September Reading Thread

[Dave]

Rodmell is a sleepy little village off the beaten track...

Maybe sleepy but it's on the South Downs Way and thousands of walkers and cyclists must pass it by every year. Depends what you mean by "beaten track" I guess.

 

[Hugh]

Maybe sleepy but it's on the South Downs Way and thousands of walkers and cyclists must pass it by every year. Depends what you mean by "beaten track" I guess.

I'd definitely say sleepy.
And as regards walkers, my feet know the Eastern end of the Downs pretty well. I think Rodmell tends to get less visited as it's a bit of detour from the Southease bridge, particularly if you want to walk the ridge rather than use the road. Likewise, while access by road is easy enough, it's a minor road and motorists prefer to use the parallel A26. But no wish to get into discussing grades of sleepiness....

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I am about to start reading From This Day Forward (1972) by John Brunner, a collection of a dozen stories, dating from 1955 to 1971, with one poem original to the book. The only stories that I know I have read before are "Judas" (1967) from Dangerous Visions and "The Vitanuls" (1967) from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

 

[Rodders]

Finished The Armour of Contempt. Excellent. Now on to Only In Death

 

[The Judge]

Well, I've continued with one of my part-read novels, and at 600 pages in, I'm now about three-quarters of the way through Tad William's Shadowmarch, but it's slow going.

Fortunately, that's not been my only read of the month. Still with fantasy I managed to get through RJ Barker's The Bone Ships (stuff happening on the High Seas while searching for the last sea-dragon) and his Gods of the Wyrdwood (stuff happening in Strange Woods while searching for redemption), both of which I struggled with due to the ponderous pace, uninteresting and unsympathetic characters and the over-complicated but for me rather underwhelming world-building, and I shan't bother with any more in either series. Rather more to my taste was The Malevolent Seven by Sebastien de Castell, involving demons, kind-of-angels, and otherworldly beings, and the plot of the Magnificent Seven turned on its head.

Outside SFF I raced through a couple of the Spenser hard-boiled-private-eye novels by Robert B Parker (I've never read of his work before, but had vague memories of the 1980s TV series with Avery Brooks -- yep, Capt Sisko of ST DS9) which were very much of their genre, but easy to read.

But the great success of the month was coming across the Dido Kent series by Anna Dean, four novels set in 1805 or thereabouts with an engaging first person narration (and much letter-writing!) by a 35 year old spinster in poor circumstances, who asks a lot of questions about mysterious deaths among her acquaintance -- basically she's a cross between Eliza Bennet and Miss Marple -- with a gentle romance alongside. The series is greatly indebted to Jane Austen for settings and situations (and not a few lines of narration) but while the characters are all of their time, there is throughout a theme of the lack of equality between the sexes and what this means for Dido, and the unfair aspects of both civil and criminal law. Heartily recommended for anyone with a love of Austen, even those not usually into cosy murder mysteries.