January 2014 reading

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of The Echo by James Smythe recently. It's the sequel to what was just about my favourite novel of 2013, The Explorer and I'm happy to say that it's just as good.

Recommend that people pick up copies of both if at all possible.

This year I'm starting out with a book that appears to lap at the edges of Science Fiction. "The Circle" by Dave Eggers was a Library Thing group read last year, and I just finally made it to the top of the hold list at my local library. A least a few people have tagged it Science Fiction, among many other things. I have some non-fiction reading to do as well, so it might be a race to the end of the month to finish.

I worked for a large high tech corporaton for many years, so the book does peak my curiosity. Looks like it gets mixed reviews and I'll be interested to discover why after I have a chance to read it.

1> Those are both on my list to read in Jan/Feb, I did intend to read The Explorer over Xmas Holiday break but best made plans & all it didn't happen.

Still working on Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Almost finished with Ports of Call by Jack Vance...

Just finished Jack Finney's Time and Again and after a slow start I enjoyed it a lot. I'll read the sequel soon.

About to start Robert Silverberg's Those Who Watch

Just finished The Shrinking Man but I was disappointed. Not in the story, it was pretty much as I remembered the movie back in 1959, but it was the way it was written, I didn't like. It was like Matheson had his manuscript ready for publication but dropped it on the floor and reassembled the manuscript in random order. It spoiled the story for me unfortunately.

After the thread on Cherryh, starting 40,000 in Gehenna. I used to have a lot more of her books but lost them in a flood a few years back, so my collection of her books is pretty spotty.

I recall that, last month, someone in this group was curious about Cthulhu Cymraeg. My review of it is now up at http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/blog/?cat=8.

I'm still in steampunk land with Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War.

Now reading Capacity by Tony Ballantyne...

>1 strung_out: I haven't read either of those two books yet, but I have read The Machine, and it's bloody good. Reminded me a bit of the sort of stories featured in Charlie Brooker's "Black Machine" TV series, with an extra dollop of Ballardian scene-setting. Highly recommended, and I'm looking forward to No Harm Can Come to a Good Man now.

Absolutely, The Machine is fabulous - both that and the Explorer were among my favourites of last year. Smythe is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors.

Just starting The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke.

Reading Kim Stanley Robinson's 2313 - so far quite interesting. Just started It Came from the North - an anthology of Finnish speculative fiction. Having read and enjoyed Hannu Rajaniemi's "Jean le Flambeur" novels, and Johanna Sinisalo's excerpt from the novel "Troll: A Love Story" I'm really looking forward to discovering some new writers.

I'm rereading Consider Phlebas, enjoying going back to an early Culture novel.

Finished, with glee and other warm feelings, Existence by David Brin, with sadness Random Acts of Senseless Violence (Jack Womack), and for New Year's Day, The White Mountains.

Reading my eighth Iain M. Banks novel, Excession which just gets more and more interesting. I am reading Banks in order of publication date (except Inversions before Excession). Works great.

#16 psybre

I am reading Banks in order of publication date (except Inversions ...

That makes sense when one thinks about it.

:-)

I am zipping around with Horza in Consider Phlebas for the group read and loving it (as I always do). Really looking forward to Player of Games (which has grown on me over the years) and Use of Weapons (old favourite) too. And Excession. I'm clearly going to fail to only readalong a couple and happily read all the Culture novels this year as I'm excited about the idea of revisiting all the others too, as I've only ever read the rest once :)

I'm enjoying the biography of Tiptree, as well as reacquainting myself with her wonderful stories.

>19 edgewood: Interesting how many people seemed to have picked up the Tiptree biography just recently (since it was published in 2006). I just barely finished it, myself. It was hard for me to read, but since I lived through nearly all the events in the book as they were happening, the immediacy of the ending was always there, and made me every bit as sad as when it happened.

I've just started Quicksilver and it looks to be the same caught-up-in-the-whirlwind that Stephenson's books usually are.

