February 2013 Book Thread

Just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie which was all kinds of fun. Starring precocious 11 year old chemist and mystery-solver Flavia de Luce, and set in 1950 Britian, its a mix of very well written young adult novel, old-school British mystery with some stiff-upper-lip comedy stylings. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

If Athryn has not already read this series, I would consider this a very Athryn-philic book. Highly recommended.

Is there a book by Charles Stross that anyone would recommend for someone who has never read anything by him? I was thinking about Glasshouse or the Atrocity Archives, but if Singularity Sky or something else is really good, I would love to know.

I've read Halting State and Rule 34, and they're both perfectly serviceable near-future SF. I wouldn't rave about them, but they're not awful.

So I assume that for the foreseeable future I will just come back once a month and say- Still working on Wheel of Time...and then leave again.

I am enjoying the first book but boy is it slow- I realize after reading 50 pages that the group arrived in town, put their horses in a stable, and walked into an inn and had a meal. Seems like 4 or 5 pages could have done that to- heh. Not a bad thing really but possibly after a few books it might.

Oh one more thing- has anyone here ever actually won a book over at Goodeads.com? I find myself about once a month or so scanning through the lists and signing up for say 10 or 15 books - but never seem to win- I know 1/500 is not that great but after so many entries wouldn't the odds favor me just a bit?

Try some of his short stories or novella's. I believe several are posted for free on his site.

Accelerando. Besides being a good book, it is also legally available for free as an ebook.

http://www.amazon.com/Stone-Tears-Sword-Truth-ebook/dp/B004LP3AYI/?tag=bookbubemaila-20

Free for now at least on Amazon

Who do I really dislike that I can gift this to??? Someone else needs to suffer as I did.

I am currently reading Starfish by Peter Watts. Dystopian near future SF about messed up bioengineered humans working and living on the bottom of the oceans - intrigued so far. Not characters you like, but you're interested in getting to know them.

I read about and was at first pissed off that the books (it's a triology) wasn't available as e-books... until I realized they were. For free on his site. So if I like the first book, and it looks like I will, I'll need to purchase it and gift it or something (I don't want the physical book, but I wouldn't mind giving the author money).

We may disagree on a lot of media-related things, but this is something we can both heartily agree on.

Finished (via Audio Book) A Memory of Light - The Wheel of Time is finished. Thank goodness. It was a satisfying ending, but I think after this long not much Sanderson could do to make me go wow. One does get tired of the Last Battle, but since we've been working up to this point for so long I suppose it's needed, but good lord, this book is 90% battles it feels like. And I don't think Min says a word until 60% of the way through the book, where Sanderson tosses her in like he forgot about her and needed something to do with her. But overall, it's a journey I'm glad I took, and even with the very low points in the middle of the series. Now Sanderson - Stop messing around with Mistborn stuff and get back to the sequel to The Way of Kings.

I am on the first page of the chapter "The Last Battle" in A Memory of Light. So far I am giving it a big thumbs up. The funny part in reading it so far is when he mentions characters that Jordan wasted books previously that we simply have forgotten about as Sanderson has driven us to Shayol Ghul. I am not complaining one iota about that.

I just started reading the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Holy crap this guy is awesome!

The Rifters series is really wonderful, enjoy reading it!

I liked the first book and just downloaded two and three.
(and just realized, that blindsight which you guys gave its own thread is by the same author)

So who wants a free book?
I wanted the e-book, and it was available for free. Now I think the authot deserves to make a sale, so if anybody wants a real physical copy of this or Blindsight, I'll gift it to you.

I read The Siege of Washington: The Twelve Days that Shook the Union which takes a look at what was going on in Washington from the fall of Fort Sumter to the arrival of the 7th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment (duh, twelve days later).

If the confederates had left 500 guys to hold Fort Sumter and put the rest on a train to Washington, they could have taken the capital and maybe the government. Best case scenario: the U.S. government has to relocate and deal with the chaos that would entail. Foreign powers would have been more likely to negotiate with the Confederacy if they held Washington.

