What Are You Reading?

[Innula Zenovka]

Now this is what fantasy is for -- An ork priestess is destined to be a virgin sacrifice to the god of death, but is persuaded at the last minute by a somewhat shady magician to run away from the temple and train as his personal assassin.

Includes lines such as

She was tentative in a way that suggested maybe she hadn’t kissed a girl with tusks before.

The Unspoken Name (The Serpent Gates, #1)

What if you knew how and when you will die? Csorwe doe…

www.goodreads.com

Queer Orc Assasins and Magical Intrigue: The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood - Reactor

On rare occasions you pick up a book that gives you everything you want and leaves you wide-eyed, searching for more. It’s a delightful feeling, to be surprised over and over again throughout the course of a novel and still want to read more at the end of it. I didn’t close The Unspoken Name […]

www.tor.com

 

[Essence Lumin]

Briefing for a Descent into Hell - Doris Lessing

I'd forgotten all about this novel. It's been decades since I've read it. The style is not for everyone. It requires one to have a love of description without worrying about the plot too much, at least at first. A man is found and placed in a mental hospital. He has no identity that they can determine. He believes himself to be endlessly sailing and rafting around the Atlantic with no escape. I don't remember the story and am only up to page 30 but here is an example of the prose:

The sea is rougher than it was. As the raft tilts up the side of a wave I see fishes curling above my head, and when the wave comes crashing over me fishes and weed slide slithering over my face, to rejoin the sea. As my raft climbs up up up to the crest the fishes look eye to eye with me out of the wall of water. There’s that air creature, they think, just before they go slop over my face and shoulders, while I think as they touch and slide, they are water creatures, they belong to wet. The wave curls and furls in its perfect whirls holding in it three deep sea fish that have come up to see the sky, a tiddler fit for ponds or jam jars, and the crispy sparkle of plankton, which is neither visible nor invisible, but a bright crunch in the imagination. If men are creatures of air, and fishes whether big or small creatures of sea, what then are the creatures of fire?

 

[Rose Karuna]

I am reading Stephen King's "The Stand" again. Why during a pandemic, I don't really know, it just fits I guess. This is the extended version so there are some new things.

I ordered "The Book of Night with Moon" because I could not get it on Kindle and I'd like to have a hard copy so I'll probably re-read that when I get it.

I also downloaded "The House in the Cerulean Sea" by Klune and I intend to read that when I'm finished with "The Stand".

Now that I've retired I stop whatever I'm doing at 3:00 and I read from 3:00 to 5:00 and then start dinner. I love reading and why not carve a couple hours out of each day to do it.

Ok - I admit it, if the books kind of boring, I nap from 3 to 5, but sitting up, always sitting up.

 

[Free]

I am reading Stephen King's "The Stand" again. Why during a pandemic, I don't really know, it just fits I guess.

That's the book that stopped me from reading any more Stephen King. Not due to the writing. Not due to the story. Just a section I can't remove from my mind....

I ordered "The Book of Night with Moon" because I could not get it on Kindle and I'd like to have a hard copy so I'll probably re-read that when I get it.

It's not in print! Although Audible has it - weird.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

I love Roger Zelazny, so I've been jumping through his stuff in no particular order. Most recently 'Jack of Shadows' (in print) and 'Deus Irae' with Philip K. Dick on audible - which I regret. The reader was getting too cutesy with the sing-songy voices for the not-human characters.

I also picked up a fragile old illustrated copy of Wollstonecraft's 'The Modern Prometheus', (aka Mary Shelly's 'Frankenstein'), which as near as I can tell was printed in 1932. I'm not a rare book collector but saw it and had to have it.

Lately though, it's been more lite-snack-reading, tearing through Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series, while I wait to get my hands on Brandon Sanderson's 'Rhythm of War', the 4th in the Stormlight Archive. (more like 7th & 8th considering the length of his books!)

That's when I'm reading at all, considering the the harsh "Don't Start Any Long Books" vibe that reality has been giving off this year.

 

[Tirellia]

It's all Innula's fault for mentioning that this book is available. I'd looked at the price of old editions and declined, but it's been reprinted.

Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

Chapter one is less than two pages long and I was in tears before the last paragraph.

I was trying to read Just Capital, The Liberal Economy by Adair Turner but I keep having 'who cares, we're all fucked' moments and put it down again.

