Dusty's Reading Tracker for 2016

Its been a turbulent year as we refugees from shelfari moved in February to Leafmarks,only to be given one month's notice that that site was also closing down 1st July!. So its been a year of constant upheaval,moving data and groups from place to place. Add real life health and family crises,and reading as a whole has taken a bit of a beating!I am probably 20 - 30 books down on my usual level.
Now we can hopefully settle down for good here on LT. I'd like to post my reads for the year so far here,but reviews have been out of the question,and may still be for a while. But I welcome anyone's comments on my reading list,which is fairly eclectic though mostly SF/F and crime. Happy reading,folks!
Sylvia,I would appreciate it if you add my tracker to the group list please. Thanks

My reads in January
1. John Varley - Titan
2. Pierre Le Maitre - Irene
3. Ursula K LeGuin - Word for World is Forest
4. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Mercy
5. Lindsey Davis - The Silver Pigs
6. Robert C O'Brien - Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
7. Laurie R King - The Moors
8. Seanan McGuire - Rosemary and Rue
9. Nicci French - Blue Monday
10. Jane Yolan - Owl Moon
11. J D Robb - Devoted in Death

My reads in February
1. Carter Dickson - The Plague Court Murders
2. Alan Dean Foster - Icerigger
3. Kathy Reichs - Speaking in Bones
4. Nalini Singh - Archangel's Enigma
5. Simon R Green - Dark Side of the Road
6. Isaac Zangwill - THe Big Bow Mystery
7. Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia
8. George Alec Effinger - Maureen Birnbaum,Barbarian Swordsperson
9. Tove Jansson - Moominpappa's Memoirs
10. John Dickson Carr - It Walks by Night
11. L M Bujold - Winterfair Gifts
12. Poul Anderson - Ensign Flandry
13. Milton Lesser - Stadium Beyond the Stars
running total - 24

My reads in March
1. Nalini Singh - Archangel's Shadows
2. Ngaio Marsh - The Nursing Home Murder
3. Benedict Jacka - Hidden
4. Arthur C Clarke - The Fountains of Paradise
5. Samuel R Delany - The Ballad of Beta B
6. Samuel R Delaney - Empire Star
7. John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline
8. Jayne Ann Krentz - Deep Waters
9. Mary Norton - The Borrowers Afield
10. Susan Cooper - The Grey King
11. Edward Marston - The Excursion Train
12. Vincent Trigili - Enemy of an Enemy
13. Andre Norton - Uncharted Stars
14. Evan Hunter - Find the Feathered Serpent
15. Nancy Gideon - Hunter of Shadows
16. Jules Verne - Round the Moon
17. Christopher Fowler - Ten Second Staircase
running total - 41

My reads in April
1. Susan Cooper - Silver on the Tree
2. Philippe Beaussant - Rendezvous in Venice
3. Mary Norton - The Borrowers Afloat
4. Mary Norton - The Borrowers Aloft
5. Mary Norton - Borrowers Avenged
6. Patricia Rosemoor - Torch Job
7. Chloe Neill - Midnight Marked
8. Arthur C Clarke - Islands in the Sky
9. Michael Innes - The Secret Vanguard
10.Trisha Alexander - With This Wedding Ring
11.C J Cherryh - Tracker
12.Keri Arthur - Fireborn
13.William Shakespeare - Much Ado about Nothing
14. C J Cherryh - Kesrith
15. Thea Harrison - Kinked
16. Patricia Briggs - Fire Touched
17. C J Cherryh - Shon'jir
running total - 58

My reads in May
1. Agatha Christie - Death Comes as the End
2. Joan D Vinge - The Snow Queen
3. C J Cherryh - Kutath
4. Margery Allingham - Death of a Ghost
5. Arthur C Clarke - The Sands of Mars
6. G R R Martin - Windhaven
7. Lindsay Davis - Graveyard of the Hesperides
8. Poul Anderson - The Enemy Stars
9. Kate Griffin - The Midnight Mayor
10. Andre Norton - The Stars Are Ours
11. Leigh Brackett - Black Amazon of Mars
12. Robert Heinlein - Orphans of the Sky
13. Lyndon Stacey - No Second Chance
running total - 71

My reads in June
1. C J Cherryh - 40,000 in Gehenna
2. Mary Balogh - A Handful of Gold
3. Jacques Futrelle - The Thinking Machine
4. Suzanne Collins - Gregor the Overlander
5. Rex Stout - The Rubber Band
6. Charlaine Harris - The Pretenders (Cemetery Girl vol 1)
7. E L Konisgurg - From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler
8. Josephine Tey - To Love and be Wise
9. Milton Lesser - The Star Seekers
10. Marissa Meyer - Winter
running total - 81

In amongst a lot of authors I don't know/haven't read, are some of my very favorite authors! Is it OK to comment in your thread? If not, I will be happy to delete this for you.

That's a really nicely varied list of books. Nice for you!

Sweet cheeses! You are a voracious reader!

40000 in gehenna is one of the odder A/U works. I enjoyed it, but only once I'd got a long way into the book, and I don't know that I'd have given a new author that much patience. Faded Sun is superb. Have you read the Chanur quintet?

Such hard political SF contrasts wonderfully with the Borrowers (Delightful) and Susan Cooper

>8 MrsLee: All comments welcome. Doubles the pleasure to share the pleasure! :0)

>11 reading_fox: The final Chanur book,Chanur's Legacy was the very first Cherryh book I ever read,and I became a major fan of her books. However they have often proved difficult to locate in my area of the UK,never showing up in the bookshops,very rarely in the public library (they have precisely one in stock today!)
I only got hold of the Faded Sun trilogy this year,and it was good stuff,dark and downbeat,but spoiled a little for me by the fact that they had brought worlds/cultures to the brink repeatedly,over 80 times. Once,twice,even three times I could swallow,but not over 80 times without any cultural changes whatsoever!
Also loved the MIchael Whelan artwork,romantic and dramatic. I am a huge Michael Whelan fan!
I did not take to the comments that this was a sort of rip-off of Dune,I found only slight similarities. All in all,impressive stuff for a new young writer as she was at that time. Most of her later stuff was a bit lighter,less depressive in tone,thank goodness! lol.
As for the contrast of genres read,thats the way I like it! I do a shelfari version of the LT Category Challenge,called the 12x12 challenge and read a variety of SF,crime,junior classics,urban fantasy. I would hate to get stale! :0)

Wow, your list may consist mostly of a couple of genres, but you sure read a wide range within those genres! There are a few books there that I have fond memories of. The Dark is Rising series is a particular favourite of mine. I've only read the first Ancillary book so far, but the other two are just waiting until I can give them my undivided attention.

This thread has been added to the master list.

I have a feeling that your thread is going to be the source of many book bullets for me. You've been reading some great books and some that I really need to take off the Tbr pile and read.

