December Book Thread

I just finished listening to Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich. I'd give it a solid 3 stars. It's about the kid that stole a safe full of lunar samples while he was an intern at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. It's written as a narrative piece, so it feels a bit more like a fiction book than a nonfiction one, and it's written from the criminal's POV, so it's very sympathetic to him, and and times I found myself feeling sympathy for him, despite the enormity of his crime. It's pretty amazing to think that NASA had such lax security that they could get away with it.

It was an audiobook, and read by Casey Affleck, who wasn't all that great of a reader, I think he was mainly picked for his star power (kind of how a lot of authors are picking Wil Wheaton to narrate their nerdy scifi books, please stop this, authors!)

You can also really tell that the author (Ben Mezrich, who also wrote the book about the MIT Card Counters that was turned into the movie 21) was writing this in a way to get it optioned by Hollywood, as it would probably make a decent heist movie, although more on the Informant! or Burn after Reading style of crime movie, as opposed to Ocean's 11.

I finished The Black Prism by Brent Weeks on audiobook. This is the guy who dealt with assassins in his Night Angel trilogy. I applaud him for just leaving that entire world behind and starting a new fantasy series, then building a whole new magic system. I'm on board for this one. It has the same blurring of who the good guys and who the bad guys are. Nothing is really clear as to exactly who to root for (except the fat kid who finds out he's the bastard child of the most powerful wizard in the world!)

My one complaint was the voice the reader chose for the most powerful wizard in the world sounds like a stoner, surf dude. C'mon, reader. He's one of the main characters! Make him sound as intelligent as the book describes him.

Also read Old Man's War by John Scalzi. So the current military fiction progression is Starship Troopers --> Forever War --> Armor --> Old Man's War? Anyone else either directly paying homage to Heinlein or disagreeing with him and writing a book about it? My only problem was that I'd read Redshirts first, and the opening bit of new recruits meeting cute around the messhall table was basically identical. Only the banter changed.

Stayed up tonight and finished Red Country. Fantastic ending, and Abercrombie has grown considerably as a writer. The First Law series felt like he was trying to write an epic that "subverted the tropes" (I hate that phrase), and it succeeded. Best Served Cold and Heroes both felt more like character studies.

in Red Country he puts it all together, with lots of commentary and insights into human nature and multiple parallel character arcs illustrating his views. But it does this within the framework of showing the banality of the concept of good vs. evil, and with a well executed plot told from multiple character viewpoints, with setups happening hundreds of pages before the payoff.

The quasi-Western-that-isn't-in-the-West irritated me early on, but i got over it.

This bumps Red Country up to the top of my to-read list.

Read The Name of the Wind by Patric Rothfuss. Very, very pleasantly surprised. I'd say it's the best fantasy I've read in years.

The absolutely ridiculous Mary Sue element of Kvoth was a huge turn off for me, especially in the sequel, aka "I'm the best sexer of faeries EVAR!", and the only saving grace is that a friend of mine claims that he believes it will be salvaged as a big unreliable narrator save, which is still lame.

They're still good books, I think the second one gets a somewhat undeserved reputation for the fairy sexing part. I basically consider them Harry Potter for grownups.

I always thought Harry Potter was Harry Potter for grownups?

Anyway, I wouldn't want anyone not to read Wise Man's Fear etc. on account of me, because hey, I read them too and I was actually really excited about WMF. The characters were absolutely one-dimensional and the Mary Sueness of Kvoth was so over the top it actually felt like a YA or kids novel (minus the faerie sex) since, hey, nuance wasn't really a part of those books.

Well thanks for spoiling the faery sex for me dude! Now I can't go into the faery sex without preconceptions. Seriously, even if faery sex is the lamest reveal ever, when I say I just read a book pointing out shit that happens in the sequels is inconsiderate. Hell, I'd love to address your point but I can't, because I haven't read the damn book yet.

