May Reading Thread

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Read Fair Warning, by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series. It stars Jack McEvoy, a reporter who is the lead in three Connelly novels. Fast paced, but not as enjoyable as Bosch.
I don't think that I'll be going back to Connelly for a while as I have read all of the Bosch and Renee Ballard novels, which are about the best police procedurals going.
Read Anne Hillerman's Lost Birds. If you are not familiar with her, or her father Tony's books, I strongly recommend them.They are southwest cop stories featuring three members of the Navaho Tribal police. It's not just the procedural part, it is the landscape and being able to see the world through the perspective of Navaho protagonists. Don't worry that they are too heavy on the tribal perspective. They're not - thet just have a somewhat different viewpoint. If you are interested, you should probably pick up a different Tony or Anne book first. Here there is some assumption that you are familiar with the characters.
Read The Weapon Shops of Isher, by A.E. van Vogt republished with The Weapon Makers
I originally read Shops a couple of years after Makers. about sixty tears ago. I am now half was through Makers.
Obviously going for nostalgia.
Wikipedia quotes Groff Conklin describing the second book as "fascinating ... despite its bombast and its blithe impossibilities." Boucher and McComas wrote "a grand fantasy-melodrama," although they questioned "whether its noble imaginative adventure has anything to do with science fiction. Both quite readable even now,, although memories help
 
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pogopossum said:
Read Fair Warning, by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series. It stars Jack McEvoy, a reporter who is the lead in three Connelly novels. Fast paced, but not as enjoyable as Bosch.
I don't think that I'll be going back to Connelly for a while as I have read all of the Bosch and Renee Ballard novels, which are about the best police procedurals going.
Read Anne Hillerman's Lost Birds. If you are not familiar with her, or her father Tony's books, I strongly recommend them.They are southwest cop stories featuring three members of the Navaho Tribal police. It's not just the procedural part, it is the landscape and being able to see the world through the perspective of Navaho protagonists. Don't worry that they are too heavy on the tribal perspective. They're not - thet just have a somewhat different perspective. If you are interested, you should probably pick up a different Tony or Anne book first. There is some assumption that you are familiar with the characters.
Read The Weapon Shops of Isher, by A.E. van Vogt republished with The Weapon Makers
I originally read Shops a couple of years after Makers. about sixty tears ago. I am now half was through Makers.
Obviously going for nostalgia.
Wikipedia quotes Groff Conklin describing the second book as "fascinating ... despite its bombast and its blithe impossibilities." Boucher and McComas wrote "a grand fantasy-melodrama," although they questioned "whether its noble imaginative adventure has anything to do with science fiction. Both quite readable even now,, although memories help
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I've read a little of David Hillerman. He's responsible for me visiting New Mexico few years back!

Currently reading:
The Shadow of War, a HF novel about the Cuban missile crisis. Almost entirely dialogue.
The Rosie Project, a comedy romance in which a genetics professor with Asperger's decides to get married and creates a questionnaire to rule out unacceptable traits like smoking or vegetarianism.

Just started:
Solar Flare, a collection of solarpunk stories. I've only read one so far (concerning a train heist) and it didn't very solarpunk to me, but the next story about a zepplin race is more interesting.
 
Vertigo said:
@Rodders (can't do a normal reply as the thread is now closed off)


I never saw any comments on difficulty of writing, but I imagine it was tough keeping his phonetic spelling consistent.

Regarding Transition it's a difficult one. I believe it was published as an Iain Banks book in the UK but an Iain M Banks book in the US. I view it as SF but it is probably better categorised as 'weird'. It's certainly not his signature space opera, Culture or otherwise, and there's not a space ship in sight. More of a parallel worlds sort of thing. I probably wouldn't have read it if I hadn't embarked on reading all his work, SF and otherwise, many years ago. But I did enjoy it; it was maybe a little darker than his normal upbeat SF as well.

