June, 2024 Readings: “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.” L.M. Montgomery
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1CliffBurns
Starting off my month searching through my piles of books--fiction or non-fiction?
Or maybe I'll read Jerry Stahl's I, FATTY and combine the two...
You?
Or maybe I'll read Jerry Stahl's I, FATTY and combine the two...
You?
2Cecrow
About halfway through an abridged copy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's about a sixth the length of the full work and all I can handle, already ate up most of May.
3mejix
Read last month:
Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu: Endlessly inventive. Written with verve. Sustains the momentum consistently. Very very well constructed. The ending is kind of muddled but overall a great read.
The Selected Poems of Po Chu-I translated by David Hinton: Bought randomly on the last day of a book fair. What a nice surprise. The subjects for the poems are somewhat repetitive and I suspect that I won't remember any one in particular distinctly. But there are some really great poems here, and many many breathtaking verses.
Land of Men, Wind, and Stars by Antoine de Saint Exupery: Very romantic and very tender. Beautifully written. Unfortunately his view of empire and colonials hasn't aged well. Sometimes feels very Tintin. Lot's of talk about manliness too. Mostly an enjoyable read though.
Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse: The influences are evident but still it works. It hits a note and sustains it beautifully. Helped by a wonderful audiobook reading by Kare Conradi. I'm guessing that reading in print might be a different experience, probably a bit repetitive. Audiobook really hit the spot for me.
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck: A sort of novel-reportage on recent African migration to Germany, with little plot and mostly background stories. It was ultimately unsatisfying, but it was an unusual project and it did keep my attention. I was left with the impression of a very talented and very intelligent writer. Will definitely look for other Erpenbeck books.
True Grit by Charles Portis: Fun, entertaining read. Relatively simple and short but felt rich and satisfying.
Currently reading Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Bhagavad Gita and Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil translated by A. K. Ramanujan.
Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu: Endlessly inventive. Written with verve. Sustains the momentum consistently. Very very well constructed. The ending is kind of muddled but overall a great read.
The Selected Poems of Po Chu-I translated by David Hinton: Bought randomly on the last day of a book fair. What a nice surprise. The subjects for the poems are somewhat repetitive and I suspect that I won't remember any one in particular distinctly. But there are some really great poems here, and many many breathtaking verses.
Land of Men, Wind, and Stars by Antoine de Saint Exupery: Very romantic and very tender. Beautifully written. Unfortunately his view of empire and colonials hasn't aged well. Sometimes feels very Tintin. Lot's of talk about manliness too. Mostly an enjoyable read though.
Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse: The influences are evident but still it works. It hits a note and sustains it beautifully. Helped by a wonderful audiobook reading by Kare Conradi. I'm guessing that reading in print might be a different experience, probably a bit repetitive. Audiobook really hit the spot for me.
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck: A sort of novel-reportage on recent African migration to Germany, with little plot and mostly background stories. It was ultimately unsatisfying, but it was an unusual project and it did keep my attention. I was left with the impression of a very talented and very intelligent writer. Will definitely look for other Erpenbeck books.
True Grit by Charles Portis: Fun, entertaining read. Relatively simple and short but felt rich and satisfying.
Currently reading Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Bhagavad Gita and Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil translated by A. K. Ramanujan.
4iansales
Read: Thank You, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
I’m of the generation that was much amused by the TV series starring Fry and Laurie, and I think I’ve read a couple of the stories at some time or another, but until The Jeeves Omnibus, Vol 1, containing the first three Jeeves novels, appeared in an ebook deal for 99p I’d never really considered reading further. A friend of mine is a big Wodehouse fan and I’m fairly sure we’ve discussed Jeeves and Wooster, although any such discussion likely took place in a pub so I’m not certain on the details. Thank You, Jeeves is the first novel-length appearance of Jeeves and Wooster, although they’d appeared in stories published up to a decade earlier. Wooster has left London in a huff after complaints by neighbours about his banjolele playing. He retires to a small cottage in the country, prompting Jeeves, who is unwilling to live in a cottage or put up with the banjolele, to resign. Then Wooster’s ex-fiancée from the US turns up, with her filthy-rich bull-headed father, and also the psychiatrist who put the kibosh on the engagement between Wooster and the rich American’s daughter. But she now wants Wooster’s pal, Chuffy, a penniless baron, who’s hoping to sell his country seat to the father to turn into a sanatorium run by the aforementioned psychiatrist… Wooster ends up running around the countryside with his face covered in boot polish, after disguising himself as a member of a blackface entertainer group - lots of uses of the n-word here, and although it was the term in use back then, I’d sooner not see it used, or indeed any reference to blackface… Wooster’s replacement for Jeeves proves to be a homicidal maniac when drunk. Cue all sorts of misunderstandings and comic set-pieces, and it’s all gratifyingly witty and occasionally LOL-funny, despite the bad taste left by the n-word… Of course, Jeeves resolves everything with inhuman aplomb. Two books to go in this omnibus, and at least three more omnibuses - omnibi? omnipodes? - so plenty left to read, and yes I’ll be reading them.