And yeah, Kvothe is super-talented and awesome at everything. He's set up to be a classical fantasy hero, that shit is a given. I give credit to Rothfuss who still manages to make him vulnerable, and does so in ways that range from the small and the petty to the large and supernatural without going deus ex machina. Kvothe lives by his wits, and sometimes they fail him, or sometimes he is hit from an unexpected quarter. Setting the coming-of-age story within the larger arc of the fallen hero also acts as a nice counterpoint.

Without spoiling any particulars, I couldn't maintain an interest in the second two books of the Night Angel trilogy, because the main character became so ridiculously powerful that none of the antagonists were a credible threat. Is that fixed in his new series, or are we in for another one-thousand pages of teenage demigod angst?

The book starts with SuperGod guy (The Prism) who is smarter, better, and faster than anyone. Prisms die every 7 years, but it's unpredictable which seventh year they'll die. So this guy has 5 years left before dropping dead, or maybe 12, or maybe 19, but he's got to plan like he only has 5 years left.

Mostly this book is laying down all the rules of his magic system. It's all color based, and magicians are called "Drafters" because they "draft" a certain color. Really good drafters have two colors, super good ones have three, and only the Prism (and there is only one of these every generation) can draft every color of the spectrum (including ultraviolet and infrared). All drafters have a fixed amount of drafting they can do in their lives, and once they go beyond that they go insane and turn into Color Wights. This process is detectable, though not quantifiable in that you can say "One more drafting and I will go nuts," and "good" drafters go willingly to their deaths once they start going insane.

The opening chapter centers on lowly farmboy whose village is being massacred by the local warlord who's now calling himself king. Surprise, surprise, farmboy is The Prism's bastard son. Prism saves him and takes him away to magical city and magical school to learn the ways of magic. It's very much mentor and apprentice stuff like in Night Angel.

Big war with rebel king. Fun exploration of magic. Good fight scenes. Secrets and lies and palace intrigue.

But if you didn't like Night Angel, you probably won't like this. Though the Big Bad looks like he's going to give Prism guy a run for his money, and there is another threat waiting in the wings...

Well, uh, sorry. Didn't really consider it much of a spoiler since...well, I don't want to say anything now, since explaining why it's not really a spoiler is probably a spoiler too.

Classical fantasy heroes aren't as one-dimensional as that. Most aren't super-awesome-at-everything, they're very good at a few things and then usually have a couple significant flaws and then are average at some other stuff. Kvothe is literally the best at everything he ever tries to do.

Vulnerability is extrinsic weakness. A flaw is an intrinsic weakness. IIRC, Kvothe's worst weakness is that he's naive, which is like saying on a resume that your biggest weakness is that you work too hard. And that naivete usually doesn't actually matter.

He scores about a 70 on the Mary Sue Litmus Test according to this guy.

I don't mean to sound like I'm railing against Kvothe or Rothfuss for something that everyone else does, but having just read Abercrombie and finding all his uniquely flawed characters so much more interesting, I'm somewhat sensitive to it.

Abercrombie and Richard Morgan have absolutely ruined Rothfuss for me.

Wise Man's Fear is execrable garbage IMHO.

One more thing I'll add about Name of the Wind/Wise Man's Fear. A common theory is that since it's a first person narrative that books 1 & 2 could be a setup for a great big unreliable narrator reveal, where in book 3 we learn it's all bullshit. This is going to be a lose/lose scenario, because the fans of Rothfuss/Kvothe will be pissed that the awesome bad ass they've been following is actually an unrepentant narcissistic liar. And then those of us that find Kvothe to be an offensive caricature of a character won't be that impressed with such a reveal given we've had to slog through what feels like thousands of pages of bullshit to get there. If you're going to go the unreliable narrator route, make it a central piece of your story (i.e. make part of the fun the contrast between what really happened vs. what actually happened, e.g. John retelling events that David hasn't witnessed in John Dies at the End) or be a lot more goddamn succinct about it (a la Usual Suspects).