Many of your authors are favourites of mine, especially
Cherryh.

Could I suggest MA Foster? Have any of you read The Gameplayers of Zan?

>16 nhlsecord: Not familiar with that author
Just finished an amiable enough outing for the married couple Patrick Gillard and Ingris Langley series,former spies and now involved with police investigations in Margaret Duffy's Dust to Dust,with the usual complex but believable plot,masses of action,an old enemy and sadly the murder of one of the usual cast of characters.Crime, spying,and mayhem abound,but there is the usual pleasure of the strong relationship between Patrick and Ingrid.

My reads in July
1. Margaret Duffy - Dust to Dust
2. Nicci French - Tuesday's Gone
3. Peter May - The Critic
4. John Dickson Carr - The Crooked Hinge
5. Quintin Jardine - Private Investigation
6. Edward Eager - Knight's Castle
7. H R F Keating - Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade
8. Roger Zelazny - Isle of the Dead
9. Darynda Jones - Fourth Grave Beneath my Feet
10. Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time
11. Olivia E Butler - Kindred
12. William Shakespeare - Henry IV
13. Darynda Jones - Fifth Grave Past the Light
14. Josephine Tey - The Daughter of Time
15. Quintin Jardine - Last Resort
16. Vicki Myron - Dewey the Library Cat
17. Larry Niven - The Integral Trees
running total - 98

In some ways I enjoyed the second tale in Nicci French's Frieda Klein series,Tuesday's Gone,more than the first story.Blue Monday,which was rather remote and cold in tone,though the mystery part was well done. In this second outing we learn a lot more about psychoanalyst Frieda,but I found the mystery part rather thin, and odd too.Frieda guesses the murderer without any other evidence than that the murderer used a nickname for a murder victim instead of his full name. Then things were developed without the readers being informed of them,a technique which irritated me.. So good marks for character development,poor marks for clues and credibility.
I think I will not pursue the series unless I happen to see the next book on the shelf at the library. I have had this disatisfaction with this author before(actually a husband and wife duo) something about the tone and lack of empathy with the characters.

I finished Peter May's The Critic the second book about a Scottish forensic scientist Enzo McLeod living in France. In this outing he is in the Gaillac wine area,and there is a lot about winemaking. I was a litle disappointed in the denouement,as the murderer hadnt been in the story since about page 50,and the motivation was somewhat incredible,the murderer was just insane really. Not my sort of story, I enjoy the gradual revealing of the villain,worked out from clues,not a barely mentioned character suddenly popping up.What the oldtime detective fans called fair play. Not sure if I will continue with the series. Like with the Nicci French books,I'll pick it up if I see it,but wont search for it.

I have a soft spot of John Dickson Carr's oldfashioned but still enjoyable locked room mysteries,where Dr Gideon Fell solves some seemingly impossible crimes,which initially are often spooky,and ostensibly supernatural. The Crooked Hinge is set in a country manor,in an enclosed garden where a man has his throat cut while no one is near him. It involves two claimants for the Farnleigh estate.John Farnleigh was thought to have died on the Titanic,and now ,20 years later one of the rival claimants has died ,but suicide or murder?And was he the heir or an imposter?
The spooky side of the book was bit weak for me,about an ancient automaton.On the other hand characterization was much stronger than usual for this sort of book,and the twists and surprises kept coming. Unusually too the murderer escapes at the end of the book,leaving an explanatory letter. Due to the shocking nature and callousness of the crimes,I found this a bit odd. Normally the nasty villains get arrested and hanged,or if more sympathetic to the reader in the course of the story,commit suicide! lol
So though less spooky than the norm this was still quite a gripping read.

Quintin Jardine's Private Investigations.#26 in the Bob Skinner police procedural series is another excellent book in this popular long running series,which after following Big Bob up the ladder right up to Chief Constable has now taken him off on a sideline as a kind of P.I.Two seemingly separate crimes finally prove to be connected in this deftly and intricately plotted tale,and as usual we follow not just Skinnner's work,but that of a large cast of other policemen. Very enjoyable,the standard is as high as ever while ringing a few changes to keep it all fresh. Ian Rankins Inspector Rebus may be more famous,but I prefer the Bob Skinner series when I fancy a bit of Scottish crime!

I had a nostalgic reread of Edward Eager's Knight's Castle,from the series which can be classed as a homage to E Nesbit's books. The author even has some of the characters reading one of her books! :0). Its many years since I read it,and I had only the vaguest memories of the tale,but I had vividly remembered the illustrations for some reason! lol
I also finished the book I read for the ''set in India'' section of my Birthstone challenge,H R F Keating's Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade. I think I read a book from this series decades ago and thought it was OK,but I found this book very weak with a very anticlimactic denouement and barely probable situations,which possibly were meant to be very funny,but didnt succeed for me! lol. No more Inspector Ghote,I think

I was quite fond of both Edward Eager and E. Nesbit as a child, but haven't read either of them in years. Looking back, some of their plots blur together a bit.

Wow Sylvia! I have just had an enjoyable time looking at your children's books shelf,brought back wonderful memories :0)
I know I read huge numbers of boarding school books back in ye olden days,all those Enid Blyton Chalet School books,and Angela Brazil.All those have blurred with time,as have the Secret Seven,Famous Five books,so I havent added them to my shelf.
The last couple of years I have been trying to fill my gaps of ignorance on older american junior classics,and have had some great reads,things like Misty of Chincoteague,Boxcar Children,Little House on the Prairie and of course Charlotte's Web,plus famous picture books like Make Way for Ducklings,classics that never came my way in our tiny childrens library in a small English town, back in the 50s,but better late than never! :0)

Read and enjoyed Roger Zelazny's Isle of the Dead,though it wasnt in the first rank of his works,and was a little bit rambling,obscure and slightly confused. However it did have the trademark preoccupations with immortality and mythology,and those fabulous descriptions of nature and landscape that are a favourite feature of his books for me.
Also had real fun with Darynda Jones Fourth Grave beneath my Feet,where feisty Charley,the Grim Reaper, finally gets together with Reyes the son of Satan in this amusing UF series. Funny,feisty,and frothy,a perfect antidote to all the grief and grimness which is all we see if we dare to brave turning on the world news. I am going straight on to the next book,Fifth Grave Past the Light for another dose of the humour and mayhem that surround the scatty Charley.

>25 dustydigger: As a Canadian child, I was fortunate enough to have a wide selection of both British and American books available at the local libraries. And Canadian, of course.

We have a Chalet School group on LibraryThing, though it hasn't been very busy since I lost my momentum while re-reading the series.

>25 dustydigger: We haven't discussed children's books lately but one of my favorites that comes to mind that you can look for if you haven't read it before is The Light Princess by George MacDonals.