Worst case scenario: they catch Lincoln and his cabinet, hang them, declare themselves the rightful government of the U.S., and now the North has to reconstitute some leadership and maybe secede?

So there are some great "what if's" inherent in those 12 days, and the most exciting part is how the Massachusetts volunteers have to fight their way through Baltimore (and I'm watching The Wire, so I guess not much has changed in Baltimore, it's a tough city). In all though, the book suffers from the fact that it tries to build suspense around something we know didn't happen. We know the ending, so without Hollywood's false suspense (cue the music), it's really hard to build excitement.

I finished 2 books today/last night. Founding Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf. It's about the gardens of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison. It was pretty decent, and an interesting/different side of these presidents. It veered around from gardens to the design of DC, to even environmentalism. There was a token bit about slavery, which maybe should have been more prominent, as 3/4 of these guys used slave labor to build their gorgeous landscapes.

One of the nice things about living where I do is that Mount Vernon, Monticello and Montpelier are all within driving distance, so when the gardens are more in bloom I'll go visit and fill in some of the details from the book. :)

The other book I finished was The Black Opera by Mary Gentle. It takes place in post-Napoleonic pre-Victorian alternate-universe Sicily. This universe has a very specific type of magic, one that happens as a result of Operas and religious services.

The concepts and overall story were good, but the book was a little messy and felt like it needed a better editor. It wasn't bad, just a little annoying in parts.

Hell yes he is. I was just thinking about picking a favorite, and I just can't. The Aleph might possibly edge them all out, but only just. And maybe not. I'm not the biggest fan of Hurley's translations, but the translations that Borges collaborated on with Norman Thomas di Giovanni are all but impossible to find (not really, you just have to be sneaky) since Borges's widow sold him up the river after Borges passed away.

I should finish up The Left Hand of Darkness tonight, my first Le Guin novel. I LOVE it and will be immediately starting either The Dispossessed or The Lathe of Heaven, but am not sure which.

The Left Hand of Darkness is the sauce. Might have to go re-read that now.

Oh, Saturday night I finished Bad Pharma from Ben Goldacre. Very good book on what's wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. Goldacre is an MD and a journalist, and his first book, Bad Science, was amazingly good. This one was excellent too, except that it's possible to laugh at stuff (okay, make fun of stuff) like homeopathy and alternative medicine (first book) but not drug companies killing people (this book). So more serious, but also more informative.

I finished Southern Gods.

Dammit. I had exactly this experience a year or two ago after I read Blindsight, except I missed the free-on-his-site part. Thank you so much for posting this!

I gave five stars each to the last two books I finished: Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre and My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland.

Goldacre does a great and thoroughly researched job of critiquing the pharamceutical industry. Definitely worth a read. And Rowland's Zombie has to be my favorite modern paranormal. It's really awesome. I read it in one day and just downloaded the sequel. So much fun.

The second White Trash Zombie book was as good as the first. I can't wait for the third one to come out in a couple of months.

Just about finished with The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. I thought this one got off to a slow start, as we didn't meet the hero until about a quarter of the way in. Then it was pretty good.

I like the revelations about the larger scope of the Old Man's War universe. I'm going to keep reading these because I like where it's going, but the way they've set up the power structure of the colonial government, the next book needs to be about someone in the diplomatic corps or something, and we don't really know anything about those people. Besides, at heart, we want to see superhumans fighting BEMs, so if we go into the politics and negotiations with the various alien species, we've lost the reason to read these books.

Which means negotiations must fail.

Reading/Listening to the Audio Book of Caliban's War which improves on the already great first book in the series. Probably about mid-way through it right now and I think the old politician woman is probably one of my favorite characters in a book in a while. She's just such a great relief to the tension set up by the other viewpoints in the book, but tempered with a good vulnerability and toughness at the same time. I always look forward to when the book heads back to Earth viewpoints!

