September Reading Thread

[Danny McG]

I've been reading Wraith. A mil SF by M R. Forbes but I'm finding it a bit plodding, saved for another day.

So now I'm starting a re-read of the Conqueror trilogy by Timothy Zahn, that'll keep me occupied for a few days.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

She's a YA writer isn't she?
Is this book a YA one?

It's marketed as YA, but really it isn't!

 

[Elentarri]

Gold Fame Citrus by Clair Vaye Watkins [Dystopian, Speculative Fiction, Literary Fiction]

I liked some aspects of this novel, but not others. Watkins introduces us to a dystopian future where the American Southwest has experienced an extended drought and completely run out of water - no rain, empty aquifers, no underground water. There is now a new ocean - the Amargosa Dune Sea - a vast, moving sand dune that has engulfed mountains ranges and swamped cities. The majority of the residents have been evacuated, but child star Luz and war veteran Ray have decided to remain, where they live in an abandoned starlet's Los Angeles mansion... until they kidnap an abused child and try to find a better life for her (and them)... and things don't go as planned.

I simply did not care (one way or another) for any of the people in this novel. The main characters are so... apathetic, vague and bland in personality. The plot showed promise but derailed somewhere in the desert encampment. On reaching the end of the novel, I am left wondering what the point of the whole story was? Showing off the author's literary ambitions? And while I loved the Amargosa Dune Sea (it's almost a character in its own right), I'm not convinced of the realism of the American Southwest producing enough sand to engulf whole states and mountain ranges. Wondering about where all that sand came from was rather distracting. On the other hand, Watkins is brilliant when she writes about the scenery - the sand, the dunes, the dryness and grittiness, the desolation and bleakness, the dried up and brittle trees, the griminess and crassness of the people. In the end this lush, sometimes pretentious, very depressing, somewhat pointless, and not particularly original story provided mild entertainment and is likely to be soon forgotten.

 

[RDArmstrong]

Finished Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Probably one of my favorite books. I could nitpick certain things, but its not even worth it considering the creativity that went into this. 9/10

 

[Elentarri]

The Swarm by Sean O’Connor

This is a post-apocalyptic horror - civilization descends into chaos (how terribly predictable!) after some sort of swarm that comes out only at night devours everything living. A father and son try to survive in the Arctic after a plane crash leaves them stranded. In the end, it's humans who are bigger monsters than the voracious, carnivorous, over-sized bugs.

This is a sparsely written novel that drove me bonkers. There was no suspense, or buildup of terror. The reader doesn't get very many details about the "big bad monster" responsible for the apocalypse until the end, where you get essentially one sentence. And once all the sparse knowledge about the creepy crawly swarm is accumulated, I have questions and objections! I get this is fiction, but biology and physics has to work (this is still earth), and this doesn't. Insects don't like the cold so having them fly around in the arctic does not make sense. Cold regions should be safe havens. Also, insects might have grown huge during the Carboniferous Age 300 million years ago, but they don't get that big anymore, probably due to the lower concentration of oxygen in today's atmosphere and insect respiratory physiology. So giant nocturnal locust-like insects flying around the Arctic is just not plausible. Author needs to do some research - just because it's fiction doesn't mean you can goof-off on the world building! Neither does the excuse that humans tried everything to kill the "big-bad" and didn't. Seriously? Did they try DDT? Or were the bureaucrats too busy wrangling over paperwork before getting eaten? Because an ancient insect just emerged from hibernation is not going to have any acquired immunity to any modern pesticide. Humans are good at killing things, and even big bugs go splat if you hit them hard enough.

We also never find out how old the boy is, other than "very young". He is also very whiny, very obstinate and very irritating. The father obviously loves his son more than I do, because I would have fed him to the polar bear in short order. The ending was interesting, and I suppose in a situation as presented in the novel, inevitable. It makes the voracious, swarming, nocturnal critters seem almost boring.