I don't think I'd even heard of Banks before joining this group, and now may have to try a book or two by him later in the year, when I get caught up with other reading.

Finished Fenrir, which didn't grab me as much as Wolfsangel had done. It felt a bit too long for its material. But they're still very good fantasies.

I agree - there seemed to be too much running about aimlessly in the first part, but
it picked up pace nicely for the last third. The third book Lord of Slaughter is more evenly paced and nicely dark and convoluted.

I read Consider Phlebas for the Culture group read and Cordelia's Honor (omnibus of Shards of Honor and Barrayar) for the Vorkosigan group read.

I'm probably going to read Falling Free next and I have The Player of Games in my queue, although I'm trying to wait until February to read it. I'm also waiting for several more Vorkosigan books to arrive in the mail, at which point I will probably pounce on them.

Back to old SF for me with The Drowned World.

Old sf for me too - The Squares of the City.

Also in Consider Phlebas, a first read though I've already picked and enjoyed a few other random books in the Culture series.

Trying to get a bit more reading done, and for me that's easiest with science fiction. To that end I've just finished Charles Stross's Accelerando (review) and just picked up The Technician by Neal Asher. The prologue of The Technician was better than the entirety of Accelerando.

Back to old SF for me, too, rereading some Robert A Heinlein while I wait either for a new library book to come in or to pick up some ARCs at a librarian conference next week. I'm starting with The Door into Summer.

Just started the Greg Mandel series, by Peter F Hamilton. It seems as if I'm reading his works in reverse order of publication!

I've nearly finished Consider Phlebas, and am thoroughly enjoying the rereading. Next up will be Ancillary justice, as I've heard so many good things about it.

30: Curious to see how you'll like it. I bought it based on things I read here about it, but haven't started it yet...

I've started Jaran by Kate Elliot, one of my Santathing books. Although I liked the concept, I needed a little time to get engrossed, but now I think I'm there. I'm starting to love this book!

>31 zjakkelien:: I loved Jaran when I read it a couple of years ago. The friendships and relationships that grew between characters were really well drawn.

32: Yes, that's exactly what I like about it. And I like the society, with its different male/female roles.

Seem to be on a bit of an old sf kick at the moment. Finished The Squares of the City, and thought it better than I'd expected (though the playing out a chess game through the plot felt like a waste of time - without the author's note no one would have known). Now reading Marta Randall's Journey for review on SF Mistressworks

I'm about a third of the way through Ancillary justice and really enjoying it so far. Both the present and past events are compelling, and the settings vivid.

Having enjoyed The Hunger Games trilogy, I was encouraged to read Divergent. While I do love the concepts, I am finding the writing to be not very good, and it is a bit too much teen romance for me. Disappointing.

35: I started that on the train today, Sakerfalcon, but my train rides are very short, and I didn't think I was doing it justice that way. I thought the naming conventions were a bit confusing, but I'm sure that'll pass, and what I read, I really liked! Oh, and figuring out who's male and who's female was somewhat complicated! I think in my head everyone is just going to be female, unless they get a very male description...

I finished up The Circle. About a third of the way in, I removed my science fiction tag. I refuse to let a 2013 book into that fold that talks about adding a new physical display screen on a desk for each individual application, and talks about bringing creatures back from the Mariana trench and putting them in regular tanks without so much as a nod to the pressure, light, and temperature differences.

The book was an easy read and tended to be straightforward, with most effort paid to an analysis of the effects of social media. The characters, while not bad, felt at times to be pawns in service to the analysis. I think the book could have been more than it was, but was a good ride. I've given thought to the consequences of extremes of social media for awhile, so it wasn't any groundbreaking eye-opener for me.

I have a couple of non-fiction books to finish up that should take precedence, but I've been checking the "Random books from my library" for SF reading inspiration. I think my next SF book will be one that pops up there that I haven't yet read and that appeals to me at the moment.