I'm tearing through Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 and loving it. A lot of the Amazon reviews complain about the plot being slow and neglected in favor of world-building, but that seems so far from the case to me. I was expecting dozens of pages of exposition about how humans have developed the solar system, followed by a few pages of plot, and repeat, but the plot is always present and although it does take the occasional lull for political building, the characters are continually being fleshed out. I honestly expected it to be something I would pick up and put down a few times before finishing it, but I really look forward to it when I have the time.

I've also been reading Stephen Brust's first three Vlad Taltos novels during my "alone" time. Fifty pages into the first and I am not impressed so far, but I've always heard really good things, so hopefully it'll pick up. So far, it's on par with Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and that's not a compliment.

Recently finished up Southern Gods as well, which I found to be a good starting premise that went disappointingly.

I also read Joe Hill's Horns...which I found to be a good starting premise that went disappointingly. Consistency!

I'm about midway(ish) through Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and really digging it, and will likely have all sorts of rambling thoughts whenever I end up finishing it.

I started it after 'hearing' good things about it, but then I recalled that I had just heard about it, not actually heard good things. So yeah, I was pretty unimpressed as well. After reading the first few books, I won't be continuing the series.

Good lord that's overpriced.

What did you find disappointing about Horns?

Flashbacks piled on top of flashbacks are always an iffy road with me. In contrast with Heart-Shaped Box, I didn't think most of Horns flashbacks did much to amplify or enhance the story. One in particular struck me as a mistake to even include (our horned poor devil's nemesis early childhood fixing the moon). I could see what he was going for with all of them, that the past isn't ever done with any of us (I did like the ending for that reason), they just didn't really hit the aimed goal for me.

I finished Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which was more of a novella, and I liked it. The society portrayed reminded me a little of The Culture (if it were in its formative years,) and it had a cute little mystery. I would have liked to have seen more, that was really my only complaint.

I didn't mind the flashbacks, though I'd agree that some were not entirely necessary. Why did you especially dislike the one involving the story's antagonist? Did you think it was heavy-handed/too much belaboring the obvious?

A mix of both. Elements of the early childhood flashback struck me as too cutely pat, and I felt it really deflated the antagonist's role in the story to drain the mystery of his whys and wherefores to tragic mundanity. It also drained any tension from all the action after, turning the contest into supernatural protagonist against mundane villain; that deck's always stacked. (Come to think of it, that's another factor of why Hill's Heart Shaped Box worked much better for me--the contest went the other way round.)

"Fluffy" is the best word I can think of for them. Definitely fluffy.

On the subject of fluff, I have discovered that modern paranormal fiction is the best stuff to read while I'm on the stationary exercise bike. I can't read a lot of them when I'm not on the bike because they're so empty of substance, but they're just brain-dead enough that I can concentrate on them and my workout at the same time. Well, the White Trash Zombie books were good enough to read purely for pleasure, but the terrible Laurell K Hamilton novel I've been reading during the last couple of workouts is so bad I can't stand it unless I'm pedaling my little heart out at the same time. In fact, I think I pedal faster when the book is at its worst...

Thanks for the reply. I can see your points though the flashbacks didn't bother me in the same way. I do have Heart-Shaped Box on my Kobo now so it'll be interesting to compare the two.

I just finished a back to back reading of The King's Blood (by Daniel Abraham) and Caliban's War (by James S.A. Corey, a pen name for a collaboration of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). I had never read anything by Daniel Abraham prior reading Leviathan Wakes, and I had purchased the version that had The Dragon's Path as a free second book attached, but his work is fantastic.

Both books are excellent, and both improve on the first in the series. The new perspective characters in Caliban's War were well done, and the authors definitely are making the collaboration work. Caliban's War also ends with two back to back bang up scenes and an ending twist that I didn't see coming at all, but that really excites me for the third book which comes out in June.

The Kings Blood, on the other hand, is merely a superlative fantasy novel. I think in both these books the strength is in the characterization. Abraham seems to be able to create characters who you manage to care about even when you despise them completely, and also pulls off making what happens to them be unexpected, yet fit completely.

So yeah, I loved both of them, and will be anxiously waiting for the third book in both series in May and June respectively.