What are you reading?

[Frelga]

I think I tried LibriVox, years ago. If it's the site I'm thinking, it's recorded by volunteers so the quality of narration varies wildly. But they had a wide selection, including books that are out of print and don't exist in the audiobook form.

[Impenitent]

The quality of the readers is indeed patchy but the good ones are excellent! I suggest you 'taste-test' before downloading.

And now, I'm also trotting off to my kindle to see to the new Murderbot book!

[narya]

I am continuing to be sick, and continuing to spend most of my day reading. Here are the latest, from the past two weeks:

"This is Not a Game" by Walter Jon Williams. So good, I read it twice! The second time was to appreciate all the casual breadcrumbs that I missed the first time around. Williams wrote the hard SF books that I reviewed last month, that I had mixed feelings about, but this book is a whole level up in writing style. It was written about 10 years ago as a near future thriller, and the technology still holds up believably (except for everyone using PDAs). It is about some alternative reality gamers that end up blending their game with a real life murder mystery, and the risks are quite high, and have global implications. I was curious as to why there were certain similarities between William's style and Daniel Abraham's style (The Expanse and various fantasy series), so I did a little digging on the Internet, and found out they were good friends (Williams officiated Abraham's wedding), were in the same writing group in New Mexico, and Williams, who is older, mentored Abraham. I like the thoroughness with which Abraham drops the reader into a scene with all the sights, sounds and smells, and into the internal feelings (physical and mental) of the narrator, but Williams does it better, at least with this book. And the very near future high tech is fun. And the dialogue is well done. Yes, you should all read this book. You can get it on Hoopla. Now I'm on to the second book in the series, "Deep State".

"Things I Wish I Told My Mother", by Susan Patterson et al, a sweet novel about a grown woman and her difficult-to-love mother taking a European vacation together, shopping and dining their way through several countries, and finally getting to know each other and bond. (A different kind of fantasy fiction, in a way.) This was for a book club, which unfortunately I was not well enough to attend. I recommend it, though it was at times a little irritating (can you really eat that much good food and not gain 50 pounds, realistically?).

"Sitting Kills, Moving Heals", by Joan Vernikos, a NASA scientist, who explained why being sedentary is bad for you. That's why I'm now using hand weights while I read, and periodically standing up and doing a few squats.

"System Collapse" by Martha Wells - another Murderbot novella. I didn't like it as much as earlier ones. The snark is a little tedious, but there is some good character arcing. And unlike some authors, Wells does not do a lot of back story at the beginning of each book, so if you pick this one up cold, you may be a little lost - I was. I probably should have taken Inanna's and Frelga's advice to reread previous books in the series first.

And a few others that probably wouldn't interest you.

I was starting get a handle on my Libby loan and hold lists until the NYT came out with their ten best speculative fiction of 2023 article, and of course I had to add those books to the hold queue. Witch King by Martha Wells, mentioned in this thread several times, is one of them.

[Frelga]

I've hit the wall on processing fiction again, just in time for all my holds to come.

The only one I can handle right now is The Ships of Air, 2nd in Martha Wells' The Fall of Ile-Rien series. It's fun, and for some reason I find it undemanding, despite the characters being on the losing side of a war against a vicious force.

I also have her debut novel City of Bones, which is sort of post-post-apocalyptic (civilization has come a long way in reshaping itself in the aftermath of a disaster). The protagonist is a human-shaped (?) marsupial, and I'm more curious about the impact of his biology on the plot than anything else so far.

(can you really eat that much good food and not gain 50 pounds, realistically?).

The amount of walking you tend to do in Europe offsets quite a bit.

[Frelga]

Almost through Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. It's a fun, undemanding fantasy story, in which an orc helps revitalize a struggling bookshop and also there's a necromancer. Just about my speed rn.

Also my library just got an audiobook of the Children of Húrin read by Christopher Lee. Viv the Orc is lucky I only have 20 minutes left in her book, or I'd have dropped it.

[Inanna]

That sounds great. What I need right now too…. But neither of my libraries has bonedust… grumble.

Another undemanding one: Paladin’s Hope. Fourth installment of that series. As east to read as the first three.

[Maria]

I've been really enjoying this series:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254 ... en-of-time
Children of Time.

The science in this fiction is impeccable. The characters are riveting. The plot twists are unpredictable. I absolutely love this series and not just because I can't guess where it's going. It's also very impressive world building and story telling.

Highly recommended. I'm going to have to seek out more by this author.

[narya]

Has it really been 6 weeks since my last brain dump here, and 18 more books devoured?

