January 2013 Book Thread

Horrors! No book thread until the 2nd of the month! Buncha slackers...

Anyhow, I just finished The Hangman's Daughter, a historical mystery involving a Bavarian hangman/torturer and other solving a mystery in 17th century Germany. Excellent historical ambience, a good villian, and some solid scenes. Recommended.

I finished Moon Over Soho, and started Cold Days (Dresden files).

Finished Gods of Risk, a James S.A. Corey novella set in his Expanse series. It's really good- loosely tied to the series, no zombies and so forth. Just a nice little coming-of-age story. If you like the Expanse, check it out.

I swear I'm going to finish A Dance With Dragons this month...

Recently finished the third Monstrumologist book Isle of Blood and found it another very solid book in the series. I'm curious about Yancey's other works, anyone read those?

Just started the Wool: Omnibus seems like it has the potential to be a decent bit of dystopian fiction.

I started the sequel to The Hangman's Daughter, The Dark Monk and stopped partway as I found it to have lost the freshness of the first book. It began moving towards some hefty ole cliche plotting, plus I felt the character progression of the first book was ret-conned away, which I dislike.

Starting up The Great North Road by Peter Hamilton and it's kicking ass so far.

I'm reading 1493, by Charles C. Mann. It's a sequel to 1491, which focused on the civilizations of the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans. This time around he's covering the global impact (biological, economic and sociological) of the massive transfer of species (not just humans!) between the two continents in the post-contact period. For instance, the fall of the Ming dynasty is not-indirectly related to the widespread adoption of new crops such as maize and sweet potatoes, plus a flood of silver from the galleon trade destabilizing the hell out of their economy. It's a fascinating book.

In ebooks, I'm midway through Matter by Iain M. Banks. It's pretty decent, one of the better Culture books. In audiobooks, I'm listening to Un Lun Dun by China Mieville. It's one of his YA books, and it's totally the kind of book I'd have loved as a kid. It has some steampunk elements, but they don't overwhelm. I'll post more thoughts when I'm done.

I liked Matter a lot... which reminds me that I need to see about getting a copy of The Hydrogen Sonata, the latest Culture book.

The Hydrogen Sonata is very, very good and a return to form after Matter, which I liked but felt like a bit of a letdown. Matter is just a travelogue at heart, whereas The Hydrogen Sonata has a great story, albeit a bit too warm and fuzzy in places.

In terms of Culture books, I keep coming back to Surface Detail, which I just love.

I just finished the Wool: Omnibus, like many people around here. I disagree that the main draw of Wool is Fallout. They really have very little to do with each other. There is no wasteland in Wool, because no one can survive outside for very long at all.

The Wool books (novellas? short stories?) start off by telling the reader that anyone can die. That's good for a bleak world. Then they give nice twists and revelations, and some very good characters. Apparently people are complaining about Wool 6, which I haven't read, because it lacks the mystery of the first five. Okay, but it seems to me that there are plenty of questions I have about how the Wool world got to be the way it is, and what the founders were thinking when they started this whole silo project. I'm willing to give it a go, but not right away. I need a bit of lighter reading first.

Just finished The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. I saw it on a list of the top ten scifi/fantasy novels of 2012 as the sole post-apoc entry so I gave it a try. One buyer review I saw called it the best post-apoc novel since The Road, but I don't know that I'd agree. It is an interesting book, and is probably one of the more realistic post-apoc novels around. But its a fairly slow moving story that is more focused on the psychological and emotional costs survivors of an apocalypse would have to face. There are hints of bigger revelations in the story, especially at the end, but those go beyond the very narrow focus of the story being told here.

The only other caveat is that the style of writing is not conventional - the story is told in first person by the main character, and everything is presented in past tense with no use of quotation marks for dialogue, etc. It takes a little getting used to.

Finished How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman. The title's a bit over the top, but it's still a pretty good read.

The Banks books are so expansive and I read them all (or the extant ones) almost front to back, which was great fun but retrospectively confusing as heck as it's all a dizzying million-word mass in my memory that I have to consult wikipedia to disentangle. Salient point in this case being that I can't remember if Djan Seriy Anaplian is my favourite SC commando or not.

Just tore through Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. Fantastic book on behavioral economics. I quite enjoyed it.

Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element by Jeremy Bernstein is one of the most technical science histories written for lay people that I've ever read. It was worth the work, though. Excellent book.

