April Reading Thread

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ablackenedrose said:
Finished The Day of the Triffids today and I must say, the entire zombie apocalypse genre needs to see me after class, because it's clearly been copying much of this book's homework.
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Absolutely - everything in later works is already there, if you substitute the giant plants for zombies.
 
Bick said:
I finished Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth L. Powell. This is the final volume in his Embers of War trilogy, and I enjoyed the first two. This one, not so much. It started out okay, introduced some new characters and scenarios, while building on the fall-out from the first two books with the characters from those books. So far, so good.

However... ultimately, this last volume in the series was a complete let down. When a book ends so badly, and it's the end of as trilogy, it taints the series as a whole. What was shaping up to be good for two and a half books, turned out to be a poor trilogy viewed as a piece, and I cannot recommend it. So what was wrong with it? Well, several things, so let's list them:

(i) The first two books set up a significant and interesting dilemma with certain characters on well established sides of the conflict, and it's hard to see a way out for our heroes. How will Powell wrap this up, we wonder. This will take a very clever idea or plot-twist from our protagonists to rectify. Easy apparently. The way out of this for Powell is not to think up a clever ruse for his existing characters, but to drop in new characters in book three that effectively have magical God-like power. It's a book-long Deus-ex-machina, in essence. If you set up a SF problem over two novels, you cannot resolve the problem with sudden god-like power from new characters and new SF rules in book three - it's 'cheating' and it's lazy.

(ii) A perfectly interesting character who's had a good supporting role to play in the book - a character we love to hate - decides a few chapters from the end that they are unhappy, not for the perfectly good reasons we've read about for the past 200 pages, but because they don't want to be called Loretta, and want to be called Stan... okay I stole the names from Monty Python, but those are essentially the facts. What affect does this sudden transexual theme have on the plot? None whatsoever. This unheralded theme from left-field takes dominates a chapter, and is then barely mentioned again. I can hear the editor now: "Gareth all the cool kids in SF have transgender themes and characters, can you not shoehorn something like that in somewhere?". It's incongruous virtue signaling to the SF Zeitgeist regardless of whether it fits the book or not - and it doesn't.

(iii) The end makes no sense. I can't say too much without 'spoiling' it, but trust me. While the final actions of some characters made some sense as an idea at one point, other subsequent outcomes mean they had no need to follow through on their desperate notion... but they do it anyway! Which had this reader want to throw the book at the wall with the exclamation "WHY... why, you idiots?"

(iv) Light of Impossible Stars is a cool name. I've read the book and I cannot tell you what it means, what it refers to, or how it relates to the novel.

Apart from that it was good. Ha ha. No really - Powell can write quite well, and his books are highly readable, but I do wish SF writers would only write trilogies when they have a great idea for the entire story arc, not just the start and middle. A whole idea is much better than half and idea, guys! Reynolds has been as culpable on this front, from personal experience. More and more, I find I want to read either standalones, or otherwise never-ending series, of which there are many. Defined trilogy series often seem to let me down - great premise, poor resolution. At least never-ending series have no conclusion so I'm unlikely to feel shortchanged at the end.
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I read the first book but was really very unimpressed by Powell's writing despite the accolades he gets from many authors who I do respect (Hamilton, Leckie, Tchaikovsky, etc.). I found his writing overly melodramatic and his prose overly purple. I remember one scene where someone's thought went along the lines of "I'm a soldier, and if I'm going to die I'll do it with dignity" and I was just "pass the bucket please!". I also found the book massively episodic with hundreds of chapters of no more than 2 to 5 pages. Gibson's Jackpot books do that but, whilst I still wasn't keen on it, he somehow makes it work. Powell didn't for me.

All your 'things wrong with' the last book are are personal bug bears of mine too so now I'm am seriously glad I didn't persist with the series!
 
Moved on to Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel (or Three Men on Wheels in the USA).
 
Pyan said:
Moved on to Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel (or Three Men on Wheels in the USA).
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All I remember is Harris (probably) being handed a bicycle and being told "Ride zigzag in case they shoot".
 
It's an interesting book, about a cycle tour of Germany by Harris, George and J.
Published in 1900, it shows the general favourable British view of Germany before the demonization of the country in the 20th century, while coincidentally mentioning aspects of the German character that make you feel "Aha - and we know what that will mean between 1914 and 1945..."
 
