March Reading Thread

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Pyan said:
Yes, I know. Slightly annoying, in that I thought that it was a new SH, but there you are.
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Bit of a spoiler but there are Slough House characters in the book.
Jackson Lamb isn't named but is clearly identifiable, and Molly in her wheelchair is named.
It also features the cold bitch but she's only named as First Desk.
 
Vince W said:
I read quite a few of the HH books but they rapidly became Tom Clancyesque with endless descriptions of weapons and ship specs. I had to give up on the series.
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I read loads of them, as many as I could get hold of on the cheap, and enjoyed them all, although in the end (as with all long series) I got bored of reading the same thing and drifted on to new stuff. For me, the really engaging bit was the developments in the society on the planet that Harrington makes her home, and that is the part that I still wish I knew more about.

Just finished reading “Radiance” by Catherynne M. Valente. I was ready to chuck the book through the nearest (open) window by the end of the first three chapters because it was so unnecessarily arch, but since the alternative was continuing with the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy I decided to give it another go and ended up quite enjoying it. Ultimately it proved to be fairly predictable and therefore disappointing, but she created a wonderful universe that I was massively in love with.

Gormenghast is giving me the heeby-jeebies. It is bound to end up as a horrible tragedy!
 
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Finished listening to Berserker!, an unabridged autobiography read by its author.

I have a hard time thinking that any book (especially an autobiography) narrated by the author would be better than the audiobook version. I also have a hard timethonking that there would be a better autobiography than tbis one.

Anyone with an interest in Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, The Young Ones, Bottom or in the educational system in Britain in the 1960s an 1970s would get a lot from reading/listening to this book.
 
This has been a good reading month for me (a sure sign I’ve not been doing things around the house I should have done…) with 14 novels finished so far, including (finally!) Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham which has been hanging around, half-read, since November. A slow beginning chock-full of worldbuilding I didn’t much care about, and two main characters I definitely didn’t care about, meant it was a struggle to stay interested, but whether I was in a different frame of mind, or Abraham finally kicked things up a gear, I read the second half in a matter of days. It’s the first of a trilogy, but I understand the plot doesn’t progress, and the sequels are basically the same events seen through other POVs, so I can’t see me buying them.

I also returned to the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman, with three books I’d not previously read (The Mortal World, The Dark Archive and The Untold Story) then a re-read of book one (The Invisible Library itself) to see how much it foreshadowed what was to come. I also read the first book of her new trilogy, Scarlet, her take on the Scarlet Pimpernel, only with vampires and, far more dangerous, a working class woman, but I'm not enthused and shan’t bother with the sequels.

Other SFF novels I’ve speeded through were Legion, Lies of the Beholder a novella by Brandon Sanderson, the last in a series about a man with multiple personalities who investigates mysteries (very clever and well written but somewhat anti-climactic for a final outing, I’d have thought); Winter Warriors by David Gemmell, a Drenai book (lots of fighting, naturally, but some interesting and psychologically true characters); Piranesi by Susanna Clarke about a man trapped in a world of countless Halls and Vestibules filled with statuary (magical, beautifully written, reminding me of Flowers for Algernon in the writing of an innocent, but I have reservations about its internal logic); and another Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self, the second in his Mistborn Wax and Wayne series set in an analogue of a c1900 US city (confusing for me as it relies heavily on understanding the characters and events in the original Mistborn series which I’ve not read).

Also, as ever, I’ve read a clutch of historical murder mysteries: Suffer Little Children by Peter Tremayne, set in the Ireland of 665 (interesting for aspects of ancient Irish law); The Queen’s Man by Rory Clements, another in his John Shakespeare series set in Elizabethan England with conspiracies for and against Mary Stuart (cleverly plotted but rather nasty violence); The Traitor’s Mark by DK Wilson set in Henrician England, concerning the death of Hans Holbein and a plot against Archbishop Cranmer (a lot of rushing around, male characters just above cardboard, female characters simply unbelievable); and The Dead of Winter by SJ Parris, three novellas about the early career of her medieval ‘detective’ Giordano Bruno (history and characters authentic, plots not terribly good).

And two fantasy novels got started then dumped – The Black Guard by AJ Smith (gave up after 44 pages – badly written, with uninteresting characters and info-dumps galore) and Dance of Thieves by Mary A Pearson, a YA enemies-to-lovers fantasy (gave this one 50 pages out of 500, but just couldn’t take any more).
 
