Which Book Are You Reading Now? Volume XII

[Dachs]

Am reading The Fragrant Oyster, twelfth book in the Sir Pelvis Johnwood series by L. L. Fanshaw. Outstanding assault on modesty thus far. Five scarves fluttered in shock out of five.

 

[Kyriakos]

(Re) reading The Murderess (after many years), by Alexander Papadiamantis. Aka the only novel in the era of current greek letters (post 1821) that does belong to the classics of world literature.
It is about

Spoiler :

a poor 60-year old woman, that can't escape the misery of her life, and at some point thinks that she is doing others a favour by killing a few pre-teen girls (because they seem to be a burden to the families, and better off dead themselves as well).

I am obviously reading the original, in greek, but the book does exist in english, eg:

 

[Zkribbler]

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Artemis by Andy Weir. It's his follow up to The Martian and it's not that great. It's a very easy/quick read so I'm sticking with it but the humor falls flat and there's none of the charm of his first book. It's also a little bit of a showcase for what I suspect are his libertarian ideals. Maybe he's just really just trying to show how a colony set up the way Artemis was would operate and that's divorced from his sense of how things should be. But given that he went out of his way to contrive a trivial plot point showing that pedophilia was allowed in Artemis 'because consent', it tends to make me think he's probably a hardcore libertarian.

 

[Takhisis]

Getting on with J.L. Borges' El Aleph.

 

[tjs282]

Artemis by Andy Weir. It's his follow up to The Martian and it's not that great. It's a very easy/quick read so I'm sticking with it but the humor falls flat and there's none of the charm of his first book. It's also a little bit of a showcase for what I suspect are his libertarian ideals.

Simpsons Heinlein did it first

Sorry for the one-liner. I don't often add anything substantial to this thread because I'm often reading about half a dozen books at once, at varying rates, so any post I made would likely be wildly inaccurate the following day. (Plus I'm kind of intimidated by all the intellectual heavy lifting I see being done here by e.g. @Owen Glyndwr, @Traitorfish et al...)

But anyway... in the last couple of weeks I have read:

"Gifts" (Ursula K. LeGuin) last weekend. I liked the writing (of course), and the premise/treatment was interesting, but it's really noticeably the first act of a (YA-aimed) trilogy: it ends rather abruptly on a cliffhanger of sorts, just as the (teenaged) protagonists make their first major life-decision, leaving the reader with a slightly cheated 'And then what...?' feeling. Guess I'll have to find the sequels (which I suppose was the intention of the publisher, even if not the author!)...
And yesterday -- just for some light relief -- "Never Go Back" (Lee Child). While I know they're pretty much disposable airport-novels, I do have a soft spot for the Jack Reacher series. This one was comparatively weak though -- had the potential to be interesting character-wise, but didn't really follow through, and there wasn't much tangible menace to the villains. It all felt a little hollow compared to e.g. "Tripwire", "61 Hours", or "Bad Luck and Trouble".

And right now I am also reading (in no particular order)

"[blah blah] Wealth of Nations" (Adam Smith) on my e-reader -- started years ago, but man it's heavy going. Why is it that none of these 18th-19thC writers seem to have grasped the idea that sentences can be shorter than whole(-page) paragraphs? (Darwin's Origin of Species took me 15 years to get all the way through, although in my defence I didn't actually have access to my copy of the book for >10 of those years... )
"The Seven Basic Plots" (Christopher Booker). Started off vaguely interesting but I'm halfway through it and it's getting increasingly repetitive/tedious. He has said basically the same thing over the last ~150 pages as he did in the first ~150 pages (using the same set of examples), and I have another ~350 pages still to go... At least it's easy reading.
"The Stars My Destination" (Alfred Bester). I am slowly and haphazardly (as I acquire them via gifts and occasional purchase) working my way through various titles in the "SF Masterworks" series that I'd never previously read. ("Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny, "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner, and "Mockingbird" by Walter Tevis were the last ones in this series I read before this one). I'm only a couple of chapters in so far, though.

Also vetting/re-reading various kids' books for bedtime stories:

Since Christmas we've done "Diggers" and "Wings" (finishing off "The Bromeliad" trilogy by Terry Pratchett) by alternating chapters, which was a great success, and a couple of the Moomin books (Tove Jansson) which weren't so much; possibly a little too surreal/random for post-millennial bratlings. We started Tom's Midnight Garden (Phillippa Pearce) a couple of weeks back, after a trial-by-first-chapter (preferred over "Midnight is a Place" by Joan Aiken, which I think is the better book, but hey, what does Dad know?)

Up next (at some point):

Anything We Love Can Be Saved (Alice Walker); salvaged last year from my Mum's destined-for-Oxfam-pile, still haven't got round to reading it
Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan); we just finished watching the Netflix series it was based on, so I bought it on 2-for-1 at the airport bookstore

 

[EnglishEdward]

I have just finished reading the hardback:

Two Sides of the Moon

by

David Scott and Alexei Leonov

which was quite inspiring.