If you read this as a novel exploring a father-son relationship, you may enjoy this more than I did. But I was reading this for the titular voracious Swarm, and was left disappointed.​

 

[Extollager]

Last month I reread The Fellowship of the Ring. This month I expect to reread The Two Towers, and then The Return of the King in October. Between readings of the first two I read other fiction -- while looking forward to returning to Tolkien. I'm reading P. D. James's Dalgliesh novels and just finished the third, Unnatural Causes. At the moment I've started Ted Gioia's Delta Blues, nonfiction that will no doubt have me reaching into my collection of early blues CDs. Gioia's book is (c) 2008 and I see Arthur Petties isn't in the index, but the JSP box with his few sides among many other performers probably wasn't available yet. I was more worried to see that Joe Bussard -- legendary collector of old, old blues records -- isn't in the index either. But I'm sure I'll learn a lot and the book is off to a good start. I'm reading a two-volume commentary on the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Before lights out I often read a little in Walter de la Mare's anthology Come Hither!

 

[Dave Vicks]

COUNT ZERO by William Gibson DNF.

OT:I had trouble getting into Shirley
Jackson's Horror stories and novels.
Her humor books are good.

 

[Dave Vicks]

TALES FROM THE CRYPT NO.3
Comic book.4 stories. 2008.

 

[Elentarri]

Relics of the Dead by Ariana Franklin [Historical fiction, mystery]

This was an entertaining little historical mystery, with three mysteries to solve. The first mystery involves the identification of two skeletons dug up in the Glastonbury graveyard. They are presumed to be the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. King Henry II, for political reasons, needs King Arthur to be dead. So he summons his "Mistress of the Art of Death", a female doctor (oh, the horror!) trained at Salerno (which incidentally happens to be the world's first medical school and also the first medical school to accept women) who has some skill as as something of a medieval forensic pathologist to examine the bones and determine who they belong to. The other two mysteries involve arson and missing people. The main character, Adelia, is fully realised. She has needs and wants, is strong and vulnerable, and very persistent. Her supporting cast are just as well written. Enjoyable, but I suspect the author stretches historical credibility a bit with her female doctor and attendant muslim eunuch, and her too-outspoken attitude to King Henry II.​

 

[Dave Vicks]

THE PATH.By Richard Matheson. 1993.

A New Look At Reality.

 

[Hugh]

Peter Hopkirk ""The Great Gam: on Secret Service in High Asia" (1990)
A lengthy account of the paranoid dance played out between Britain and Russia @1800 - 1900 re who was cheating who out of territory in Asia that they felt belonged to them. Central to all this was British concern that Russia might invade India, thereby gaining control of the major Victorian source of revenue.
524 pages long. And it felt long. I am relieved to finish it.
However, it has been interesting, and I'm surprised how little I knew on these matters. To begin with, I didn't know that war between Russia and Britain was an ever-present possibility during this period, and that for at least 50 years Russia had entertained serious plans to invade India, as apparently had Napoleon back in the day. Although the author paints with a broad brush, there are still plenty of individual accounts of heroic derring do in high Himalayas and oases of Central Asia, as well as ill-informed governmental arrogance (such as the two invasions of Afghanistan and their associated disasters).

One aspect that stands out is the vast distances involved. For instance in the 1870s the Chinese Emperor finally roused himself to send a large army westwards to remote Sinkiang where a Moslem adventurer, Yakub Beg, had carved himself out a kingdom over a thousand miles long, and was now being courted by both Russians and British. The Chinese army took three years to get there, in the process planting and harvesting its own crops, before routing the interloper. Another example: in 1839 a Russian general set out with 5,000 troops and 10,000 camels to conquer Khiva, the northernmost Khanate of Central Asia. After three months he gave up, having got nowhere near his objective due to an early winter.

One final bizarre story in a book of bizarre stories.... Near the very end of this saga, in 1904, the Russian Navy had been hammered by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, so the Tsar decided to send reinforcements all the way from the Baltic Sea to Korea. However, the Russian fleet only got as far as the North Sea when they mistook some British fishing trawlers on the Dogger Bank for Japanese Navy Torpedo Boats, despite these boats being a fair distance from Japan (!!!) and fired on them while also managing to fire and damage their own ships. This was the infamous "Dogger Bank Incident" in which the Russian Navy sank one trawler, damaged five others, killed two British fishermen and injured six others. Unsurprisingly this created a furore and almost led to war.
Truth stranger than fiction....

 

[Vince W]

The Deceivers by Alfred Bester.

