July 2018: Reading Thread

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Finished reading Outlander. I'm a bit on the fence with it. It's basically a 900 page love letter to Jamie Fraser, which is fine, but I felt that the historical plot thread really lacked direction or purpose and so it didn't give the story any real tension. Didn't like the grand finale rape. Then read Assassination Classroom 2, which is a manga series, and now reading Woman on the Edge of Time.
 
I'm finally reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. His First Law books. I started this book once before and lost interest. To start it meanders around jumping from character to character not giving me time to become familiar. This time I have gotten past that and I'm with the characters.
 
Huzzah!

Hope you enjoyed it. (Begun early work on the next, but need to sort out some secondary character stuff).
 
thaddeus6th said:
Huzzah!

Hope you enjoyed it. (Begun early work on the next, but need to sort out some secondary character stuff).
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I did. Feel like you've hit a good consistency with them. Beginning and end maybe rushed a little, but the middle was great. Loved the golem.


While I'm chronning it up, started on The Girl With Two Souls. More admiring it than enjoying it so far.
 
Well, I ended up reading and finishing God Emperor of Dune - Herbert's prose is easy to read and moves at a relaxing pace, which is good for 5am puppy sitting. :)

I did enjoy it more than expected, though. The past couple of books haven't come anywhere near the dizzying heights of brilliance that was Dune - but neither have they sunk near to the disappointment that was Dune Messiah.

I may as well finish this series after all...
 
Brian G Turner said:
Well, I ended up reading and finishing God Emperor of Dune - Herbert's prose is easy to read and moves at a relaxing pace, which is good for 5am puppy sitting. :)

I did enjoy it more than expected, though. The past couple of books haven't come anywhere near the dizzying heights of brilliance that was Dune - but neither have they sunk near to the disappointment that was Dune Messiah.

I may as well finish this series after all...
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We'll make you one of us yet Brian. *rubs hands evilly*
 
I just finished "Exile" by Martin Owton and am starting "Nandor", the sequel. I have mixed feelings about this book. The characters and world feel shallow and cliche, but the story itself is fast-paced and captivating. It feels like a D&D adventure.

The ending of "Exile" left something open, so I find myself interested enough to move on to the next in the series.
 
Have made a start into my newly acquired kindle edition of Dickens' The Uncommercial Traveller.

Which is to say I've just finished the (long) introduction. HATED it.

Still, now I get to read the Dickens.
 
First few pages of The Darwin Effect by Mark Lukens. So far it's very reminiscent of the start of Alien, with the ships systems coming back online and waking the crew at an unscheduled stop.
The story ain't kicked into gear yet :)
 
Finished woman on the edge of time, and still processing my thoughts on that one. Now reading Circe by Madeleine Miller which is a greek myth inspired YA. It's been huge selling, but so far there's nothing that particularly stands out about it.
 
dannymcg said:
First few pages of The Darwin Effect by Mark Lukens. So far it's very reminiscent of the start of Alien, with the ships systems coming back online and waking the crew at an unscheduled stop.
The story ain't kicked into gear yet :)
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Finished this. What a cliche ending, I've saw the same 'surprise reveal' in a dozen other stories
 
I've got some catching up to do:

Finished Homegoing, by Yai Gyasi and thought it was mostly excellent. It's actually more a collection of linked short stories than a novel, and begins with two siblings in Africa at the dawn of the slave trade... one taken to America as a slave, the other married off to a white man in Africa. It then tells the chronological stories of various members of this family, offering parallel tales of the African experience in Africa and America and how the trauma of the slave trade carries on for generations. Each vignette is very engaging, but the topics are pretty heavy (especially early on) so I went through this one very slowly as there's a lot to absorb.

My only criticism is that, because of the way the story is told, you don't necessarily get to spend much time with any one character and by the end, some of them begin to blur together. Still, fascinating to see how the "hero" in one story becomes a background grandparent two stories later, their history often forgotten or ignored by descendants that have little understanding of what those forebears endured, whether by force or ignorance.

It's incredibly ambitious and rather stunning that this was a first-time author, as a story this big (even though the book is a reasonable 300 pages) could easily overwhelm a writer. She manages an impressive control of the narrative though. I highly recommend it.

I then tackled Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, which was amusing but by no means one of his best.

Now I'm taking a much lighter break and reading my first John Grisham novel in probably 20 years, The Rooster Bar. It's by no means one of his more well-known efforts, but it's about a group of law school friends who realize what a fraud their for-profit law school is and set out to get some payback. I'm mostly tackling it because, as someone still paying for a semi-useless law degree, the premise amuses me. The writing is terrible a few chapters in (I get the impression he wrote it on a whim and rather quickly), but it's as breezy as a plot-driven summer blockbuster should be.
 
A mixed bag of reading over the last week.

First up was Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert. I'd never felt the need to read the rest of the Dune series, since I wasn't so impressed with Herbert's writing that I wanted more of it, nor did I feeI I had to know what happened next. But I've been keeping an eye on the comments about Messiah on Chrons, so I thought it was time to try it. Not one for me, as it turns out. The mystic prescience stuff was never of much interest to me in the original and to have it take centre stage with characters who did little but whinge about being trapped in their gilded cages was rather too much. It may be I'd get more from it on a re-read, but I'm not holding out much hope, nor trying to find out in the near future.

The book I'd chosen to read alongside it, Shadowmancer by CP Taylor, was far worse. I don't usually look at children's books, but I recalled it made a bit of a splash when it was published in 2003, the back cover had a glowing quote from a national newspaper, and it was going very cheap at a charity stall, so I thought I'd give it a go. Garish and poorly written. I grouched through two short chapters and gave up.

But that was a whole chapter more than I managed with Herald of the Storm by Richard Ford, where I plodded through an info-dumpy and cliched prologue hoping the first chapter would be better, only to find there a spirited tom-boy princess, now heir to the throne, being petulant as she has a dress fitted, and I had to restrain myself from physically throwing it away.

I picked up the Ford while killing 10 mins in our local library, after fighting my way through dozens of volumes by Brooks and Eddings. The shelves also held some of the SF Masterworks series, and I took out The Female Man by Joanna Russ. Another mistake. I didn't even manage a chapter of this. No doubt all very clever and experimental and conscious-raising, and for me, utterly unreadable.

But with my third library choice I hit gold... well, actually more like well-polished brass, but it was shiny enough after that litany of tin-smithed failure, Temeraire by Naomi Novik. Hornblower with dragons. Fast, fun and easy to read, and if hardly authentic in any aspect of life in early C19th Britain it at least paid lip service to its language and mores.
 
This weekend I'm reading The Haunted Earth by Dean Koontz.
Sci fi and supernatural fusion from a good few years ago :D
 
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