May 2018 reading thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
Oh s#$$% I have:barefoot::barefoot: sorry :cry:

My only excuse is I read it when it was released many moons ago, never reread unlike Magician.

I was never keen on Talon either.

Me neither, although inspired by this conversation I went and re-read the Conclave of Shadows trilogy.

Tal... is, I dunno, your standard fantasy superhero. He does everything amazingly. There's no endearing sense of struggle. There's no deep ties of affection between him and others to bring out his hidden qualities. And, in the end, while he goes through a lot, he's not making deliberate sacrifices for others. I'm not saying those things have to happen for a character to become more than just another fantasy hero, but without them I am looking for something. But I can't find it.

Kaspar... well, his redemption arc is well set up in King of Foxes in retrospect. A lot of characters suggest he's only the way he is due to malign influences. The question of what happens to a bad man when you can remove the source of the wrongness is an interesting one. I like that Feist went there. But I'm not sure he nailed it.

There's a lot in both books that I wished had been made a lot longer - Tal's period of serving Kaspar is the best bit of King of Foxes; Kaspar's period with the farmers and the General are cool - and quite a bit that adds little, most of it journeys of some sort.

I'm gonna forge through the rest of the series after this and see if its improved for me. But, tbh, reading this, I find myself missing Erik and Roo, Pug and Tomas, Arutha and Jimmy. They had heart. Kaspar and Tal... don't.

Who knows? Maybe I won't feel the need to ring up Feist and scream profanities at him when I next encounter Jimmyhand, the unnecessary superhero sequel to a better character. At least Kaspar and Tal were new ground.
 
Me neither, although inspired by this conversation I went and re-read the Conclave of Shadows trilogy.

Tal... is, I dunno, your standard fantasy superhero. He does everything amazingly. There's no endearing sense of struggle. There's no deep ties of affection between him and others to bring out his hidden qualities. And, in the end, while he goes through a lot, he's not making deliberate sacrifices for others. I'm not saying those things have to happen for a character to become more than just another fantasy hero, but without them I am looking for something. But I can't find it.

Kaspar... well, his redemption arc is well set up in King of Foxes in retrospect. A lot of characters suggest he's only the way he is due to malign influences. The question of what happens to a bad man when you can remove the source of the wrongness is an interesting one. I like that Feist went there. But I'm not sure he nailed it.

There's a lot in both books that I wished had been made a lot longer - Tal's period of serving Kaspar is the best bit of King of Foxes; Kaspar's period with the farmers and the General are cool - and quite a bit that adds little, most of it journeys of some sort.

I'm gonna forge through the rest of the series after this and see if its improved for me. But, tbh, reading this, I find myself missing Erik and Roo, Pug and Tomas, Arutha and Jimmy. They had heart. Kaspar and Tal... don't.

Who knows? Maybe I won't feel the need to ring up Feist and scream profanities at him when I next encounter Jimmyhand, the unnecessary superhero sequel to
Ha thanks you've nailed my problem with it.
Never had a problem with Guy's redemption but then he was never truly evil.
 
I’m continuing to educate myself around Tolkien. To this end, I’ve read: Michel White’s “Tolkien, a Biography”, Ruth S. Noel’s “The Mythology of Middle Earth”, and Paul Kocher’s “Master of Middle-Earth”. These last two were published before the Silmarillion. No reason for choosing these, other than that they were available to borrow.

I find something very comforting and nourishing in finding out more about Tolkien and his writings, perhaps because LOTR has been some part of my inner landscape for many years. I’m also truly impressed by my level of ignorance. For example, I had no idea that he was a staunch Roman Catholic, that his father died when he was four years old, and his mother when twelve, or that at the age of seventeen he told the father figure in his life, a Roman Catholic priest, that he was in love, and was promptly banned from seeing his future wife again until he was twenty one (orders that he followed). There’ve also been various small nuggets of information that have delighted me. I look forward to reading further.

Thanks to discussions earlier in this thread, I’ve managed to start Tim Powers' “Hide Me Among the Graves”.
 
I’m continuing to educate myself around Tolkien. To this end, I’ve read: Michel White’s “Tolkien, a Biography”, Ruth S. Noel’s “The Mythology of Middle Earth”, and Paul Kocher’s “Master of Middle-Earth”. These last two were published before the Silmarillion. No reason for choosing these, other than that they were available to borrow.

Tolkien's letters (edited by Humphrey Carpenter) are well worth a read too.

Would you particularly recommend any of those you listed above?
 
Ha thanks you've nailed my problem with it.
Never had a problem with Guy's redemption but then he was never truly evil.

Guy's redemption was a lot less involved too. As much as anything, it was less redemption, and more Arutha coming round to his point of view.

I dunno. Now I've finished reading it, the more I like what Feist did was Kasper. I don't much care for the Friendly Ghost, but I do like authors exploring the humanity of their villains.
 
Tolkien's letters (edited by Humphrey Carpenter) are well worth a read too.

Would you particularly recommend any of those you listed above?

The Letters are next up! I'm sure I'll get a lot from them.

I’m hesitant to recommend any of the books when yourself and others are almost certainly better read.

However, the Michael White biography (2001) is a very easy and informative read for someone like myself who is new to the biographies, so I’d recommend it for that reason. (I intend to read the Carpenter biography before too long).

