Finished Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, which is mystery/thriller set in rural Mississippi. In 1982 Larry Ott, then a high school junior, takes a girl on a date and she's never seen again. He claims he dropped her off and she ran away from the car. Her body was never found, and with no evidence, he's never prosecuted. Now, 20 years or so later, another girl has gone missing and everyone suspects Larry. We follow the local deputy, Silas "32" Jones through his day, and flash back and forth between Larry and Silas. This was another good thriller kind of thing that's less a thriller than a character study of the two men and their relationship, which is complicated and layered. Franklin reveals secrets slowly, and maybe takes a little too much time after it seems like everything is resolved. It's like he was enjoying himself in this world so much he didn't want it to end, so he kept writing. Again, another fizzy read in the mystery/thriller section.
Can I implore again for people to do more (as Dean does above) than just list off book titles? While I am a lover of lists I enjoy these book threads because they help expose me to subjects and authors I may not have considered -- but only if I get more than just a name and title. As an example, BTG talked about Talent is Overrated way back when and if he'd only mentioned the title I probably would have thought 'That book is probably overrated lol!!' but he gave his thoughts on it, I was intrigued and so I picked it up (and enjoyed it). I'm not asking for book reports or anything. Even just mentioning that you liked or disliked a book is better than nothing. If this seems too demanding/picky/whining, please file appropriately in a dank and horrible place.
Speaking of which! I just finished China Mieville's YA fantasy Un Lun Dun, and I really enjoyed it. It is exactly the kind of book that the preteen me would have adored, and I still very much enjoyed it now. Un Lun Dun shares a lot in common with the Oz books, Alice in Wonderland, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (which I haven't read, but Mieville thanks Gaiman specifically for that book as an influence,) and The Princess Bride. Un Lun Dun is a place that is an alternate/magical version of London, almost a mirror image, and it's a fascinating and terrible place. The story follows a chosen one and a quest, but does a very good job of subverting many of the typical "person on a quest" types of tropes that you often find in YA fantasy. The audiobook narrator was one drawback though, I was not particularly satisfied with her strange rhythm. Anyhow, if you like the types of books I mentioned, you will undoubtedly like this one. And there's bits of steampunk, but they're not obnoxious.
I didn't manage to get much reading done over the holiday but did finish Joe Abercrombie's Red Country. Once it dawned on me that no, really, it was a western, it kinda lost any charm it had and become a little ponderous, I was actually glad to get it done. I also read Tubes by Andrew Blum, which is a sort of "How the Internet *Really* Works, for Dummies". I'm overstating it a little, but it's not a technical book and was a nice easy read for the beach and would serve anyone who doesn't work in the internet business quite well as a primer on how the internet is constructed. He managed to at least prompt me to review a few of our contracts for hosting at data centres to find out if they're too restrictive on interconnection to other parties.
I read I Am Legend which is pretty short (as you can tell by the quick turnaround since my last post), and I'm not sure it really holds up. Vampire plague has wiped out everyone and Robert Neville is the only guy who didn't get it. Every night vampires come to his house and exhort him to come out, presumably so they can drink his blood. Every night he doesn't, and they end up killing and draining one or two of their own. In the morning he cleans up the bodies. Every night Robert Neville is sorely tempted to go out, because he drinks and the lady vampires show him their ladybits and I guess he's really horny. That was the first, "Buh?" At first I was going with the vampire hypnotism thing that made the lady vampires extra seduction-ey, but it becomes clear that is not the case. So maybe Robert Neville should look around the wreckage of civilization for some porn and rub one out or something so he's not so tempted by the lady vampires. The part about the dog was really sad. But when the only other survivor lady shows up, he's immediately skeptical. He shoves a bowl of garlic at her and she reacts like a vampire, but then says, "Dude, that's a lot of garlic and I haven't eaten in days. Wouldn't you be nauseous too?" And he buys that. Then he says he wants to test her blood, because by now he can see the vampire bacterium and that's a sure-fire vampire detector, and she says, "Eh, I'm tired. Can we do it tomorrow?" And he buys that. Then she doesn't really eat, and she kind of chokes down the liquor he gives her (I would've made me some nice pasta in garlic and butter that night and served it up) and she says, "I'm tired, let's go to bed." So he gets really drunk and passes out. Good call, Robert Neville. Well, we all know what happens then (hint: they changed the ending for the Will Smith movie.) So, it doesn't really hold up, but the ending is still cool.