Other than that, cheap and nameless billionaire/vampire/pirate porn. Shameless escapism.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I've just started A Deadly Education, the first part of a trilogy that's apparently getting a film adaptation

Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education Is Getting a Film Adaptation - Reactor

Naomi Novik’s upcoming fantasy trilogy Scholomance is coming to the big screen! According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal Pictures has won the film rights to the series, beginning with an adaptation of book 1, A Deadly Education. The publication reports that Todd Lieberman and David...

www.tor.com

First announced in February, A Deadly Education was described by publisher Del Rey as “a twisted, super dark, super modern, female-led Harry Potter.” Set at the titular hidden school for witchcraft and wizardry rumored to be run by the Devil, the Scholomance series follows protagonist El Higgins, who is gifted with a mysterious dark power and must make it to graduation with her fellow students—or meet an untimely end. An excerpt can be read at Entertainment Weekly, and you can also listen to Novik read from the book herself.

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)

Lesson One of the Scholomance: Learning has never been this deadly. A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically...

www.goodreads.com

The Tor.com article has a link to Novik's reading.

I've only read the first couple of chapters, and it's great fun. I'm not yet wholly sure of the audience -- young adults, certainly, but I think it's aimed at a far larger audience than that, with its very enjoyable dark riposte to Harry Potter.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I just gave myself a treat of a subscription to The Paris Review. If you aren't familiar, it is a literary magazine that has been around since the '50s well known for interviews and writings by many famous authors (Wikipedia). For the $50 / year subscription I get the magazine and also the entire 67 year archive online. Woohoo! For some reason, I'm interested in Dorothy Parker at the moment. They have a lengthy interview with her and a few other pieces.

 

[Rose Karuna]

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

I'm enjoying this partly because I'm from British Columbia but also because it's an intriguing story.

The Glass Hotel

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at...

www.google.com

 

[Isabeau]

The author Heather O’Neill just delivered a signed copy of her book at my door!!! All wrapped up with string.

This one:
Daydreams of Angels

 

[Noodles]

I realized my Audible subscription has access to their newer library feature. There honestly isn't a lot on the free list that seems that interesting, I mostly subscribe when I can get a short term deal for credits, and because subscribers get access to really good sales.

Anyway, I have been listening to these Minecraft books through the library. They are definitely geared towards a younger audience, but they are kind of fun and do keep a fairly decent bit of continuity from story to story. They are almost disgustingly wholesome however. Like the second book involved tracking down a griefer harassing everyone and the end result was basically to forgive and forget because the griefer was sorry.

There is also this weird single mindedness to all of the main characters. Like they sort of have classes, like farmer and potion maker and treasure hunter, and often their "problems" are all things that would be super easy to solve in a world of infinitely generated resources, but everyone acts like they couldn't just collect up a bunch of dirt or wood in like 5 seconds to overcome some obstacle. Meanwhile they all manage to just break out all the Obsidian they may ever need to escape into the Nether at a moment's notice.

 

[k_leh]

I'm reading The Book of Law (1904)
A very weird, still an interesting book (a small book review here)

The two quotes will probably interest you:
"The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading."
"Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence."

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Just finished reading the The Burning God, the final volume in R F Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy

The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

An epic historical military fantasy, inspired by the bl…

www.goodreads.com

It's a quite astonishing military and political fantasy, set in a sort-of steampunk world based on C20th Chinese history, with gods, shamans and monsters thrown in -- Western colonialism seen from the Chinese point of view.

A very impressive series -- I thought I would be put off by the military emphasis but I found it very gripping. If you enjoy Joe Abercrombie, then this is certainly worth a look.

And Rin, the protagonist, really is something.

 

[ranner]

I'm reading Chang-Rae Lee's - Native Speaker. It is about a Korean American man who tries to rebuild his personal and professional life while discovering his identity. The novel reminded me of the Korean movie Minari (2020). However, in Minari, the family sticks together to build and shape their collective identity.

 

[Rose Karuna]

I stumbled across this and love Neil Gaiman's books. Sadly, it's not in the Amazon store and I'm not sure where to find it.

Neil Gaiman | Cool Stuff | Short Stories | I Cthulhu

www.neilgaiman.com

 

[Essence Lumin]

I'm reading The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington which is all of her short stories. I love the surreal writing style. You might miss something if you skip part of a sentence! It's a hoot. Here's a little sample in the middle of one of her stories about the Neutral Man.

