October Reading Thread

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Just finished, The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean (audiobook version). I enjoyed it but found it a bit predictable. The prose and pacing are very good. Many of the linguistic flourishes are very good. Having a single mother MC is rather different and I enjoyed that perspective driving the novel. All but one relationship felt very real and honest.

Premise: There are vampires, but they only eat books and magazines, and cannot write or communicate in written forms. And they occasionally give birth to disabled babies who consume minds, not books-- mind eaters. When you raise your girls on fairy tales -- literally -- and they find out the stories aren't true, what then?

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. DNF'ed. Kids in love, but not lovers, go from LA to Boston as they attend Harvard and MIT and build the first rogue-lite video game a decade before the genre existed, get famous/wealthy and yaaaaaaawn. There's a sister with cancer. A dead mother. Duplicity and tragedy. Heartstrings are plucked.

A- prose (it's very good). Many scenes were well crafted. The overall story felt incredibly fake and neither MC was compelling
 
Finished Vernor Vinge's True Names last night, included with several essays about its subjects in a book about early cyberspace writing. It's from 1981 and depicts something like the Internet called "The Other Plane", but its users interact with it through a fantasy-magical simulation -- so hackers are warlocks, databanks are represented as bodies of water like swamps (literal data lakes ), security protocols appear as guardian sprites, etc. Very imaginative, and there's discussion about whether one of the war lock users is itself a simulation -- AI!
 
I'm trying The Quiet Invasion by Sarah Zettel, but I'm not sure I'll finish it, I really can't get settled into the story - I can't explain why, it's just not suiting my reading brain
 
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. This is a Biblical fiction story which takes liberties with both the Bible and history. However, it is a beautiful tale of a sisterhood of women who form their own communities of support in a world where they are overshadowed and often have few choices. These women are brought to life as they experience births and deaths, coming of age, slavery, and religious and culture clashes. They also have deep friendships and bonds which carry through their lives.
 
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

After a night out watching an unusual meteor shower, most of the world’s population is stricken with blindness. The narrator of this novel, Bill Masen, missed out on this feature of the meteor shower by being in hospital with his eyes bandaged. Of course, civilization starts collapsing fairly quickly. Wyndham has a better opinion of humanity than I do. His collapse of civilization is not nearly as brutal and vicious as I suspect it would be in real life. There are also the “escaped” science-experiment that this remnant of civilization has to deal with. The triffids – a semi-sentient, ambulatory, carnivorous species of vegetation with a taste for human (especially humans that can’t see them). For a novel titled “The Day of the Triffids“, the triffids aren’t really the focus of this story. I could have done with more triffids. I found some of the triffids rather amusing – especially those loitering around in the hedges waiting for humans to blunder past. Too bad no one though to try communicating with the triffids instead of destroying them. I would also have liked a more substantive reason for the comet/meteor shower blindness. This is an interesting and entertaining novel that has quite a bit to say about human nature and the fragility of civil society.

Below is a random triffid illustration I found on the internet. It's just so darned cute!

Triffid by Cthulhusaurus-Rex .jpg
 
Light reading now, with a slim little book, with many illustrations, called American Food: A Not-So-Serious History (2019) by Rachel Wharton. It discusses twenty-six topics, one for each letter of the alphabet, from A for Ambrosia to Z for Zucchini Bread. (X is for Xanthan Gum.)
 
HareBrain said:
Also began the Providence Compendium, a graphic novel (but with lots of plain text pages) by Alan Moore, drawn by Jacen Burrows. I'd never even heard of this until a couple of days ago. So far, it seems to be up there with the best of Moore's work.
Click to expand...
I read this in a couple of days, so it's fair to say I was hooked. I'd recommend it, especially to anyone interested in HP Lovecraft (which I'm not, particularly).

This is the story of Robert Black, a 25-year-old New York journalist who in 1919 gets caught up in investigating some deeply weird events in coastal New England, which eventually leads him to HP Lovecraft himself, before HPL's writing career really gets going. The way in which Lovecraft the person intersects with the Lovecraftian ideas in the story in very ingenious. Moore, as usual, also throws in a lot of other stuff, which can make it feel a bit fragmented, and which means he doesn't tie everything up together in a way that I found very satisfying, though I thought it was clever. It's full of very big ideas about fiction and reality.

This "kitchen sink" approach works both for and against it, but two things I thought worked more against it were a rather bland main character, and the handwritten text sections at the end of each chapter. These are pages from Black's "commonplace book" (basically, a journal), and often are useful in shedding light on events in the graphic sections. However, parts of them just aren't, and all of them are (very accurately, probably) in the style of an educated man of the time just getting into writing, musing on the novel he intends to write based on his experiences. I found parts of them painfully reminiscent of my own beginner's self-satisfied diary style at the same age, which is possibly why I didn't like them much.

So, not without flaws, but with an impressive set of ambitions it mostly fulfils.
 
I'm trying a weird and very pulp trashy book now. It's ridiculously enjoyable so far.

Zombies and sh*t by Carlton Mellick III
 
An anthology: Dracula Unfanged by various authors.
I found this collection of stories featuring and/or inspired by Dracula to be wildly diverse and also quite a mixed bag. A few of the stories were really good, most were just ok, and some didn't really appeal to me.
 
Recently finished The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter. A very solid effort of epic fantasy, though for some reason it didn't click with me as much as I'd hoped even though I can't really point to anything specific as to why not.

Up next is The Eye of the World, which I assume needs no introduction on a fantasy book forum. I've been hearing about The Wheel of Time since I was about 14 (with descriptions both good and bad) but never once got around to starting it in the decade-plus since I first heard about it. Time to change that...
 
Life and Otter Miracles by Hazel Prior
A charming general fiction novel that involves otters.
 
REVIVAL by Stephen King

I'm practically finished this book now but I'm still waiting for, and still wondering, what the punchline is going to be. The characters are all so old now, many are already dead, some are dying. I've enjoyed the life-story of Jamie Morton, intertwined with that of the ex-minister showman, Charles Daniel Jacobs, but the coincidences have become increasingly unbelievable, and when I went to read some reviews of the book, it seems that I'm not the only one who feels that way. A "shaggy dog story" was one quote, and that it could really have been a short story if all the build up was removed. Apparently, it was going to be a film but was abandoned for being too expensive.

One clever thing is how the title of the book seems to work on many different levels; at least three, if not four, five or six. This is classic Stephen King, and while I've never read a bad book by him, I think I've been reading some of his less good. I think it is one of his writing idiosyncrasies, but the way he always has the storyteller tell you what will happen, and then writes it happening, I'm not keen about that. Maybe that is just me, but it takes me back to English lessons at school, when the whole class had to read the same book, but someone in class would always tell you what was going to happen next before I'd managed to finish the next chapter.
 
Tonight I'm starting Simple Simon by Ryne Douglas Pearson - this is the book that became the Bruce Willis film "Mercury Rising", where the FBI man protects an autistic boy.
 
Elentarri said:
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Click to expand...

It's basically the first zombie apocalypse book, if you factor in that the triffids aren't zombies.

I went to a talk by the comedian David Baddiel, and bought his recent book about atheism, The God Desire. It's really a pamphlet, and doesn't have much of a shape beyond Baddiel explaining - often amusingly - why he isn't a believer. It does have two interesting things in its favour: Baddiel is reacting to a Jewish rather than Christian upbringing, and unlike many famous atheists he doesn't regard believers as imbeciles. The lack of contempt and smugness is very refreshing. A well-written and likeable, book, although I doubt it will convert many people (which doesn't seem to be Baddiel's aim).
 
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