I finally got around to All Clear -- somehow I kept not picking it up in the last year or so.

38> Ah. I'm suddenly disinclined to read it, having picked it up in the Kindle January sale. That sort of wilful ignorance of basic science/tech in a book that purports to be about a tech community doesn't work for me at all.

>38 GwenH:. Are you talking about Dave Eggers The Circle? You didn't have a touchstone and there are quite a few books by that name.

If it is Eggers's book, the LT group read book, I hadn't heard that it even purported to be SF?

Just about to start a book that was popular here a year or more ago, The Time Traveller's Guide To Medieval England .

>41 vwinsloe: Yes, I was referring to Dave Eggers book. Sorry, I added the touchstone. ( I resist adding touchstones to minor comments, because it then refers back on the book page). The book had a fairly good size "science fiction" tag when I first went to look at it. Also, the summary I'd read, led me to believe it would be more of an extension of social media technology than it was. People also refer to it as a "literary novel" and I don't really see that either. To me, it read more like a very low-key thriller, written with movie adaptation in mind.

I pulled a cool old anthology off of my pulp novels shelf to read little by little over the next couple of months. It's The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, published in 1957 and edited by Judith Merril.

I have just finished reading Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea by Adam Roberts and it's fantastic. The illustrations are gorgeous, and I think he gets the whole feel of Verne and submarining absolutely spot on. The ending is sufficiently weird to leave me a bit wtf at the end, but I think it was just about pitch perfect.

Between bits of Breton's The Arctic Grail, I'm reading modern post-apocalypse short fiction in Paula Guran's anthology After the End.

A pleasing mixture of miseries made up and real.

Just started The Violent Century. Not really loving the sentence fragments.

I finished Divergent after discovering that it was an allegory for religious right anti-intellectual propaganda. At least that was my interpretation, and it absolutely ruined the book for me. I will be skipping the rest of the series (I had almost made that decision based on the poor writing and "romance" inclination anyway.)

Just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. Wow was that good. Sort of a disaster story/survival story all in one. Really well done.

It must really improve after the excerpt given on Amazon, then.

Going back to rereading Heinlein for the last few days before the conference. On Farnham's Freehold now.

I went with choosing the first SF book that caught my interest in the "Random books from your library" feature on the profile page. This turned out to be The Paradise Plot by Ed Naha, published in 1980.

The book blurb on Amazon: First of two novels (the other is "The Suicide Plague") featuring Harry Porter, the likably cynical journalist. Excellent hardboiled-mystery meets science fiction. This one features Harry investigating murderous goings-on at Earth's first orbital colony. Entertaining reading!

Since I've never read or watched the Harry Potter stuff, the dectective's similar name doesn't get in the way for me. The first few pages fit the book blurb description. I'm expecting a light, fun read.

I just read the first chapter of Glasshouse this morning. The epigrams from Kafka and Hitler were certainly bracing! So far it seems like a curious mix of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Dancers at the End of Time.

I'm revisiting Fahrenheit 451 for the first time since school. Thank you SantaThing, I'm looking forward to this!

I've just read GemSigns by Stephanie Saulter. Now starting Wolves by Simon Ings.

I've just started the first in Neal Stephenson's trilogy of an alternative history, Quicksilver, and have already been reminded of why it takes me so long to read his books. I spent two hours wandering through Euclidean Geometry, after encountering "homotheties" and realizing I wasn't sure that I knew what it was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homothetic_transformation

Stephenson must have a filing cabinet filled with notes from all his books, since I have already seen references back to at least three earlier novels. The mapping between books is a spider web of commonalities.

I really wish that the titles of the two different Quicksilvers would make it more obvious that one was only 1/3 of the story of the other, and that the Volume Three called the Odalisque is merely the third part of the real Volume One, aka Quicksilver, but I don't make the rules...not even for Neal Stephenson.

>48 vwinsloe:

I finished Divergent after discovering that it was an allegory for religious right anti-intellectual propaganda. At least that was my interpretation, and it absolutely ruined the book for me.