I don't think I've reviewed it here. I suspect it was before I was posting reviews here. However I have a review here on GoodReads: Mike Franklin's review of Transition
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Weirdly, I found a copy of "Transition" a few hours ago in a stack of books I was throwing out, and decided I had to read it again. I don't remember much of the story but I do recall the feeling it gave me, kind of like a New Wave book, Moorcockian?
I do have a stash of septus
 
Danny McG said:
Now I'm reading 'Stars Call' by somebody known as Lise Eclaire
A mil sci-fi, apparently the first in a series.
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I've almost finished this one now - I don't think I'll read any more in the series, the writer got a bit too clever with inflicting memory restrictions and then reveals on the protagonist .
(And the protagonist was a very familiar type of figure in recent SF - a humanoid body containing the memory core of an obsolete interstellar battleship)
 
Just finished Plan 9 from Outer Space, a tie-in. The author does a little bit to cover up the movie's weirdness -- attributing the alien's stilted dialogue to bad translation machines, etc. Advanced review copy of a title that will be released in October. Enjoyable if you're a fan of the movie.
 
The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain - a novella by Sofia Samatar.

Some blurb:-
The boy was raised as one of "the Chained", condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked “upstairs” and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
 
So, I've ambitiously begun reading the epic Stephen King Dark Tower series starting with the Gunslinger. I've managed to pick up most of them second hand (is that a bad sign?) but I still feel like I would rather be finishing the Slough House series that I began first. Anyhow, the Gunslinger is a fairly slim volume in comparison to some of the other tomes in this series. It's still the weirdest Stephen King book I've read, with the talking corvids and wandering bird-men. From the introduction, he appears to have been going for a spaghetti western feeling, crossed with the scale of Lord of the Rings, but I'm getting more of a Margaret Attwood or a China Miéville feeling (and I'm not going to be so keen if it is) but very early days yet.
 
Danny McG said:
The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain - a novella by Sofia Samatar.

Some blurb:-
The boy was raised as one of "the Chained", condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked “upstairs” and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
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Total twonk DNF - avoid this one people!
 
The Forever Ship by Joshua James and Scott Bartlett.
So far a typical mil sci-fi .....a long conquered Earth has it's natives used as soldiers by the reptilian aliens.

(Key human personnel are also fitted with surgically implanted remote kill switches to ensure compliance.)
 
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hitmouse said:
I have read both multiple times and have never connected or compared them.
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I was told Peake has a similar literary feel to Wolfe compared to other fantasies. And I remember reading the first few pages of Gormenghast in Waterstones once when I was in my teens and I felt like it had the kind of archaic, gothic feel I associate with TBOFTNS.
 
Danny McG said:
The Forever Ship by Joshua James and Scott Bartlett.
So far a typical mil sci-fi .....a long conquered Earth has it's natives used as soldiers by the reptilian aliens.

(Key human personnel are also fitted with surgically implanted remote kill switches to ensure compliance.)
Click to expand...
Looks interesting I've added it to queue.
 
Richard III by William Shakespeare. Now this is more like it!

I found this play to be the more entertaining and interesting of all Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays. This not-particularly-accurate historical play (doesn't do to piss off the current monarch whose grandfather killed Richard III) is the second longest play in Shakespeare's repertoire (Hamlet is the longest).

Richard III features the rise and demise of the crippled Richard of Gloucester, brother to King Edward IV of England, who is hell bent on being king, regardless of how much scheming and murdering he has to do to get there. This play has some juicy soliloquies (e.g. "Now is the winter of our discontent...", pithy observations ("Murder her brothers, then marry her; Uncertain way of gain ..." ), wonderful one-liners ( horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!) and delightfully insulting word-dueling (almost every scene involving Richard and a lady/queen).

While Shakespeare's version of Richard III sometimes comes across as a villain more suited to Disney animated productions (thinking of Jafar from Alladin here), the exaggeration and "gleeful relish" with which Richard contemplates his schemes, worked for this play (to me anyway) by providing some comedy and a villain one could enjoy disliking. This play with it's villainous Richard was actually fun to listen too.
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