February 2021 Reading Thread.

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Giving The Shadow of What Was Lost a go and I can't help but suspect what was lost was 'being interested' going from the early pages. There's a soothing quality about the prose - like a soporific - so I'll probably continue, but the world is so mundane.
 
Finished Phyllis Eisenstein’s In The Western Tradition. An interesting story but not one that really grabbed me.

My journey into novellas continues with The Alley Man by Philip Jose Farmer.
 
I'm now reading Timescape, by Gregory Benford, along with some other things, including a lot of short stories. Timescape is brilliant, and a worthy winner of the Nebula Award. I'll post more on it once I'm finished, but it's one of the finest hard-SF books ever written, I have no doubt.
 
A couple of history non-fiction:

The Fens by Francis Pryor: The first half is all about the prehistory of the Fens and is great. The second half is a travel guide to the area. Have ended up skipping, putting down, and leaving for now - I've read what I wanted to.

The Beginnings of Rome by TP Cornell - fantastic book that aims to make sense of the legends and archaeology of the founding and development of Rome. Too many books on Rome lazily give out the Romulus legend and paraphrase Livy without explaining the actuality. Cornell does a great job of trying to find the historical roots in it all. The first chapter on source analysis was brilliant and alone worth buying for.
 
Lester del Rey: "Early del Rey" (Doubleday hardback 1975)
The twenty four previously uncollected earliest del Rey stories, first published between 1938 and 1951.
I'm afraid I couldn't get into the stories that much and can see why they hadn't been published in book form before. They seem fairly run-of-the-mill 1940s pulp stories. "The Best of del Rey" is much better. However I did enjoy his commentary on how he wrote these stories and the interplay with John Campbell at Astounding.
 
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Bick said:
I'm now reading Timescape, by Gregory Benford, along with some other things, including a lot of short stories. Timescape is brilliant, and a worthy winner of the Nebula Award. I'll post more on it once I'm finished, but it's one of the finest hard-SF books ever written, I have no doubt.
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Fantastic book. I read it oh so many years ago and it's one that I've often recommended to non-sf fans as a book to try.
 
Case Histories, a crime/literary novel by Kate Atkinson. It's really about a group of failed, quietly wretched people linked by connected crimes. An odd book: the characters, for all the literary-ness, feel quite cartoony, and there's too much coincidence and not enough investigation of crime to be really satisfying. But it was good overall and I'll have a look at the sequel.
 
Bick said:
I'm now reading Timescape, by Gregory Benford, along with some other things, including a lot of short stories. Timescape is brilliant, and a worthy winner of the Nebula Award. I'll post more on it once I'm finished, but it's one of the finest hard-SF books ever written, I have no doubt.
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I still haven't gotten around to it, but I read one from around the same time, Against Infinity that I thought was terrific. I think Benford had a streak where he was one of the foremost writers of s.f. It's too bad he isn't often mentioned now, at least not on the forums I'm aware of.

Randy M.
 
Finished the pen-ultimate book (at this time) in Mackey Chandler's Family Law series with A Hop, a Skip, and a Jump. I think I've finally pegged another thing that's been bothering me in this series. I can't remember any of Chandler's positive characters ever doing anything that they regret. They sometimes regret how forceful they "had to be." But they seem to believe every one of their actions is very defensible, even when it involved killing thousands upon thousands of people. I may have said this before, but, but in his books so far no governmental action is seen as anything other than a grab of individual wealth or liberty.

Might as well finish, so onto Friends in the Stars. The book where the April Series and the Family Law series are completely merged. --- I assume that there's more coming down the pike.

*Each book I've read has been rated 4+ stars with more than a 100 ratings. As there are 15 books in these two series combined, it shows that he has maintained a fairly large and fairly loyal audience.

**15 books with a 100+ (less than 200) ratings means in total 100,000 copies sold???
 
During my days away from the computer I read several "easy reading" books on things like insults, English cheeses, alien invasions in pop culture, The Twilight Zone, and Star Trek. I still have a couple of the latter to go.
 
Randy M. said:
I think Benford had a streak where he was one of the foremost writers of s.f. It's too bad he isn't often mentioned now, at least not on the forums I'm aware of.
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Yes - one of the greats I think. I've been very impressed with the short fiction of his that I've come across in 1970s-80's Analog magazines, also. I really rate Benford.
 
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