The Mythology of Middle Earth seems a curious book in that the author clearly has a deep knowledge of comparative mythology, but it seems to be more of a postgraduate musing. It probably suffers from being pre-Silmarillion.

To my surprise, I really liked Kocher’s (1972) Master of Middle-Earth for the depth of thought he had put into discussing the characters. There was one nugget that particularly amused me, that may be documented elsewhere. In Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien quotes the definition of a blunderbuss given by the “Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford”. The definition he quotes is the exact definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary, so the “Four Wise Clerks” must be a reference to the Four Editors of the OED. I’d like to know more about who exactly he was teasing and why.
 
I’d like to know more about who exactly he was teasing and why.

Apparently (from "The Meaning of Everything" by Simon Winchester) their names were James Murray, Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C.T. Onions. Tolkien himself was involved in updating the OED, so they would effectively have been his colleagues, and I guess this was a friendly in-joke.
 
I've started Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers. Good so far, but I'd never have guessed it was by Powers; it's not at all typical.
 
I just finished a reread of "The Cybernetic Brains" by Raymond F. Jones. I read the short story (published in 1950) when I was 13. The author expanded it to a short novel in 1962, which is the version I recently read on Kindle Unlimited. I prefer the short story version.

I have a strong sense of nostalgia for this story since it was among my earliest sci-fi reads, but was disappointed in the re-read. Now I find the story extremely dated. The book shows its age through lack of understanding of both computers and brains. It also suffers from one-dimensional characters as well as old-fashioned language and values.

Even so, I can understand why I found this story so influential when I was younger. "The Cybernetic Brains" could be considered proto-cyberpunk, one of the earlier stories exploring what artificial intelligence and dependence on machines could mean in society. The concepts and themes are still prevalent in many sci-fi stories today.
 
Finished Excise by Danielle Girard, this was the sequel to Exhume which I read last month. This picked up a few months after Exhume finished which had seemed to wrap up the mystery and I was looking forward to the next crime on the docket. Well, there was indeed an interesting next crime on the docket, but the wrap up from Exhume became unraveled. This would normally frustrate me only a little, but in this case it seems as though the totally human human villain was playing the long game with a precision that only the God Emperor of Dune could rival. It just doesn't ring true. No human could be that insightful that many years into the future. It will be interesting to see whether my desire to put an end to the story will outweigh my outrage over the unbelievable story line will win out.

I just finished Fire Ant by Jonathan Brazee. By todays standards the book was almost? a novelette, having only 147 pages. Quick read it was, as would be expected. And rather enjoyable in a light predictable sort of way. Brazee seems to have turned out a couple of dozen novels in three years time. So I'm torn between reading something else or not. These books might be a kind of slap dash project.

I am about to start listening to Points of Impact by Marco Kloos. It is book 6 in the Frontlines series.

(I've discovered the world of podcasts, and find I really love some of them. My book listening has been taking a serious hit of late. My favorite this far is Invisibilia an NPR podcast looking the invisible things that shape our lives. Always interesting, sometimes life changing.)
 
Apparently (from "The Meaning of Everything" by Simon Winchester) their names were James Murray, Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C.T. Onions. Tolkien himself was involved in updating the OED, so they would effectively have been his colleagues, and I guess this was a friendly in-joke.

Many thanks! The gang of four. I get pleasure from coming across these very human in-jokes.
 
This morning I'm making a start on Hairy London by our very own Stephen Palmer.
Interesting premise so far, odd quest while strange things happen around them

(I'm struggling a bit with the three gents names tbh - when I need to mentally pause to labour through several syllables it distracts me from the yarn.)
 
Almost finished Alex Lamb Nemesis and will then be reading Emma Newman Planetfall. Have a half finished Catherine Cookson on the go as well.
 
Accelerating away through the Feist series - now on Wrath of a Mad God.

My short form thoughts would be that while I do really enjoy what Feist adds to this series, we're reaching the point where he's stacked on so much that it's working against itself. Its like taking a burger and shoving a slice of pizza and a piece of fried chicken in there.
 
Just finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon, which was very good, next up is R.A.Lafferty’s Arrive at Easterwine, the Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine, which I bought out of curiosity when @Hugh expressed a dislike of it.

I hope you like it and can give me reason to try again.

Not sure I can ;)

I'm half way through but likely to give it up for a while. It started out ok, but it's getting quite mad and doesn't seem to be really going anywhere.

I nearly gave up last night but I'll give it one more go later and see if I can ride out the storm to somewhere a bit more readable :)
 
R.A.Lafferty’s Arrive at Easterwine, the Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine which I bought out of curiosity when @Hugh expressed a dislike of it.

Not sure I can ;)

I'm half way through but likely to give it up for a while. It started out ok, but it's getting quite mad and doesn't seem to be really going anywhere.

I nearly gave up last night but I'll give it one more go later and see if I can ride out the storm to somewhere a bit more readable :)

You've got further than me.
 
I finished Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades, which I thought was excellent - I shall be sure to read the next one, which I understand completes a trilogy story arc, even though there are more OMW series books.

I'm turning now to the last book in Jack Vance's Demon Princes series, the 5th novel in the sequence, The Book of Dreams. I have started many more series than I've finished in my time, so I'm keen to finish one for a change!
 
I finished Stephen Palmer's Hairy London and started right away on The Call by Peader O Guilan. This has got me enthralled so far
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads


Back
Top