November 2018 reading thread

Today reading the first part (the Great War section) of Tom McAlindon's Two Brothers, Two Wars. This part concerns one of McAlindon's Armagh-born uncles, who enlisted in the Royal Irish Rifles in 1908 and died, a Great War combat veteran, of dysentery in a military hospital in 1918.
1541967547317.png

Two Brothers, Two Wars - The Lilliput Press
 
Last week I finished your own, your very own @HareBrain's second book, The Empyreus Proof, which is also the second of the four books in his Fire Stealers sequence.

I won't say too much here as I'm still mulling over it in advance of writing a proper review, but I will say that anyone who's read The Goddess Project ought to crack on and get reading, because it brings a lot more depth and substance to the world.

It's a very complex book, and at 650 pages, there are parts which perhaps unsurprisingly don't move at breakneck pace, and it does invite the reader to invest a rare degree of thought and patience in a fantasy series.

Having said that, the last 100 pages or so contains some of the most astonishing and original passages of fantasy I think I've ever come across.
 
I have finished Paper Wife by Laila Ibrahim. I listened to it as I walked and drove the last couple of days. I found this a sweet story of grit, determination, faith, sacrafice, and family loyalty. It ticked a lot of the boxes that I really like and would recommend this to someone who was looking for an historical novel.

Next up: The Shotgun Lawyer by Victor Methos. I've read some of his novels before and like them pretty well. I was really surprised to read that he really is a lawyer; a really good defense lawyer, who heads up the largest defense firm in Utah. He determined he would be a defense lawyer when he was 13 and a friend of his confessed to a crime he had never done after hours of being questioned by police. ---- (I gave up my Kindle Unlimited account because I was having trouble finding books that I wanted to read in it. So.... Now I will have read 4 of those books in the twenty days before my account runs dead. Go figure!)
 
i read the Three Secret Cities by Matthew Reilly. Honestly i love his Scarecrow stories… has for his other books… They are not bad exactly, they're just away over the top for me
 
Thought I'd posted in this section already but double checked and it looks like I haven't!

I'm reading The Fisherman by John Langan. It was a recommendation by Randy M and I have to say it's fabulous. It reminds me of Stephen King and Lovecraft thrown in the mixing bowl together and given a good whisk.

If you're interested, see here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1939905214/?tag=brite-21
 
Thought I'd posted in this section already but double checked and it looks like I haven't!

I'm reading The Fisherman by John Langan. It was a recommendation by Randy M and I have to say it's fabulous. It reminds me of Stephen King and Lovecraft thrown in the mixing bowl together and given a good whisk.

If you're interested, see here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1939905214/?tag=brite-21
I'd never heard of this book.
I've now read the blurb, bought it, downloaded it and added to my TBR pile. Cheers :)
 
Aldous Huxley "Beyond the Mexique Bay": author's account of 1933 travels in Guatemala and other countries in Central America. Very dated, and easy to accuse him of prejudice/Eurocentrism, but nonetheless is "of its time" and has points of interest.

I became more interested in the paperback itself: I was half way through it before I realised it was an "Albatross", which I assumed was a form of Penguin. Then I looked more closely and saw the cover included "Not to be introduced to the British Empire or the USA". I looked up Albatross Books on wikipedia and found that they were "the first modern mass-market paperback", very very successful, and, based in Hamburg, produced English Language books for sale in Europe. Furthermore, Penguin pretty much completely adopted/stole the Albatross format, using very similar covers, identical size, even using a sea bird as the name. I then saw that my copy was printed in 1935 and that naturally made me think of the changes going on in Germany at that time, the more so as Kurt Enoch, one of the co-founders of Albatross Books, was Jewish. Fortunately Enoch managed to get to the USA by 1940 where he first set up the US branch of Penguin, and then the New American Library.

1542108747689.png
 
Last edited:
Just finished Steppenwolf and, frankly, I found it tedious. It was as if an old man had stored up all his repressed teenage angst and then plastered it into one book. It did improve in about the latter third but not enough to save it for me. It was overly long and you could hack out about two thirds of the novel and still make it work. It's a spiritual book about how life can be a living death if there is no meaning in existence and I'm not a spiritual person (I don't particularly class my self as an atheist or humanist or - just as someone who has no faith whatsoever) so perhaps it's just not for me.

But, in a nutshell, I just don't see what all the fuss is about. One good point: I'll never have to read it again.
 