 

[Takhisis]

"[blah blah] Wealth of Nations" (Adam Smith) on my e-reader -- started years ago, but man it's heavy going. Why is it that none of these 18th-19thC writers seem to have grasped the idea that sentences can be shorter than whole(-page) paragraphs? (Darwin's Origin of Species took me 15 years to get all the way through, although in my defence I didn't actually have access to my copy of the book for >10 of those years... )

There was a time in which people had nothing better to do with their time, and also people thought that long+elaborate+complicated was the same as being eloquent and effective.

 

[sophie]

There was a time in which people had nothing better to do with their time, and also people thought that long+elaborate+complicated was the same as being eloquent and effective.

Also the crisis of too much content was not a Thing. In 1776 15 Nonfiction books were published. Total. In the whole Western world. By contrast, some 400,000 books were published last year in the United States alone.

As Takh noted: books were extremely expensive in the 18th century. Effectively the only people who owned books were the wealthy, i.e. people of leisure. You're not in a position where you're having to worry about juggling work and reading.

 

[JohannaK]

I had a lecturer in uni who is a specialist in readwrs of English-language books in 17th and 18th Century Spain.

 

[Takhisis]

They must have learned English as she is spoke.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I am slowly and haphazardly (as I acquire them via gifts and occasional purchase) working my way through various titles in the "SF Masterworks" series that I'd never previously read. ("Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny, "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner, and "Mockingbird" by Walter Tevis were the last ones in this series I read before this one). I'm only a couple of chapters in so far, though.

Interesting list. I have a fair number of those in my personal library, though some have gone unread for decades and at this point I'm seriously considering weeding them out.

Dune and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress will always stay on my shelves, though. I've read both of them multiple times.

I've met three of the authors on the list: Greg Bear, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Silverberg.


As for my own current reading, there are two books on the go: Voyager (part of the Outlander series), and Henry Reed's Journey (a kids' book I read many years ago and decided to re-read the series). And of course I'm reading lots of fanfic.

 

[Dachs]

Rereading Lord of the Flies as a refresher before I teach it. It's a shame I can't make any David Cameron pig jokes in class. Nobody would get them.

Also reading Imperial Germany and War, 1871-1918, a new joint by Daniel Hughes and Richard DiNardo, because institutional histories of warfighting organizations.

 

[Traitorfish]

Space pew-pews and agrarian history, the breakfast of champions.

 

[JohannaK]

Simon has always been my favourite boy on the island.

 

[Dachs]

Simon has always been my favourite boy on the island.

he died for their sins

 

[JohannaK]

RIP. I love the crazy stuff he had going on.

 

[Takhisis]

Just finished Beasts in my Belfry by Gerald Durrell.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Artemis by Andy Weir. It's his follow up to The Martian and it's not that great. It's a very easy/quick read so I'm sticking with it but the humor falls flat and there's none of the charm of his first book. It's also a little bit of a showcase for what I suspect are his libertarian ideals. Maybe he's just really just trying to show how a colony set up the way Artemis was would operate and that's divorced from his sense of how things should be. But given that he went out of his way to contrive a trivial plot point showing that pedophilia was allowed in Artemis 'because consent', it tends to make me think he's probably a hardcore libertarian.

It quickly went from 'not great' to just trash. The main character just turned into a Mary Sue that's fixing all the problems because she's a genius at all things even though she's basically a FedEx worker with no education. Also, she's a woman that acts like a man in many situations.* I think Andy was trying to write an independent, liberated female character but she's a total dude-bro and she reads like he just doesn't know how to make a female character. She also lectures another character (who I'm 99% sure she's going to fall in love with out of nowhere and totally bang) on how he needs to learn how to 'act around women' as if she would know (because she's a dude-bro).

The plot was serviceable to a point but now it's entirely reliant on Mary Sue antics and people doing things they would never ever do in reality to move forward. I'm basically hate-reading it at this point but it's not as bad as Ready Player One so it's got that going for it.

Speaking of RP1, do 'young adult' novels typically start out as adult novels but then get downgraded when the editor/publisher realize they aren't that great?

*And just to be clear, I don't really mean there should be clear gender roles every character should have, I'm just trying to say that she's a dude-bro. Not a tomboy, a dude bro.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Andy Weir came to my work and had a talk and I learned that for The Martian, he actually published it for free on line and solicited audience feedback which he rolled back into the story as he wrote it. I believe this process took a few years and it made the book much, much better than if he had written it all by himself. I think Artemis could have used this same treatment to be honest. I don't think he's that strong of a writer on his own; he needs a lot of feedback to take a serviceable story and make it shine.