What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!

[EnglishEdward]

Yesterday I finished reading:

The Puzzler's War

by

Eyal Kless

A good sci-fi novel in a post war world.
Entertaining read, but it left a few loose ends,

 

[EgonSpengler]

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells (4/5)

I've been reading Murderbot, too. I'm only up to Rogue Protocol, though. I think a new one just came out recently.

 

[Kyriakos]

Ito stuff. Voices in the Dark etc. These are short stories, so easier to read.
While none is quite as memorable as the Enigma of the Amigara Fault (his most famous story), and the art isn't as great as in Uzumaki (Spiral), there are bits and pieces of interest. Particularly in the story about the boy with the nails in his mouth.
But, as usual, Ito doesn't care much for build-up, so stuff just happen and the reader is asked to accept them as real. This is an issue with some of the best short stories of King as well, and likewise at times Ito's talent is enough to help cover up for the abruptness.

 

[Ajidica]

Ardennes: 1944 by Antony Beevor. Pop-history book about the Battle of the Bulge. Fairly well written but I think the author made a critical mistake in how he organized the book. He chose to organize it by dates instead of by geographic region. The result was that he was shifting between talking about different regions/points of the Bulge without doing a particularly good job in making it clear he was moving to a new region. The maps weren't particularly good either. They were all different scales so it wasn't clear how they all fitted together. So if you want to orient yourself as to where the region is, you need to look at the map he is talking about in text, then flip to the front of the book to the big map, and then try and match place-names from the small map to the large. Still, Beevor did a good job with covering all layers of the battle - from the poor bloody infantry to the grand politics of the fight between Monty, Eisenhower, and Bradley. Book moved along at a good pace. Can't really complain about it and worth a read.

Currently working on Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings. Author is taking a "revisionist" point of view in emphasizing how the French, Vietnamese political figures, and Americans were all terrible. Interesting book so far, but he has a massive hate-boner for people who romanticize the North Vietnamese leadership.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ardennes: 1944 by Antony Beevor. Pop-history book about the Battle of the Bulge. Fairly well written but I think the author made a critical mistake in how he organized the book. He chose to organize it by dates instead of by geographic region. The result was that he was shifting between talking about different regions/points of the Bulge without doing a particularly good job in making it clear he was moving to a new region. The maps weren't particularly good either. They were all different scales so it wasn't clear how they all fitted together. So if you want to orient yourself as to where the region is, you need to look at the map he is talking about in text, then flip to the front of the book to the big map, and then try and match place-names from the small map to the large. Still, Beevor did a good job with covering all layers of the battle - from the poor bloody infantry to the grand politics of the fight between Monty, Eisenhower, and Bradley. Book moved along at a good pace. Can't really complain about it and worth a read.

Currently working on Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings. Author is taking a "revisionist" point of view in emphasizing how the French, Vietnamese political figures, and Americans were all terrible. Interesting book so far, but he has a massive hate-boner for people who romanticize the North Vietnamese leadership.

Beevor has a way with words

 

[Ajidica]

Beevor has a way with words

Care to elaborate? I found it well written, but fairly workmanlike. Adam Tooze The Wages of Destruction stands out to me the best written WW2 book I've read, though Tooze is writing in a very different style than Beevor.

 

[Zardnaar]

Care to elaborate? I found it well written, but fairly workmanlike. Adam Tooze The Wages of Destruction stands out to me the best written WW2 book I've read, though Tooze is writing in a very different style than Beevor.

Beevor is easy enough to read. Wages of Destruction is really good.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Beevor is easy enough to read. Wages of Destruction is really good.

Germany war economy was interesting to read about, Hitler did have economic goals in mind when he invaded Soviet but it was more likely he always planned to invade
I think that Soviet came close to collapse in 41,42 even with allied lend lease but afterward the industrial might made victory nearly impossible. The allies were constantly growing stronger

It also helps that we have access to post soviet archives, which balanced out the apologtic-german view of the eastern front war and blame shifting onto Hitler.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Yesterday I finished reading:

Early Riser

by

Jasper Fforde

A sci-fi novel postulating a world of global cooling where humans hibernate in winter;
and very strange things happen with dreams. Largely set in an alternative Wales.

