November Reading Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
Overreach: The Inside Story Of Putin's War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews
The author has spent 25 years as a correspondent in Moscow and chronicles the first year of the war from his point of view inside Russia. He uses multiple sources (including accounts from former Kremlin insiders) to show us the changing mindset in Russia in the years leading up to the war and tells how old friends suddenly became hostile or reluctant to communicate with him. It's an eye opener even for people who think they keep themselves informed when it comes to this conflict.

It's a clinical and often scary analysis of what is going on in and around the Kremlin and a book I just can't put down.
 
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox
This is a nicely written account of how Arthur Evans, Alice Kober and Michael Ventril (and a few others) were involved in cracking the code to decipher the ancient Linear B script found on clay tablets on Crete and mainland Greece. Informative and interesting.
 
The Palace of Eternity by Bob Shaw. A falling-apart 1969 Pan edition I picked up second hand somewhere as a teenager. The cover has completely gone.
Stands up well to a reread after at least 20 years. There are some dated and slightly embarrassing passages, and it is a bit hippyish and of its time, but on the whole this is a decent SF novel about transcendent human group-consciousness and immortality.
 
hitmouse said:
The Palace of Eternity by Bob Shaw. A falling-apart 1969 Pan edition I picked up second hand somewhere as a teenager. The cover has completely gone.
Stands up well to a reread after at least 20 years. There are some dated and slightly embarrassing passages, and it is a bit hippyish and of its time, but on the whole this is a decent SF novel about transcendent human group-consciousness and immortality.
Click to expand...
I love the opening line of that book
 
The Children of Men – P.D. James

A worldwide blight of male infertility means that the human race is slowly but steadily dying out. Rather than a global catastrophe set to wipe us out in short shrift, what makes the premise so powerful and the book’s drama so different is the timing: how long there is left.

Crime novelist P.D. James speculated on how a society might behave under such a collective death sentence and The Children of Men was what she came up with.

Although it is set thirty years in the future, James describes pretty much the fabric of the real England of 1992 in which she wrote, which makes the story compellingly credible. The English answer to their existential predicament is to install an oppressive police state to maintain order, while managing their slow but inescapable demise. The country has degenerated into a sinister and dismal place. Squalor is the ubiquitous norm.

To preserve resources for the younger, citizens who reach sixty are supposedly encouraged, but in fact drugged and herded, to mass suicides: ceremonial drownings called Quietus. The last children ever to be born, called Omegas, who are indulged by law, act disappointingly selfishly. In Bexhill-on-Sea of all places (an inspired choice!), a so-called refugee camp is a detention centre where detainees are abused in every way by camp guards.

Meanwhile, for many people there is no immediate panic, of course, and everyday life goes strangely on. It is this absurd normality that gives the book its unique tone and underlying tension. Reflection is that much more poignant when you know that there is to be no future. I was gripped from the first page.

The ones who are alive now are the last. When the youngest extant generation dies out, that will be it. A few decades at most… but for each person, it means their entire lifetime, which is all we ever have! The thought experiment, then, confronts us with the realization of how much our individual lives are predicated on hopes for a future in which we will not exist.

James, the expert crime writer, knows how to build suspense and also explore motivation, so that when the reluctant Theo acts to aid political resistance to the dictatorial regime of his cousin, we know that it is from compassion. With Theo, James presents us with a redemptive desire for selfless acts. While no religious undertone is intended or perceptible, (spoiler alert) Theo accompanies the stricken and pregnant Julian like a modern-day Joseph and Mary with a miracle birth imminent.

The film of the book is worthy of special mention. It is all gritty realism with striking imagery and respectfully faithful to the spirit of the book. P.D. James approved of it. Director Alfonso Cuaron called it “the anti-Blade Runner” as the depicted future is not futuristic but grimly and grimily familiar, making it only too believable. In different backgrounds you have Picasso’s Guernica, a Banksy, “Arbeit Macht Frei” by The Libertines, Pink Floyd’s inflatable Battersea pig referencing Orwell’s Animal Farm, and in Bexhill, now a desolate, dangerous war zone, a detained refugee in a hood is chillingly reminiscent of TV footage of Abu Graib prison in the Iraq War.

It could never happen in England, could it?

PDJames2.jpg
 
THE MARTIANS.1999 .By Kim Stanley Robinson.

SELECTED STORIES. 2000 .By
Theodore Sturgeon.
 
Danny McG said:
James Patterson - The house of Cross.
Number 32 in his series about detective Alex Cross
Click to expand...
The author is going a bit meta in this book.
He has Alex Cross's wife and mother sitting watching and discussing one of the Madea movies.

The Madea character is created and played by actor Tyler Perry.

Tyler Perry also played detective Alex Cross in the movie "Alex Cross"
 
Read Road of Bones by Christopher Golden. Ended up devouring this one in a single sitting, so safe to say I found it quite a compelling read. Essentially a supernatural horror novel set along the real-life R504 Kolyma Highway in Siberia, colloquially known as, well, the "Road of Bones" due to the vast number of Gulag prisoners who died building it and which are supposedly buried under and around it. An American and a Brit go to an extremely isolated village along the titular road in the dead of winter along with a local guide and a woman whose car broke down, only to find the place completely empty apart from a single seemingly catatonic girl. Then they're attacked by things that look like wolves and things go straight to hell in a handbasket. The rest of the novel is basically fleeing down the Road of Bones as more and more horrible supernatural things happen until they finally hit a fever pitch and they're forced to confront the source of it.

The prose made this book flow incredibly well - I've never read anything by Golden before this, but he's got a skill with words that made it feel like I was right alongside the characters, and the repeated ways he describes the extreme cold of the Siberian winter never failed to get a shudder out of me. The cold is itself a major factor in the story, since if their vehicle shuts off for even a few minutes it will freeze and won't start again, and if that happens, they're dead already.

That said, I figured out the main twist about the connection of the catatonic girl and the horrific events of the novel quite early on and was hoping that it was a misdirection. That it wasn't was a weak link in an otherwise quite well-crafted story.

Next up is Dead Water by C. A. Fletcher. Picked this one up a long time ago and never got around to reading it, but my appetite for supernatural horror's been whetted by the last book I read and this one's a significantly thicker volume, so it should do something to sate the urge.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
The Judge November Reading Thread Book Discussion 177
The Judge November 2022 Reading Thread Book Discussion 173
The Judge November 2021 Reading Thread Book Discussion 299
The Judge November 2020 Reading Thread Book Discussion 198
T November 2019 reading thread Book Discussion 202

Similar threads


Back
Top