What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!
- Thread starter Ajidica
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Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I got pretty deep into that series, but never continued when one of the next books came out.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I would like to, but to relive all that pain....
I am close to the end of Alliance Rising, the newest Alliance-Union novel by C.J. Cherryh. It's a sequel to her much older novel, Finity's End, skipping ahead about 20 ship-years and who-knows-how-many standard years. As the story progressed, I started to wonder how soon the falling action would lead to the denouement...
... and discovered that this is part one of a two-part story arc within the larger series. The next book to come is Alliance Unbound.
It won't be out until July 2023!
THIS IS SO UNFAIR!!!
Not only do I have to wait a whole year for the end of the story, but once again she isn't doing a sequel to Regenesis... and that book needs a sequel to wrap up the loose ends. Cherryh is getting on in years, so there's not a lot of time left.
I just realized that Thanksgiving this year will be the 40th anniversary of the first time I met C.J. Cherryh at a science fiction convention. The first book of hers I ever read was Downbelow Station. The ones I re-read most often are Cyteen, Rimrunners, and her Merovingen Nights shared-world series.
... and discovered that this is part one of a two-part story arc within the larger series. The next book to come is Alliance Unbound.
It won't be out until July 2023!
THIS IS SO UNFAIR!!!
Not only do I have to wait a whole year for the end of the story, but once again she isn't doing a sequel to Regenesis... and that book needs a sequel to wrap up the loose ends. Cherryh is getting on in years, so there's not a lot of time left.
I just realized that Thanksgiving this year will be the 40th anniversary of the first time I met C.J. Cherryh at a science fiction convention. The first book of hers I ever read was Downbelow Station. The ones I re-read most often are Cyteen, Rimrunners, and her Merovingen Nights shared-world series.
Lapovna by Ottessa Moshfegh. A very strange novel. A superbly written, unusual story about a place that might resemble the Balkans. Lots of religious over and undertones. The author seems to be of some recent renown.
Chukchi Husky
Lone Wolf
While I'm away, I've brought a book with an appropriate title, "Yes, You Are Trans Enough" by Mia Violet.
Have a nice vacation!!!
EnglishEdward
Deity
Last Saturday I finished reading:
Inhibitor Phase
by the Welsh author
Alastair Reynolds
copyright 2021
that I had bought new from Waterstones.
It is a novel set in his Revelation Space Universe.
This volume is about the remnants of humanity trying to avoid extermination
from Inhibitors, self replicating robots, by obtaining alien technology.
Inhibitor Phase was a gripping read, all action, and not too much political theory.
Inhibitor Phase
by the Welsh author
Alastair Reynolds
copyright 2021
that I had bought new from Waterstones.
It is a novel set in his Revelation Space Universe.
This volume is about the remnants of humanity trying to avoid extermination
from Inhibitors, self replicating robots, by obtaining alien technology.
Inhibitor Phase was a gripping read, all action, and not too much political theory.
EgonSpengler
Deity
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- Jun 26, 2014
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- 12,260
I just picked up Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven't read a ton of his books, but I've mostly liked what I've read. I really liked Red Mars, but for some reason I never got around to the other Mars books. The Years of Rice and Salt and Aurora were both pretty good, I think. I also have New York 2140, but I didn't finish it - couldn't get into it, for some reason (I don't remember thinking it was bad, just got impatient or something, and never went back to finish it).
Synobun
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- Nov 19, 2006
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- 24,884
Good luck. Ministry for the Future should have been nonfiction. It is only very loosely a novel. I found the structure intolerable, personally.
The opening plot, though, is an accurate representation of what we are heading into. It has already very nearly happened a couple times in real life. So I guess it's great if you want to feel sad about reality.
You can always pick up the second book of the 3-body problem
(I stopped reading in the massive first chapter of book 2)
Chukchi Husky
Lone Wolf
Some of the doubts that I had about if I'm transgender or not have gone and that I really should've tried to find out if I was transgender much earlier. I started reading and had to stop at page 41 because I was crying so much. Her early life in school, just change a few of the details and stick it in the South West of England and it could've been me growing up, except she figured out that she is transgender during her teens while while at that time I would've just blamed my feelings at the time on autism.
Reading further on and the book has warned me of the problems with transitioning in the UK.
What's funny is that I bought it at a secondhand bookshop for ~2 dólares and it turns out that it sells on places like Amazon and eBay for between 40 and 100 of the same currency.
This shows that you either got lucky or there are people on Amazon and eBay who are out to make a quick sale from people who haven't done a thorough search of their options.
There's a notorious Star Trek fanzine from the early '70s called Spock Enslaved. It was mentioned in a book about Star Trek fandom in the fanfiction chapter, and of course everyone who read that book got curious.
Fast-forward 30+ years when I finally got online and discovered that hey, you actually don't need to go to conventions to find fanzines... and saw that the usual price for this particular title was either $250 or even $500. And that's in American currency.
I figured there must be other people selling this who would realize that nobody in their right mind would pay that much, and so I got one - price about $25 CAD. I don't care if it's an original or reprint. I just care that the seller must have realized that if they want to sell it, they needed to set a reasonable price.
