taught her—which does include some knowledge that the upper classes, blinded by their privilege, do not take into account. And she may be largely ignorant but she’s not stupid. In the course of the story, all that she sees and experiences in France at the height of the Terror causes her to stop believing everything she’s been told, to ask her own questions, and to search for answers. She comes up with no simple conclusions, but her view of the world, of politics and justice, and of right and wrong, is considerably more sophisticated and nuanced by the end of the book. Her courage and compassion have also been tested, so that she knows herself better and has grown in confidence and strength.

Scarlet is the first in a series, which is planned to include at least two more books.

 

[hitmouse]

A book I started and finished last week, but didn’t have time right then to put down my thoughts, is Scarlet, by Genevieve Cogman. This is a fantasy reimagining of one of the Scarlet Pimpernel novels. The fantasy element is that vampires openly exist among the aristocracy of England and France. The English vampires seem fairly benign: they feed on blood, but don’t kill, instead drinking small amounts of blood provided by their human servants who (unknowingly) are under a light compulsion to cooperate.

The French vampires, on the other hand, are everything one has ever read about the arrogance and the abusiveness of the worst kind of French aristocrats, in a novels by writers like Orczy and Sabatini—only more so. The few that are encountered during this story are cruel and vicious and frankly horrifying. The swashbuckling gentleman of The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel do not initially know this. They rescue vampires as well as other aristocrats, and count members of the vampire aristocracy as allies (although they later find out otherwise).

But this is the story of Eleanor Dalton, servant to an English vampire countess, Eleanor whose chance resemblance to a certain important someone startles the visiting Sir Percy Blakeney (as those who have read the original books will know, he’s the Pimpernel) and inspires him to devise a plan to recruit her to the cause and use her as a decoy in order to rescue Marie Antoinette and her children. For much of the story, he keeps Eleanor in the dark about who they are rescuing and exactly what the plan is, because she’s just there for the one mission, and I suppose it wouldn’t do to let her in on too many secrets. But this causes problems when Eleanor is separated from the rest of the party, and forced to make her way to Paris on her own. Also, the scars on her arms from years of bloodletting make her an object of suspicion in Revolutionary France.

It’s not a deep book by any means, but the adventure made for enjoyable light reading. Eleanor starts out as relatively sheltered. As an English servant, she knows little of the world except for what her “betters” tell her, and what her limited experiences have taught her—which does include some knowledge that the upper classes, blinded by their privilege, do not take into account. And she may be largely ignorant but she’s not stupid. In the course of the story, all that she sees and experiences in France at the height of the Terror causes her to stop believing everything she’s been told, to ask her own questions, and to search for answers. She comes up with no simple conclusions, but her view of the world, of politics and justice, and of right and wrong, is considerably more sophisticated and nuanced by the end of the book. Her courage and compassion have also been tested, so that she knows herself better and has grown in confidence and strength.

Scarlet is the first in a series, which is planned to include at least two more books.

I shall add this to my Summer Holiday reading pile. Cogman has an easy, undemanding style. I enjoyed her Invisible Library series.

 

[Steve Harrison]

Couple of hundred pages into Geography is Destiny by Ian Morris, which tells the story of Britain's relationship with Europe (and Brexit!) through prism of 10,000 years of history. Excellent so far.

 

[HareBrain]

The English vampires seem fairly benign: they feed on blood, but don’t kill, instead drinking small amounts of blood provided by their human servants who (unknowingly) are under a light compulsion to cooperate.

This aspect sounds quite similar to what I'm reading at the moment, Burying the Shadow by Storm Constantine. Only here the "vampires" (who aren't vulnerable to sunlight etc) are also fallen angels, trying to hide out in a fantasy world vaguely reminiscent of C18th Italy, and beginning to suffer from some kind of psychic sickness possibly related to their origins. It's very heady, lush and dense, perhaps overly so in parts, but I'm really into it. I haven't read it since it came out in 1992.

 

[Randy M.]