>28 Darth-Heather: I think I may have read it as a child,but it has faded.I''ll probably put it on next year's lists.....yep,already composing next years reads,cant resist! :0)
I liked Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblins,The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind

I normally avoid books about the holocaust,or slavery,or about child abuse etc,these days I tend to want lighter books on lighter topics. So I have been putting off Olivia E Butler's Kindred where a young modern black woman has an irresistible link with her slave owning white ancestor ,born back around 1810,so that whenever he is in physical danger she is transported back in time to save his life,switching back and forth in time till she is sure that her great great grandmother has been born to one of his slave women . I was surprised at how accessible the style was,since was expecting a typical literary fiction style,dry and erudite. The book did move smoothly and easily,and was tense and gripping. But I just found the whole heartbreaking slavery situation very distressing to read about,I only read one flashback section at a time because it was so grim and disturbing,as this modern american woman had to struggle to become servile to survive ill treatment and the heartbreak of numerous abuses of the slaves. So its taken quite a while to finish the book,but it was a good book I'm glad I read it. I think I will wait a few months before tackling another of Butler's works!
Co-incidentally I was also reading a very different time travel novel,Michael Bishop's No Enemy But Time about a time experiment where a young man is sent back to the Pleistocene,and when the technology for his return to the present fails,he joins a group of hominids and even falls in love with one! The book is vividly written,often hilarious,or harrowing,sexually frank,and addresses themes of racism and identity in a vibant way. Good fun.One more Nebula off the list!That's 31/52 completed :0)
How interesting that time travel can be used for such different authors themes! Butler uses it only as a device to get a modern character back to the 1820s where she can be a foil for the state of blacks back then,as well as showing that even the most sensitive or well-intentioned of people are affected by the whole social milieu,so that the whole society can fall into gross injustices and cruelty.
Bishop uses a form of spirit travel combined with military equipment to thrust his protagonist much further back,while being careful to avoid pitfalls of pulp SF novels time travel gaffes That was my second Bishop book,and it was very different from Transfigurations,though both are rather anthropologically themed,and both interesting and thought provoking. Good stuff

Larry Niven's The Integral Trees,a Locus award winner, was a hugely enjoyable romp,but as is usual with Niven it has a jaw dropping setting
.500 years ago the ship Discipline was exploring with an eye to colonization,under the watchful eye of a computer tasked with monitoring the crew's loyalty for the all powerful State. They came across the Smoke Ring,a massive gas torus surrounding a neutron star with no planets,but with a variety of plant and animal life-forms evolved to thrive in conditions of continual free-fall. A mutiny occurred,and the crew abandoned ship, setting up home on some of the vegetation,setting up a variety of social and political systems.Scratching for a living on the tree like vegetation,and now with no memory of their past,and a pitiful amount of old tech slowly dying out,life is hard.
A small group of survivors from a dying Tree have a hair raising series of adventures,including slavery, before they steal an aged shuttle craft and make brief contact with the ship Discipline's computer,which is still patiently obeying orders to monitor the crew,before setting up a new colony on a new Tree.
Sketchy characterization of course,but lots of derring do,narrow escapes and wild adventures. A fun,quick read,and of course that weird and wonderful setting of the Smoke Ring. Excellent.
That makes 28/46 Locus award winners completed.I am trying to read 2 or 3 Hugo,Nebula or Locus winners per month,it should take about two more years to complete them all! lol.
But now the nice short,easy SF/F reads are going to give way to all the massive wristbreaking tomes,so progress may be a bit slower. Having a great time though,and have had some wonderful reads since getting back into the genre after decades away.

Aarrggghhhh... now I want to go pull The Integral Trees off my shelf for a quick re-read. I have too many new books that need reading for this, Dusty!!! ;)

>31 dustydigger: The integral trees has been on my TBR for a while now. Good to hear you enjoyed it!

>32 ScoLgo: Lol! ScoLgo,I am always getting posts about people wanting to reread after seeing my lists,since about 90% of my reads are golden oldies and classics.
>33 zjakkelien: thanks.Have you read John Varley's Titan? A different environment,not at iconic as Niven's,but I get the same sort of vibes and ambience with both authors. Good old derring do fun and adventure,without too much in your face fancy writing and heavy themes!lol.

Completed Ellen Raskin's Newbury Medal winning The Westing Game,which seems to have attracted rave reviews and is now established as a classic. Somehow I couldnt warm to it at all.The characters for the most part were rather flat,and there were too many of them.
Going to have to cut my TBR down drastically,because the olympics have started and I am glued to the sport.Thoroughly enjoying the swimming,diving,archery,and equestrianism,with rowing to come today! And soon the track and field start and thats that,I'm a fixture in front of the TV .No time for reading for the next fortnight.So the Tbr is slashed from 14 to 8! :0)

My reads in August
1. Margaret Duffy - Stealth
2. C J Cherryh - Heavy Time
3. C J Cherryh - Hellburner
4. Ellen Raskin - The Westing Game
5. Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach
6. Darynda Jones - Sixth Grave on the Edge
7. Darynda Jones - Seventh Grave and No Body
8. Roger Zelazny - Roadmarks
9. Darynda Jones - Eighth Grave After Dark
10. Jack Williamson - Darker Than You Think
11. Peter James - Dead Simple
12. Kathy Reichs - Exposure
13. Pat Murphy - The Falling Woman
14. Darynda Jones - The Dirt on Ninth Grave
15. Isaac Asimov - Robots and Empire

running total - 113

Maybe The Westing Game is more enjoyable if read in one's youth. I was about ten when I first read it, and liked it a lot, although it wasn't my favourite by the author. When I started reading it again a few years ago, I only got about a third of the way in before I lost interest.

>34 dustydigger: No, but I'm going to take a look at it now!

>34 dustydigger: >38 zjakkelien:

I'll throw another recommend for Varley's Gaea Trilogy on the pile. I really enjoyed Titan, Wizard, and Demon when I read them years ago.

I had to read a banned book for a challenge so I read.....James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.Yep,as ever small US towns wanted the ever nonPC and irreverent Dahl's blood for depicting child abuse,alcohol and drugs,inappropriate language,mockery of body images,violence and magical elements! lol.Wow,all that in a little kids fantasy novel! lol.
I loved the first part of the book when lonely 7 yr old orphan James,severely abused for years by his cruel and vindictive aunts who beat and half starve him, overwork him and isolate him from other children, meets a strange old man who gives him some odd stones which cause a peach as big as a house to grow overnight. Inside are various insects that have magically been made as big as James. The peach,with James and the others inside, rolls down the hill flattening and killing the wicked aunts on the way,which is a jubilant cause for one of Dahls hilarious little poems.James and the insects go off in the peach and have hair raising adventures and all triumphantly succeed in life and live happily ever after.
I had completed the book when I realized it was surely a homage to Jack and the Beanstalk,with the odd little man who gives out magic stuff to make something grow huge,but never turns up in the story again. I have often wondered what happened to him! lol

>40 dustydigger: One of my coworkers is named James. The past week or so he has been bringing me a large and luscious peach every day from his garden. I always think of this book when he does. :)

>41 MrsLee: ooooh I'm envious! The peaches failed in our local farmstand's orchard this year. Apparently they didn't get the weather they needed. Apples might not be good this fall either.