It was well written, and very entertaining, I'd definitely recommend it.

 

[Darsnan]

Limits to Growth: the 30 year update.

The original book (published in 1972 by 3 MIT Researchers) was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. The book’s central point was that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash. The 30 year update which came out in the early 2000's show how the original forecasts had tracked, as well as additional observations from the original MIT researchers. Poking around the internets I found another update to the forecasts from 2020 which shows the predictions are tracking quite well. Probably have a little more time before the collapse of global society, but yeah, something to think about:

 

[tjs282]

After reading through the entire thread about the upcoming Dune movie(s) a couple of weeks back, I sat down and re-read the book last week. It took me two days = still great.

 

[Synobun]

The Golden City by John Twelve Hawks (3/5) [Should really be 2.5/5]
Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson (1/5)

 

[Kyriakos]

1/4 into Spiral Obsession (by Ito). The story is rather dull, imo.
Not that surprising; it is rare enough to be good in one thing (drawing), let alone two (+story-writing).

 

[Birdjaguar]

I finished the second book of the Poppy War series by RF Kuang: The Dragon Republic. Excellent, like the first book. On to the third and last: The Burning God. It is a fantasy earth-like world deeply rooted in a China-like history with elements of shamanism and Steampunk. The parallels to Earth history are obvious and fun. Well written. 600 pages to go. I wonder how it will end.

 

[Arakhor]

Date Me, Bryson Keller by Kevin van Whye is a funny and touching gay high school rom-com about the football captain who agrees to date the first person who asks him each week and the closeted gay book nerd who asks him. I saw the description on Amazon and knew I had to get the book, so I bought it from my local bookstore on Weds morning and immediately started reading it. It's funny and wholesome and so good. I am not disappointed in the slightest.

 

[Ajidica]

Been listening to the audiobook of The Silmarillion on the way to work, and I just completed the story of Beren and Luthien; after which I decided it should be renamed the story of Huan, the Goodest of Good Boys.

 

[Synobun]

Network Effect by Martha Wells (5/5)
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2/5)
Childhood Disrupted by Donna Jackson Nakazawa (3/5)
Recursion by Blake Crouch (2/5)

 

[EgonSpengler]

Network Effect by Martha Wells (5/5)
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2/5)
Childhood Disrupted by Donna Jackson Nakazawa (3/5)
Recursion by Blake Crouch (2/5)

I haven't read Childhood Disrupted, but I liked the other 3 well enough.

Although now that I'm thinking about it, I'm confusing the plots and characters of Recursion and Dark Matter in my head. I also read his "Wayward Pines" books, which were also fine. Crouch's books are "books for reading on the train", like Michael Chrichton, Dan Brown, Janet Evanovich, et al. At some point, I lost track of Evanovich's books because they were basically all the same, they had indistinguishable titles, and I couldn't remember which ones I'd already read. Crouch hasn't written enough to have reached that point, but he's working on it.


EDIT: I'm still on the fence about A Memory Called Empire. I think I went into it with misguided expectations. I read it described as "space opera", but I liked it more once I recognized it as cyberpunk. I never did get my head around the naming convention and I kind of stuttered every time a character's name was in a sentence, which was exasperating after a while. I do kind of want to read the sequel, though, which looks like it might be more space opera-ish (of course, now I'm into it for the cyberpunk aspects and might want more of that - I'm just never satisfied).

EDIT 2: Tor/Forge Blog, 15 February 2021 - "What's in a Teixcalaanli Name?" by Arkady Martine
Playing their little game, my Teixcalaanli name might be Eight Soupspoon (but my friends call me Ladle).

 

[Synobun]

Recursion had a great premise and opening chapter but it fell off a cliff immediately for me. I almost shut the book when it earnestly made references to people thinking Nelson Mandela had died in the 80s and the Berenstain/Berenstein Bears confusion in comparison to the fake-memory epidemic. Just a really pained pop culture reference that made me go, "Ah yes, I too visit Reddit." I didn't make it much further than that; the reviews say it gets much better later, but the tedium of the back-and-forth POVs was just a plain miss for me and I never made it that far.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I finished the last book of the Poppy War. Excellent from start to finish across all three books.