This aspect sounds quite similar to what I'm reading at the moment, Burying the Shadow by Storm Constantine. Only here the "vampires" (who aren't vulnerable to sunlight etc) are also fallen angels, trying to hide out in a fantasy world vaguely reminiscent of C18th Italy, and beginning to suffer from some kind of psychic sickness possibly related to their origins. It's very heady, lush and dense, perhaps overly so in parts, but I'm really into it. I haven't read it since it came out in 1992.

A variation of that aspect is also in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Certain Dark Things.

 

[Vertigo]

My reading seems to have slowed down rather this year which is probably not a bad thing since I'm getting even slower to write up my reading! But anyway here's my 'recent' reading (going back to April!):

The Algebraist by Iain M Banks
This was one of the first Banks books I read, although it was from the middle years of his writing, and coming back to it some 20+ years later I was surprised how many details I’d forgotten. Though of course that made it all the more readable. From the perspective of Banks’s usual work this was unusual in that the AIs are very much the bogey men in this story rather than the benign, omniscient entities of the Culture. All AI is banned, and they are hunted down as abominations, though by the end of the book, that position has shifted somewhat. I think this is probably the largest and most complex of Banks’s non-Culture books and was a fascinating reread after all this time and probably my favourite non-Culture pure SF space opera of his. It is also the last of my Ian M Banks SF rereads other than Transition which can be considered to both be or not be an ‘M’ book. 5/5 stars

A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano
A Little Lumpen Novelita is a rather strange and sad and very short novella (or long short story) from Bolano, written just a couple of years before his death. It’s a slightly dreamy, otherworldy story about a pair of orphaned siblings’ slide into poverty and then a failed attempt at crime. Told in very close person by the sister; her rather fatalistic acceptance of her present and future feels both all too real and possible and yet has a strange sense of unreality persisting throughout. A good but disturbing story. 4/5 stars

Ten Low by Stark Holborn
A good fun SF action story. Plenty of action and plenty of pace and an enjoyable read if you don’t look too closely. Look closely and there are all sorts of little inconsistencies. For example, they/them/there are used for some people but gender pronouns used for others, with no explanation like them being some sort of gender neutral types. And the they/them/their usage for individuals occasionally slips with an occasional gender pronoun slipping in for someone otherwise referred to as they/them/their. There does seem to be an element of supernatural which I dislike and also the science/engineering is sometimes a little implausible and poorly explained. Even by the end of the book I had no clear idea what the ‘mule’ and ‘mare’ vehicles were; possibly quad and two wheeled motorbikes? And motivations are also sometimes less than convincing. But if read uncritically it’s a fun read with some interesting characters. I may go on to read the sequel. Note this was an Adrian Tchaikovsky recommendation. 3/5 stars

The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
I do find I’m struggling rather with these older Asimov books. I know it’s a sign of the times but I do struggle with his tendency to make women second class characters in need of support, protection and rescuing by the male protagonists. But what keeps giving me trouble with his writing is that he comes up with interesting and different future visions and then slaps early C19th social values into them. Most other authors writing at the same time seemed to try and imagine rather more futuristic social setups (even if that meant we had to put up with REH and his libertarian views!). However, the story was still enjoyable; it just grated a little in places. 3/5 stars

Randomize by Andy Weir
This was meant to be a novella but at less than 30 pages it’s really more of a short story. Here he has presented an interesting gambling heist to get around a future quantum random number generator that produces true random numbers (most current ones are not true but will always give the same sequence from the same seed). However for a techie hard SF story from someone who bases most of his writing tightly around the science I was upset so see him having a quantum entangled pair being created for an existing particle. Now I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure that any pair of entangled particles must be created together. But maybe I’m wrong and if so apologies to Andy Weir! 3/5 stars

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Not my favourite Murakami to date. It still has his wonderful dreamy and poetic treatment of the prosaic, but this time there is no real weirdness and no magical realism. It is pretty much a straight, if rather convoluted, love story. Not really what I’ve come to expect from him. It’s interesting that Murakami says of this story that he wanted to challenge himself to write a ‘straight’ story and I guess in that he has succeeded, but It’s just not so much to my taste. 3/5 stars