It may be all flashand little real substance,but Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks,reread for a challenge where I needed a original world creation, was hugely enjoyable. I probably grasped a lot more than my bewildered first attempt (inaudible mumble) decades ago,or my second read maybe a decade ago. If you want amazing settings,quirky characters,mythology,a headcracking plot,a hero who is living backwards like Merlin,time travel,French poetry(in the original French!) AIs in the form of books of poetry, a ninja,a tyranosurus rex, rollercoaster adventures and DRAGONS no less,Mr Zelazny juggles all these effortlessly in the air and masterfully somehow produces some sense out of it by the end! lol.And its only 185 pages long! Enormous fun,and, sure sign of being one of my all time favourite books, I could have happily turned by to the beginning and reread it! Superior popcorn read,and its made me want to sink back into Zelazny again. I do have the second set of Amber books on hand,I am ready to read book 7,Blood of Amber,but I know for a fact I would want to read the other three books of the series straight after,and I still have nearly 50 other books on my TBR for the rest of the year.Think I had better leave Merle in the Shadows for a while,or I'll never finish my challenges!I'll join Merle on his travels in Shadow in December I think! Then if I must read more of one of my fave authors,I can put them on next year's list! :0)

I have been on a Darynda Jones kick this month,reading books books 4-8 of the Charley Davidson series over the last two months,and I am starting book 9,The Dirt on Ninth Grave today. The series,about a rather ditsy young PI who is also a Grim Reaper, is light amusing fare,a perfect way to relax from heavy duty SF or grisly crime novels.My library only got the first three in the series and then all of a sudden after several years got all the rest of the series in one go,so I have been indulging myself as a distraction from health problems for both me and my family.
I used to read a lot of UF till I started to feel I had read out the sub-genre,and also got deep into SF,so its nice to be reading such a fun series.I may read a bit more of UF next year,instead of crime fiction. Somehow I just cant get away with modern style writing plus all the unreliable narrators,protagonists as vicious as the baddies,depressed detectives and the villains seeming to have a huge share of attention. I prefer nice old fashioned ''white hat'' heroes,I'm afraid,and that seems out of fashion these days. I am going to stick to older books,vintage or romantic suspense. I am sick of having to read about lots of nasty characters on the rampage - and thats just the heroes!

>40 dustydigger: "ever nonPC and irreverent Dahl's blood for depicting child abuse,alcohol and drugs,inappropriate language,mockery of body images,violence and magical elements" for JaGP. LOL indeed. It was one of my favourites as a child too. I think even at quite young ages children are able to separate out squishing of book characters versus their real counterparts.

>45 reading_fox: Lol! I loved the violence of the ''squishing'' of the revolting aunts. So satisfying that they got a well deserved comeuppance. :0) I had got a definite frisson at the terrible abuse they had inflicted on poor James. Maybe the disapprovers of violence and cruelty felt in that case the nastiness of the aunts was so close to the bone it was too distressing for children. I think Dahl is so popular with kids because he faces up to the grim side of life, which he ameliorates with sometimes savage humour,but is never saccherine or goody goody.
I'll bet Roald was amused at the sheer variety of complaints about this particular work of his!

Completed Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think as a winner of the Grand Master of Science Fiction Award. Odd mixture of noir,fantasy and science fiction with some good ideas and it is fairly enjoyable,with your typical femme fatale of the noir genre luring some weak sap into committing crimes - only she is a witch/shapeshifter dedicated to destroying a device which could exterminate the shifters forever! Lots of psychology gobbledegook,so common at the time (1948).the blackest of noir with a very downbeat ending. Quite good fun,but the writing is clunky flat and repetitive. Could have been excellent in the hands of a better writer.
I found it impossible not to picture Lana Turner and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity as the protagonists! lol.But without the sparkling dialogue and sexual tension.Here the guy is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He persists in believing that he only dreams of going off as a wolf,tiger or huge snake and murdering people,all of them old dear friends. He only comes to believe its true 20 pages from the end.Ah well Jack did his best,and I did find it interesting.
That makes 24/27 of the Grand Masters sampled,only Damon Knight,Michael Moorcock and James E Gunn left to go....next year!

Also finished Pat Murphy's The Falling Woman all about an archaeologist in Mexico unearthing the ruins of a Mayan temple. She has always been able to see shadows of the people of the past but now an ancient Mayan priestess of a moon goddess is urging her on to kill her estranged daughter as a sacrifice,claiming this will bring the goddess back to power. Odd sort of book,almost a travelogue for Mexico. Masses of stuff about ancient Mayan life,their calendars and religion etc. Plus the difficulties between a mother and daughter. Apart from the ancient priestess popping up now and again,and a would be dramatic climax in an ancient temple which didnt really get me excited at all,I didnt really take to this book probably because the characters never struck a chord with me,and the book somewhat tailed off. Not really award winning material IMO,but it had all those womens issues so beloved at the time. Certainly a riproaring adventure like fellow nominees Brin's The Uplift War,or even Gene Wolfe's offbeat Soldier in the Mist didnt have enough gravitas! lol. Oh well,that makes 32/52 Nebulas completed,still a long long way to go. :0(

AT LAST! Completed Isaac Asimov's Robots and Empire which dragged on almost interminably,as Asimov attempted to make a framework to meld the Robot series with the Foundation books. I found it turgid,too long and dull.
I will be reading Asimov's The Currents of Space this week,lets hope I enjoy that more. At least its 216 pages compare favourably with Robots and Empire's 480! lol

Books -in- Progress

Piers Anthony - Cluster110/251
P K Hrezo - Butterman's (Time)Travel Inc (45% read)
Andre Norton - Quest Crosstime 1/253

Hi Dusty, I remember you from Shelfari, thought I should let you know I am following your reading as I enjoy your comments about books.

>52 Kristelh: Good to see you here,Kristel! Yep. a little band of old shelfarians are still here ,hoping that we have found quiet waters after some turbulent seas this year!

Not sure if you'll find much of interest,I gave up on the 1001 Books last year. Are you still pursuing that list,I remember you being very active in the group on Shelfari.I had just too much real life issues on my plate,and also got more into science fiction etc in my reading,I didnt have the time and mental stamina to keep up with that often very tough list! Hope things are going well for you,and please feel free to chat about anything on my TBR. Happy reading

I read a quite a bit SF and Fantasy, tracking some Tournament of Books possibilities so reading new 2016 books, following CATS here at LT and still reading away at the 1001 lists too. I have about 400 of those read so far.