Please expand on this. It actually sounds kind of fascinating.

I'm about to start Troublesome Minds by Dave Galanter. I have no idea why I bought this book since I don't usually read Star Trek: TOS professional fan fiction and the blurb on the back doesn't exactly scream read me. I suspect I was drawn to it because of the cover image of Spock.

>57 artturnerjr:. In the Divergent dystopian world, society is divided in to factions called "Dauntless" (brave); "Erudite" (intellectual), "Abnegation" (selfless), "Candor" (honesty) and "Amity" (peaceful/friendly). The jobs of these castes in society is determined by their characteristics, hence the Dauntless are the military/police and Abnegation run the government. People are "Divergent" if they do not have one of these single salient character traits.

The plot thickens as the "nasty Erudite" attempt to take over the government from Abnegation, by manipulating the Dauntless to carry out their military coup.

When I was about halfway through the novel, my suspicious nature led me to google the author, Veronica Roth, and I learned that she identifies herself as "Christian."

Finished Fireflood and Other Stories by Vonda N McIntyre. Review to go up on SF Mistressworks in a few weeks. Now reading Europe in Autumn, which I have to review for Vector.

>58 seitherin: I've only read three ST novels so far, but I've enjoyed each one. I don't think of it as "professional fan fiction" but rather as an extension of the tv shows. I'd always been a bit snobby about reading the ST novels, but once ST veered off in a new direction with the reboot movies, I knew the books were my only hope for anything like the tv shows. I expect with so many ST books released there will be some good ones and some stinkers. I've been lucky so far.

I possess precisely one ST novel, John Ford's How Much for just the Planet?. It was recommended to me as "a fine comic novel that happens to take place in the ST universe". Others liked it too, as the makers of TNG lifted an incident from it to put into the show...

I'm currently reading The Arrows of Time on me e-reader which I'm really enjoying and my Santathing book The Shambling Guide to New York in paperback which I'm also enjoying. It's very odd reading a dead tree book after almost exclusively reading with the e-reader for the last 18 months!

I really didn't enjoy How Much for Just the Planet?, I read about 3/4 of it then skimmed the rest to see how it ended because I'm not a fan of farce and it just got annoying towards the end. I've read a lot of other ST and I've enjoyed it but it can be really bad when the characters are so far from what they should be it isn't funny. In some of the books it feels like the character is only there because they have to be and they need someone to do/say something no matter how out of character it would be for them.

>>61 GwenH: & 62: I've read a few of the ST:TNG novels and several of them were decent reads tho I'd be hard pressed to say which ones they were given how long ago I read them. This is my first TOS novel and I'm rather ambivalent about it just one chapter in. Oh, well.

So far this month my science fiction reading has been Use of Weapons and Frankenstein. I could have sworn I'd read Frankenstein before, but apparently not. Use of Weapons is even better on re-reading it than it was first time round.

Managed to a fair bit of reading this month, and there's stil a week to go yet:

The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar. He's something special, that Tidhar chap. Loved the sentence fragments. Atmospheric. I enjoyed.

Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human. What would have happened if the film Brick had been set in South Africa and had a bunch of the supernatural and mystical added to it. A fun read, not massively deep, but I did learn plenty about SA creature horror.

Gemsigns by Stephanie Saulter. X-Men meets The West Wing. Highly recommended, I zipped through it in a matter of days as it really grabbed me and sucked me in.

Drakenfeld by Mark Charan Newton. Rubbish. I liked the idea, but the execution is awful. Avoid.

Next up: probably some Kitschies reading (and/or re-reading).

I finished Ancillary justice yesterday. It was great, very imaginative with a great protagonist. I hope Ann Leckie keeps this up!

#66 The Violent Century didn't really start to get moving for me until about a third of the way in. And I felt the ending was weak too. I have Lavie's Martian Sands on the TBR, and I know a few people who thought that the better book.