Yeah, the extreme "WAAAAUUUGH! LADY BITS! CAN'T ...CONTROL ...LOINS!" stuff in I Am Legend struck me as spectacularly weird, too. I just chocked it up to insanity and/or extreme Puritanism on the author's part. Not sure if that's correct or not, though.
That last time I read I Am Legend I thought the increasingly erratic decision-making it was more a function of Neville slowly going mad from what is effectively a life sentence of solitary confinement coupled with a burgeoning case of alcoholism, rather than just "OMG SO HORNY." It's been a few years since I read it, though, so maybe I skimmed over some extreme ladybits-madness. I'm currently reading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick. It's pretty good stuff, even a non-scientist like myself can follow the development of quantum physics fairly well, but mostly I'm interested in Feynman the person.
I liked James Gleick's The Information, though it got super dense in a few spots --at least for me. Just noticed that he's also written an Isaac Newton biography as well. Adding that and the Feynman one to my list.
It's funny you should say that, because the book about Newton was the one that I was originally interested in. But after reading a few reviews, it sounded like a fairly light, very brief treatment of Newton's life with a lot left out. In the course of perusing these reviews I saw several mentions of the book on Feynman, and saw that it had generally much higher reviews, so I downloaded a sample and liked it enough to buy the book the next day.
I just started Kim Stanley Robinson's latest world-building-with-a-bit-of-plot, 2312. I am enjoying it so far. Am also re-reading Left Hand of Darkness.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry was completely awesome. A lot of the books is about the beginnings of modern medicine in America and some of the personalities involved. Also, Woodrow Wilson was a dick.
Well, he swears off the alcohol and devotes himself to research and classical music for two years before the lady survivor shows up. It actually explicitly says that his libido went away through clean living and exercise or something, but once she shows up, his little vampire really starts calling the shots. And that's really the crux of all the bad decisions with her. He wants so badly for her to be another survivor that he's willing to ignore practically anything.
Right, I do remember that now that you mention it. I just didn't get the sense that it was solely his dick doing his thinking - one of many needs, sure. Absolutely, I really like that about the whole encounter, it's gut-wrenching how desperate he is to have just one other human being. And in the end, that's his undoing. He knows, I think, but he can't face it. I really liked that story, concerned as it is with the inner life of the survivor and the tormented loneliness such a life entails. It really isn't about vampires at all, in the usual sense; they're almost incidental until the reversal that forms the elegant denouement.
Finished The Twelve by Justin Cronin today. This was a great follow up to the post-apocalyptic-vampire-virus-novel The Passage that managed to exceed the first novel in a number of ways. Highly recommended if you enjoyed The Passage - Cronin is a great writer.
Finished Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks by William Elliot Griffis. It's quite interesting to compare it to the German tales collected by the Grimms. Less gore, more original stories. And LOTS of cheese. You have no idea. SO MUCH CHEESE.
I finished a short story anthology called The Future is Japanese, which is a science fiction collection containing stories from or about Japan. I really wanted to like it, but the overall quality was so uneven, I can't recommend it. There were a couple of good stories, but so many bad/borderline incoherent ones, that the bad ones ended up dominating. I only finished it because I was hoping the next story would be better than the last.
Just finished All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (about to be turned into a Tom Cruise movie) and liked it. It's simple premise and a quick read - basically the Earth is under invasion from this relentless race called Mimics that are so tough that we need special weapons and armored suits to kill them. Or protagonist goes into battle and is killed on the very first page (so not a spoiler) only to awake Groundhog Day-style to relive the battle. The story is about him trying to get out of the time loop and us finding out what's really going on. The writing is somewhat simple, the characters not that deep and it all hinges on this one clever idea - but hey, it is pretty clever. Sakurazaka is a gamer and this is his "what if we really could go back to the last savepoint and try again when we died?" Of course it's not that simple, but to explain why would be a spoiler. If you like a bit of action, alien invasion, an interesting mystery and a clever sci-fi idea, than you could do much worse. I certainly see why it appealed to Hollywood - it must have been easy to turn into a movie script.
