What are you reading?

[Frelga]

I can't believe I finished another book! This one on audio, Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett.

It's the third book in the Emily Wilde series, where the MC is a renowned dryadologist in the universe where fairies are real and are studied like other natural sciences. Written in the form of scientific and personal journals, and enjoyable for having a heroine whose strength is in her formidable intelligence and learning, and whose lack of social skills can be a genuine hindrance.

And the audiobook narrator is very good.

[Inanna]

I really enjoyed this series. The first one was a bit weak, I thought, but then it picked up.

[Jude]

I just reserved the first in the series. “Several months’ wait”. Just as well, because I have a pile of books ahead of it.

Anyone read Katherine Mansfield? I heard her referred to as one of the best short-story authors of all time. I’ve got one of her books from the library, but so far it’s just not grabbing me. I’ll at least finish the first story and probably the second before I decide to put it away.

[Inanna]

I tried reading “A Tiger’s Curse”, but could not stomach the murdering of Indian names.

[Impenitent]

I've discovered Edith Nesbit.
The books were written for children but are written with such humour and imagination that I found them charming.

[Alatar]

Wow, blast from the past. I remember loving "Five Children and It" when I was a child, but I have no recollection of the plot.

[Maria]

I've quit two more audiobooks this week.
"The Galaxy and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers. Just too darn boring. The story is about a group of alien travelers stuck in what amounts to a hotel on an airless planet while some disaster prevents them from leaving. What little plot there is seems to be about getting to know one another. While I appreciate the lack of violence and excitement, there just isn't much compelling about the story telling.

"Third Eye" by Felicia Day. I had high hopes for this one and thought the multiperson cast (mostly of actors I've actually heard of before) might be interesting. Instead, I had to work to ignore which actor was playing which person because having "AWWW, that's Wil Wheaton!" or "Sean Astin!" jump into my head every time they spoke was really distracting from the crappy tale. The story itself was a miserable slog of getting through the protagonist's woes and I finally gave up with relief after about halfway. Presumably things get better for the character later on, making for a character arc.... but I just couldn't stand to keep going.

I liked Adrian Tchaikovsky's "The Expert System's Brother" well enough to finish it, but there were definitely times I wish I'd been able to skim through the tedious parts. The same could be said about his other book I've previously mentioned here, "Spider Light".

Now I'm trying some random book series that seemed like it might be a welcome change from whiny protagonists and stranded travelers and obsessing about alien viewpoints. "Earth's First Starfighter" series. I don't hate it yet... but I'm only an hour in. 41 hours to go. Yes, I chose it because it's long.

[Jude]

Well, I read three of the Katherine Mansfield short stories and I guess she’s just not for me.

Since I heard her described as one of the greatest-ever short story writers, I’m sure I must be missing something.

[narya]

I finished Lessons in Chemistry - is everyone else ready to talk about it, or is it too late?

I agree with you, Maria, on the later Becky Chambers books - the earlier ones are better.

Jude, the book by Kate Quinn that you recommended sounds interesting, as do and all the other historical novels by her available in audio from Libby. I put "The Rose Code" on my "NEXT" list. I've got several lists: the 16 books actually checked out, 9 more on hold, 42 more on my "NEXT" list that I have so far had the restraint to not check out or put on hold, but hope to read soon, and then there are the *cough* 1000 or tagged as next after that.

Books I've read recently worth mentioning:

"Gaudy Night" by Dorothy Sayers. This book was assigned in our local mystery book club, based on the recommendation that Sayers was a Grand Dame of murder mysteries, and this is considered to be her best. I found this Peter Whimsey novel so awful, I dropped it after 4 hours (it's 16 hours total of chit chat, and doesn't even have a murder in it). Instead, I listened to the 2-hour radio drama of the same name, and looked the book up on Wikipedia so I could participate in the club's discussion. Most of the other club members disliked it, and didn't finish it, and I was delighted to find someone else quoted in the Wikipedia entry who sums it up for me!

In a letter to his son Christopher from May 1944, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote: "I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman's H[oneymoon].?) was worse. I was sick."

"Strong Poison" by Dorothy Sayers. This book preceded the one above, and was the first Peter Whimsey - Harriet Vane duo, and so I thought I would try it. It was shorter, and passable, but I still wouldn't recommend it.

"Interior States" by Meghan O'Gieblyn is a series of essays/musings about how the author grew up in a "flyover" state, slowly broadened her understanding of the secular world, and lost her connections to her religious, conservative roots. It's quite a delightful, introspective, sometimes poignant read. Each essay had been previously published in a different literary magazine, so the book can be consumed in small bites. I think you'd all like it.

"Karla's Choice" by Nick Harkaway, the son of John Le Carre, who wrote the George Smiley spy thriller series. I'd been delighted by two of Harkaway's zany speculative fiction books (Titanium Noir and The Angelmaker), and was interested in his attempt to continue his father's legacy, writing in his father's style. I'd say he does a pretty good job of sounding like his dad (having the same person narrate the books helps LOL), but I still like his speculative fiction better. If you are a fan of the late Le Carre, lamenting the lack of any new books, then you'd probably want to read it.