These are both excellent, 1493 even better -- Mann does a good job of dusting off, updating, and elucidating Alfred Crosby Columbian Exchange history thematic.

Matter was my least favourite Culture book. Surface Detail was amazing.

Warning: potentially politically divisive book ahead. There be dragons, and all that.

Finally got around to reading Drift by Rachel Maddow. I was never fond of what little I saw of her as a TV talking head, which is why the book surprised me so much. Also shocked it was her first, it was a pretty good read.

It's about American war culture, how we've evolved away from the idea of the civilian militia our founding fathers intended and settled into a standing army that begs to be used. Also talks quite a bit about bogus American cold war rhetoric during the Soviet era. It's an extremely well researched book with a great afterward that discusses sources and suggests a lot of other good reading.

It does tend to infrequently toe the line toward preachiness, but never quite gets there. I feel it also misses a couple of points I reckon are kinda vital to the discussion of the knock-on effects of our military's influence on sociopolitical culture, but on the whole it gave new perspectives on what I already knew and enlightened me to a few things I didn't that led me to find out more. I would have snoozed through what I expected to be droning rhetoric if it wasn't filled with good history. It also ended up being refreshingly centrist and not at all anti-military.

I'm into I, Claudius because the cover scared me, and Gone Girl just to see what all the fuss was about. I don't like it. But I'm gonna have to get The Dog Stars, saw that in a "Best of 2012" display at the library. Plus it sounds like An Experience.

About 45% of the way through The Great North Road from Peter F. Hamilton. It takes place in his pet universe and seems to a return to his most talent-filled form: The space-crime-drama. I'm really enjoying it, to the point where I'll keep it up in a window on my PC so that I can alt-tab to it during down periods at work.

I finished The Great North Road and it was outstanding, the best sci-fi I've read in a couple of years. It's got the typical Hamilton mix of space opera elements, high tech, action, politics etc, as well as the usual ensemble cast of POVs. However, unlike his last couple of series, where I felt the multiple POVs never gelled, Great North Road comes together with IMO a very satisfying conclusion. It does have a fair amount of the hand-wavy Clarke's law deus ex machina that Hamilton always pulls out of his ass, but the characters really worked for me. I was fascinated both by Angela and Sid's storyline. Highly recommend for sci-fi readers.

I sort of half-read Richard Dawkins' The Magic of Reality, which is his book about science for kids. Dave McKean did the illustrations, which made me happy. I'm not a fan of Dawkins the man, but this is a great book to give to 8-12 year olds interested in science. I'm going to send it to my niece, who's 10. I suspect it'll be right up her alley. I read the first couple of chapters and then skimmed the rest. He does a great job of explaining evolution in simple terms. (Go figure.) Science-challenged adults would enjoy this, too, because it's well-written enough for grown-ups as well. I liked the writing, it's just that I know what natural selection and igneous rocks are already, so I wasn't actually learning anything. But it's good. Very good.

Philip Larkin Collected Poems if that counts.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Finished Dances With Dragons and finally activated my Audible.com gift subscription that I got last October. Picked up Redshirts by John Scalzi. Looked fun.

It's a good book, but Wil Wheaton is a fairly mediocre narrator.

Yeah, but I found him tolerable with Ready Player One so I figured it wouldn't be worse than that.

2012 was a very disappointing year in books for me, in that I didn't read very much. Looking over my list of when I finished various books/audiobooks, this is all I got:

12/04/12 -- The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
11/02/12 -- The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
09/20/12 -- Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
09/04/12 -- 1/22/63 by Stephen King
07/23/12 -- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
02/24/12 -- A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin
02/18/12 -- The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks
01/09/12 -- You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney
01/09/12 -- A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

In so much as I have a new year's resolution, I'm going to read more. I've started by trimming down my podcasts list but I plan on reading more paper (or equivalent) books as well.

Just finished Warren Ellis' Gun Machine. Very Well written but somewhat light 'Burnt out NY cop vs. scary serial killer and nasty conspiracy'-story. Ells is a great writer and the idea is well executed... He uses the background chatter of the police radio registering all the nasty shit happening in the city quite effectively (apart from painting painting a picture of a bad world we're living in t also goes to explaining how a couple of hundred murders could fall I solved and unconnected through the statistics).
Recommended.