Elentarri said:
Another history book, a charity shop find: Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts by Tracy Borman
This book provides an overview of the English witchcraft persecutions under James I/VI, using as a narrative thread the trials of the Belvoir witches (Joan, Margaret and Phillipa Flower) accused of bewitching the Duke of Rutland’s sons. The book also examines the cultural, religious, legal circumstances, as well as royal influence, of the times as pertaining to the witchcraft in mainly England and to a lesser degree, continental Europe and Scotland. Due to lack of surviving documentation, a fair bit of the Belvoir witches’ trial is speculation. The topic is interesting, but the writing style is uninspiring, and the organisation of the material is erratic and meandering.​
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I actually just grabbed Daemonologie by King James I/VI on Kindle. There's also a version that modernizes most of the word spellings. I grabbed both versions because they were only a couple of dollars each. The modernized version is a bit easier to read, but once you get into the rhythm of the original it's not that difficult.
It's a very fascinating read if you've got any interest in the topic.
 
HareBrain said:
I'm near the end of The Dark Lantern, the first of Henry Williamson's mammoth 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. This book, set in the 1890s and written in the 1950s, follows the parents of what will be the main character for the rest of the sequence.
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Finished this last night. Fascinating in terms of social history of 1890s London and surrounding areas. The characters feel very real, with all their faults on display, especially the main character Richard Maddison. In a way he's one of the hardest character types to engage with: well-meaning, hard-working and knowledgeable, but very stiff and emotionally repressed. He never seems to realise how much his wife walks on eggshells for fear of disappointing him, and is always correcting her, which made me want to slap him a few times. I guess he's a portrait of Williamson's father, which would account for the complexity of his portrayal.

I've got the second volume, Donkey Boy, from the library, but not sure whether I'll start it just yet.
 
James Crowden "Dorset Man. The Working Landscape"
A series of interviews, mainly with elderly men, of their lives and traditional crafts in the Dorset landscape. One of a series of three 2005 - 2007. This one has interviews with hedge-layers, farmers, cider makers, rat-catchers, farriers, hurdle-makers, thatchers, charcoal burners, among others.
Excellent.
 
While away from the computer I read:

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (2013) by Keith Houston. Traces the history of the subject in great detail.

Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience (2000) by Martin Gardner. Essays on the subject.
 
A third Janet Lewis historical novel: The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. I already read The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Qvist. She and W. G. Sebald are probably my best "discoveries" in fiction of the past 15 years. Conversely, I seem to be reaching a point where I can't force myself to persist with recent novels such as Pears' Instance of the Fingerpost and Robson's The Tokaido Road -- where I get a sense of a long novel typed into being at a keyboard from a pretty conventional mind...
 
I've just finished Letters of Cold Fire (The Occult Cases of John Thunstone, Volume 1), by Manly Wade Wellman. This book consists of four short stories (or perhaps novelettes) featuring John Thunstone, wealthy playboy, scholar of the occult, crusader against evil magics. I found the stories interesting, but not enthralling or particularly terrifying. The main character is certainly unique. The story from which the collection takes its name is perhaps the best. Glimpses of authentic folk lore and historical magic intrigued me, in this story in particular, where the underground school reminded me of Scandinavian tales of the Black School presided over by the Devil.

And yet, I felt the stories lacked depth (not surprising, perhaps, at the length), and the hero, although unusual, he lacked depth as well. He succeeds because of his determination and physical strength, along with his occult knowledge, but also, far too often, because he happens to know people in a position to provide exactly what he needs or needs to know at any particular point, people eager to oblige him because ... well, we are left to guess why. Because they respect him? Because they owe him? Because they are in sympathy with his goals. It's never made clear. And why is he impelled to do what he does? Is it compulsion? Idealism? The result of some personal event in his own history? Again there is no answer. He is dedicated, but so unemotional, it is hard to believe that he is passionate about what he does. I was left with the feeling that his backstory would be far, far more interesting to read about than these four stories. Perhaps parts of that backstory might be revealed in further tales, and especially in the novels Wellman wrote about this character.

Which I'd be tempted to read, but those stories all appear to be out of print and available only at exorbitant prices used. And they are apparently still in copyright since nothing is listed at free ebook sites like Project Gutenberg. Mind you, I'd be glad to pay to read them, but not to spend many hundreds of dollars in order to do so, as seems to be the case now.

That this book is subtitled Volume One, seems to indicate there might be more on the way, but it was published in 2021, so I suspect that plan came to nothing. Yet with so many OP books being reissued as ebooks these days, I feel that there is some hope that some publisher somewhere might publish a volume or two containing the rest of the Thunstone stories. I will keep an eye out for them.
 
~The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews [history book]
Robert Drews provides a scholarly summary of what is known and speculated about the catastrophe at the end of the Bronze Age (as of 1995), and proposes his own hypothesis for the Bronze Age Collapse (i.e. a change in the warfare tactics and armour that made small armies of chariots obsolete). The author has an interesting hypothesis, and while the evidence isn't overwhelming, it is still significant.

Next book is a more recent (2021) book about the Bronze Age Collapse: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Revised and Updated) by Eric H. Cline.​
 
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