Maria, I finished the first two books by Adrian Tschaikovsky - "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin" - and now I'm reading the third in the series, "Children of Memory". Fortunately, in the first chapter of the third book, the author reviews all the major events of the first two books, which took place in various locations, from various POVs (alien and human), during their past and present, all overlapped somewhat. I reviewed the first book on this thread back on July 30, 2023. I won't comment more on the second book, to avoid being spoilerish, other than to say there's another sentient species, and they are delightful. Oh, and another sentient species that is really scary. The second book was more complex and a little harder to follow, jumping around more in time and place, so I recommend you read it slowly. Nuf said.

My favorite recent read was "Titanium Noir", which was a NYT recommendation. It is written as a classic detective noir, in that same gritty, sardonic style, but with some sci-fi elements concerning genetic modification of people. Highly recommended. This is another one that I immediately re-read, just to savor all the little clues I missed the first time around.

I read "The Long COVID Survival Guide", written by people who have had horrific experiences with long COVID, not coincidentally while I was having COVID myself. I'm very lucky by comparison to have just had lingering coughing and fatigue. Sadly, the early sufferers of long COVID, like the early sufferers of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, were brushed off as kooks. But my medical provider seems to be on the ball with this, and was being supportive. I was well armed and assertive, and got the care I needed to end my long COVID quickly.

I read "The Martian", by Andy Weir, and concurrently listened to it being read in Castilian Spanish by a very suave narrator. It's about a fictional NASA mission that ends up with one astronaut stranded on Mars when the others have to leave. The Spanish translation uses lots of simple words within my vocabulary, and technical words that are almost identical to English words, so that helps. All of the English idioms and almost all of the swear words are cleaned out, and no Spanish idioms are added. Then I watched the movie, with Matt Damon, which was enjoyable but only skimmed the surface of the story. One of the good things about the book is the constant stream of suspense-puzzling-reveal. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong, then the astronaut has to find a work around, and he does. It's an engineer-hero story. Highly recommended, though someone who does not geek out as badly as I do might not enjoy all the attention to detail.

I finished "Midnight in Washington" by Adam Schiff, who is running opposite Barbara Lee and Katy Porter for US senator in California. A horror story, but this one is, unfortunately, true, and concerns the events wrought by Trump and the Congressional hearings that Schiff led.

I listened to "Solito" written by and narrated by Javier Zamora. This autobiography is about his 3 month trek from El Salvador to the USA with various coyotes and various other undocumented immigrants. He was only 9 years old. His parents had already made the trip to the USA, to flee civil war violence in El Salvador, and he was finally deemed old enough to make the trip, unaccompanied by family, to join his parents in the USA. It is a difficult read, because of the stresses he was under, but the writer is quite poetic, presenting an innocent, childlike perspective of horrific circumstances.

I read "Babel-17" by Samuel Delany, because Delany is a classic, heavily awarded, sci fi author of the 60s and 70s, and I thought I should at least read one of his books. I had foundered on "Pocket Full of Stars", but decided to try again, and picked this one because it won the Nebula in 1966. He wrote as someone of his era, and it's an era that I'm very happy we are not still stuck in. I don't really recommend it. Has anyone else read his stories?

The book "Beacon 23" by Hugh Howey bears the same name as the TV series, and that's about it. It was an OK but forgettable story (actually 5 serialized short stories, brought together in one book) about manning a "lighthouse" in a hyperspace corridor.

In December on this thread I highly recommended "This is Not a Game" by Walter Jon Williams. The two sequels, "Deep State" and "The Fourth Wall", were not as good, which was disappointing to me. I'd still recommend just reading the first story. The second story has some of the same main characters in a discrete adventure, and in the third story they return as ancillary characters (to the new, main antagonist) in another discrete adventure. Perhaps as stand-alone stories they are OK, but only the first of the series was superb.

And finally, I read "Witch King" by Martha Wells. There are lots of characters, in various timelines, that were hard for me to follow on an audio book. And so many titles that were not explained! What is an Immortal Marshal? What is a Lesser Immortal? What is a Hierarch? Why is he called the Witch King when he's not a witch, and not in charge of witches, and is actually a Fourth Prince? He's a demon, and a hard protagonist to feel warm and fuzzy about, especially when he is complaining that he's tired because he hasn't sucked the life out of anyone lately. (Easy to do during a battle, but a little harder to do during peacetime.) Wells uses the same methodical narrative style she uses in the Murderbot series, so unsurprisingly, the protagonist comes off as a bit robotic. The story building was both overwhelming and full of holes. Frelga and Inanna both mentioned that they were fine with that. I wasn't, but that's OK, we all have our own passions concerning books.

You probably don't want to hear about all the other books I read, including the ones on death cleaning and lucid dreaming.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I for one am interested.