"Call for the Dead", "A Murder of Quality", and "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre. These are first three George Smiley spy novels. They are quick, 5 hour audio books. I read them first so I'd be ready to compare them with the next in the series, chronologically, written by Nick Harkaway. They were definitely a product of their times (the third was written in 1963) about the cold war, but I enjoyed them.

"Mad House" by Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater. Is a horror-non-fiction book, so to speak. It's an inside look at the epic dysfunction in the US Congress over the past few years. It would be more entertaining if it weren't so scary.

"The Pacific Circuit" by Alexis Madrigal. This is a fascinating look at how global shipping started in the Port of Oakland, California, and spread until the whole world is now tied together. It is a history of horrific urban planning at the expense of people of color, redlining, labor unions, running freeways thru neighborhoods, converting longshoreman-based warehousing into a containerized and modular shipping mode, and so much more. The book focuses on the big picture and also follows a few individuals in West Oakland as they experience this change through the past few decades. I grew up near West Oakland, so this was a fresh way for me to see the history of my own region. Definitely not the way I was taught about it in school.

"Someone You Can Build a Nest In" by John Wiswell. This is horror, specifically body horror, and a fairy tale, and a sweet romance. By the end of the story, it become clear that most of the humans are also monsters, in a way. It's very weird. You might like it. It is both a Nebula and Hugo finalist for this year, so don't take my word for it

"The River We Remember" by William Kent Krueger. This is a murder mystery, but also a beautiful, lyrical, literary novel. The author writes about small-town Minnesota like a love letter. It takes place in the 50s, and everyone there has been scarred, directly or indirectly, by WWII, when the soldiers brought their troubled and changed selves back to the town, or when they didn't come back, leaving holes in relationships. We didn't have a good understanding of PTSD back then, but clearly that was what some of these people were experiencing, while doing their best not to show it on the outside. It makes me wonder how many of my father's friends had the same experience. I'd recommend this book, and plan to try another by this author.

"Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice" by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. This book (yet another recommended by my associate MFT son) is a series of essays examining the needs of people who are disabled, disenfranchised, queer, chronically ill, and/or discriminated against. Definitely an eyeopener for me.

"Neuromancer" by William Gibson. I read this 40 years ago, and decided to read it again, since it is considered to be one of the founding books of the cyberpunk genre. It has aged remarkably well.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've just read the first seven paragraphs of the first chapter of Charles Dickens's 1852-53 novel Bleak House. That text appears at the end of this post. I've never read this novel (nor most of Dickens's work). I first heard of it when another student in a high school AP English class (in which I struggled in part because I'm a very slow writer) selected it from a set list for a book report. Another friend read it on his own in college specifically because he heard it was so difficult. He didn't care for it: he thought it suffered from an excess of characters which, in his opinion, Dickens had introduced simply to have something to use in later installments of this serialized novel whose outcome was unknown when he started writing. He much preferred A Tale of Two Cities.

The reason I read these paragraphs is because of the new paper described on this blog, which describes a study of the reading level of 89 college English majors and English education majors (the latter being people who will teach English to others) who were asked to read those paragraphs aloud to a facilitator, who would ask them every few sentences to pause and explain what they'd just read. Despite being allowed to consult a dictionary or even use their phones to search for more information, some 58% of the test subjects, the researchers say, not only didn't understand what they were reading, but they didn't realize they didn't understand it and said that they would have no difficulty reading the rest of the novel (which is about 900 pages long). Only 5% of the subjects were able to demonstrate "proficiency" as readers. Some of the subjects' interpretations of the text -- as you can see at the link -- are alarmingly comical or comically alarming. And I had no trouble with those paragraphs, although I did have to look up some unfamiliar words like "ait" and "reticule." (From context, I knew approximately what the latter term must mean. I see that the former is a synonym for "eyot," a word I know thanks to Tolkien, though it appears that they are not etymologically related.) I had the advantage over these students of already knowing that the novel concerns an interminable court case. I agree with the blogger that the study's authors make some mistakes of their own. I would add that their expectations are somewhat unrealistic, particularly of students in Kansas who apparently are supposed to pull up a map of southeast England to see how far the Essex marshes are from London.

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to purge himself of his contempt,” which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out “My Lord!” in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little.

Does "since the day broke (if this day ever broke)" remind anyone else of the Dawnless Day in The Return of the King?

[Jude]

Charles Dickens is a bit of hit-and-miss with me. I keep meaning to read more...

I finished Lessons in Chemistry - is everyone else ready to talk about it, or is it too late?

It's never too late to talk about Lessons in Chemistry. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

My mom was a huge Dorothy Sayers fan. From time to time I've made an effort to get into him, and so far haven't succeeded.

I'm now on another Kate Quinn novel, "The Alice Network." It's another real page-turner. Set at about the same time as "The Rose Code", alternating between WWI and shortly after WWII (1947), the main character is trying to solve the mystery of the disappearance of her cousin Rose during the war. On the way she meets up with Evelyn Gardner, now an old angry woman but who was the young protagonist in the chapters that take place during WWI.

