What are you reading?

[comrade_general]

Could it be found online maybe?

[Glaurung]

Could it be found online maybe?

Yes (or so Google tells me). It's also more widely available as a paper copy than I expected, perhaps as a result of a US revised edition as recently as 2006.

[Son of the King]

Currently reading Iron Winter, the third book in the Northland trilogy by Stephen Baxter.

[vulcanology]

Old forum but I might as well drop my recent reads in here. I just finished 'a long way to a small angry planet' recently and would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is into the space-faring area of science fiction. I also finished 'The Martian' after putting off reading it for ages and it was fantastic - honestly right up my alley for the kind of tone I love in writing.

[Jubal]

Don't worry, we're very relaxed about necroposting

The last book I read was Zen Cho's Sorceror to the Crown, which is a sort of Victoriana-themed magicians-and-faery book. It was well written, though it sort of threw me that there was a pseudo-Victoriana in the writing style itself - it was kept extremely verbose throughout, which I assume was to keep it in-theme, though the plot was so thoroughly un-Victorian (and in a good way) that it jarred a little. I think Zen Cho actually lives in London, but it nonetheless felt like a slightly international view of how England is (which is to say, divided between "London" and "The Countryside Which Has Funny Named Places In It") - so there were a couple of things like that which made me feel a bit like I was in a rather "thin" sort of Victoriana setting, which was a pity in some ways as the faery stuff was really nicely done and she's clearly got a great talent for world-building, so adding depth to the human world would've been nice. It was a very neat plot, anyhow, and tied together very nicely, and it dealt with societies and the importance (or not) of The Rules and of bureaucracy-politics in a way which appealed to me. It examined the differences between human and faery moralities in an interesting way, too, which I liked. Would recommend, anyway, if sorcerors with complex relations with their familiars and victorian gentlemen having to seek audiences with fairy kings and so on is up your alley.

[comrade_general]

Hory sheet need a tl;dr on that, hue.

[Lady Grey]

Don't worry, we're very relaxed about necroposting

The last book I read was Zen Cho's Sorceror to the Crown, which is a sort of Victoriana-themed magicians-and-faery book. It was well written, though it sort of threw me that there was a pseudo-Victoriana in the writing style itself - it was kept extremely verbose throughout, which I assume was to keep it in-theme, though the plot was so thoroughly un-Victorian (and in a good way) that it jarred a little. I think Zen Cho actually lives in London, but it nonetheless felt like a slightly international view of how England is (which is to say, divided between "London" and "The Countryside Which Has Funny Named Places In It") - so there were a couple of things like that which made me feel a bit like I was in a rather "thin" sort of Victoriana setting, which was a pity in some ways as the faery stuff was really nicely done and she's clearly got a great talent for world-building, so adding depth to the human world would've been nice. It was a very neat plot, anyhow, and tied together very nicely, and it dealt with societies and the importance (or not) of The Rules and of bureaucracy-politics in a way which appealed to me. It examined the differences between human and faery moralities in an interesting way, too, which I liked. Would recommend, anyway, if sorcerors with complex relations with their familiars and victorian gentlemen having to seek audiences with fairy kings and so on is up your alley.

SotK bought me that one for Christmas, yet to read it though

[Jubal]

My first completed book of 2019: The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared.

I absolutely loved it and would definitely recommend. It's a little like Forrest Gump in style - that is, the focus is on an ordinary-ish character who has had an utterly extraordinary life and met a ton of major world leaders and generally inadvertently changed the course of history. It's very, very funny, and written in a flash back/forward system between the present and sections of the eponymous character's past. It also includes an elephant, several explosions, dodgy fruit sales businesses, about half the major international wars in the twentieth century, and several glasses of vodka.

[Jubal]

And I've finally finished Sholokov's The Don Flows Home To The Sea. It's... big, for one thing, and it's only the second half of the Tikhii Don epic (the first part being Quiet Flows the Don). It's a book with a heavy, painful realism to it, but one that perhaps finds that clashing now and again with the author's wish to write a tragedy. Covering the cossack revolts and Russian civil war from 1919 to 1921 roughly, its protagonist, Gregor Melekhov, is a well-off cossack who ends up fighting for insurgents, whites, reds, and bandits; there's a lot of battle drama and cossacks sabring people to death, though the focus of the novel is on the complex web of character interactions as members of the cossack village of Tatarsk end up fighting for different sides and dealing with war. It probably contains considerably more vodka than the book I mentioned in my previous post.