 

[hitmouse]

Peter Hopkirk ""The Great Gam: on Secret Service in High Asia" (1990)
A lengthy account of the paranoid dance played out between Britain and Russia @1800 - 1900 re who was cheating who out of territory in Asia that they felt belonged to them. Central to all this was British concern that Russia might invade India, thereby gaining control of the major Victorian source of revenue.
524 pages long. And it felt long. I am relieved to finish it.
However, it has been interesting, and I'm surprised how little I knew on these matters. To begin with, I didn't know that war between Russia and Britain was an ever-present possibility during this period, and that for at least 50 years Russia had entertained serious plans to invade India, as apparently had Napoleon back in the day. Although the author paints with a broad brush, there are still plenty of individual accounts of heroic derring do in high Himalayas and oases of Central Asia, as well as ill-informed governmental arrogance (such as the two invasions of Afghanistan and their associated disasters).

One aspect that stands out is the vast distances involved. For instance in the 1870s the Chinese Emperor finally roused himself to send a large army westwards to remote Sinkiang where a Moslem adventurer, Yakub Beg, had carved himself out a kingdom over a thousand miles long, and was now being courted by both Russians and British. The Chinese army took three years to get there, in the process planting and harvesting its own crops, before routing the interloper. Another example: in 1839 a Russian general set out with 5,000 troops and 10,000 camels to conquer Khiva, the northernmost Khanate of Central Asia. After three months he gave up, having got nowhere near his objective due to an early winter.

One final bizarre story in a book of bizarre stories.... Near the very end of this saga, in 1904, the Russian Navy had been hammered by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, so the Tsar decided to send reinforcements all the way from the Baltic Sea to Korea. However, the Russian fleet only got as far as the North Sea when they mistook some British fishing trawlers on the Dogger Bank for Japanese Navy Torpedo Boats, despite these boats being a fair distance from Japan (!!!) and fired on them while also managing to fire and damage their own ships. This was the infamous "Dogger Bank Incident" in which the Russian Navy sank one trawler, damaged five others, killed two British fishermen and injured six others. Unsurprisingly this created a furore and almost led to war.
Truth stranger than fiction....

The best books in the Great Game are some of the Flashman novels. Superb history lessons.

 

[Extollager]

Hugh, I have that book & mean to read it eventually.

 

[Extollager]

Have begun the final Aubrey and Maturin novel, Blue at the Mizzen.

 

[Elentarri]

The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins [historical fantasy, gothic]

I quite enjoyed this one. It has little spiders in it; magical, silence-enducing silk and a rotten industrial underbelly.

 

[Hugh]

Hugh, I have that book & mean to read it eventually.

I found it a bit of an effort though I'm glad I've read it. It was in a pile of books that I saved from my parents' house clearance and am gradually working through.

 

[Hugh]

The best books in the Great Game are some of the Flashman novels. Superb history lessons.

I loved the first one but I'm afraid I lost interest in the books after a while - although he retained his deviousness, he became less cowardly and that absolute gibbering cowardice was the quality I'd particularly enjoyed. I did read the ones on the Indian Mutiny and the Taiping Rebellion, but stopped there. It looks as if I never read the last four and maybe one or two before that.

 

[AE35Unit]

Next up Bread by Ed Mcbain, about, amongst other things, a warehouse fire. Introduces the character Ollie Weeks apparently

 

[williamjm]

I read James S.A. Corey's The Mercy of Gods, the first book in their Captive's War series. Humanity coming under threat from a seemingly overwhelming alien threat are a common plotline in space opera stories but there is a particularly big mismatch here as all human resistance is quickly crushed and the rest of the novel follows a small group of researchers held in captivity whose survival depends on persuading the aliens that they can contribute something of use to their new masters. Unlike a lot of space opera series (such as Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation, which has a few similar plot points) this does not have the huge cast of characters or varied locations that are typical of the genre but instead has a claustrophobic feel to it. There is also a tension throughout between the desire of some of the survivors to make a quixotic attempt at rebellion and others who would either prefer to try to play the long game and look for a better opportunity, or who just want to survive. I thought the variety of reactions shown by the characters did seem plausible. There are some interesting characters in this, although I don't think any of them are as compelling as the best character in the Expanse series. I thought that this was a good story which takes some familiar elements but does something relatively original with them and the ending sets things up intriguingly for the rest of the series.

I have now moved on to Max Gladstone's Wicked Problems, the latest book in his Craft series. Although this is fantasy rather than science fiction I suppose it does have a similarity with the previous book I read because humanity is again coming under threat from a seemingly overwhelming alien threat.