May Reading Thread

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Currently reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? by Philip K. Dick. Hoping it is a good as blade runner.

Also reading Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. So far I really like this one. Trumbo completely eschews commas which makes it confusing at times but gives it the air of being written by an amateur, the main character after all is just a young man who is gravely injured in WW2. The flashbacks to his life feel real and while not all connected they paint the picture of a young man who was just starting his life. His ruminations on his injury and how his life will never be the same play out in a disturbing manner. The book is able to define the horrors of war and so far (half way through) we haven't even had a scene of battle. Definitely would recommend.
Johnny Got His Gun is one of those books that I'm glad I read, but I would never attempt another reading. It's too disturbing.
 
I read Lord of the Flies when I was about 11, along with the Island of Dr Moreau. I think I was too young for both and never again. :)
 
Finished The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, an unexpected re-read after a recent discussion here. Wasn't planning to, but once I'd started it was hard not to finish. Only my second novel finished in 2 months, though, after all the non-fiction I've been reading.

On that point also finished Origins: How the Earth shaped human history by Lewis Dartnell, a really interesting account of how earth and environmental science factors played a big role in shaping everything from prehistoric to recent history. A really enjoyable read, written in a popular style - though I realized part-way through that Earth Science probably wasn't Dartnell's strong point as some of what he mentions is more "pop fact" than anything from research - ie, he states Snowball Earth occurred for 10 million years, but my reading puts it at multiple periods of no less than 15-30 million years each.
 
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Halfway through this gem now.
Very much of it's time, a Ione Englishwoman standing resolute against the fiendish machinations of Johnny Foreigner, who will believe her?
Finished this book now, a lot of similarities to the classic film 'The lady vanishes' but what a load of unlikeable characters!
I don't think any of them had many redeeming features to their personalities, even the young lady protagonist and the unfortunate vanished person.
I'm not surprised Hitchcock got some big changes made
 
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Continuing my Ell Donsaii run. Finished Allotropes and am on to Defiant. On this my second run through this books and one where I read each book back to back with the next. I've discovered that the first three were pretty much stand alone, although Dahners is clear to say it's better to read them in order, but now 9 books in at this point we just have a continual story with each book fairly dependent on the one before. ---- I really love these. They are notable for humble heroes, moral steadfastness, good science, and exciting adventures. I like them better the second time than I did the first. But I'm still a little troubled by how much Ell's good looks are noted in the story. I would suspect that this get mentioned maybe a dozen times in each book. Almost always now with the idea "how could anyone so beautiful be so smart and so athletic." Okay.... why not? And is there something wrong with having only one or two of these things?
 
@dannymcg - Life's too short to read bad books, that's probably why I haven't tried the Wheel of Times series yet.

I muscled through the gag reflex those books inspired to get to the ones written by Sanderson. What I found were slightly better books (there's only so much Sanderson could do with that steaming pile) and the first, and probably last, books by Sanderson I'll only ever read once. It's kinda sad, because the first book is quite good and lays out a promising premise, then Jordan proceeds to take a dozen books to tell a tale that could have been told in four, maybe five, books. He could have finished it himself and gone on to write other tales had he not wrested the Crown of Purple Prose and Bloated Books away from Stephen King. It makes me wonder if his publisher was paying him by the pound.
 
"Goodnight, Mr James and other stories. The complete short fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Eight"
Nine short stories plus the obligatory western.
This is an excellent collection containing several of my personal favourites. There are two particularly that just leave me feeling more at peace with life and at ease with the world: "Kindergarten" and "Auk House".
Anyone who reads "Kindergarten" cannot help but see the parallels with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and appreciate that the film would have been so very different if Spielberg had not read this story. While I have never seen this explicitly acknowledged, I have read that Spielberg enjoyed Simak, and.... well if you read the story....
Other particularly good stories are "Census" (from City: the first appearance of Joe the mutant and the ants), "Brother", and "Senior Citizen" (a brief but deeply disturbing tale of a care package for the elderly).
 
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Stanley Ellin

Experiencing a brain cramp, I misstated the title of this earlier in the thread.

Anyway, I came into this expecting a mystery and ended up with sort of an experimental novel. I thought it would be a dark exploration of sexual obsession but the style of the opening sections are more panicky comic hysteria.

And then it changes into a combination of all those things.

Peter Hibben comes to in his bathroom. He doesn't remember what he's done or how he got there, but he's shocked and terrified to see a dead woman on the floor dressed in a negligee and fishnet stockings with garters.

And shortly after his shrink and his lawyer show up ...

First published in 1972, winner of the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere (International prize) in France and selected by H. R. F. Keating for his Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books. This probably couldn't have been published 10 years earlier, and though it is steeped in 1960s-'70s sexual thinking, it has not aged badly, the essential message still relevant as Hibben becomes his own judge and jury trying to work out what happened and what part he played in it.

Randy M.
 
