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

[Takhisis]

And yet we have a St. Ursula.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Tiamat's Wrath (2019 - book 8 of The Expanse). Hang on, did they just kill Bobbie? Sure seems like it. Well, [fig]. Could be a fakeout, I guess. The destruction of everything in the Slow Zone was kind of nuts, too.

There's a passage that reminded me of Luthen's speech in episode 10 of Andor:

Spoiler :

[Naomi] felt herself sliding into the same analytic mindset that had been her whole life in the container. She's hardly been out - a few weeks on the Bhikaji Cama and now here with Chava - and slipping back already felt cold and constraining. Her mind ticked through the implications of Bobbie's plan: the exposure of the Storm, the scrutiny that would fall on the Jovian moon bases, the symbolic and practical effects of Duarte's losing a second Magnetar-class ship.

And as she did, a quiet part of her mourned.

The day she'd gone into the container and committed herself to living as a pea in a shell game had been the day she left the Rocinante behind. It felt like relief at the time. Like her soul had been been rubbed raw, and the container was her bandage. Her whole life, she'd survived the unsurvivable by falling back and getting small. And every time, she had come back healed. Scarred, sometimes. But healed.

All it had taken was a handful of human interactions to show her that the Naomi who had fled into the container wasn't the won who'd come out. Time had passed, and she had found what peace she was going to find.

When she'd taken up Saba's role, it had been from necessity, but it had also been because she was ready to. It was only after the fact that she was starting to see what leaders were. The price the position required.

 

[Takhisis]

I am now on to a strange book by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never let me go (2005).

A very dark science-fiction horror work indeed, ever so gentle, ever so dreadful.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Currently reading Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. Funny and informative, but the author's obsessive use of the word 'colonialism' to describe every instance of human-animal behavior that's not 'noble indigeneous people living in magic peace and harmony with mother nature' is tiresome.

 

[EnglishEdward]

And yet we have a St. Ursula.

This one

Saint Ursula - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(or do you mean the patron saint if the EU ?)

 

[Gori the Grey]

I'm reading G.R. Elton's England Under the Tudors. I only mention it because of a funny experience with an end note (end of chapter). I'm mostly not bothering with the end notes, but I get the end of Chapter III, and they follow immediately, so my eye catches the first one: "There always are." That's not the kind of thing one usually puts in an end note, so I have to track back to the sentence that it's a note for: "though there were limits to what the crown could do."

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm reading G.R. Elton's England Under the Tudors. I only mention it because of a funny experience with an end note (end of chapter). I'm mostly not bothering with the end notes, but I get the end of Chapter III, and they follow immediately, so my eye catches the first one: "There always are." That's not the kind of thing one usually puts in an end note, so I have to track back to the sentence that it's a note for: "though there were limits to what the crown could do."

Sounds a bit snarky for a history reference book.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It is. That's why I shared it with you all. Now he has a kind of breezy style over all. And as I understand it, his is considered one of the top histories of the period, so he can get away with it. But this amused me.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It is. That's why I shared it with you all. Now he has a kind of breezy style over all. And as I understand it, his is considered one of the top histories of the period, so he can get away with it. But this amused me.

I was commenting, not criticizing.

 

[Takhisis]

This one

Saint Ursula - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(or do you mean the patron saint if the EU ?)

Any, really. I'm just commenting on the name itself.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Just finished Adventures with Ed, a biography of Ed Abbey. Now reading One Life at a Time, Please, Abbey's last collection of essays.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Yesterday, I finished reading:

Clipjoint

by the Scottish author:

Wilhelmina Baird

it is a follow on to her Crashcourse.

 

[Snerk]

Update on Anna Karenina:

It's alright but I don't see the big deal. It's your standard aristocratic intrigues and affairs imo. Perhaps it get's better.

 

[PhroX]

Re-read Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana for the first time in probably 20 years and I was a little disappointed as it didn't live up to my memories of it being one of my all time favourites. It's one of Kay's earlier works, and the first of the "fantasy heavily inspired by history" novels that he would become known for, and, having read his later works, it does now feel like he was still working on perfecting his craft with Tigana. The Sarantine series, The Last Light of the Sun, Under Heaven and so on are noticeably better books. That said, Tigana is still good, and I did enjoy re-reading it, just maybe not as much as my old memories told me I should've....

 

[bene_legionary]

Update on Anna Karenina:

It's alright but I don't see the big deal. It's your standard aristocratic intrigues and affairs imo. Perhaps it get's better.

Just wait until you get to Levin and his love of farming! It is a challenge and I can see why it can be dull. What part and chapter are you on?

 

[Snerk]

Just wait until you get to Levin and his love of farming! It is a challenge and I can see why it can be dull. What part and chapter are you on?

Part 2 chapter 22 right now. It's indeed concerning Levin at his estate actually. It's well written I just feel like it's not that special for a book that is very celebrated. I like it but I've been more engaged. But there's plenty left.

 

[Hygro]

I got lost, what do you mean by Ivory Tower?

The all theory world of the university

 

[Smellincoffee]

Just finished One Life at a Time, Please by Ed Abbey. Not his best collection, but there are a few in there that make it worth seeking out for themselves along. Also finally finished Origins by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I thought was more cosmologically oriented than it actually was. 40% percent of it is on the origin of matter, order, the cosmos -- the rest is on the prospects for life elsewhere in the universe, which wasn't what I signed up for.

 

[EgonSpengler]

In the discussion of zombie-pandemic-apocalypse fiction, I had to slap my forehead for forgetting about Justin Cronin's The Passage (2010). If you like horror novels or post-apocalypse novels, I heartily recommend it. It's not technically a zombie apocalypse (even though it basically is), it's a vampire apocalypse. Sometimes the details matter, sometimes they don't. And if you like it, it's the first book in a trilogy (that I've yet to continue, so if you post any spoilers for The Twelve or City of Mirrors, please note them accordingly). Note that there was a failed attempt to adapt The Passage as a television series in 2019. Definitely do not watch that before reading the book. If you've read the book and are just curious to see what they did, I didn't think it was terrible, but it wasn't wholly successful, either, and got canceled after one 10-episode season.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Currently reading Revolutionary Characters: Why the Founders were Different. Gordon S. Woods examines the unique aspects of several of the founding fathers -- Ben Franklin as 'an invention', for instance, someone who was diplomatically instrumental, but ignored at his death and not deified until later on, as a self-made man. The figures included are George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Aaron Burr -- in that curious order. As an Adams man I take umbrage.