January 2013 Book Thread

Just finished Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (who's actually two people) - very good space opera (or pseudohard sci-fi) about a conflict between Earth, Mars and Belters (outer mining colonies), which borrows heavily from other genres with a bit of bloody horror and detective noir thrown in.

Definitely buying the next books in their Expanse-series.

Started reading 14 by Peter Clines today. I'm not familiar with the author, but apparently the Ex-Heroes series is pretty good as well. It's about a guy who moves into an old apartment and weird shit starts happening. It reminds me a lot of some modern Lovecraftian fiction with its tone and strangeness of happenings. Definitely worth checking out. From the blurb about it:

Anyone else read this?

The second book is definitely better as the two authors learn to meld their styles together. The short story and novella that are available are pretty decent, too.

Dunno - I had the exact opposite reaction. Felt like more of the same from book 1. I enjoy the characters blasting their way through conspiracies and problems and all, but the story was just treading water.

I was in the mood for something very pulpy and throwaway, so I read Xenos, by Dan Abnett. It's WH40K, which I was completely unfamiliar with, and was recommended as a decent book in that setting. It was quite fun; not much in the psychological depth (or realism!), but plenty of action, and by no means badly written. Fun, and I might finish off the series (it's a trilogy). Probably not about to become a huge WH40K fan, though.

Surprising to me, I finished Born Round, by Frank Bruni, this morning. I was surprised because I didn't realize I was only a few minutes away from the end when I'd stopped the previous day.

It was a very good memoir. Frank Bruni was the restaurant critic for the NYT from 2004-2009. He also has had a lifelong issue with his weight and had several eating disorders over the years, including bulimia. Although I've never had that sort of eating disorder, I can definitely sympathize with a lot of his struggles with weight and his issues and attitudes towards food. He's also a fantastic writer, which made his somewhat unremarkable, WASP-y upbringing very enjoyable to read.

Since I was caught off guard by finishing this book and really wanted to get on my exercise, I kinda just picked the first thing I had sitting around for my next audiobook, which was last year's Hugo winner, Among Others, by Jo Walton. Doesn't really seem like standard fantasy to me so far, but I only just started.

Still reading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and I might have overestimated either James Gleick's ability to render complex physics understandable to the layman and/or my own ability to grasp complex physics as a layman. Some of the material about quantum electrodynamics gets really dense, and this is a long book - the title doesn't lie, it's as much about the science as it is about Feynman's life.

I'm currently reading Mortality Bridge which seems to be a modern take on Dante's Inferno and I'm really having to slog through it. His prose just does nothing for me and I find my eyes wandering over the paragraphs. It could be because it's not easy to describe Hell in a way that can be easily pictured but I loved Dante's Inferno so I'm not sure that that's it.
I finished In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson which I thought was a great read. To me, pre-WWII history is actually more interesting than WWII history. Anybody know of any good documentaries or whatnot about what was taking place in Europe in the early to mid 30's?

We actually had a book club on this book, and I was not particularly a fan of it, either.

I just finished My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad. I wasn't sure what to expect when I started because when something's touted as a classic it can be iffy, especially if it wasn't originally in English (a bad translation can ruin a perfectly good book and stuff gets lost). But it's a really fun story about an extended Iranian family's feuds in WWII Tehran, though with some lower-key sadder moments too, and I personally will never see the words 'San Francisco' the same again. Dick Davis did well with the translation too.

I'm in the middle of The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman's sequel to The Half-made World. I loved the tone and world of the first book- the mysteries look like they're by definition unsolvable and the reader and characters learn to adapt to that. The inevitable, soul-destroying order of the Line and the futile chaotic terrorism of the Gun catch the "normal" world in the middle of an unwinnable war, one whose rules aren't even clear.

Initially I was skeptical of the second book as it doesn't focus on Creedmoor and the events of the first, but a tangential character is brought in, the world is expanded, and the events occur on what seems to be a grander scale. I highly recommend it. If you haven't read The Half-made World, get out there and do it!

Turns out I agree with you.
Better written and more tense in plotting - I don't agree that it's just more of the same. The addition of a missing kid story gave everything an urgency that for me as a father is somewhat easier to relate to than the 'save the galaxy and prevent genocide' large picture stuff. The three new characters where also well written and the whole diplomacy game on a huge scale worked well - and it brought the overall story forward, and in a way reminiscent of Clarke's 2001 and sequels, you want to know what's going on with the alien stuff.

Now I'm just annoyed that Amazon want me to pay $3.79 for each installment of Scalzi's new serial because I'm foreign - making the entire novel more expensive than the hardcover once that's out - and iBooks won't sell it to me at all. Stupid region pricing.

I just finished Ringworld's Children. I hadn't read anything in the series since The Ringworld Throne in 1996, and I didn't notice when Niven published this one a few years ago. He still has his slightly-creepy fixation with alien sex*, but I thought he moved the overall storyline along in a much more satisfying way than the last book did. Thumbs up.

I also just found out that he's recently published a whole slew of new Known Space books (Fleet of Worlds, Juggler of Worlds, etcetera), with a co-author**. I'm a sucker for the Known Space series, so I'll probably check them out.


*"Greetings stranger. Shall we engage in risathra?" I imagine Niven sitting in one of those bubble chairs and wearing a smoking jacket as he types this stuff in an apartment like Don Drapers', with James Brown playing in the background. No, this is not a positive image.

