July Reading Thread

[Dave Vicks]

AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS, Editor,
Harlan Ellison, 1972.46 Stories.

 

[Hugh]

William Tenn "Of All Possible Worlds"
Eight stories, first published 1951-1955
Fairly unexceptional 1950s SF, a pleasant read.

 

[Orcadian]

...
Next up is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I greatly enjoyed The Ocean at the End of the Lane when I read it some months back, so it seems right to head back to Gaiman to see if any of his other work clicks with me or if that one was just a lightning strike of brilliance.

I have to say that the Goodreads review of this book is very intriguing! https://www dot goodreads dot com/book/show/18505792-the-ocean-at-the-end-of-the-lane. (Sorry about the ' dot ' but for some reason the editor turns the URL into an infoblurb. Not sure how one stops this behaviour!)

 

[Vertigo]

Sorry about the ' dot ' but for some reason the editor turns the URL into an infoblurb. Not sure how one stops this behaviour!

You shouldn't need to the infoblurb is still a clickable link.

 

[Orcadian]

You shouldn't need to the infoblurb is still a clickable link.

I know, Vertigo, but I want to see the URL. The 'insert link' option allows you to enter text, and I just give the URL, which contains the book title without any publisher hook. But the SFF editor rejects my chosen text in favour of the infoblurb.

 

[THX1138]

Finished Culture Shock by our own @Bowler1.
This is his second go at writing a novel and it turned out to be quite good. There is a lot of action in it, and some parts are a bit more blunt-and-to-the-point.
What I liked about it is in a WW1 setting on another planet and the authors knowledge of the history shows throughout the book in an other world, SF fashion. Very easy to read too.

Now, on to catching up on some self-reflection reading, Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones by B, Groeschel.
After that, back to Tinker Tayler Soldier Spy that I started on our last holiday.

 

[Bick]

I’ve just started The Godel Operation by James L. Cambias. Good so far.

 

[Chris von shannow]

Death Unleashed by Steve McHugh

 

[Vince W]

The Harlan Ellison collection The Time of the Eye.

 

[Dave Vicks]

OT:I Found that JG Ballard's novel
THE DAY OF CREATION, 1997,to be underrated.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I have started The Book of Fantasy (originally published in Argentina in 1940 as Antologia de la Literatura Fantastica; revised in 1965 and 1976; 1988 edition with new introduction by Ursula K. LeGuin) edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and A. Bioy Casares. It looks to be an eclectic, possibly eccentric collections of pieces, many very short. Consider the following work, which I quote in full.

A Woman Alone with Her Soul by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1912)

A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.

___________________________________________

Was Fredric Brown aware of this before he wrote "Knock"?

 

[Danny McG]

Finished Culture Shock by our own @Bowler1.
This is his second go at writing a novel and it turned out to be quite good

Can we have the author name please?
It's awkward just googling "a book called Culture Shock" because too many links appear

 

[THX1138]

Can we have the author name please?
It's awkward just googling "a book called Culture Shock" because too many links appear

Sorry Danny! My fault.
Seamus O'Dwyer.

 

[Dave Vicks]

RAISING DEMONS,Shirley Jackson,1953.
Domestic Humor.
I find some of her writings hard to get into.

 

[Vertigo]

Three more books from the back end of last month and the beginning of this:

Upgrade by Blake Crouch
I find that Blake Crouch sometimes tries a bit too hard to be a bit too clever, but this is mostly a pretty serviceable techno genetics thriller. It was rather let down by the main characters who just didn't, when it really mattered, behave plausibly and the ending was a real disappointment; for me at least he simply dodged the main issue. A mostly enjoyable journey but not such a great final arrival. 4/5 stars

Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill
This is a good prequel to the equally good Sea of Rust. Sea of Rust was written first and is set in a post apocalyptic world after sentient robots have killed all humans. This book is detailing the start of the war the caused that apocalypse. Cargill does a pretty good job of portraying sentient robots just trying to survive without making them, mentally, just humans in a tin can, as I often find other robot oriented SF stories have a tendency to do. A good fast read with plenty of action and plenty of philosophy without it feeling forced. I enjoy books set from the perspective of robots/AIs when done well which I sadly find quite rare. 4/5 stars

Rome's Sacred Flame by Robert Fabbri
This is book 8 in Fabbri's Vespasian series and we're in the middle of Nero's rule. It continues with the mostly convincing narrative of Vespasian's path to becoming Emperor. As always Fabbri does sometimes get rather carried away with the more gory aspects of the story though, of course, that period in history certainly had its fair share of goriness, so pretty hard to dodge. Slightly more annoying is the way Fabbri seems to have a real downer on Vespasian's son Domitian. Now he might not have been the nicest person in the Roman Empire but he is presented as such a nasty bit of stuff by the age of 12-13 as to be, for me, implausible. Also there is a whole moderately large section of the book that is not really relevant to the whole arc and is not based on any history that I could find and felt to me to be solely there to pad what would otherwise have been a somewhat short book. 3/5 stars

 

[Elentarri]

Upgrade by Blake Crouch
I find that Blake Crouch sometimes tries a bit too hard to be a bit too clever, but this is mostly a pretty serviceable techno genetics thriller. It was rather let down by the main characters who just didn't, when it really mattered, behave plausibly and the ending was a real disappointment; for me at least he simply dodged the main issue. A mostly enjoyable journey but not such a great final arrival. 4/5 stars

Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill

I found the second half of Upgrade to be extremely disappointing, especially compared to the first half. It just didn't fit. I think I wrote a really snotty review of it on GoodReads.

I must get around to reading Cargill's robot novels. There is just not enough tiiiimmmmeeee..............

 

[Vertigo]

I found the second half of Upgrade to be extremely disappointing, especially compared to the first half. It just didn't fit. I think I wrote a really snotty review of it on GoodReads.

I must get around to reading Cargill's robot novels. There is just not enough tiiiimmmmeeee..............

Yeah that's probably fair; as the second half proceeded I just wasn't being convinced by motivations and behaviours. And as I said the ending was just a cop out.

The Cargill books are definitely worth a read. This one could have slipped into slightly sloppy YA territory but he steered it around that quite deftly.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Comic book AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Marc Guggenheim, Marvel, 2016.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'm currently reading Kala, by Colin Walsh.

It is my local book group read.

 

[Hugh]

Christopher Ondaatje "Woolf in Ceylon. An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf 1904-1911" (2005)
Largish hardback with good pictures. Author (born 1933) grew up in Ceylon as the son of a tea-planter, leaving age 13 to attend public school in the UK, then subsequently emigrating to Canada. Here he pursues his fascination with Woolf's years in Ceylon, revisiting the various places the young Woolf lived and worked. The devastation wrought by years of fighting in Jaffna is well-documented.