If you string things along as potentially true for a huge amount of time and then try to go "Oh, that never happened like that" at the end, it rarely goes well. Think "Lost" or "St. Elsewhere".

I officially finished all 955 pages of Terror by Dan Simmons.

In short, I will say that I really enjoyed the book. I guess I would compare its length and style to be some what King-esq. If it takes 20 pages to describe something, he just took 20 pages and the book got longer. While his need of an editor is one of the most vocal complaints about the book, imho it is one of the best elements of the book. By taking 10 pages to describe scurvy or 20 pages to describe the crew getting ready to get off the ship or 15 pages to describe a 1 mile trek across the Arctic, I think it really helps the reader get a better feel for the despair and hardship that this crew felt basically stranded for several years on the ice. I may be weird but I found that to be a good thing.

To bring up Stephen King again, the ending...heh. I liked it, a lot. The book is loosely based on a true story of 2 ships that headed to the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage, and were never heard from again. Over the years rescuers and other expeditions found bits and pieces of the lost expedition but really very little of what was over 150 men and 2 ships. If you read the story of the actual ship and crew, it definitely had an eerie feel to it. The tidbits of both physical evidence and witness accounts of the local peoples of the area just make it even more ...spooky. The we toss in a bit of horror because, who knows, maybe that is what REALLY happened...

Anyway it is a bit of a slog but if you want to really get into a long long long book and the subject matter appeals to you, I highly recommend it.

Jim Butcher needs to rein it in a little. One of the things I liked about The Dresden Files is that they were reasonably short books, so I could process one in less than a month. Because there was about as much story as a kind of fat episode of television. Which you would expect from a property that turned some of its novels into episodes of a television show. Cold Days is a little thick, which I wouldn't worry about, but there's going to be somewhere between six and nine more of these things and there's a reason that I haven't read anything by King in forever (specifically, I have a deplorably tiny amount of time to sit and read a book these days). Nonetheless, I'm about eight or nine chapters in and I suppose he's doing alright so far, but who knows how long it will take me to actually consume the whole thing.

Speaking of long books, I'm in the middle of Vanity Fair, which is a sprawling book. Very funny, but at about halfway through, the humor is starting to wear on me.

Agreed. I've read the entire series over the last few years, and the general trend is that each book is a little better than the last. The first three books were fine. Not bad, but not anything special either. Then the series becomes progressively more interesting as Butcher gets more creative with the antagonists and the mythologies he's incorporating. I love how everything after book seven is this insane mix of competing supernatural interests.

I'm liking the current book, but it's starting to get ridiculous. There's a convention Butcher overuses where he gives the protagonist a series of ticking time bombs to juggle, most of which get simultaneously diffused at the last second. In Cold Days there are five swords of Damocles hanging over Dresden's head. I know this because I stopped reading for a few minutes and counted them up. When I woke up this morning I read some more, thought about my list, and realized that I couldn't remember one of the five immediate threats.

When the reader can't keep track of all the threats you've cooked up, you probably didn't need one of those threats to keep the character in jeopardy.

Since Terror took so much effort to read, I was having trouble just trying to find something a bit *lighter* for a bit. Poking through all my e-reader books on a whim, I started Gateway by Fredrik Pohl. I haven't read it in years. So far so good but what is funny is how much I remember from my read years ago. Maybe my brain is not as muddy as I thought it was.

Terror is cool and good, but would be even better as straight historical fiction. I don't know if Simmons felt obliged to cram some supernatural limbo-jumbo in there or what, but being list in the arctic is plenty scary enough without introducing a giant monster.

I just read "Endurance", which is a very well written and researched account of the ill-fated Shackleton expedition; the much suckier "Lost City of Z" which concerns the also ill-fated Fawcett expedition; and am now reading "In the Heart of the Sea", about the probably-ill-fated-but-not-that-far-in-the-book Essex whaling ship.

I finished The Scavenger's Daughter by Mike McIntyre, which I got for free as a daily deal from some kindle ebook deal newsletter I subscribe to. Generally my expectations are not high for these books, as they're self published. I figure if it doesn't grab me right away, I delete it and the only thing it cost me was a click or two.

