January 2018: Reading thread

I started Autonomous, but jumped ship last night as the third Binti book (The Night Masquerade) popped onto my Kindle at midnight, so I thought I'd whizz through it first because Autonomous had reached a point where it was easy enough to stop for a couple of days

Single White Male, Julian M Miles who is none other than our own @Rafellin

Having finished Foreigner, I've returned re-invigorated to Cherryh's compact space and have started Chanur's Homecoming - I really ought to finish that tale. I have the next two Foreigner books on order and have a few other Cherryh A/U books on the shelf too, so it looks like this year may be peppered with a fair few C J Cherryh books. I'll comment more on the books themselves in her sub-forum.

Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head Of Cerberus. It's a book I've never read before but I've heard good things about it (and upon opening, I've just discovered that it is actually a collection of three novellas). Should keep me going whilst the wind blows and the snow falls

Finished Henry IV bio, now reading (begun about a week ago) Marc Morris' The Norman Conquest, which is suddenly very timely.

Started an oldie but goodie this afternoon. The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds.
A good few years since i last read it.
I've read (somewhere??) that it's been reissued under a new title....Can't remember what it is

Victoria Silverwolf said:

I have just started Last Summer (1968) by Evan Hunter, reputed to be a dark and disturbing novel about teenagers, which I will follow by reading the sequel Come Winter (1973). There was a film made of Last Summer in 1969 which had to be edited to avoid an X rating.

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I read that as a teenage schoolboy and did indeed find it a bit dark (in between the very carefully read rude bits!)
I saw the film a lot of years later and did a re read - I was pleasantly surprised to see how tightly written it was. Much better than I had remembered it. I always liked his Ed McBain 87th precinct books

Halfway through Anansi Boys now. Really enjoying it.

Mouse said:

Halfway through Anansi Boys now. Really enjoying it.

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There's still time to catch the adaptation on Radio 4. It's well worth a listen.

BBC Radio 4 - Anansi Boys

Thanks, I keep forgetting about that!

Began listening to Cold Harbor the third and I suspect last, of the Gibson Vaughn series by Matthew Fitzsimmons. As in the other two books the writing is tight, the characters engaging, and the plot intriguing if somewhat frustrating for someone like me who likes their heroes playing by the rules of a righteous moral ethic, rather than some selfish ethic.

Finished The Hours by Michael Cunningham. I was mostly underwhelmed at first, as it seemed like a textbook example of the 90's fad of over-writing everything (a chair where the light falls across it just so in order to make it seem "surprised" it's a chair... what does that MEAN???). Nonetheless, the ending tied it together surprisingly well and has the rare effect of making me want to reread it to look for subtleties I missed, a la Sixth Sense or something.

Now deep into Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, an epic about the medieval that I chased down after visiting a medieval French monastery last summer.

dannymcg said:

Started an oldie but goodie this afternoon. The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds.
A good few years since i last read it.
I've read (somewhere??) that it's been reissued under a new title....Can't remember what it is

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Aurora Rising is its new name, there's a sequel due out this month - Elysium Fire.

soulsinging said:

Now deep into Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

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I think you'll enjoy that piece of literature. The story was intriguing, but I was never quite sure how well researched it was. Maybe it was dead on, but it seemed a little off to me. Perhaps it was a little too close to modern sympathies in a medieval dress? Too little inevitability of life situation? Maybe you'll be able to help me there.

Just started The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985) by Barry N. Malzberg. This incorporates some previous stories by the author, and appears to be more of a mosaic of variations on Freud (and Emily Dickinson) than a true novel; the sections appear to be the past, the future, and alternate histories. (I know I've read the story "Emily Dickinson -- Saved From Drowning" before, which shows the famous poet as successful during her lifetime instead of obscure and only appreciated after her death, her acclaim to the detriment of her poetry.)

Binti:The Night Masquerade completed - I liked it a lot

Back to Autonomous now.

Angel's Truth A.J. Grimmelhaus aka @Gonk the Insane

I've finished reading To the Mothers of the Movement with Love by Dianne Liuzzi Hagan. I'm conflicted about this book. On the one hand it is a powerful message and one a lot of white Americans haven't heard or have ignored. She makes a terrific case for the pervasive quality of white privilege in America. She doesn't lay the blame at any one overt conspiracy. She does see some organization, but she lays a good share of the blame on people, especially whites, who close their eyes to what is happening all around them. She sees the problems of race relations in the U.S. as deteriorating with little hope for any reversal, especially under the Trump administration. It is well documented and I doubt that there's any "fake news" in it. On the other hand her message seems too simplistic. She sees white American treatment of African Americans, especially the last 20 years, as all but universally wretched and self serving. She sees even the effort to move to a more nuanced position as blatant racism. I gave the book (for me) a very unusual 5 stars so as to encourage more readers, but if I were to rate that simply on its literary merits I think I would move to 3 stars. I found that much of the book seems to alternate between screaming, whining, and crying. It was obvious that this was a kind of compilation of blog posts and that probably accounts for the overly emotional tone of this. That said, I would recommend that white Americans everywhere read this and respond with empathy to the problem that she so passionately addressed.

I haven't finished yet, Parson, but what you characterize as "screaming, whining, and crying" I'm more inclined to see as degrees of outrage, much of it earned if not from personal experience then from close observation of events of the last two decades.

Again, though, I'm biased as a friend of Dianne and her husband. Maybe I compensate for the emotional because I can hear her voice in her writing. That said, I find it well-written in the sense of line by line enunciating her thoughts and positions clearly, moving her narrative along at a steady and involving pace. I agree, though, that the underpinning of blog posts is noticeable and problematic because it leads to repetition. Off-setting that, for me, I think she gains some rhetorical power from some of the repetition because it leads to restatements from slightly different perspectives, and from weaving her and her family's personal experience with a summary of events like the killing of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman and his post-trial behavior.

"She sees even the effort to move to a more nuanced position as blatant racism." This one, though, I'm not quite sure what you mean.


Randy M.

Randy M. said:

"She sees even the effort to move to a more nuanced position as blatant racism." This one, though, I'm not quite sure what you mean.

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I'm trying to remember exactly what the language was so that I can point to the portions directly, but up to now I haven't been able to come up with that. --- What I do remember is that a couple of times I thought: "Now she's going to be a little less categorical in her denunciation of everyone, everywhere, and admit that while every white person has benefited from white privilege, some have been trying to do better." But it seemed to me that when she came close to saying that, she would say something like 'But they/you? are only fooling yourselves. You are just as complicit as every other white person in America.'