UGH what to READ? I am floundering around with short stories and my Asimov magazine...Maybe I will start Wheel of Time. And now I need to put All You Need Is Kill on my list too- sounds fun.
Read Penn Jillette's Every Day is an Atheist Holiday yesterday. It was okay. Some of it was great, some was boring. If you liked God No! then you'll like this one. I can't stand Penn's politics, but for the most part he seems like a decent guy. And there's not a lot of politics in this, so yay.
I'm reading through Leviathan by Scott Westerfield. It's another one of those that I must have seen somewhere and shot off a request to borrow from the library. Turns out it's more of a YA book, but it's interesting for its worldbuilding nonetheless. It's an alternate history book set at the beginning of World War I. One side (Austrians, Germans) has steampunk mechs and machines. The other side (Brittish) have "Darwinist" bioengineered monsters and assorted creatures including the titular warship Leviathan. It's odd, but I kind of get a Studio Ghibli vibe from it.
I just finished The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein. I have probably read this before when I was in my early teens, but I have no recollection of it. I was reading a lot of Heinlein back then. Anyway, it's a time travel book, except time travel is via cold sleep and only in one direction. Our hero finds out his fiance is a ruthless gold digger and his business partner has allied with her to steal his company (Hired Girl Inc., makers of fine robotic housekeepers), so he decides to take the Long Sleep for 30 years, sleeping from 1970 to 2000. He'll wake up and they'll be old, and he'll laugh at them. Or something. So a few things here-- Heinlein spends lots of time on gadgets of the future. This thing was written in the 50's, and his hero basically invents the Rhumba robotic vacuum cleaner to make his fortune. Heinlein also postulates that in 2000 all clothes fastening will be via velcro (called snaptite, or something in his book). He spends an awful lot of time on how patents work and how stock works, mostly so his hero can make a fortune, lose a fortune, and then make another one. It's all very, "I'm an engineer! I'm a self-reliant American! I can be poor and through hard work and get-it-done-ness be rich within a year!" There's also a little weirdness with a 10-year-old girl who he falls in love with when she's 10 (and vice versa, of course) and they get together through staggering their cold sleeps to become the right ages for each other (which means she's 21 and he's about 30). It's a great time-travel book where Heinlein has worked out all the paradoxes and explains them in ways that would make your typical internet nerd ("But that doesn't work because...") feel content. I could've used a bit less explanation of exactly how our hero's company's stock is affected by 30 years, and how patents can be licensed, but as a look back into a different age of science fiction, it was kind of fun.
Actually, no sex at all. Though he does just run across a group of nudists at one point. This was written in the 50's. He hadn't gotten to the kinky sex yet.
I received Ready Player One as a Christmas gift from Hawkeye Fierce, and I both started and finished it last week. I loved it and just devoured it. Now I'm finally getting around to reading The Hunger Games, and that's progressing pretty quickly as well. Read for an hour and a half last night and an hour this morning and I'm halfway through already. It's feeling pretty good to get back to tearing through books. Over Christmas I read Holidays On Ice by David Sedaris, which took all of two hours to read, and also The Cult of LEGO, which is more of a coffee-table book. Before that though was Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Good book overall, but with quite a few parts that completely drag the book down, so it took me a few months to get through it.
The first "episode" of John Scalzi's The Human Division came out on Tuesday. It's set in the Old Mans War universe and you'll really benefit from having read the earlier books before picking it up, just as filler on the setting (there's a passing mention of John and Jane, FWIW). It's Scalzi's writing at it's best and the serial release format (99c per chapter for 13 weeks on every Tuesday from now until April) is actually kind of nifty - Tuesday night at 9pm is new book night! I don't think the serialisation is going to hurt my enjoyment of the book at all and I really hope it works out for him and the publishers. A complete anthology is due later this year, for anyone that wants to wait until it's complete (he mentioned on Twitter a little while back that it's not finished yet!).
