August Reading Thread

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Sarah Winman "Still Life" (2021)
Novel, largely set in Florence in the 1950s/60s.
Lovely Book. Wonderful. It made me cry and I can't remember the last time a book did that to me. Not just once, but repeatedly. And not because of anything tragic or sentimental - I can't work out what/why exactly, but something about the characters must touch me deeply.
The book begins in 1944 with two English women, former lovers now irritated companions, on the outskirts of a Florence still partially occupied by the retreating Germans. This begins to develop interestingly, but then the book shifts to a pub in a gritty part of London for some sixty pages and I wondered whether to continue as I got used to the new characters. However, then the action shifts back to Florence and the book takes off somehow. There's a wonderfully light touch about the writing with the occasional surprising shaft of humour. At times there's an element of magical realism but this is so subtly done it's barely noticeable. I loved it and as soon as I finished, I started it again, and even found myself crying again, but in different places.
It's very rare for me to read "a Sunday Times Bestseller", but my wife read it and loved it so much I had to read it myself.​
 
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Pest Cemetery by Scott Bell

This jaunty novel starts with college dropout and self-confessed looser, Bradley Langston, arriving at the doors of the Pottsville East Shady Terraces cemetery, on an empty petrol tank, and with a wet Huskey and a murderous kitten, to start his new job as cemetery caretaker. This is a fun and almost fluffy novel featuring ghosts (it is a cemetery after all!), the pets (which made the novel for me), a potential girlfriend or two (does this make is a romantic suspense novel?), a few mysterious (and probably) murdered corpses that are not customers of the cemetery, and a really pissed off ghost hell-bent on vengeance. There is humour and a great deal of fun... and it is fantasy, so hang your "belief" on the rack for the duration of the novel. But I felt this novel was too light and frivolous, and could have been great if the author had not tried to stuff every horror creature into the story, and dealt more realistically with the situation. I just knew that nothing bad would happen to anyone important, which doesn't do much for the suspense or the thrills. I'm not sure I can categorise this as horror - it's so horror-lite it's floating beyond Earth's atmosphere! A fun and frothy supernatural novel set in a graveyard.​
 
RLCaves said:
Eh... Heavy Time is grim and hard going, and Hellburner only really makes sense after Heavy Time. No, you emphatically *don't* need to read either of these to get into the Company Wars. The joy of Cherryh is you can pretty much jump in anywhere (Hellburner one of the few exceptions). In particular, I'd recommend starting with Downbelow Station - the prologue gives you all the background you need, and it all turns around the events of the novel. Next: Merchanter's Luck for something more action-adventure; Cyteen for political and psychological intrigue; 40, 000 in Gehenna for something heavier on scientific and anthropological speculation. I see the Devil to the Belt duology (HT/Hellburner) as more joining some dots for completionists, or for those who particularly like corporate dystopia space mining!
Click to expand...
Interesting overview, thanks RL. :)
 
Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil (penname of Kim Newman)

A self-proclaimed genius puts on a play about the death of an evil sorcerer. To help him, he recruits a vampire and several of the survivors. But the sorcerer isn't truly dead, and plans to return during the performance.

This is one of the earlier Games Workshop Black Library novels, and is a lot smarter and more fun than some of their more by-the-numbers stuff. It's not outright funny and there is quite a lot of casual gore, but it's got a light, witty quality that suits a novel about a group of bickering actors. It's also pretty short and doesn't outstay its welcome. The vampire, Genevieve, crops up in Newman's other books, including Anno Dracula. It reminded me slightly of Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, but it's much better than that. Recommended.
 
Just One Damned Thing After Another [The Chronicles of St Mary's #1] by Jodi Taylor

This is a fast, entertaining and rollicking joyride, where just one damned thing happens after another... and most of it isn't good. I rather like Taylor's rendition of a collage for time travel or "investigating major historical events in contemporary time". Somehow it reminds me a bit of Quantum Leap, except history doesn't allow them to right what once went wrong. Or at least not in this first novel. The novel ends in a bit of a cliff-hanger, so if that bothers you, be warned. But I would love to spend more time with St. Mary's and her people, so onto the next book!​
 
The Great Journeys in History edited by Robin Hanbury-Tenison

The "Great Journeys" themselves might have been inspired and be inspiring to some people, but the very abbreviated descriptions of these great journeys as given in this book is decidedly uninspiring and down-right boring. The maps in this book are very nice. The selected great journeys may provide a starting off point for further reading. But otherwise, this is essentially a bathroom reader - each chapter is between 3 and 5 pages long and give the bare-bones minimum on each journey. Superficial and bland.​
 
The Grey King by Susan Cooper. I love this book more each time I read it. It's not perfect -- as an adult, the Light-v-Dark and prophetic elements feel less interesting or credible than when I was a kid. But this is balanced out by the very human, and surprisingly adult, story played out by the residents of two farms in a North Welsh valley overshadowed by the mountain stronghold of the dark mystical power after which the book is named. Love, infidelity, rivalry, bitterness, loss, grief, all are beautifully (and at times heartbreakingly) woven together in the history of the mysterious albino boy Bran Davies and his adoptive father, and the build-up of exposition is incredibly well-handled. It also includes some of Cooper's best descriptive writing and character work. She feels completely inspired here.

This is the only book in Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence in which other people's stories feel more important than the protagonists'. That sounds like it might be a criticism, but it isn't. The main character Will isn't sidelined, it's just that he can't accomplish his mission without understanding the elemental story of the people among which he's found himself. Cooper has a character say at one point that ultimately the fate of the world will depend much more on ordinary human beings, and how many of them are stupid or wise, than on the Dark-v-Light conflict of which Will is part, and I think it's this theme that gives the book a maturity greater than others in the series.
 
Leigh Bardugo's The Familiar started really promising but ended up a very damp squib indeed.
 
I finished Joust the other day. It was cute; more of a morality tale about hard work than anything else, about a slave boy taken from his previous position on a farm to serve the royal dragonriders as a 'dragon boy' (equivalent to a stablehand I guess.) The specific dragonrider he serves is sympathetic to his conquered people and begins to teach him about raising and taming dragons, leading him on to raise his own and escape. Nothing you haven't seen before but it was fine.
The ancient-Egypt-esque setting was very neat--lots of fun elements derived from it like the ghosts that wander at night due to lacking proper burial rights and the way all the dragons are named after two god's names smashed together. The dragons are distinctly unmagical creatures characterized somewhere between big cats, falcons, and moody horses. Usually with dragons in fiction I like to look for some kind of dual symbolism and here they represent the protagonist's split loyalties between his dragonrider and his own country and people. I liked them well enough, I think.

I'm in the mood for something darker after my last couple reads so I think I'm gonna reread We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. It's been one of my favourite books since I first read it last year so I'm excited to plow through it again.
 
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