Assuming her other books are as good as these two, I'll probably end up reading all her novels. It's great to discover a new author!

[Maria]

"Earth's First Starfighter" ..... 24 hours into this book and I'm ready to quit this one. Cardboard cutout characters who always do everything right I can usually tolerate. Very little description of what's going makes this feel like the outline of a story instead of the published work, though. Worst of all is the narration. It's a two person cast and I can only understand maybe half of what the woman says! Granted, the character is supposed to have a Russian accent, but I just can't follow her most of the time. If I speed up the narration to 1.3 it is actually more intelligible which makes no sense at all.

I'm tired of trying to figure out from context, so I'm quitting.

[Frelga]

Spiderlight got returned before I finished listening and now there's a long line. I had 6 hours left over 3 days, but it didn't grab me enough to power through. It'll come back.

Is it just me, or is Adrian Tchaikovsky just not taking his characters seriously? I'm 1/3 into the book, and the "heroes" seem to represent one trope each. He's setting up an interesting moral dilemma, but that's not enough to make a good story.

[Maria]

I started wondering if Spiderlight was a first novel after a while. So I was bothered by quality, too.

[Alatar]

Saw this and had to share....

499212831_1050936780336664_8657197051114239432_n.jpg (46.61 KiB) Viewed 2530 times

[Snowdog]

Finally started reading 'Port of Shadows' by Glen Cook. Apparently a new Black Company book is coming out this year so thought I should read the book I got in 2018.

[Maria]

I'm listening to a post apocalyptic novel right now that is actually pretty engrossing: The Dark Road series by Bruno Miller.
I just popped on here to mention that a gas station I've been to many times irl just went up in a giant fireball. It's a travel story and they are crossing what's left of Missouri right now. I am, of course, listening for familiar landmarks.

Also, "post apocalyptic- EMP" seems to be an actual sub genre nowadays.

[Maria]

This story I'm on now is a case in point of how an author can mess up in their research. The next altercation the protagonists are involved in takes place about 5 miles from where I live, and is a place I've visited often, down by the river. The author was obviously using google maps to decide where the characters were going ... and from where he said they drove down to the river there is NO road. That part of the east side of the river is lined with cliffs that are at least 100 feet high. Maybe more. There is no road there, only a very narrow, steep footpath. I've seen it. It is not wide enough for vehicles to drive down and has steps in some places. I could pretend he meant further west a few miles at the next conservation area, but the building he said they were driving past is definitely on top of those cliffs. Obviously he didn't notice the extreme elevation change on the google map , despite having name dropped "The BluffTop Winery" several times before.

Also, he mentioned that the Missouri river was a couple hundred yards across. (Or was it feet?) It looks far wider to me and according to google is more like 600 yards across on average in this area. And he said it had rapids! There are no rapids anywhere close. The whole lower part of the Missouri has very slow elevation changes and does not have rapids. And they dredge it to keep it open for barge traffic. That wouldn't have changed in the few weeks since the EMP event, no matter if maintenance had stopped.

If our heroes had just crossed to the other side of the river to refill their water, they'd have found conditions much as described. Only a slight slope down to the river, with graveled beaches here and there. That just doesn't exist on the east side of the river at that point. That has cliffs! Big ones! And an old railroad line converted to a linear state park running along the base of the cliffs.

Anyway. That's the end of my rant. Flawed research totally ruined my immersion in the story. I tried to just pay attention to what the characters were doing but my mind kept trying to reconcile what I knew to be true with what was being described.

This book is full of violence, btw, so if that bothers you, don't try it. I'm hooked now, though, and very curious to see how this all works out for the protagonists. It's free on audible.

My husband insisted on getting the Murderbot series last week. When I'm done with the Dark Road series, I'll be trying that next.

[Frelga]

THREE more books, by Jingo!

K. B. Wagers, A Pale Light in
the Black Coast Guard in space. A fun adventure with likeable characters, a found family trope, and not too much violence. I'm starting the second book, and a third is coming out soon.

John Scalzi, When the Moon Hits Your Eye Crack treated seriously. The cracky premise is that the moon is suddenly replaced by an object of equal mass made of cheese. The rest of the book consists of loosely connected chapters of humanity dealing with the phenomenon. The most unbelievable element is how competent many characters are at their jobs. Even the totally not Elon Musk, look, we even have Musk himself over there billionaire character, while obnoxious, manages to get something done. It's unexpectedly moving in places.

Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret
Society of Irregular Witches. I got it when I was between audio books and needed something without a wait. A romantasy in a modern setting, where witches are living in secret and avoid gathering together but the main character is asked to tutor three little girl witches in the same house. A bit on the nose in places, and it doesn't subject the message that it's more important to be yourself than to be safe to the test of what happens when it really isn't safe. But overall charming.

[Maria]

I'm on "book" 3 of the Murderbot diaries and not really liking it at all.
The first few dozen times a protagonist says they don't care, it's kind of amusing in a snarky sort of way. This far in, though, I'm getting really tired of it. If the main character doesn't care, why should I?