August 2022 Reading Thread

[Elentarri]

Vertigo it's an Audio book.Saramago is one of Ursula k le Guin s favorite writers.

Well then, lucky you. You aren't having the lack of proper punctuation inflicted on your eyeballs. Maybe the narrator has sense enough to add some oomph to the text. I hope you enjoy it!

 

[Vertigo]

Vertigo it's an Audio book.Saramago is one of Ursula k le Guin s favorite writers.

Ah well probably not an issue regarding the dialogue then! Though I wouldn't want to have been the reader! I can cope with just dropping the quotes but Saramago also drops the paragraphs. So an entire conversation would be contained in a single paragraph, and about the only time he ever uses capital letters was to indicate the next person starting to talk. Really annoying as you quickly lose track of who's speaking! But ultimately the way the book was constructed left me cold.

 

[Foxbat]

I'm still working my way through Dan Jones' Crusaders. I 've read two or three different accounts of the crusades and the information in this one appears to be sticking in my brain better than the other books. Enjoying it muchly

 

[Dave Vicks]

SO FAR SO GOOD poems by URSULA K LE GUIN. 2018.

 

[Parson]

I'm currently re-reading the Fallen Empire series by Lindsay Buroker --- unintentionally. I didn't recognize it for a chapter or two, and by then I was enjoying it a lot. Now if memory serves, I became disenchanted with this series the last time. My vague recognition is that it turned into a romance novel. So .... we'll see .... What is clear is that until such a time as that happens this is first rate. I am 36% through book 2 and I have an omnibus of the first three.

 

[Vince W]

Reading my first book in several months, Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It has a distinct Cold War flavour but is surprisingly relevant today given events in the Crimea.

 

[Hugh]

Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson "Farthest Star"
I was delighted to find this, but after a few pages it became unpleasantly familiar and I realised that the first sixty pages were the short story "Doomship", which I'd thought surprisingly poor. Anyway, it turns out this is a fix-up novel, the last two thirds being the serial "The Org's Egg" which, for me, read much better, and that the book as a whole is the first of two, which together are known as "The Saga of the Cuckoo". I've now ordered the second, "Wall Around a Star".

 

[SCI-FI CY]

Actualy reading "Hot sky at midnight" by R. Silverberg. A good read. Midway

through. When I m sick of it i just go to either the regular sci fi stuff(the New York Times- is Sci-fi enough) or a tough and intricate (but what's new ? Phil K Dick...(Solar lottery these days))

I worked my way through all five books of Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber last month, but I'm making less headway through Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss which I started earlier and I'm considering cutting my losses and dumping it now.

What are you reading this month?

For pictures and my profile on flickr :

https://flic.kr/p/2nG9Ljg

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Giving Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 another read -think it's very good and can't fault it as a story so far. Also dipping in and out of Abendau's Heir by Jo Zebedee which seems to me to be pure space opera. My reading is terrible but I've been ploughing through audio books, currently Operation: Outer Space by Murray Leinster which has been brilliant so far as he seems to have a knack of keeping the thing rolling without it feeling like there's been any description or background info.

 

[dask]

Next:

 

[Parson]

Hm, I wonder how the Batman murders Craig Shaw Gardener.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
Re-read out of curiosity after many many many years. I'd forgotten everything except the vaguest outlines. Perhaps a bit disappointing, but what can you say about a classic? What I enjoyed most was the nonsense verse, and also the feel of the 1932 hardback edition (probably the same as I read years ago). I'll see if I can find a similarly venerable edition of Through the Looking Glass.
One sad aspect of reading it - I could never quite escape a slightly creepy feeling about Lewis Carroll, given the current climate of accusations and suspicions that permeate the media.

View attachment 92569

It seems to me that the Alice books are "children's books" that are best enjoyed by adults.

His very strange work Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (one novel in two volumes; avoid any condensed version in one volume, which only contains the fairy tale part) is a bizarre combination of Victorian sentimentality, satire, Carrollian math and logic jokes, babyish fairy tale, and so forth and so on, all these disparate elements mixed up at random. Somebody called it something like "One of the most interesting failures in English literature."

As far as the potentially unsavory aspects of Charles Dodgson go, well, I am certainly no expert, but my feeling (without any real evidence one way or the other) is that he saw his photography of nude children as completely innocent. It's a matter of controversy, anyway.

Lewis Carroll - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org