Just finished Steppenwolf and, frankly, I found it tedious. It was as if an old man had stored up all his repressed teenage angst and then plastered it into one book. It did improve in about the latter third but not enough to save it for me. It was overly long and you could hack out about two thirds of the novel and still make it work. It's a spiritual book about how life can be a living death if there is no meaning in existence and I'm not a spiritual person (I don't particularly class my self as an atheist or humanist or - just as someone who has no faith whatsoever) so perhaps it's just not for me.

But, in a nutshell, I just don't see what all the fuss is about. One good point: I'll never have to read it again.
"Interesting" (to quote Robert Barone). This is one of those moments where I'd like to say something intelligent (much like Robert Barone) but know that is not possible.
I read Steppenwolf back in the early 70s when there was a lot of excitement about it as one of the books you ought to read. At the time I remember liking the idea of someone breaking out of the tedium of everyday life, and that he had a wolf side, but it was very much about a protagonist that was older than me and I did not feel connected to his dilemma. It wasn't really for me.
I read maybe three other Hesse around the same time, two of which stayed with me in some way ("Journey to the East" and "Siddhartha"). I recently re-read Journey to the East and really enjoyed it. I wondered about Steppenwolf but did not feel particularly connected or interested in looking at it again.
If I remember rightly it was written very much out of his own conflicts, and these may not be so relevant today. He was friends with Jung and I remember an interview with Jung in which he referred fondly to Hesse as the Wolf. Despite my relative lack of interest in re-reading Steppenwolf, I have tremendous admiration for the way Hesse managed to articulate his dilemmas in prose.
 
Finished reading Viking Britain by Thomas Williams.

It's an interesting book to read, that introduces some basic ideas about Viking/Norse culture, then goes into a long account of the Viking attacks on Britain between 800-1050 AD. There are some nice sections of prose and some personal notes about his journeys in researching this book.

But... but... but...

It's not a history of the Vikings, or the Vikings in Britain, or even Viking Britain - it's a history of the Anglo-Saxons fighting the Vikings, the rise of the House of Wessex, with some explanation of who they were fighting (ie, Vikings).

Although Williams does mention a few archaeological discoveries, in a single page he dismisses the rest of the archaeological record and its interpretation as too complicated and too full of arguments to cover in the book. Which basically sounds like Williams is completely out of his depth outside of reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and a few Norse sagas.

Additionally, as with too many books, Williams makes the classic mistake of presuming England = Britain. So we get a lot of English history - specifically based in the South of England - but only a few brief mentions of the long-standing Viking kingdoms based along the coast of Scotland the Isle of Man (are they no longer British?), let alone any in-depth discussion of the Danelaw itself and the establishment of Viking culture in Northern Britain.

So, a well-written and interesting source for discussion of the Anglo-Saxons with some insight into their enemies - but a book about this Vikings this is not.
 
The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock - came across a tatty 1970s paperback. I like it as a study in paranoia, self-delusion and the 'slow reveal'.
The Black Corridor was one of the first SF books I read I think. I don't recall the details well but the dark ambiance is memorable. I like the idea of how the solitude of space would affect the mind.
 
Despite my relative lack of interest in re-reading Steppenwolf, I have tremendous admiration for the way Hesse managed to articulate his dilemmas in prose.

To a certain extent, I'd agree with you on his ability to put down on paper his own dilemmas but he took far too long in doing so and overwrote to a mind-numbing extent in my opinion.

It may perhaps go some way to understand my personal view if I explain that one of my pet hates in life is somebody who talks too much. Hesse, to me, did the literary equivalent in Steppenwolf.
 
To a certain extent, I'd agree with you on his ability to put down on paper his own dilemmas but he took far too long in doing so and overwrote to a mind-numbing extent in my opinion.
This is probably accurate - but when you embarked on reading a book by a German intellectual transposing a personal philosophical theme into a prose experiment, could you honestly expect anything different!? :)
 
Finished GX Todd Defender and then read Hunted, which is the sequel. She writes brilliantly, and the style is fluid and the story well constructed, but grim post-apocalptic journeys aren't really my thing and it didn't push my buttons. Too many horrible deaths :/ Now reading Ilona Andrews Iron Magic, which is a near future UF.
 
This is probably accurate - but when you embarked on reading a book by a German intellectual transposing a personal philosophical theme into a prose experiment, could you honestly expect anything different!? :)
Hindsight has been invoked and the conclusion is you're probably right.:D

Edit: now reading our very own Stephen Palmer's Tommy Catkins
 

Similar threads


Back
Top