Danny McG said:
DNF for me, a very plodding yarn that couldn't engage my interest - I got about halfway and thought
"why am I doing this, there's millions of books unread out there?"
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I think you're the first person I've come across who didn't love a Tchaikovsky book, Danny. All I ever seem to hear are gushing reviews of everything he's done. Well done for being honest but you should probably watch your back for a while. This is the internet after all.
 
Vince W said:
I think you're the first person I've come across who didn't love a Tchaikovsky book, Danny. All I ever seem to hear are gushing reviews of everything he's done
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I was the same with his space spider book, I was giving it "please humans, stop messing about and just land on the freaking planet!"
 
Danny is not the only one. I do not "love" Tchaikovsky's novels. I've only read 4 Tchaikovsky books - the space spider trilogy and the time travel novella with the dinosaur on the cover. They all have really interesting concepts, but they all tend to drag and take a while to get on with it.
 
paranoid marvin said:
Finished listening to Berserker!, an unabridged autobiography read by its author.

I have a hard time thinking that any book (especially an autobiography) narrated by the author would be better than the audiobook version. I also have a hard timethonking that there would be a better autobiography than tbis one.

Anyone with an interest in Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, The Young Ones, Bottom or in the educational system in Britain in the 1960s an 1970s would get a lot from reading/listening to this book.
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It’s a very good read
 
Holly Ordway "Tolkien's Faith, a Spiritual Biography"
Please note these comments are not intended to generate discussion on the rights/wrongs of Christianity.

While this work may be over-specialised for some, for me it's a truly wonderful contribution to an understanding of Tolkien. I also found it very touching and moving at times. Several years ago I went through a phase of reading at length about Tolkien and his circle, including all his significant biographies, but I became increasingly frustrated that there wasn't one that gave me any insight into the world of Roman Catholicism in which he lived and breathed. He made repeated comments such as how the LOTR was "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" and "I attribute whatever there is of beauty and goodness in my work to the influence of the Holy Mother of God". Likewise: "I should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little I know".
When I first read comments such as these I was very surprised as I'd never seen the LOTR as having had a religious component, and yet clearly his religious faith was central to his life and could not help but be present in his work. After all, the boy that was Tolkien had lost both his parents by the time he was eight at which point his family became the priests at the Birmingham Oratory.

This is the book I was looking for five years ago. It's the first book to directly address what it meant for Tolkien to be a Catholic, and I found it very helpful in giving me (who knows nothing at all of Catholicism) some sort of greater understanding of the richness of his inner life. There is little that is speculative, as there is much in his letters and in memories of his friends that touches on his beliefs, but this subject matter has not been addressed before at such length or so compellingly. It may be a reflection on the compartmentalization of our times that it's taken fifty years for a book on Tolkien's 'spiritual' life to be published, when all the evidence has been in plain sight all along for anyone with the expertise. Fortunately Holly Ordway has the expertise as not only is she an established Tolkien scholar, but is a practising Catholic herself and so is able to explain in simple terms to an outsider such as myself the intricacies of Tolkien's beliefs and practice.

Many thanks indeed @Extollager for the recommendation.
 
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I'm rereading Charles Williams's Descent into Hell, which in its basic plot is a kind of Gothic horror novel. It moves very slowly, and though I have been reading and rereading Williams for over 50 years, I find myself giving up on understanding what he is saying. At times it's as if he's talking to himself. He knows what he means but doesn't take sufficient care to keep the reader with him. I suppose the editor responsible for the publication of this book was T. S. Eliot (or that Eliot was involved in the acceptance anyway, but I don't know). Eliot knew Williams, eventually anyway, and was highly appreciative of his work, and probably also rather tolerant of a difficult style. I think now that Descent into Hell is something of a book apart over against the other six novels in being so dense and slow. Yet it might be his masterpiece. This would have been a good one to study with a sympathetic, knowledgeable, first-rate teacher. I can only imagine how great it would have been to be in a seminar on this novel with Stephen Medcalf as the professor -- supposing that ever happened.

As far as I know, this, the 6th of the seven novels, was written before Williams became involved with the Inklings. Only his last, All Hallows' Eve, was written with their input, and it can't be a coincidence that it is so much more readable than Descent. It seems to me to combine the brooding intelligence of Descent with the accessibility of the earlier "thrillers." I'd say All Hallows' Eve is his best novel. But the best one to start with might well be the Grail thriller misleadingly titled War in Heaven or the amazingly original Platonic thriller called The Place of the Lion. For people who like horror fiction, definitely War in Heaven.
 
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