I saw a man of such neutral appearance that he struck me like a salmon with the head of a sphinx in the middle of a railway station. The extraordinary neutrality of this individual gave me such a disagreeable impression that I staggered to a chair.

“Would you like to meet D?” the young man asked. “He is a very remarkable man.”

I was just going to reply when a woman dressed in pale blue taffeta, who wore a very hard expression, took me by the shoulder and pushed me straight into the gaming room.

“We need a fourth for bridge,” she told me. “You play bridge, of course.” I didn’t at all know how, but kept quiet out of panic. I would have liked to leave, but was too timid, so much so that I began to explain that I could only play with felt cards, because of an allergy in the little finger of my left hand. Outside, the orchestra was playing a waltz which I loathed so much I didn’t have the courage to say that I was hungry. A high ecclesiastical dignitary, who sat on my right, drew a pork chop from inside his rich, crimson cummerbund.

“Take it, my daughter,” he said to me. “Charity pours forth mercy equally on cats, the poor, and women with green faces.” [earlier in the story she had put on green makeup - Essence]

The chop, which had undoubtedly spent a very long time near the ecclesiastic’s stomach, didn’t appeal to me, but I took it, intending to bury it in the garden.

When I took the chop outside, I found myself in the darkness, weakly lit by the planet Venus. I was walking near the stagnant basin of a fountain full of stupefied bees, when I found myself face to face with the magician, the neutral man.

 

[bubblesort]

I've been rereading I, Robot, because the new Apple+ Foundation series put me in the mood for some Asimov. The Apple+ Foundation series is great, BTW, except for obnoxious editing, and bad action, which is probably because the corona lockdowns hit halfway through production, so I give them a pass on that for the first season. They do diverge from the Foundation books quite a lot at times, but I generally like the ways they diverge.

Anyway, the last short story in I, Robot is The Evitable Conflict, and it got me thinking about our current global supply chain issues. In the story, there's a global government, and the supply chains of the world are run by AI. The AI has been making some mistakes, causing supply and demand shocks, which isn't supposed to happen with AI. The whole point of letting an AI run things is that they don't let that happen. The protagonist finally figures out that the under-runs and over-runs are being done to hurt a specific group of humans, called the Society for Humanity, who are anti-AI. The AI decides that AI is good for humanity, so the Society for Humanity is hurting humans when they hurt AI, so they must be stopped. To stop them, the AI turns the global supply chain against them.

It does make me think about who is getting hurt the most from the supply chain issues we're having, in the real world, today. Obviously, the poor, and minorities are suffering from higher prices and scarcity, but the pain from these supply shocks seems to cut through class divisions more than previous economic issues. Blue collar factory workers can't work if they can't make cars, and they can't make cars without chips. Investors betting on commodities arriving before they rot are out of luck. Retailers are at the mercy of fickle politics surrounding shipping containers. Nobody has enough ports or trucks. The supply chain is so complex, if some rogue AI did this to target specific people with the supply chain, like in The Evitable Conflict, I can't imagine how anybody could figure that out, no matter how much information they have. It hurts my brain to even consider tracing the issue to one group being targeted like that.

 

[Rose Karuna]

Leonora Carrington

What ever drugs her or her characters are doing, can I haz some please?

 

[Free]

I've been rereading the first 2 books in Dan Simmons' science fiction tetralogy the Hyperion Cantos.

It's fascinating to me how often genre stories, when you return to them after many years, don't hold up all that well to reappraisal due simply to ones maturation, or to the change of years. It can be the storytelling, or plot, or characterization - or all of them at once. And when it comes to SF, science and/or historical circumstances overtaking the themes or turning the future-prognosticating aspects of it into a parody of speculation. I'm finding Simmon's prose a little over-earnest at times, but I seem to recall I had the same problem with it the last time I read these books. Otherwise, I'm absorbed in the effort of going over this story again. And a lot of it I've forgotten, so there's still surprise in some of the details.

The books are 30 years old but read a lot like modern (if not "postmodern") SF and I'm glad that sometimes you can look back on something you enjoyed early in your life and still find a lot there to enjoy.

 

[Essence Lumin]

What ever drugs her or her characters are doing, can I haz some please?

She is best known as a surrealist painter but wrote that one novel and a bunch of short stories.