Next bit has spoilers:

Spoiler

Through the course of the book, the war takes an increasing toll on Gregor's family (indeed they just about all die). The tension between an adventure epic and a slice-of-life story is present throughout, though in most of the book the moves between grand narrative and its impacts on the Melekhov household make this sustainable - it gets harder later on as the cast of characters in Tatarsk is heavily winnowed down. It's all shot through with beautiful observational scene-setting, though sometimes in a depth that might be difficult to catch onto for those unused to the steppe landscape. The large-scale and small-scale are linked together well through most of the book - the lack of maps is actually a problem, though, as it frequently makes it tricky to envisage the spaces in which Gregor is operating.

The whole book, being pinned in realism, gets no effective climax: from the grand scope of the White retreat and Gregor's eventual switch to the Reds, the final parts of the book increasingly zoom in on his smaller interactions after demobilisation and into inglorious bandit companies. It's a peculiar narrative trick to slowly extinguish the protagonist's hopes but in a way that feels oddly small and undramatic. Whilst in the middle of the book Gregor's wife got a long and dramatic death scene, his lover Aksinia gets extinguished very suddenly despite being perhaps the book's most important female character, and just a few pages thereafter Gregor's daughter is 'killed off' in the book's final conversation, her death merely a five word report that isn't dwelt on at all in the text. I wasn't sure, in light of that, whether leaving Gregor alive and with future uncertainties entirely ignored at the end felt like an appropriate closure or simply a shrug of an ending.

Since my muscles have been playing up today and I couldn't do all the word processing I had planned, I also read right through If Only They Could Talk, which is the first book by James Herriot (actually a pseud but I've forgotten the guy's real name) about his career as a vet. It's a very nice read; funny in a gentle and very British way, good for observations on Yorkshire and its people, and on animals too. Not necessarily a book for the squeamish, since it spares little when it comes to shoving the accidentally passed uterus of a cow back into its body and similar things like that. It's the first book I've read in 2019 that does not include significant quantities of vodka.

[Jubal]

Lots of books recently!

I read all three books of N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy and I would hugely recommend them. Very powerful, punchy fantasy writing with a somewhat post-apocalypse vibe that tackles issues of oppression and slavery etc in ways I'm not that used to seeing in the fantasy genre. Her writing style is interesting, lots of second person text - the effect is spectacular though. I was left feeling less like I feel after reading most fantasy and more like after something like LOTR, in that I think Broken Earth really gave me a very different possible baseline look at what can be done with the fantasy genre, and I think it'll deservedly become a classic. Some books just hit you that way.

Also on the recently read & highly recommended: The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes. Very different to the Broken Earth - where the Broken Earth books are heavy, epic, and powerful, The Palace Job is just very, very good fun  - essentially it's a fairly played straight fantasy heist novel, executed very well and with a sharply written character cast and witty dialogue. It revels in its plot-writing, and continual twists and turns of who is one step ahead of whom. Despite being 400 pages or so it was a pretty quick read, it drags you through the plot at quite a pace.

I'm also partway through Ulysses, but I'll write that up when I'm done with it, which might be a while yet. It's... big. And mostly written in streams of consciousness.

[Jubal]

I was so exhausted after finishing Ulysses that I didn't bother writing anything about it at the time!

It was an interesting read, though not one I'll do again in a hurry - I was left a bit sceptical about its claims to be a sort of everyman paean to the human condition, and found it very wrapped up in past mentalities and social norms that felt ill at ease with how I think about the world. This is a problem with stream of consciousness novels - if you're doing it for a poem, that's one thing, but when you're spending 900 pages in someone else's brain, that's quite an undertaking if you're not sure you actually like the person all that much. The whole book is very very clever - the wordplay is intricate, the framing is very sharp, etc - but perhaps it does that at the expense of readability a bit. All in all, a decent read and I'm glad I did it, but I'm also a little bit glad it's done and I can find a few easier things on the brain to tackle next!

[Clockwork]

I may have posted this before but it's worth a repost even if I have: If you're a fan of absurdist very British humour, go read Lint by Steve Aylett. It's a masterpiece of a niche market.

[Jubal]

Ooh, I'd not even heard of it. That sounds a good idea for a read

I think the next thing on my list will be One Hundred Years of Solitude, which looks like it'll be interesting.

[Jubal]

I finished reading 100 Years of Solitude! It's definitely a "wow" level book, and it has a particular sort of creeping way of drawing you on through the multigenerational, semi magical and semi real, family tragedy that forms the core of its plot. There are so many tiny threads which can span multiple generations, and yet also repetition as character names and traits are recycled through the family. It deals with a number of really major themes, many of them quite grim ones, and the blurring of truth and fiction creates a powerful but also miasmic soup of a setting that one can just sort of sleepwalk through along with the characters. Would definitely recommend.

[Pentagathus]

Sound good wi L try