** which I take to mean they're basically written by the other guy, but are much more marketable with Niven's name attached.

Finished the last little bits of three books today.

Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends by David Wilton -- I like seeing urban legends debunked, and seeing linguistic ones torn apart is even more fun.

Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul, edited by Mark D. White -- made me want to read a bunch of philosophers referenced in the book's essays. this may or may not be a good thing.

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris -- I agree with some of Harris' points about the problems with religion, but I feel like he's a bit too extreme. Still, good read. thought-provoking.

Read the last Robert Jordan book, Knife of Dreams this week, followed by the three Brandon Sanderson-Robert Jordan books, Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light

Series might have bogged down after/in Lord of Chaos, but it was nice that RJ went out on a high note, KoD was the best book he'd written since Fires of Heaven - things happen and plots are resolved - or at least positioned for resolution.

Last three books are definitely in Sanderson's own style, more than Jordan's - and it took him a book or two to get the feel for the characters (Matt especially), but things happen and it was a great finish to the series. Nice to have a long running series end with a satisfying ending - thats a rare commodity these days...

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Looking back over 2012, I'm calling Railsea by China Mieville my favorite book of the year. I read a lot, but that one just sticks with me - well written, imaginative - its rare now to read a book that can engage my mind months later.

I read Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. It's pretty gonzo in a Hitchiker's Guide sort of way. Most of the world has uploaded themselves into the cloud, which has dismantled most of the solar system to create more processing power (how this works is kind of hand waved). Every once in awhile the cloud takes notice of meat people back on earth and sends them something. This "godvomit" might cure the common cold or it might wipe out half the planet, so there's a world court which reviews stuff that comes down and either lets it loose on the world, or destroys it. Our everyman hero is a potter who hates tech and finally gets on one of these juries. He plans on rejecting whatever it is, but stuff happens.

And that's only the setup for the first third. It gets really crazy. They name drop everything from Hitchiker's Guide to Doctor Who, but in a less obvious way than Ready, Player One.

I also got this e-book off Doctorow's site for free, and it's the first book I've read that has pledge drives sprinkled throughout. After each section they break in, say, "Hey, that was pretty cool, wasn't it. Did you like it? You could actually buy this book from these places, or, if you think you don't want it because you're already reading it, you could donate a copy to a school or library by following these links." I've read other Doctorow stuff from his website too, and this is the first time that we've had words from our sponsor. I've bought his books and given them to people because I read them for free. Ads in books don't exactly breed goodwill, and it made me less likely to give him money than just giving the thing away for free did.

Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind's Oldest Taboo by Carole A. Travis-Henikoff was fun, in a grisly sort of way. Author occasionally went off on unrelated tangents, but stuck to the topic for the most part.

The cure for reading a book about people being horrible to each other: flipping through my copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature. For those of you who haven't read it, it's a science book about how humanity has gotten generally less violent over the course of our species' history. Yes, there is still violence, but it's greatly improved and probably will continue to improve. Steven Pinker is very well-respected, and his book gives me hope for humanity.

I recently finished World Without End, which I think was better than Pillars of the Earth. It felt like a more complete book, more complex and interesting. It takes place 200 years after the first, so although it's a sequel, it's not really.

I also quickly read an older Kim Stanley Robinson novella that became available on Kindle, A Short, Sharp Shock. It's good, but very surreal, like reading someone's dream diary.

I'm now reading Mary Gentle's Black Opera, which is a historical fantasy about music in post-Napoleonic Italy.

I finished Roadside Picnic which is the novel that gave rise to the movie Stalker which gave rise to the Stalker series of games, which are in my backlog but which I have never played.

Aliens have landed on Earth, done something, and left. We don't know what they were here for, we don't know why they left. They never tried to communicate with us. The areas where they landed are now known as The Zones, and all sorts of weird stuff happened in there, and is still happening in there. All the animals died. Whole towns died. Others mutated and "adapted to the new environment." The Zones have been walled off and no one goes in or out. The Institute has been set up to make expeditions into the Zones and study what they find. The first section of the book describes an Institute foray that seems like it goes a matter of yards into the Zone. Every step might kill you, but we've found stuff like never ending batteries, and bracelets that will stop aging.

Oh, and because people are people, some guys sneak into the Zone and bring out alien stuff and sell it on a black market. They're called Stalkers, and our hero is one of them.

I pretty much loved this book and now I want to play the games. Funny thing is, they first two, Stalker and Stalker: Clear Sky, are on disk and sitting on a shelf. That's how long I've had these games.

I dug the first Stalker, but then I hit a bug in a junkyard where the enemy spawn rate was just nuts, and they were like a a never ending wave. I might have to check out that book though.

Just started the mini-series on Netflix. I liked Pillars, but heard fairly bad things about WWE. We will watch it anyway because we're Kingsbridge fanbois.

They did a miniseries for WWE? I saw the Starz one for Pillars, which was good, but had no idea there was one for WWE. I'll have to watch it.

World Without End

It has Cynthia Nixon who I can't stand, which makes it harder to watch.

I think I may be the first person in Amazon's history to have bundled the Peter Hook tell-all about Joy Division with Peter Criss' tell-all about Kiss.