He's far worse in Redshirts, but the story is good enough that I eventually got over his wooden narration. I just kinda hate that authors use a big name to give their book some sort of extra "nerd cred." The other example of this was when I read "Sex on the Moon" it was read by Casey Affleck, (presumably they picked him because the book was about a heist, and he was in the Oceans movies,) and he didn't do such a great job either.

I really thought the scene with the drunken Chekov-like lieutenant was a masterful reading with many voices very quickly and all of them immediately comprehensible.

Started A Memory of Light today via audio book for my commuting. 20 years after I started reading the series (I didn't discover it until 1993 or so) I'm happy to finally see it all through. Even those sad books in the middle in which one or two incredible scenes do not make up for the other 600+ pages of nothing much happening. Dear lord though. Sanderson certainly did take the long prologue style of Jordan. I'm two hours in and the prologue is still going! Same readers as the last couple, which is good. They do an excellent job.

Wait until you get to The Last Battle chapter. That's gigantic.

I am currently slogging through Wastelands, Stories of the Apocalypse. The stories are basically ok but nothing really seems to stand out. Lots of interesting takes on what if the world ended stuff but eh...

I have my latest edition of Asimov's Science Fiction sitting on my iPad so that will probably be next but poking around on Goodreads today I found this. Brandon Sanderson it seems has just finished his Wheel of Time final volume, A Memory of Light. And since it seems that at least one person is reading it, I would probably get some good advice...that is, should I start the series now? Am I just a pretend reader for never having read a Wheel of Time book?

Finished One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper. My fundamental problem with the book is the general assumption amongst all of the supporting characters that the protagonist had been a lousy father/husband without any supporting information. I think that particular part of the narrative hit a little close to home, so every time he would get blamed for some shit he wasn't present for, it triggered my "parental alienation" radar.

Finished listening to Redshirts by John Scalzi. No spoilers below, in case you're concerned.

The book is about a group of Ensigns in a thinly veiled Star Trek setting who slowly figure out that they're extras on some sort of thinly veiled Star Trek TV show knockoff. And like such extras (commonly known as "redshirts") they are doomed to die in dramatic ways in service to The Narrative.

The book's hook is definitely its strongest suit and Scalzi is most entertaining near the beginning when he illustrates how ridiculous and contrived many of Star Trek's plot devices were, and considers what people would think of them if they were slapped up against a more realistic setting. It's funny to see the redshirts piece together how to increase their odds of survival on away team missions, watch them boggle at black boxes that spew out nonsense designed only to move The Narrative forward, and scream out things like "What kind of asshole would encode a distress signal about killer robots?" It's entertaining in an inside joke, look how absurd this stuff really is kind of way.

Unfortunately things get a lot less entertaining in Act II when the redshirts try to take control of their fate. No spoilers, but suffice to say the book contorts around and crawls so far up its own butt that it just gets silly. Absurd is fun, but just plain silly is not.

Scalzi plotting in this section is also odd in the way it lurches around and leaves a lot of important stuff to happen off "camera." I supposed one could say that he was just being very meta and making another sly commentary on how things work on bad-to-mediocre sci-fi shows, but it just hurts the quality of the story. And speaking of which, Scalzi also takes the opportunity to slide in a kind of polemic about bad science fiction writing. This kind of works in the context of the story (to say more would lead to spoilers) but it still often feels like the characters are reciting one of Scalzi's blog posts instead of speaking with their own voices This is a common problem, actually, as there are also frequently few meaningful differences in the cast's voice and character. They often sound like I would expect Scalzi sounds like rather than their own people.

Finally, there are not one, not two, but THREE superfluous codas at the end of the book that follow up on some of the ancilary characters. They're tonally very different from the rest of the book, and feel very much like the author (or his editor) read first draft of the book and said "Hrm, this needs more heart." But instead of infusing the heart and emotional connections into the main book, Scalzi just slapped on the codas and said "There. Done."

On balance I actually liked the book, though. The best parts felt like inside jokes about bad sci-fi shows and reveled in the incredulity that you or I would feel if we were part of that crew. Super meta, I know, but in a way that's kind of charming and often amusing.

Why did you label this "no spoilers" and then proceed to post spoilers?

I don't think I did.

Sorry, early morning pre-breakfast post. I haven't actually read the book yet.

Finished China Mieville's Embassytown and I am now launching in to A Memory of Light

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky, which I finished last night, is basically a history of New York City with a lot of oysters thrown in. I like his food histories. This one was a quick but fun read.