I am currently reading The Star Diaries, hilarious and The Goldfinch.

>54 Kristelh: Interesting that you are finding The Star Diaries hilarious. It certainly sounds very different from his Solaris which def wasnt a laugh a minute! :0)
Not sure if I will ever get round to The Goldfinch,unlike most people I was a bit underwhelmed with The Secret History.I found that neither fish nor fowl falling a bit between genres,very literary,yet making a major foray in the mystery arena,and not quite cutting the mustard there,falling short of strong enough mystery elements to grab the attention of this seasoned old crime fic fan. My lukewarm attitude and lack of attachment to the characters didnt help either! lol.Oh well,thats me all over,as you may remember,being rather unenthusiastic to the pretensions of literary fiction. I'm such a philistine,navel contemplation without strong plot action and vivid characterisation dont cut it with me,and boy how often have I got totally fed up and impatient with some of the 1001 Books over the years!..
I will look out for your take on The Goldfinch :0)

The Star Diaries are definitely different than Solaris but yet, you can tell that it is the same author. I am liking The Goldfinch so far but there are plenty of negative reviews about the end so......will see.

National Velvet is an odd book but one of my favourites. I'll be interested to see what you think of it.

>51 dustydigger:, and I really liked The Doomsday Book.

Ouch,thinking about 1001 Books,withall those literary works being solemnly discussed on such a elevated critical level,I have just read Edith Wharton's short story Xingu about a little book club of five would be upper crust ladies who meet regularly to discuss the latest literary and cultural triumph,without a single original thought in their snobbish heads.They are jubilant about having snagged a literary lion as a guest for their next meeting,plus a new member for the group,who appals them by saying she is reading Trollope for pleasure,when they know Trollope is so very outdated,my dear,and cheerfully admits she dropped the latest book of the literary lion lady in a river and hasnt read it.
The literary lion appears, is cold,, disdainful and asks them piercing questions they havent a clue about answering. It seems the new member is saving them from embarrassment when she tells the guest that the group has been heavily involved all year with Xingu,and the group happily fall into their usual vague platitudes and would be insightful rubbish extolling Xingu,and when the guest abruptly goes off with the new member to play bridge, they finally check up and Xingu isnt a book or a philosophy,but an Amazon river! Cringes all round at the nonsense they have so confidently spouted.
I bet Wharton didnt get many calls to discuss literature in the rich folks salons after she published this. Spot on satire as Wharton gets out the knives for flaying the pretensions and prejudices of her own class. Brilliant amusing stuff. Read it for the ''X'' title in my A-Z Authors and titles challenges.

>57 Sakerfalcon: Wow! Sakerfalcon I just finished National Velvet and I think this is probably my read of the year. I'd say it wasnt written for kids at all,though sophisticated 12 year old readers may grasp some of its subtleties,and ,as kids do with difficult books, pick out the horsey bits - after all,thats what the film did! -this book is really about the dynamics of the Brown family,a person's aspirations to be the best at something,and also the crass intrusions of the media and how fleeting is fame. The post race section is a pretty sharp and scathing take on the media which,taking away a few dated expressions,could have been written yesterday. Wonderful characters,lyrical if quirky writing,humour and pathos all make for a poignant often moving read. LOVED it.
I had no quarrel with the oft criticised style,I was born only 14 years after it was written so I got all the allusions that would puzzle many today.There were numerous fascinating things,such as the descriptions of the racecourse. I remember as a kid the awe and fear Becher's Brook instilled in people.The everyday life of an impoverished family in the 1920s also comes vividly to life.
All in all I was impressed and this book will stay in my mind for a long time. A true classic.

I finished Asimov's The Currents of Space. It was an OK read,typical Asimov,with the usual rather flat characters,but a reasonably interesting depiction of the relationship between two planets,one of which produces the only known plant kyrt which is processed into a beautiful material,the other rules and exploits the workers shockingly. Typical Asimov pessimism over human nature :0) It has the usual Asimov conspiracies and a slight mystery,complete with a Poirot like revealing of the culprit. Asmov must have been a Christie fan and enjoyed producing his own mystery series,The Black Widowers series. To me however the writing is so dry and clunky it detracts from the story sometimes.
You've got to love the boundless faith that some day humans will inhabit not hundreds,not thousands,but a million planets across the galaxy! :0)

Whew! At last I finished Connie Willis's Doomsday Book A fair read that could have been even better if there had been less repetition and the stressing of themes had been less heavyhandedly pointed.Willis never heard that less is more
Most of the historical inaccuracies were minor or passed me by completely so didnt bother me much,except the irritation of the times ''The NHS phoned you'' and the measurements being in centimetres. Written in late 80s I would have expected feet and inches would have been more sensible,both for US and UK audiences. Instead,every time I saw centimetres it brought back the French Revolution when centimetres and metres were invented,400 years after the plague!
But I did like the theme that human beings are human beings in all their variety, strengths and weaknesses,and historians are too fond of simplifying, even dismissing this for the ''big picture''.The same attitude that dismissively states that back in ye olden days when parents lost three or four of their children before they reached five years old they didnt feel it as much as we much more sensitive modern people do.OK,cultural mores and religion may have muted things in some ways but tragedy,grief and pain were still there to be suffered.
That makes 49/65 Hugos read,33/52 nebulas. Slow steady progress through the award. Hope to finish them by the end of 2017,before my 70th birthday January 2018! lol.

>60 dustydigger: So glad you liked National Velvet! I don't know if the author wrote it for children or not, but I think it would be a shame if adults gave it a miss because they think it is juvenile.

>63 Sakerfalcon: I was struck by the character of Mrs Brown in particular. Near the end we hear her outburst to her husband,as to whether he was attracted to her for her fleeting fame. Wow! Twenty years of silence then an outburst which Bagnold doesnt define as bitter,angry,wry,or what,so we are left to form our own opinions. Such subtleties,which would go over the heads of children. I will definitely be rereading this book in a year or two.

Dusty, I'm going to have to give National Velvet a reread. Your review makes me think that I would get something different out of it now than I did reading it as a child. This book was probably suggested to me at that age because I was a big fan of other books about girls and horses, like Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague.

The main thing I remember is her cutout paper horses (I wanted some). Also that I identified with her feeling of being lost in her family as other members got more attention.

I have just finished the excellent Replay by Ken Grimwood,a World Fantasy award winner.When, Jeff, the 43 year old protagonist, dies suddenly from a heart attack he then wakes up to find himself once more an 18 year old college boy,but with all his memories of his past life intact.Again he lives to the same date,again he dies - repeatedly.On a later ''replay'' he meets Pamela,another replayer and some of the sheer loneliness of keeping the situation secret is mitigated. But each replay becomes shorter,first by months,then by years,till in the end the replays only last minutes.Often sad,bittersweet and haunting,I was ever eager to see what the latest replay would be like. The characters come to the conclusion that they cant ever make the world better,only different,and that what we do to treat our people with kindness and love on a regular basis will impact on their very nature.
OK perhaps a little schmaltzy and sentimental near the end,but a really enjoyable read.