This one was actually really good, and worth the $2.99 that he's asking for it regularly. Sure, it's a popcorn mystery/thriller, but you could do worse with a lot of stuff on the airport newsstand paperback rack for $7.99. It's also subtitled, "A Tyler West Mystery" which implies that there's a series of these, but this is the first and only, thus far.

So the deal is, disgraced former Pulitzer-winning reporter is trying to come back from his disgrace. Local museum opens an exhibit on medieval torture devices and everyone at the opening starts dying from a serial killer who uses a different torture device to kill each one. Our investigative reporter must catch the killer because the police are even denying there is a serial killer on the loose.

There were some eye-rolling moments with how the cops act. They don't seem to want to investigate or do anything cop-like unless our hero hands it to them on a silver platter. The writing is pretty good, as Mike McIntyre was (surprise surprise) a reporter for years before settling down to write travel books and now a novel.

I know the tastes in this thread run towards fantasy and sf, but I like a good mystery/thriller to mix things up. This one was a quick read and good fun.

Well, there's at least one one that's more than likely not going to get resolved in this book. One thing that Athryn mentioned in another thread, though, he has improved on: I've only counted one instance of "tips of her breasts" so far (I'm about halfway though).

I've finally started in on The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's unfinished final novel. So far it reads more like a collection of short stories / character studies than a novel, which is to be expected. The narrative arc of Infinite Jest was difficult to tease out at the best of times; the fact that The Pale King was at most half done means it's going to be that much more difficult. Nonetheless, as a fan of DFW's writing, the book is like candy. So many wonderful sentences!

Ohhh thanks for those ideas. I had read Roald Amundsen's book about his trip to the South Pole years ago but the Terror gave me a hankering for some more historical Arctic exploration reading- More books to put on my to do list!

I'm almost halfway through Esslemont's Blood and Bone and I'm really enjoying it. His style is a bit more hit-and-run than Erikson's, which means the plot moves more quickly. At this point, I'll rate it as better than Forge of Darkness simply because not a single character has lapsed into a multi-page emo monologue about the pointlessness of life.

I've taken break from Red Country (this isn't unusual of me while reading Abercrombie, it's no reflection on the book) and I picked up One Shot At Forever by Chris Ballard, a story about a very small Illinois town called Macon (pop. 1200) and the remarkable success their high school had through 1970-1971 in regional baseball, due to the relatively unconventional coaching of LC Sweet. It was a very quick read (although I did go out of my way to read this one, something I haven't been doing since Far Cry 3 came out) and throughly enjoyable. I know enough about baseball to be slightly dangerous but really, like a lot of these books, the sport itself is mostly irrelevant.

I need some more baseball recommendations now, but only for when I finally get around to reading Friday Night Lights :)

I just finished Kelly Link's second collection of short stories, Magic for Beginners. It's... weird. The stories don't really go anywhere... they sort of remind me of Ramsey Campbell short stories in that weird things just happen, only in Ramsey Campbell stories the protagonist is destroyed horribly in the end and in Link's the stories just end.

But here's the thing... I don't finish the stories and feel unsatisfied. Something about the journey is fascinating enough that even though I don't see a destination I'm happy to have been on-board. I also may have compared reading her stories to being on drugs when describing them to friends last night.

I also read the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, after having read a handful of them over the past couple decades. It was exactly what I expected. I just needed something fluffy and amusing for the trip home from New England, and it worked.

I've almost finished Wise Man's Fear and while the sex scenes were eye-rolling I enjoyed it. Claiming Kvothe is the best at everything is a massive exaggeration. He's been beaten in magic and beaten in combat and it's been made clear that while he is very very good there are plenty of actual masters out there who have both the talent and experience to best him. He's still a prodigy in everything he does, that part of his character defines who he is as much as anything, and in the next book he might actually become best at everything ever but he's not there yet by a longshot.