Glass Bottoms
ONE MORNING, after leaving a glass emptied of Scotch whisky out overnight, photographer Ernie Button noticed what he calls a “patterned film of fine lines” on the bottom of the glass. Experimenting, he found that most aged whisky can produce the lines, which depend on factors like drying time, whisky age and alcohol content— and create patterns as unique as snowflakes.
Mr. Button set to work with colored lights, filters and artful cropping to enhance the texture of the bottom-glass residue—each final image takes about 10 hours to produce—and thus was born “The Art of Whisky” (Chronicle Books).
In the book, Princeton professor and fluid-mechanics specialist Howard A. Stone, one of several scientists to have studied the patterns, writes that they form because water and ethyl alcohol evaporate at different speeds; surface tension changes as they dry. The grain in the whisky and wood from the cask also play a part.
The somewhat psychedelic results can turn the bottom of a glass into a stormy ocean under a star-filled sky (residue of a Macallan), an undiscovered planet (a Glenlivet), mother-of-pearl shells (a Balvenie DoubleWood), one-celled organisms (a Glenfiddich) or the X-ray of a limb joint (a Clynelish).
From WSJ
ONE MORNING, after leaving a glass emptied of Scotch whisky out overnight, photographer Ernie Button noticed what he calls a “patterned film of fine lines” on the bottom of the glass. Experimenting, he found that most aged whisky can produce the lines, which depend on factors like drying time, whisky age and alcohol content— and create patterns as unique as snowflakes.
Mr. Button set to work with colored lights, filters and artful cropping to enhance the texture of the bottom-glass residue—each final image takes about 10 hours to produce—and thus was born “The Art of Whisky” (Chronicle Books).
In the book, Princeton professor and fluid-mechanics specialist Howard A. Stone, one of several scientists to have studied the patterns, writes that they form because water and ethyl alcohol evaporate at different speeds; surface tension changes as they dry. The grain in the whisky and wood from the cask also play a part.
The somewhat psychedelic results can turn the bottom of a glass into a stormy ocean under a star-filled sky (residue of a Macallan), an undiscovered planet (a Glenlivet), mother-of-pearl shells (a Balvenie DoubleWood), one-celled organisms (a Glenfiddich) or the X-ray of a limb joint (a Clynelish).
From WSJ
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Impossible Journey: Two Against the Sahara, by Michael Asher.
A married couple - he's British, she's Italian, and they married for the purpose of making this journey - travels across the Sahara from Morocco to Egypt, on camel and on foot.
I read this twice before, a long time ago. It was in one of my grandmother's Reader's Digest condensed books, and I found it so interesting that I decided to read the unabridged version. That was a long time ago, and the other day I decided to take a break from science fiction and historical novels and re-read this.
A married couple - he's British, she's Italian, and they married for the purpose of making this journey - travels across the Sahara from Morocco to Egypt, on camel and on foot.
I read this twice before, a long time ago. It was in one of my grandmother's Reader's Digest condensed books, and I found it so interesting that I decided to read the unabridged version. That was a long time ago, and the other day I decided to take a break from science fiction and historical novels and re-read this.
EnglishEdward
Deity
Today I finished reading:
Bones to Ashes
by the North American author
Kathy Reichs
copyright 2007
It is one of her Temperance Brennan, forensic scientist, novels, that I bought second hand,
It is set in Canada.
It is about the investigation of missing teenagers and the identification of dead bodies.
I worked out that one had died of ..<...with held > .. and one missing one was alive.
Strangely enough a comparatively happy ending,
Bones to Ashes
by the North American author
Kathy Reichs
copyright 2007
It is one of her Temperance Brennan, forensic scientist, novels, that I bought second hand,
It is set in Canada.
It is about the investigation of missing teenagers and the identification of dead bodies.
I worked out that one had died of ..<...with held > .. and one missing one was alive.
Strangely enough a comparatively happy ending,
This isn't a book, just a short story.
The Invisible Man, by Chesterton.
It was meh, generally. Father Brown in no way is on the level of Dupin. That said, Chesterton does follow Poe in one thing, his story has a fantastical element (high tech machines). But even there it's not in the same form, given in this story the fantasy exists solely as a diversion (and for a dramatic moment), while in Poe's Rue Morgue it's actually what the detective has to work with.
The Invisible Man, by Chesterton.
It was meh, generally. Father Brown in no way is on the level of Dupin. That said, Chesterton does follow Poe in one thing, his story has a fantastical element (high tech machines). But even there it's not in the same form, given in this story the fantasy exists solely as a diversion (and for a dramatic moment), while in Poe's Rue Morgue it's actually what the detective has to work with.
EnglishEdward
Deity
Yesterday I finished reading:
Widowmaker Unleashed
by
Mike Resnick
copyright 1998
that I had bought second hand in Norwich.
It is a brilliant cross between sci-fi and western genres.
Widowmaker Unleashed
by
Mike Resnick
copyright 1998
that I had bought second hand in Norwich.
It is a brilliant cross between sci-fi and western genres.
I'm currently reading Steve Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why it Matters. The entire book is data-parsing, so it's....slow going.
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