>66 dustydigger: This sounds very much like Claire North's The first fifteen lives of Harry August. Which I liked, even though I had the feeling that there are inherent inconsistencies in the timelines.

>67 zjakkelien: I havent read that yet. This theme of reliving the past is such a beloved trope of SF writers!Probably the screenplay writers of Groundhog Day had read Grimwood's book,but played it for laughs. Replay has a much sadder tone. For instance,after his first replay,where he naturally became one of the very rich by betting on sports events and buying shares,but leading a sterile life he deliberately decides to stick to suburbia,marries his highschool sweetheart,and has a daughter whom he adores.Of course the 3rd replay meant this happy life was swept away. Grimwood really shows the anguish of this,it is a gaping hole in his life,so he underlines all the downsides of repeating life,and the futility of trying to change the world So its often a sad little book,but a good read.

>68 dustydigger: Well, I put it on my wishlist...

Finished Ellery Queen's vintage'' locked room'' story The American Gun Mystery. Interesting setting,murder at an indoor Wild West show,with lots of seedy characters,but the denouement was a bit meh.

Finished Paul Finch's Dead Man Walking an action packed high octane suspense story about a maniac stalking and killing the inhabitants of a Lake District isolated village. Very macabre,gruesome and gritty. I always enjoy this series about Mark ''Heck'' Heckenburg,but I correctly guessed the murderer only half way through. So I had to plough through another 150 pages to see if I was right,plus the whole thing was a bit farfetched. But quite enjoyable mayhem!
Hey,thats two books completed in one day.At one point I had 6 or 7 on the go,and finally the books-in-progress are getting more reasonable.Should make my targeted 12 books by the end of the month after all.

72 I think this latest book in Jacqueline Winspear'sMaisie Dobbs series,An Incomplete Revenge was possibly the most enjoyable so far,as we got away from London and out to a small village in Kent which carries a dark heavy secret. Lots of interesting details about hop picking and an insight into gypsy culture in the 1930s,along with the intense suspicion and fear of the romany world,sadly just as strong and prevalent today. We can see how the protagonist,a psychologist cum investigator goes about her work,as well as some more of the gradual thawing of her soul,so terribly damaged in WWI. Sad and haunting at times,I found it an engrossing read.

I've only read the first Maisie Dobbs book so far, but I've been gradually collecting the others when they go on sale for the Kindle. I have all of them now except for the second one.

Fortunately our public library seems to like her books,they are all available. I am enjoying the series more as it goes on. The first book was necessarily heavy on historical detail and explanations of Maisie's unusual back story,now as the series goes on we see more of her character,which I found frustratingly opaque in #1,as we reeally only saw her from the outside,at a distance.I think this character development,plus a clever focusing on different aspects of life in the early 30s,has kept the series fresh and unstereotypical. Takes a lot to get me to read historical novels at any time,so having read 5 of the series shows I am impressed! lol

No SF this week,as I had to focus on some library books which couldnt be renewed,so I have been reading an Ellery Queen and a chinese mystery story.
I put aside Wolfe's Sword of the Lictor for a while,mostly to try to get my head around some plot revelations. I particularly like to muse about our Severian when I am washing up the dishes,a mindless task that can set me screaming with boredom,but now I am whining in shock and bewilderment as I try to wrap my head around this book,a pleasant change! lol.
I also put aside my latest Nebula winner read Elizabet Ann Scarborough's The Healer's War about a nurse working in a army hospital during the Vietnam war,who meets an old man whose amulet seems to have mystical healing powers. As I said in my profile,the war genre is one I avoid like the plague as a rule,so thats making the book difficult anyway with its graphic depictions of war wounds,burn victims,amputees,screaming patients and the like. Then there is the depressing casual sex,drug taking,low morale etc and the persistant raciism,even of so called allies,which is so offensive and distressing ,however realistic. And I know for a fact things are going to get really dire when the heroine ends up in the jungle and is captured by Vietcong. Dreading it! I tend to stick with challenge reads so that I can tick them off faithfully from my eternal lists,but this is very hard going,not least because I have no empathy with the rather ditsy,clueless heroine.First person too,so I cant get a break from her thoughts.Have read 110/378 pages ,so I have a hard trek ahead!. :0(So I am taking a break. I have till the end of December to finish it,I get the feeling it is going to be done in increments! :0(

Finished Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld,which is set in an alternate 1914,where after an ideological split back in the 19th century Europe has split into Clankers,nations who have become heavily mechanized,and Darwinists,especially in Britain,who have cracked the genetic code and have adapted animals and birds as beasts of burden and weapons of war,which is regarded as an abomination to the Clankers. Leviathan is a whale airship. Deryn is a girl disguised as a boy to join the military,Alek is the son of the Archduke of Austria -Hungary who has escaped with a handful of supporters after his family were killed as an excuse to start a war. He is being searched for across Europe to kill him. A riproaring adventure ensues in a wonderfully convincing and detailed world. The book has copious magnificent illustrations which truly enhance the story. My first tentative foray into YA steampunk was great fun.

Completed H Beam Piper's second Fuzzy story,Fuzzy SapiensGood fun and the Fuzzies are delightful,but the book comes across today as very paternalistic and patronising of these small golden furred creatures newly discovered to have speech and the mental level of a 10 year old.They come across. as rather amusing pets. But still an enjoyable read,so I will search out the third book in the series soon.

>76 dustydigger: Leviathan sounds really good; I'm going to have to check that out. I loved his Uglies quartet.

76, I read Leviathan awhile back and enjoyed it.

Books-in-Progress in October

Larry Niven - World of Ptavvs 22/198
Laurie R King - Night Work
Allan M Steele - Orbital Decay 15/345

How is Andre Nortin's sf aging? I read a lot of them about 30 years ago, but haven't read any since.

I read a lot of Piers Anthony as a teenager, but stopped when it dawned on me just how mysogynistic his books were.

>82 SylviaC: Much of Norton's work is YA so is fairly straightforward storytelling,no frills,but it holds up quite well as she tends to have sympathetic characters and lots of action.

Finished Elizabeth A Scarborough's The Healer's War about a nurse during the Vietnam war who ihas custody of a magic healing amulet. Very downbeat and harrowing scenes,its a relief to have finally completed it. Thats 34/52 Nebula winners done :0)
Completed Darynda Jones The Curse of Tenth Grave in the Charley Davidson series,but I am not keen on the story arc of the last few books,where Charley is now a deity, has had a baby,and is now at loggerheads with God..Plots much more sober and a bit downbeat,I much preferred the early madcap adventures of Charley as just the Grim Reaper. Her ditsy persona just doesnt fit in with who and what she has turned out to be,so her funny ways dont ring true for me now.