With one thing or another I've just not had to time to write any notes on my recent books so here's just a few words on some of that recent reading:

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan - Good, dark, if slightly strident, condemnation of the behaviour of big corporations. 4/5
The Soldier by Neal Asher - Promising, solid start to this new series. 4/5
Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Rather strange far future, dying earth style of novel that has elements of both SF and fantasy in it. Very good. 4/5
Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton - An intriguing start to this new series. Very promising. 4/5
The Flame Bearer by Bernard Cornwell - The last few books have been starting to feel a little tired; this one has picked the story up somewhat. 4/5
Stealing Light by Gary Gibson - Painfully badly written. If I'm being generous I'd call it a homage to Banks, Hamilton and Asher, however I'm far more inclined to call it blatantly derivative. Dreadful; I persisted to half way through and then finally gave up regretting I hadn't followed my very much earlier impulse to quit. Apologies if this ruffles any feathers here!
Noumenon Infinity by Marina J. Lostetter - A step up from the first book but still had major flaws; the euthanasia stuff still feels extremely unlikely and the 'big reveal' towards the end was so obvious it just got painful each time a new hint was (generally clumsily) dropped. But still a good and interesting idea. 4/5
Lions of Rome by S.J.A. Turney - The story is good, very good even and whilst it is generally fairly well written Turney does have a tendency to make his main character just a bit too squirmingly honourable for plausibility. And finally the quality of editing seems to have steadily fallen from being unusually adequate to what I have, sadly, come to expect from self published authors. The book is filled with missing/extra words and typos that are invariably valid but incorrect words, all of which suggests the only proof reading done was by spellchecker alone. Why do self published authors so often seem to think this is acceptable? 3/5
Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds - An interesting idea which hopefully the next book will fully explain. Rather let down by what I feel is a somewhat failed attempt to make it YA. The main result of this is that the characters seem, to me, to lack depth. I'm not saying all YA characters lack depth but I feel that in this case the main effect of the YA approach is to leave the characters very shallow. 3/5
 
It's much better than Blade Runner in my humble opinion. Blade Runner merely scratches the surface of the story. Then again, PKD's one of my favorite authors...
The book and the film are both excellent and so different and complex that I think that simple comparisons of superiority/ inferiority do not really do justice to either.
 
Just finished rereading something I read over 50 years ago, The Runaway Robot, credited to Lester del Rey but, I gather, written from del Rey's outline by Paul Fairman. Terribly anthropopathic robot, but what's to be expected from the author of that unpleasant story "Helen O'Loy"? Much more to my taste was another reading of Heinlein's "...And He Built a Crooked House," which is about as near perfect for what it is as anything I've read. I expect to start a rereading of Asimov's Mysteries shortly.
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I'm rereading, extremely slowly, Paradise Lost, and just now, in Book IV, I was bonked over the head by Milton's way of describing Satan's first prowl through Eden in a fashion that reminds me of, say, an A. E. van Vogt monster story -- I'm thinking of the "Black Destroyer" one about Coeurl. The point of view is close to the invader's. As Satan gets closer to his prey, he keeps taking different shapes of animals. Whew, is it sfnal!

And Milton had that kind of imagination, or a proto form of it anyway. In one of his autobiographical prose passages elsewhere, Milton referred to his meeting Galileo in exile, and in this poem he thinks of the astronomer using his telescope on the moon so as "to descry new lands, Rivers our mountains in her spotty globe." I'm using Alastair Fowler's abundantly-annotated edition of the 1667 PL.
 
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Jackaloupe Wives by T Kingfisher, a collection of longish short stories. All very good, some draw some inspiration from "classic" fairy tales others from folk lore. All are modern stories, some funny , some sad. Particularly liked one about a lady trying to make her living from wood carving, another about an old witch whose best friend was a wild boar and have just read one which was an excellent story in its own right as well as being an amusing re-write of Cinderella. T Kingfisher is definitely one of those authors where I come across one of their books, then read all of their books, then wonder how on earth I missed her before.
 
Jackaloupe Wives by T Kingfisher, a collection of longish short stories. All very good, some draw some inspiration from "classic" fairy tales others from folk lore. All are modern stories, some funny , some sad. Particularly liked one about a lady trying to make her living from wood carving, another about an old witch whose best friend was a wild boar and have just read one which was an excellent story in its own right as well as being an amusing re-write of Cinderella. T Kingfisher is definitely one of those authors where I come across one of their books, then read all of their books, then wonder how on earth I missed her before.
...and onto my wish list.
 
Continuing my Ell Donsaii run. Finished Defiant and am on to Wanted by Laurence E. Dahners. This book was published in 2014 and it was likely about then that I read it the first time. One of the main characters is the American President who is a narcissistic unpredictable petty tyrant. I remember thinking at the time that Dahners was really pushing the envelop with this president because such a person could never be elected president. ---- (Sigh!) ---- Sometimes it's better if books aren't too realisitic.
 
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