October Reading Thread

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BLOODY JANUARY by Alan Parks

Set in Glasgow , Scotland , during January 1973 . Detective McCoy and team conduct a murder investigation .
60 pages in and enjoying it so far . McCoy appears to be our flawed " anti - hero " . An impressively written debut which is perfect for an autumn day or evening . Wonderful description of a city going through change and urban renewal . Although , violent and sweary so won't suit all readers .

First of a series of thrillers which take place over consecutive months .
 
Finished The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore and loved every one of its 1300 pages. It’s a brutal and often darkly humorous account of the families who shaped history and the sheer ruthlessness of power.

I’ve now started Ben McIntyre’s latest, The Siege, which details the 1980 Iranian Embassy hostage drama.
 
Finished Blade of Dream by Daniel Abraham. Serves as an excellent sequel to an excellent trilogy introduction. Quite enjoying this structure where each book in the trilogy tells one piece of an interlocking story over the span of a year, with no one involved being entirely aware of everything that's going on, not even the main antagonist. Not sure when I'll get to the final book of the trilogy, but I have high hopes.

Next up: Passin' Through, a Louis L'Amour Western (oh, I'm sorry, "frontier story"). Been wanting to get into Westerns for a long while, and ended up getting this one on sale for three dollars. I understand L'Amour is one of the most successful of all Western writers, and by all accounts he knew his genre better than most. Guess I'll find out soon enough.
 
The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature by Ludovic Slimak

A pretentious, verbose, repetitive, over-wrought, poorly written, overly-philosophical, internal-monologue diatribe about... nothing. I could contribute some of this to translation issues, but not all of it. The author comes across as arrogant, insisting that only people who dig for Neanderthal remains for decades have any knowledge on the subject... but insists repeatedly that we can draw no conclusions about any of the finds. So, in short, scientists (and by default, the general public who reads what the scientist write) knows nothing about Neanderthals. Anything vaguely interesting related to Neanderthals is completely lost and subsumed in the vast forest of fluff, travelogue and more fluff. There is no overall thesis to this book, no substance, other than that Slimak thinks Neanderthals (referred to often as "the creature") is totally alien from us i.e. homo sapiens sapiens (which is a valid point), and that we don't actually know anything about them.​

If you are looking for new information on Neanderthals, try: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
 
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton

I don't usually read romance novels, or novels meant to be funny (apparently I don't have a sense of humour), but the idea of prestigious Victorian women pickpocket, blackmailing and being piratical caught my attention. This novel is a delightful concoction of frivolous fun, hilarity and silliness, with some romance tossed in, that I enjoyed much more than I expected. It has William Goldman's The Princess Bride vibes, but Holton's book appealed to me more. Maybe because of the prestigious Victorian women were flying pirate houses around the country, instead of ships or broomsticks. Or because I really liked the characters and their interactions - the elderly Miss Darlington and her feisty, but naive, ward Cecilia, the very efficient Pleasance, along with all their terribly sensible lady scoundrels acquaintances, the doggerel poet Captain Movathand who flies a hijacked abbey, and of course, the sometime assassin and too good-looking Ned Lightbourne (of the numerous names and titles). This is a frivolous, amusing and action packed story of espionage, piracy, family relations and regency romance all rolled into one. Best read while lounging on the couch, wrapped in a fluffy robe, sipping a glass of champagne while nibbling decadent chocolate sweets (plain tea and digestive biscuits is too tame for this novel!) and just going with the story.​
 
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Slowly getting through Playgrounds of The Mind (1991) by Larry Niven, a excellent collection of some of his writings.

Got some classics lined up afterwards
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Comic books THE THING Vol .3
By Mark Gruenwald.
CATWOMAN by Ram V. Vol .5
 
HIGH WEIRDNESS: by Erik Davis.2019
1970's writing's of Philip K. Dick,
Terence McKenna, and Anton Wilson.
 