Completed Gene Wolfe's Sword of the Lictor - brilliant,baffling,fiendishly literary and very difficult,as well as absorbing and haunting. I am still struggling to get my head around it,and have probably only grasped a tiny part of its complexities. I will leave the final section of Severian's tale,Citadel of the Autarch,till next year My brain needs a rest! :0)
Also finished P J Tracy's Cold Kill a nice easy quick read by comparison. I always enjoy the Monkeewrench series

Finished Island of the Blue Dolphins,and of course had a few tears. Delightful book,based on a true story, about a young girl in a Robinson Crusoe style story,who survives for 18 years on an island using only local materials and ancient traditional ways of hunter gathering,no tools and luxuries like Crusoe collected from his shipwreck!! lol Lovely,sad and full of inspiration and beautiful descriptions of nature in all its aspects. Good stuff.
That completes my children's lit category of my 12x12 challenge,and it has been a very enjoyble one. Read the Borrowers series,Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,National Velvetbooks and then this book. Now rubbing my hands with glee as I start exploring next year's category. I am thinking of choosing books from the Newberry award winners.

>86 dustydigger: Some of my favorites in that post!

So many children's books are too good not to be read by adults!

I started off really liking Jim Kelly's The Fire Baby yet somehow I was much less enthusiastic by the end,because the plot interactions were sometimes a bit hard to follow,and the book became relentlessly darker,downbeat and gloomy. And almost everyone ended up either dead or in prison,or still trapped in sad lives.I found the ending just too bleak and depressing to enjoy. Good writing,deft control of the complex tale,and a sympathetic hero, I thought at first I was on to a new series where I had half a dozen fun books in store,but I am now unsure whether I will read more. I have enough angst in my life than being disturbed and depressed when perfectly nice people are ruined by falling victim to awful circumstances. But if you like gritty downbeat books,this has a lot going for it

I tend to be only a dutiful reader of Isaac Asimov. He is my least favourite of the so called ''Big Three'' of 50s SF(along with Heinlein and Clarke). The End of Eternity was a case in point. I struggled with it,finding ample irritating examples of the usual flat characters and plodding pedestrian prose.But had to admire the fascinating and complex time travel premise,Asimov's usual turning things inside out to show wheels within wheels.Then too there is the startling link with the Galactic Empire which underpins Asimov's whole opus,but seemed missing here till the very end.
The characters,especially the geeky priggish,virgin 32 year old protagonist,who works for Eternity,who make changes in reality up and down the ages for the greater benefit of mankind who falls in love and decides to pretty much destroy the whole fabric of the world to be with his beloved, are dull and flat. He is so oblivious and clueless that he is being a patsy for nearly everyone around him that I couldnt whip up a bit of sympathy for him! lol OK,all that is probably appropriate for the prosaic gray mundane world he is living in,but it doesnt make for me having any empathy for him.The book was only 190 pages long,but I grimly trudged through it,and it felt much longer :0) Nice to mark it off as read,but I wouldnt want to return to that world.

Lester Del Rey's Marooned on Mars was written in 1952,so before the Mariner mission pics and data supplied us with the stark truths about barren Mars. After that no more Barsooms etc,but at least here we could still some rather interesting martians,the weak remnants of a great culture which is running out of water and resources. Typical plucky young hero(who had stowed away on the first voyage to Mars as you do) As usual we have smoking,atomic fuelled rocket ships which have to land on three fins,and delightful make do and mend solutions to problems such as soldering holes in the walls of the rocket when the inevitable meteorite storm attacks the ship. Yep our hero just happened to have his soldering kit at hand to put things right immediately!That makes three of this series where I have seen meteorites are a problem
One or two interesting features. The crew are typical Right Stuff types. Our hero is scared to death,but the crew dont blink an eye,and their pulses remain rock steady. Perhaps the pilot really was Chuck Yeager in disguise.
Then there was a comment at the end when as the young hero is appointed to be liaison with the martians,one of the crew rather cynically states there will be no trouble with the natives until the humans have civilised them enough that their own culture will go to pieces. Not quite the gung ho tone promoted by the rest of the book! Pleasant light fun,a nice return to the old style SF that a whole generation grew up with.I am very much enjoying this series

Thoroughly enjoyed Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep,full of cool aliens,unique worldsettings,and a canvas that spans the galaxy. It doesnt do to look too closely at some of the ideasand the writing and characters can be a bit flat,but we can ignore them when being swept away by all the flash and dazzle of superior soap opera.One of my fave reads of the year,and I certainly liked it a lot better than its fellow Hugo winner that year,Connie Willis's Doomsday Book which I read last month! :0)

Finished John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale,pleasant enough little book written in a YA style with a snarky teenage heroine. The story parallels The Last Colony but from Zoe's point of view. Quite a bit of sentimentality,and Zoe's part in saving her colony is a tad improbable for a teenage girl(I was irresistably reminded of Buffy the Slayer. That's who I saw in my mind's eye!) ,but its quite enjoyable,though hardly groundbreaking. I think I read so many award winners and classics that I am often quite surprised when books are just light and frothy without serious underlying themes or the like!.lol
Now tonight for Halloween I am just going to relax (?) and reread some favourite Edgar Allan Poe .The Pit and the Pendulum still gives me the horrors even though I know the poor protagonist escapes his fate in time!
So,apart from the horrors of the Inquisition I will revisit that cellar with the delicious amontilado - dont trip over the cat - and go see my friend at the Usher house,rather odd place that.And I am invited to a party,a Masque. Sounds interesting.......Hmm,does anyone hear that strange thudding noise under the floorboards ?....odd......
Wow,that man could write. Happy Halloween everyone!

Books read in November
1. Nicole Peeler - Tempest Reborn
2. Roger Zelazny - Blood of Amber
3. Larry Niven - World of Ptavvs
4. J D Robb - Brotherhood in Death
5. Gordon R Dickson - Dorsai!
6. Robert A Heinlein - The Rolling Stones
7. Poul Anderson - Trader to the Stars
8. Robert A Heinlein - Time for the Stars
9. A A Van Vogt - Voyage of the Space Beagle
10. Laurie R King - Night Work
11. Chad Oliver - Mists of Dawn
12. Dorothy L Sayers - Murder Must Advertise
13. Ben Aaronovitch - The Hanging Tree
14. Simon R Green - Paths Not Taken

running total 158

Books -in-progress in November

Edgar Rice Burroughs - At The Earth's Core 47/245
Dorothy L Sayers - Hangman's Holidays 63/188
Allan M Steele - Orbital Decay 165/324

Just finished the rather jolly if old fashioned Heinlein juvenile The Rolling Stones about a rather eccentric family who go off on a jaunt round Mars and the asteroid belt.
Originally written for teenage boys, the Heinlein juvenile books are still enjoyable for older readers as Heinlein respected his eager young audience, writing often quite challenging material (eg the hero in Between Two Planets becomes a guerilla,actually slitting the throats of the enemy, or teenagers carry weapons in Red Planet,and protagonists can even die). Result,quarrels with the publisher Scribner every year about unsuitable material. The big bust up came with book 13,a little known novel called Starship Troopers where RAH got so fed up he went off and wrote for adults ever after. Some of us still think the juveniles were his best work!