[Frelga]

Narya, I'm glad you shared your feelings on Witch King. As I've said, I thought it was a masterclass in providing just enough information to orient the reader while avoiding infodumping. It's a good reality check to hear that it doesn't work for everyone. (and yeah, what's up with the title when he's neither a witch nor a king?)

I've given up on the Darker Shade of Magic when I was a 1/4 way in and realized it was all worldbuilding and nothing was happening. Also the obligatory feisty girl got on my nerves. You'd think tough life on the streets would have made her less of a brat or at least given her some self control. By the time plot started happening, I didn't care. But maybe I'm just grumpy.

[narya]

V, since you asked...

"The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning", by Margareta Magnusson, is similar to Marie Kondo's "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up", except that instead of concentrating on simplifying your life and getting rid of what doesn't cause you joy (Kondo's approach) the focus is on making life a little less miserable for those who have to eventually settle your affairs. Having had to deal with the lifetimes of accumulations by my mom, dad, and two uncles, of Stuff that was meaningful for them, but not for me, it was a wake up call to start winnowing my own collections now, and save my kids some grief. The author is in her 80s, and has a sweet, grandmotherly, yet practical approach. I'm not planning to go any time soon, but there is no reason not to address the issue now. It can be freeing for both the death cleaner and his/her heirs.

"A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming" by Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel, and Thomas Peisel was OK, but none of the exercises have yet increased my current modest level of lucid dreaming.

Frelga - I did not have enough info to feel oriented in The Witch King or, for that matter, the later installments of the Murderbot Diaries. So I just go along for the ride.

[RoseMorninStar]

I've read articles about Swedish death cleaning. It seems a healthy, though not necessarily easy, thing to do. Culling stuff is a touchy subject for many. I might give that a read.

I recently had a strange lucid dream. I have no idea if it had an applicable purpose.

I enjoy historical fiction and recently read quite a few set in the WWII era, several from the author Fiona Valpy. I just finished 'The Echo of Old Books' by Barbara Davis. A nice read.
In that same vein I read, 'All The Light We Cannot See.' by Anthony Doerr.

I've just started, 'Enough' by Cassidy Hutchinson.

I'm also picking through 'What Jane Austin Ate and Charles Dickens Knew'. I'm not sure I'll read it cover to cover. It details words and concepts authors of that period presumed their readers knew but may be obscure to the modern reader.

[Maria]

Maria, I finished the first two books by Adrian Tschaikovsky - "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin" - and now I'm reading the third in the series, "Children of Memory". Fortunately, in the first chapter of the third book, the author reviews all the major events of the first two books, which took place in various locations, from various POVs (alien and human), during their past and present, all overlapped somewhat. I reviewed the first book on this thread back on July 30, 2023. I won't comment more on the second book, to avoid being spoilerish, other than to say there's another sentient species, and they are delightful. Oh, and another sentient species that is really scary. The second book was more complex and a little harder to follow, jumping around more in time and place, so I recommend you read it slowly. Nuf said.

Part of what I find fascinating about them is how believable it is that it is almost impossible to communicate with a non-human species. Almost every other science fiction book I've ever read blows right past that not so minor point. I mean... our own primary method of communications is blowing air over strings of flesh, modulated by the fleshy hole it passes through. When you think about it, having that same method develop in a different ecology is mindbogglingly slim.

[narya]

Maria, I agree. Communication disconnects are just blown over in the Star Trek other universes with the use of Universal Translators. Just wait till you see the communication issues in Children of Ruin

[Inanna]

Maria, I love your description of how we communicate! I had to read it twice to get it, but it’s so insightful.

The series sounds great, but once again, for some reason my two libraries don’t have them.

Narya, interesting take on the Witch King. I like books that don’t do info dumps (Neal Stephenson is notorious for really NOT bothering), but I can get your perspective too.

[Frelga]

I mean... our own primary method of communications is blowing air over strings of flesh, modulated by the fleshy hole it passes through. When you think about it, having that same method develop in a different ecology is mindbogglingly slim.

They're Made out of Meat

[Inanna]

I mean... our own primary method of communications is blowing air over strings of flesh, modulated by the fleshy hole it passes through. When you think about it, having that same method develop in a different ecology is mindbogglingly slim.

They're Made out of Meat

I always love re-reading that.

[narya]

Inanna, have you checked on Hoopla? I found it there through my local library. I'm not sure if the content is the same for every library.

[RoseMorninStar]

I'm really surprised -shocked- that your area doesn't have a larger library consortium, Inanna.

[Inanna]

Well, NYPL is huge. It’s made up of so many branches - I guess they don’t bother with consortiums.