Elentarri said:
If you are looking for new information on Neanderthals, try: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
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I have read this book and can confirm that it is really well written, very interesting and very informative. :giggle:
However, my favourite book on Neanderthals and Denisovans is The World Before Us by Tom Higham, and I recommend it to anyone interested in these subjects.
Elentarri said:
I found Emma annoying - kept wanting to shove her into a muddy puddle. I'm sure it would have been thoroughly disagreeable!
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You're too soft-hearted. I wanted to hit her with something heavy when I read that book. :lol:

As for me, I am currently reading Northern Wei by Scott Pearce. It's a book about how, in the 4th century, the northern nomadic people called the Xionbei took over a large part of China and tried to set up their own state, with the Xionbei themselves as lords and ladies and the Han Chinese as their humble subjects.
I already know a bit about the history of this state, but it's very handy to have a book that brings together most of the information about Northern Wei and puts it in the right order.
 
I read Max Gladstone's Wicked Problems, the second book in his Craft Wars trilogy and also the penultimate book in the setting. It is a contrast to Dead Country, the first book in the trilogy, which was very focused on a couple of characters and the events occurring in a small town threatened by a supernatural menace. This book is much more expansive, rather than just being focused on Tara and Dawn there are also plotlines for most of the protagonists of the earlier series as they travel back and forth around the world in an attempt to prepare to fight against an apocalyptic threat. While it is good to see the various characters again and see how they interact with each other, the frequent switching between perspectives means that it can feel a bit frenetic at times. It is also good to see some parts of the world we have only heard about before, as well as returning to some familiar locales, since I do like the setting's unusual mix of fantasy and modern elements with lawyer-necromancers and corporations headed by undead sorcerers. I think the most interesting bit of the plot is the tension between the two groups of characters who are both absolutely convinced that they are doing what is necessary to save the world and the other group are making a terrible mistake.

I then read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay. I thought the setting was fascinating, Tchaikovsky clearly having a lot of fun designing an alien ecology for his planet full of life that the humans find inexplicable and often terrifying. The lead character often finds it difficult to fully appreciate the setting, having been sent to the planet as part of a one-way trip to a prison camp for mid-level revolutionaries who attempt to rebel against Earth's totalitarian government. He is given the unenviable task of trying to explain how the local lifeforms had apparently constructed mysterious structures, a task made more difficult by having to fit any explanations into the government's restrictive scientific dogma. Meanwhile he also gets involved in a seemingly quixotic attempt to rise up against the labour camp's commandant, while trying to navigate the constant threat of one of the would-be rebels selling out their comrades. I thought the plot and setting were both done very well, although I would say that while the characterisation is adequate I didn't find any of them as memorable as in some of Tchaikovsky's other books such as House of Open Wounds.
 
Stranger by Simon Clark

Post plague survivors mutate into crazed killers, one town stands safe because they have a guy who can sense when the frenzy is going to happen, and he kills any stranger who is secretly infected.
 
The Judge said:
Um... well... the revenge is long, but the novel is bulked out with a load of other stuff. If it's of interest -- and by way of warning! -- this is what I said in my book-blog 10 years ago:

After the gripping start to The Count of Monte Cristo things rather slowed down, and I began to see why it comes in at 875 pages (and would top well over 1,000 if all the dialogue was split into separate lines as is now standard), with tedious chapters devoted to the only marginally interesting antics of two men-about-town in Rome, the dumped-on-the-page backstories of peripheral characters, and, worst of all, the billing and cooing from the drippiest pair of lovers I've ever had the misfortune to read (the Introduction's judgement on the couple is "vapid and verbose"). As for the submissive, brainless, ever-tearful Victorian ideal of perfect womanhood, I was ready to gag. Page-turning, nonetheless, thanks to the revenge-driven scheming of the Count himself, but though I'm glad I've read it, I'm far more glad its sexism and sentimental, sanctimonious, hypocritical God-bothering is largely a thing of the past.
So, be ready to skim-read a lot of unnecessary stuff to get back to the Count!
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At about 50% now, and all of this is accurate, both good and bad.
 
williamjm said:
I then read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay. I thought the plot and setting were both done very well, although I would say that while the characterisation is adequate I didn't find any of them as memorable as in some of Tchaikovsky's other books such as House of Open Wounds.
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Tchaikovsky seems to have problems writing people... or that's what it looks like after reading his spider trilogy and a novella.
 
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