Probably Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs will turn out to be my worst read of the year. His first novel,it was so confused,and confusing, with a rather ridiculous plot and not a smidgen of characterisation so that I didnt care what was happening to such flat unconvincing characters.It really dragged,and I was relieved to finally finish it.. 2.5 stars
J D Robb's Brotherhood in Death is another fine futuristic police procrdural,which points up both the dilemma police have in having to look for murderers who having been terribly abused by men and whose lives had been torn apart by it,and have now wreaked horrific revenge on the abusers,and also the terribly sad and heartrending shock of the innocent members of the abusers families,whose lives will never be the same again.As ever Robb is deft at spinning out all the threads of a complex investigation in a way that must be the envy of other crime writers,while continuing to provide nice little snippets about the lives of Eve's now extensive support web.Doing this over a series of more than 40 titles is extremely impressive,and I dont think she gets enough praise for it,so that while having a huge number of fans within the romance genre she doesnt get the critical acclaim of the famous male crime writers.

I finished that UF book,Nicole Peeler's Tempest Reborn,which picked up after a dull start,but was full of graphic first person sex scenes .(Ugh,using the C-word in descriptions of sex do NOT please me in a book which is really YA in tone) Only rather amusing thing in the book was when the huge evil dragon had destroyed Big Ben and demolished the Houses of Parliament,and was described as using the London Eye as a frisbee! No more Peeler for me.
Also finished Roger Zelazny's Blood of Amber the second in the series about Merlin,the son of Prince Corwin in the original five Amber books. Merle is growing on me now,and his serch for a mysterious masked sorcerer was intriguing,but then it turned out to be a cliffhanger,ending midscene with Merle being dragged through a portal. Grrr! I dont like cliffhangers when I havent time to read straight on,it will be January before I have time to read the other 3 books in the series. :0(

I flew through the last of the Heinlein juveniles,Time for the Stars Wow,what a contrast with The Rolling Stones which was the frothiest of humorous froth. So much is packed into a mere 188 pages in Time for the Stars with lots of science,space exploration adventure and danger.
When mankind sets off to the stars,desperate to locate liveable planets to ease Earth's dire overpopulation, the technology will get the ships up to 99% light speed,so radio waves will be impossibly slow for communication over the huge distances.So they decide to use the simultaneity of telepathy between twins,which is unaffected by distance.We follow the story through one such pair of twins,Tom and Pat. One twin will go on the spaceship,the other will stay earthbound to receive the ship communications. RAH carefully shows some of the interesting effects of relativity as the twin on earth ages by decades,while barely months or a few years passes by in the ships.
One interesting topic is the matter of relationships between twins which rather than being depicted as all sweetness and light can actually be quite fraught . We also have contac t with aliens who pretty much wipe the floor with the humans,with a lot of deaths. Surprised that RAH managed to get so much of that through the publisher. This is definitely up at the top of of the audience's age group.
Then at the end is tacked on an unexpected tech development,slightly deus ex machina in my mind,but on return to Earth the spacers find that society has moved on tremendously in 50 years and they are just a minor little footnote in the history books.. Got to say despite the YA tone of the book I found this a much more agreeable and interesting take on relativity than Joe Haldeman's Forever War.(Yep I am one of the few who didnt take to that book in the slightest!).
I would rate this as one of the better of the Heinlein juveniles with its complex relationships and the stuff about relativity. Good stuff.
I am now about a quarter of the way through A A Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle and have started ERBs At the Earth's Core

Just completed A E Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle a fix up of some of his earliest stories. The writing is a bit stodgy.,characterisation nonexistent,and some of the science theories are a bit lame or vague,but the book earned its place in Jim Harris's Defining Books of the Fifties because of some of its ideas being used later.
Such as the fact that this is a five year voyage out across the galaxies seeking out life forms and new planets. It has an outsider who promotes a new science which integrates all others,but his dependence on sheer logic and rationalism separates him from his fellows,who are wary of him and his lack of human warmth. Each section of the book shows a new and dangerous lifeform to be bested. Certainly they killed off beast a lot more readily than Star Trek,but the Enterprise voyagers did their fair share,high ideals or not!
Then in one episode a beast gets into the ship and steals crew members to act as incubators for the creatures eggs. After the crittur is finally killed the surgeon does an op to remove the egg,burning the eggs as they are removed. Suddenly-

''an ugly round scarlet head with tiny beady eyes and a tiny slit of a mouth poked out. The head twisted on its short neck and the eyes glittered up at them with hard ferocity.With a swiftness that almost took them by surprise the creature reared up and tried to to climb out of the vat. The smooth walls defeated it. It slid back and dissolved in the flames that poured upon it.
Smith licked his lips and said''Suppose it had escaped and dissolved into the nearest wall?''

Well,we all know someone with an evil imagination DID let the creature escape in a very gruesome fashion and frightened the wits out of millions of filmgoers in a modest little film called Alien.
But you can see why Van Vogt was able to contest them and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. :0)Hope it was a good sum! :0)

books in progress in December

Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Mars 65/568
Anton Strout - Dead Matters 89/312

In the chaos that is my life, I lost track of where everyone migrated to. I tracked you down through Shelfarians on Goodreads. Would it be presumptuous to ask you to invite me into your private group? I miss everyone and can't wait to reconnect with the magpies

>103 LeslieHurd: Private? Us? Grab a PGGB and some cheese, and consider yourself invited, welcome and at home!

>103 LeslieHurd: Hi Leslie! Good to see that you found your way here! I'm sure Dusty will add you to the Trove when she gets a chance - she recently had surgery and is only here intermittently for now. Remember when she had her knee done last year? They finally got to do the other one.

Also be welcome in this group - the Green Dragon folks are fun and friendly and there's all sort of good stuff going on!

I finished my final book of the year #175,better than I estimated earlier in the year,though still 20-30 down on my original target before nasty real life poked its ugly nose into affairs.Here's hoping for a happier and more tranquil 2017 on all fronts so we can get on with the important thing,reducing that towering TBR.
Happy New Year everyone!

>106 dustydigger:, congratulations on #175, Happy New Year and happy reading 2017.