>68 iansales: A third seems quite a long way to get in. I was gripped long before that, but then, the terseness, the atmosphere, the structure, it pushed my buttons for "the sort of thing what I like".

Agree that the ending was a bit weak, but given I find most endings a bit weak, I'm not holding that against the book at all.

Have heard a couple of people speak about Martian Sands, but it's a PS Publishing book and those are a pain to get hold of.

You can get it from PS's website, and I suspect Forbidden Planet might have a copy or two in stock. And if you have a Kindle, there's an ebook version available on Amazon. In fact, Amazon seem to have the hardback in stock too - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Martian-Sands-Lavie-Tidhar/dp/1848635982/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U...

I bought mine at Fantasycon, and then Lavie scrawled something illegible in the front - after moaning that the design of the title page didn't leave him any room to sign it....

>70 iansales: Ah, I should probably clarify; I don't buy hardbacks, as a rule (they're not space-efficient), so when I want to read a book that's a hardback, I get it through the local library service instead. Works fine for big publishers. But for small press, limited edition hardbacks, not so much. If it comes out as a mass-market paperback anywhere, I'll get it then.

#71. Ah, right. PS have recently started publishing mass-market paperbacks under their Drugstore Indian imprint, but I don't know if they plan to do that for Martian Sands. Unlikely, I'd have thought. But if it gets shortlisted for an award, perhaps someone will pick it up and publish a new edition - like they did for Osama.

Unfortunately, I buy too many hardbacks. I prefer them, but they do take up a lot of room. I really need to cut back on those authors whose books I buy in hardback, perhaps limit it to my absolute favourites, or the odd book here and there when I'm at a book launch...

I'm re-reading Golem 100 by Alfred Bester, which I first read over 20 years ago.

I'm reading Archetype.

Just finished Hild by Nicola Griffith, which I mention since she's a favorite SF author of mine, though this is an historical novel with no SF or fantasy elements. It's a great evocation of life in 7th-century Anglo Saxon Britain: the jostling realities of native British, Celts, and Germanic tribes, with fading memories of the Romans; right at the period of Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity. As always her characters spring to life, but also the book is infused with a love of nature's processes and beauty (something I don't remember from the other books of hers I've read.) And of course a strong sense of women's issues (they tend to be strong & wise, while the men tend to stamp around being violent and "heroic" - but it's not cardboardy, both are nuanced also.) If you liked her SF (Ammonite is a classic), and feel like some genre-hopping, this would be a great time for it.

Finished up Leviathan (A-) an impressive exercise in what happens when steam punk runs into ribofunk, as an alternate son of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand finds himself on the run in the wake of the assassination of his parents. That the story is embellished with some very evocative illustrations doesn't hurt.

Finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. My review: "What?"

And I don't mean that in a good way.

Well, I thoroughly enjoyed Glasshouse, as reflected in my review. Stross knows how to entertain me anyhow, and this story was an interesting fit with my recent philosophical reflections.

Took a break from sf with Sara Paretsky's Breakdown. Now back to 2013 sf, so I've good idea what to nominate for the Hugo - starting with Paul McAuley's Evening's Empires, which has already been shortlisted for the BSFA Award.

As it turns out, last SF book I finished in January was Mitch Benn's Terra. Clearly indebted to Hitchhiker's Guide, slight for a novel, more of a bildingsroman, really, and not done any favours by the cover which I think positions it in the wrong market. But it was an enjoyable enough read, I suppose. And given that I know some people who read Hitchhiker's but not any other SF, Terra is something I'll be pointing them to given the chance.

>80 HoldenCarver: Wow - it is that Mitch Benn - one of my favourite comics!

Finished 40,000 in Gehenna, starting Deepsix

I finished off the month with a re-read of The State of the Art.

Forgot to post that I finished Ancillary justice and it certainly lived up to the hype. A really excellent read.

Now I'm reading The blue world by Jack Vance.