Kvothe's worst weakness isn't that he's naive, his worst weakness is his pride. Pride in his skills, pride in his heritage, and while well-deserved the cause of most of his troubles. Like rebuking racist nobles to their face. And then there's his ongoing love story. I'd rate love as a flaw when it makes you do story-book foolhardyness.

Finished The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss, which was about the writer Alexandre Dumas' father (also Alex Dumas), who was a general in the French Revolution and happened to be a man of color (the child of a white French aristocrat and his black slave). His story is a fascinating one. Book is well-written, too. I definitely recommend it.

I finished Rivers of London, and started Moon Over Soho. After this, I shall endeavour to slog through Ghost Story so I can take on Cold Days.

Glad to hear Esslemont's new book is better. I was really dissapointed with Orb, Scepter, Throne, which you'd think would be great in a return to some well loved characters but fell really flat. Still meandering through Forge of Darkness myself at the moment but keep getting distracted by shiny games to play.

To be fair, it ends somewhat flat, with a quasi "happily ever after" vibe, but getting there is fun. For me, Esslemont is more fun to read because he's chipping away at the parts of the world that Erikson just teases, without the angsty baggage that Erikson's been toting around since his anti-oil crap in the middle of the series (Toll the Hounds, maybe? Can't remember) It's a nice complementary effect.

Many of her stories feel to me like they're describing what life is like on the side, while the main story is going on somewhere else, and all you get is glimpses of that story. It's a really cool thing, and I've never read anyone else who does it quite as well.

I LOVE Kelly Link. I wish she'd quit editing journals and publish some damn stories.

I wrapped up The Fractal Prince last night. Much like its predecessor, I finished feeling somewhat confused and committed to a re-read before the next volume (I didn't re-read The Quantum Thief) and completely stoked for the next book. I'm a big fan of the story-within-a-story-within-a-story and particularly liked that you got to mentally insert the first book into part of this one.

I really, truly will read them both again before I read the third. Promise.

Now I have no idea what to read next. Hrm.

I reread Dune for the first time in many many years. It's still good stuff, and there's an interesting tension between Herbert's generally pedestrian writing and what he was trying to pull off with the mystical/druggie bits. A bit too pedestrian, there's an awful lot of whirling and glaring; since he was obviously trying harder elsewhere, it's a shame he couldn't do better with those bits. Paul "barks" at least three times in the last chapter, apparently he'd turned into a dog. The voiceovers are as annoying in the book as they were in the film!

With that said, there's an afterword by Brian Herbert, and my god he's simply awful. I'm not reading any of the stuff he's produced.

I finished up The Pillars of the Earth. I know, I'm probably the last person on earth who hasn't read it. I liked it. I knew the plot already, as I'd watched the miniseries, but that didn't effect my enjoyment at all.

The book really about the smallfolk (to use a Game of Thrones term,) it's not about kings and princes, it's just about some poor bastards who want to build a big building, if only other people would stop being assholes.

Anyhow, I decided to be festive and am now reading Krampus, the Yule Lord by Brom. It's good so far, set in the present day. Puts a dark spin on the holiday.

Athryn, when I was in tenth grade I took a creative writing class. It was taught by my 9th grade English teacher, whom I loved because she encouraged my writing. For one assignment I did something about monks building a home in a hillside, and from my prose my teacher said, "You've been reading Pillars of the Earth, haven't you?" Still cracks me up.

You should give World Without End a try (one Amazon reviewer called it "book without end" lol). It's not quite as good as Pillars of the Earth but it's pretty darned good nonetheless.

I'm reading All the Shah's Men which is all about the American organized coup in Iran in the 1950s. It really portrays the Brits as total assholes (sorry Brits) and it makes me a little depressed while reading it to think that a lot of the trouble that we have with Iran today could have been avoided had we not fucked around with them 60 years ago. Hell, they could have even been strong allies perhaps! Who knows how the world might have turned out differently?

Yeah, it's in my list also!