A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick
Even by PKD’s standards this was a strange and rather depressing book made all the more so by the twist at the end. Of course, it has all PKD’s usual obsession with mental illness, drugs reality and identity but it didn’t really have much to lift you out of the ever-present doom and gloom. 3/5 stars

Solip:System by Walter Jon Williams
A good short novella set in Williams’ Hardwired universe. Though set in the same world as Hardwired it is far more concerned with virtual reality than with the frenetic high octane smuggling of the earlier work. Good but a little too short to be brilliant. 4/5 stars

The Postman by David Brin
I started out quite liking this and found it significantly better than the film (no surprise there) however as the story progressed, I found the American Apple Pie all a bit too much. He constantly puts America forward as the best thing since sliced bread before the apocalypse and how America could have conquered the world but held back out of altruism and how it was so unfair that it was destroyed along with the rest of the world… and so on! To be fair he does also have a good solid go at the right-wing survivalist movement whose descendants are very much the antagonists. A good story but very flawed in its set up. 3/5 stars.

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St John Mandel
I’ve yet to be disappointed by a Mandel book and this is no exception. It’s a story about a girl abducted from her mother by the estranged father at a very young age and subsequently searched for obsessively by a detective until well after she is no longer a minor. But having been constantly on the move for all that time, both with the father and on her own, the girl can no longer stay in one place and keeps moving on leaving abandoned relationships behind. The irony of this itinerant lifestyle is that the detective doing the searching rebelled from his itinerant circus family to marry and settle in one place. A strange and sad story beautifully told and neatly manipulates the reader’s assumptions about right and wrong. Hard to believe this was her debut novel! 4/5 stars

The Ascendant Stars by Michael Cobley
This is the third book in Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire trilogy, a vast sprawling space opera on set on a huge scale with labyrinthine plots with multiple POVs. Which makes it likely to appeal to readers of authors like Peter F Hamilton and Iain Banks (whose recommendation led me to this trilogy). However, the quality falls rather short of those authors; I think the whole set up becomes a little too elaborate making following the many different threads something of a trial for the reader. An enjoyable space opera but maybe a little over cooked. The level of techno babble almost pushes things into magic. But then as the great Arthur C Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There is another duology set in the same universe but with generally lower ratings than this trilogy I’ll probably not bother with them. 3/5 stars

Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This is a great space opera from the ever-impressive Tchaikovsky. How he manages to maintain such quality with such fecundity never ceases to amaze me. Here he has a produced a large-scale space opera written on a huge galactic stage. He has introduced an interesting idea of ‘unspace’ for getting around fast, though not without cost, and a mysterious ultimate, planet destroying enemy, whilst his complex politics result in all sorts of political, and physical, infighting despite the presence of that ultimate enemy. As ever his pacing is excellent and rarely lets up. Okay the old, barely held together spacecraft crewed by a bunch of misfits is something of an over used meme but he handles it well making them sympathetic without being saccharine. An excellent space opera; I’m very much looking forward to the next instalment. 5/5 stars


The last two were interesting to read one after the other as both are big scale space operas, with multiple POVs and threads. I'm rather afraid Cobley loses out in the comparison. Tchaikovsky's work is much more coherent and approachable and generally an easier, more enjoyable read.

 

[HareBrain]

I also recently finished an advance copy of the forthcoming Legion of Bones by Toby Frost, last of his "Dark Renaissance" fantasy trilogy centred on underworld small-fry turned undead hunter Giulia Degarno. This sends the trilogy out on a high -- it's the strongest of the three and it really hit the spot for me, in a way I haven't found with much fantasy lately. It has some very tense sequences, a plot that's twisty but which I had no trouble keeping track of, and some very interesting and/or likeable characters.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

This aspect sounds quite similar to what I'm reading at the moment, Burying the Shadow by Storm Constantine.

I read several books by Storm Constantine a long time ago. This one sounds interesting.

 

[HareBrain]

I read several books by Storm Constantine a long time ago. This one sounds interesting.