Yeah, I don't recall Starship Troopers having any sex in it either, I think it had like a chaste kiss?
The Passage was ok. I won a free copy of it by submitting vampire couplets to a librarian comic strip contest (now I can't say I never win anything!), otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered, but it was pretty decent. I probably wouldn't have picked up The Twelve, but I'll probably try it on your recommendation, thanks!
One runs into one or two of those maps doing the history of WWI. I'm most familiar with but there seems to be a whole bunch of em.
Just finished Consider the Fork: How Technology Transforms the Way We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson. AMAZING book. Gave it five stars on GoodReads. Here's my mini-review from there:
Have any of you read George Saunders? As I understand it, he does short stories exclusively. I'm reading his newest, Tenth of December, right now. I asked around about it after it was recommended and three people with taste I trust said he's phenomenal. One person said he was a satirist. Another said he'd make me "laugh about depressing things." I'm about three stories in and it's so depressing it's making me want to kill myself. Why is everyone having such a different experience from mine?
I recently read Richard J. Evan's The Coming of the Third Reich. It was a rather good overview of the Nazi's rise during the Weimar Republic (or rather lack of a total rise). I was pleased to see that they never got a full plurality and instead managed to derive their power by astutely playing the various other, more important, players off each other. The Communists, Social Democrats, the Centre Party, and the Nationalists all come off looking like short-sighted idiots in this monograph. Though the rise of the Nazi's is the main focus of this volume I actually found myself more interested in the various other movements. How did the Social Democrats fail to mobilize against such an obvious existential threat (according to my hindsight). They had the paramilitary Reichsbanner organization open to them and never really used it. Why did the Steel Helmets submit to the SA so readily? Why didn't the highly organized Communists raise a revolt? Evan's does a concise explaining why they didn't, but I still want to read more about why there wasn't a civil war in the early 1930's.
All the other parties were discredited by their total inability to deal with either the Versailles Treaty or the Great Depression. I don't think they would have found many willing to fight for their continued rule, even among people who didn't much like the Nazis. (As it turned out Hitler was very successful with both issues, and that cemented his popularity.) Also, the Communists had attempted a revolution directly after the war and were loyal to Stalin's USSR. Absolutely no non-Communist would have wanted them to succeed.
Fortean Times: World's Weirdest News Stories was about what I expected. There was at least one article on every page that made me chuckle, but the best was the one where a guy had been hunting gorillas, tranquilizing them, and dressing them up in clown costumes. He was caught when he was pulled over for speeding and had, as passengers, fourteen pregnant goats wearing T-shirts. I just about pissed myself laughing. If you want something short and fluffy to read, this is a good choice.
Evans did explain it, as you said. :) My impression was that the Social Democrats felt certain that they would lose in an open rebellion since the army would rally behind the nazis and the threat of a general strike didn't hold any weight because it was the great depression and even the most loyal social democrat would consider himself happy to have a job so he could feed his family. The communists were organised but they didn't have the popular support of the social democrats and it's important to remember that the communists considered the social democrats almost as big of an enemy as the nazis, so mutual support was hard to arrange and mutual trust almost nonexistant. The communist parties of Europe at the time pretty much all took direction from the USSR and that meant strict doctrinalism as well as a penchant for political scheming that would put the byzantines to shame. So the German left caved because they believed that as big of a disaster as it was, an open rebellion would be an even bigger disaster.
Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks by Patricia Fara was... okay. Short. On an interesting topic. Just... nothing to write home about.
I just finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which I had been meaning to read for quite a while but never bought. I happened to see it was available from our local library, and decided it was time. I remembered loving The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay when I read it years ago, but recently I was trying to decide whether that was just a fond memory or if it was really that good. If TYPU is any measure, I really need to go back and read Chabon's earlier work again, because TYPU was a joy to read from beginning to end. There's just such a solid grasp of character in Chabon's writing, and he sticks these fantastic characters into a murder mystery which had enough twist and turns to keep me completely in the dark as to which direction it would go, yet when it was all figured out, made perfect sense. Next up is Larry Niven's Destiny's Road.
