December Reading Thread

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Orcadian said:
I have Laughing Boy on my shelves. I read it as a student and remember finding it both moving and educational. I'd had no idea the sort of thing described in the book had actually happened - not only to the Navajo but to many tribes across North America. You are the only other person I've encountered who has read this book.
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I think it's one of those books that will get rediscovered in time. Maybe a tad idealistic, but it's just too powerful to disappear. Frank Waters' "The Man who killed the deer" set in the Taos Pueblo covers similar themes and also seems to have slipped out of sight, but books such as these will always resurface. I value books like these that touch on the spiritual interface between cultures.
 
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Orcadian said:
... I've just started The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell. You may be shocked by this choice; I certainly was! I began the (audio)book with a view to eventually reading Boswell's famous biography The Life of Samuel Johnson. But we shall see. That certainly is (to quote the late Duke of Gloucester) "[A] damn'd thick, square book".
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I've now finished this. It's quite a fast 'read' (eye problems mean I listen to books) but you do have to pay attention, as the 18th century English is both formal and erudite, consisting of many long sentences. There can be so many clauses one forgets what the subject was! But if you are interested in British social history, this journal is rich with fascinating detail and fragments of an even older past. I would have liked to hear more about the foods eaten (i.e. more than "We supped very well that night"). And I'd have liked to know how - given many miles of outdoor travel in all weathers - the two men kept themselves and their clothes clean enough for the dining rooms (and beds!) of the many houses they visited. Scattered throughout the journal are lovely gems of humour, beautifully-crafted insult and sardonic wit perceptible even after 250 years. If you fancy it, it's available on Librivox.
 
Ian Fortytwo said:
DNF I cannot understand why. I enjoyed reading this years ago. However now I didn't enjoy one second of it.
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I re-read A Wizard Of Earthsea last month, and found it a bit on the slow side. There's a lot of travelling from this place to that, with not a huge amount of stuff to get stuck into along the way. The Tombs Of Atuan however I found much better - a more propulsive read, with more insight.
 
I've finished The Fall by M Wolf, and enjoyed it. If you've been keeping an eye on American politics and the enigma of Fox news, then this book provides an interesting analysis that I suspect, is close to the truth (no single view ever being correct). Worth a read if this world interests you, and not a book on Trump, but clearly he is in the shadows and background of Fox. Anyway, better than I had been expecting.
 
Now reading Bystander 27 by Rik Hoskin.

What happens when you get too closely involved with costumed superheroes fighting super villains on the streets of Manhattan.
 
I've finished two books of the Perseverance Andrews series: The Defense of the Commonwealth and The Courage of the Commonwealth by John J. Spearman. These are both military S.F. and pretty well done at that. I think they are inspired by David Weber's Honor Harrington series. There are hints of that in this book, the main characters first name Perseverance, the government is a constitutional monarchy, the ships enter and exit star systems in a somewhat predictable way, etc. But they are not as good as those are (bear in mind I am a very big fan of the H.H. series), but they are very solid. The biggest downside I can see is that the first book The Defense of the Commonwealth starts really slowly. The author has a lot of history to bring in to set the stage for the story, and I believe that he does it in about the most Sargent Friday manner ("Just the facts, Mam, Just the facts.) that can be imagined. It was almost a DNF for me, but I "persevered." Finally, the story starts and then it is solid stuff. The second book is much better than the first. One way I think this is better than Weber's stories is that the battles are far less one sided and the losses in each battle are considerable which makes the bravery involved in fighting them both more chilling and perhaps a bit less realistic? I've never been a soldier so I'm not sure what it takes to go into a battle and understand that your chances of surviving are very low. I find time of the battles, which are almost always less than a minute long, to be more realistic than Weber's long drawn out battles. Sigh! but they are a bit less fun because of that. --- Should space battles be fun? That's a question worth considering.

I have the third, and so far the last one; The Resolve of the Commonwealth queued up and ready to roll.


Avoid --- Not Recommended --- Flawed --- Okay --- Good --- Recommended --- Shouldn’t be Missed
 
I finished Kate Elliot's Furious Heaven, the second book in her space opera trilogy loosely inspired by Alexander the Great's conquests. It is a long book, at well over 700 pages in the edition I read but I thought it moved along at a good pace and packed a lot of story into those pages. Initially it took a while to remember all of the plot points from the first book, I think perhaps it could have benefited from a synopsis of the previous book at the start. It does have a lot of characters in it, many of whom get their own point-of-view chapters but the vast majority of the book is told from the perspective of 4 or 5 of them. I did find the characters interesting and varied, and I thought most of them got some good character development. It does also feature perspectives from both sides of the central conflict, although most of the story is told from the Chaonian side, seeing some of the Phene perspective on events does help avoid them being faceless villains. The world-building has some interesting mysteries in it, such as the reasons for the long-ago collapse of parts of the beacon network than joins star systems. The series is set several millennia in the future and their knowledge of their own history is a fragmentary and unreliable, some bits of contemporary culture have survived but there is also much that has been forgotten or made up. I think this way a stronger novel than the first book, which did take a while to really get going, and I am looking forward to the final book in the trilogy.

I have now started Ian McDonald's latest book, Hopeland.
 
I working through Vernor Vinge's 3rd and hopefully not final book of Zones of Thought. In fact, it actually lead me to start re-reading A Deepness in the Sky again.
 
Logan Selmes said:
I working through Vernor Vinge's 3rd and hopefully not final book of Zones of Thought. In fact, it actually lead me to start re-reading A Deepness in the Sky again.
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Even if Children of the Sky was the weakest of the novels I still enjoyed it and would be happy to read a sequel, but I'm not sure whether Vinge has any plans to publish any more books.
 
williamjm said:
Even if Children of the Sky was the weakest of the novels I still enjoyed it and would be happy to read a sequel, but I'm not sure whether Vinge has any plans to publish any more books.
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Pham Nuwen is such an intriguing idea, but by the time I finished Deepness I got the weird feeling he was bored with the character for whatever reason. Other authors might have delved into looking at Pham Nuwen's medieval childhood with legends about technology and space travel.

Or taking a wider look at how the Qeng Ho could possibly maintain cultural cohesion with such vast distances and times between enterprises (for example, at any given moment why aren't thousands of popular figures within the Qeng Ho companies like Pham also trying to convert humanity into centralized empires? Etc. etc.)

Or following up with the interstellar human-arachnid civilizations, Pham turning warlord against the Emergents, etc.

Or following a new set of characters dealing with the aftermath of Countermeasure in the fast zones.

I don't have my hopes up, but there's so much potential.
 
I just finished up the year with two classics I had never read.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
This has a feel of following in the footsteps of Jane Austin, though more gritty. Jane is a spunky heroine. She shows resiliance, intelligence, self-confidence, and independence in making her way through life starting with nothing going for her. The story reminds me of Mansfield Park, except that Jane is very proactive about her circumstances. I do see Mr. Rochester as a whiny spoiled jerk, but I understand why he and Jane see each other as intellectual equals. Jane maintains her sense of self-worth in dealing with him and accepts him on her terms rather than the other way around.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The author has a similar writing style to her sister, but this is a dark tale of reclusive dysfunctional families and ghosts who do not rest. None of the characters serve as good role models, whether from two-faced behavior, narrow-minded perspectives, manipulating others, or outright physical abuse. Even the narrator comes across as a gossipy busy-body. Although the story ends on a good note for the remaining characters, the overall level of conflict adds a greater sense of realism to this story than Jane Eyre or the Jane Austin stories.
 
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