I'll update when I've finished it, but I'm finding it better now than I remembered it being, and better than the few other things I've read of hers. As well as the vampire analogues, it features a race of healers who can enter the mindscapes of people suffering from psychic illness, and (like the rest of the world-building) this is very well thought-through. I think it must have subconsciously influenced some of my writing (including the word soulscape in The Goddess Project, which I assumed I'd made up!)

 

[Extollager]

Rereading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and reading for the first time Heinlein's Starman Jones. Among other things.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Lee Child NEVER GO BACK .2013

 

[tachyon]

Recent post in the "book discusison" forum reminded me that I used to post in these monthly threads, I'm still reading if not posting.

Currently enjoying Martha Wells' new fantasy Witch King, second-world fantasy single POV.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

So I finally finished reading the nonfiction Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age. As I said before, it is dense with names and dates, but covers a great range of topics (all related in some way to books and printing). It never really moves on from politics and religion, because those were central to the printing trade and vice versa throughout the 17th and into the 18th century. While the first chapters of the book had much to say about Bibles and Latin classics, voyages of exploration, maps, and travellers’ tales, later chapters address, among other subjects, schools and schoolbooks, universities, libraries, book collecting (the size of some of the collections that were assembled by ordinary citizens is extraordinary for the period), lotteries, finance, art, and law. Rembrandt makes a brief inglorious appearance. The Glorious Revolution makes a brief appearance, too. The Dutch Republic fought many wars during the 17th century, but if, as it is said, history is written by the winners, in the days of the Republic battles waged in print sometimes influenced the outcomes. In William’s case he not only invaded England with troops, but with a widely distributed (almost 50,000 copies) and covertly* printed Declaration of his right to rule.
_________

*Perhaps covert is too strong a word; the English had an idea what was in the works. But though the Ambassador at the Hague and the Consul in Amsterdam tried to get a glimpse of the contents of the document while it was being printed, the printers and their workers proved steadfast to a man and didn’t leak a single copy.

 

[Dave Vicks]

THE PRICE OF SILENCE,2005, Legal Thriller by Kate Wilhelm.

 

[pogopossum]

Read The Shadow of the Gods & The Hunger of the Gods, by John Gwynne, based on reccs. by others. Thank you.

Absolutely involving reads. The technique of telling intertwined stories from various viewpoints actually worked well, somewhat to my surprise. Although Gwynne jump shifts each chapter, I only lost track once in two very fat tomes: forgetting which of the several fighting bands the specific chapter was about. Two of the bands are very similar and the viewpoints of the fighters are generally quite the same, whichever company they belong to.
The books were so involving that it was only after I was done that I questioned how even in a fictional world any society could exist with many many mercenary groups always available to attack and devastate.

I dredged into my history nerdom and remembered "The White Company", which fought and controlled much of Italy in the 14th century century. Other mercenary companies fought and destroyed in Europe throughout the MIddle Ages. You can google Mercenary Armies and find accounts of many of them.
One, "The Catalan Grand Army" actually settled down to rule Athens & much of Greece for 75 years.
Gwynne is obviously aware of that history.
Although the books are fantasy, with elder gods and sorcerers, they are like any good fiction about people and personality first with the magic there to move the adventure along and to add another level of creativity.
And they are Gridmark, with torture, murder and horror commonplace.

Last

 

[Danny McG]

I'm having a go at Dual Memory by Sue Burke.
I'm not sure if I'll finish this, something I can't define about the writing style is irking me.

 

[Elentarri]

Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities by Adrienne Mayor

Mayor has provided the reader with a collection of 50 previously published pop-articles, rather than her usual fare of semi-academic books about ancient topics. This book reads something like a cabinet of curiosities. There are mostly superficial and usually short articles on a variety of animals, formidable women, tattoos, ancient tourists, and other oddball topics such as mirages and poisonous honey. Some of it is interesting, but I bought the book on the assumption she would be treating the subject the same as the previous books she wrote, so this superficial treatment of a variety of interesting subjects is a bit of a disappointment.​

 

[Vince W]

On to Wish I Was Here, the anti-memoir from M. John Harrison. Very stream of consciousness so far.