I’m of the generation that was much amused by the TV series starring Fry and Laurie, and I think I’ve read a couple of the stories at some time or another, but until The Jeeves Omnibus, Vol 1, containing the first three Jeeves novels, appeared in an ebook deal for 99p I’d never really considered reading further. A friend of mine is a big Wodehouse fan and I’m fairly sure we’ve discussed Jeeves and Wooster, although any such discussion likely took place in a pub so I’m not certain on the details. Thank You, Jeeves is the first novel-length appearance of Jeeves and Wooster, although they’d appeared in stories published up to a decade earlier. Wooster has left London in a huff after complaints by neighbours about his banjolele playing. He retires to a small cottage in the country, prompting Jeeves, who is unwilling to live in a cottage or put up with the banjolele, to resign. Then Wooster’s ex-fiancée from the US turns up, with her filthy-rich bull-headed father, and also the psychiatrist who put the kibosh on the engagement between Wooster and the rich American’s daughter. But she now wants Wooster’s pal, Chuffy, a penniless baron, who’s hoping to sell his country seat to the father to turn into a sanatorium run by the aforementioned psychiatrist… Wooster ends up running around the countryside with his face covered in boot polish, after disguising himself as a member of a blackface entertainer group - lots of uses of the n-word here, and although it was the term in use back then, I’d sooner not see it used, or indeed any reference to blackface… Wooster’s replacement for Jeeves proves to be a homicidal maniac when drunk. Cue all sorts of misunderstandings and comic set-pieces, and it’s all gratifyingly witty and occasionally LOL-funny, despite the bad taste left by the n-word… Of course, Jeeves resolves everything with inhuman aplomb. Two books to go in this omnibus, and at least three more omnibuses - omnibi? omnipodes? - so plenty left to read, and yes I’ll be reading them.
5iansales
Read: Raise the Titanic!; Clive Cussler
For reasons I have yet to question, I’ve started rereading Cussler’s novels, which I last read back in the 1980s and 1990s. And even then I thought they were bad. Raise the Titanic! is probably his most famous novel - it’s certainly the one that made him a bestselling author. It was his third novel, the first two had sold poorly, and this one was expected to do the same. But an editor visiting from the UK saw the manuscript at Cussler’s US publisher, and took a copy back home with him. This kicked off a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in Cussler pulling in a huge advance. The novel then went on to become a bestseller. (Soon after, Cussler bought back the rights to his earlier novels, and resold them to his then-current publisher for considerably more than he’d sold them originally.) The plot of Raise the Titanic! sees Dirk Pitt, special operations director the US National Underwater and Marine Agency, and all-round hard man, lady killer and Competent Man, is tapped to head a US project to lift the RMS Titanic from its seabed grave, 3800 metres below the surface (where the pressure is around 400 atmospheres). Because there’s a presidential black project to build an anti-missile screen around the US and it needs a supply of “byzanium” in order to work. The only known quantity of byzanium was secretly mined under the noses of the Soviets on Novaya Zemlya by US miners in 1912, but was shipped home on the RMS Titanic. Oops. The USSR learns of this plan and decides to hijack the Titanic once she is on the surface. Perhaps because of the amount spent to buy the novel, Raise the Titanic! seems to have been closely edited, and the prose is far better than in the earlier novels (although still not, well, good). The plot and setting is also much more science-fictional. The book was written before the wreck was found, and most people believed the ship had come to rest in one piece (she actually split in two). So Pitt’s plan is to plug the many holes in the Titanic’s hull with “wetsteel” and then pump the ship full of air… The novel was adapted for the screen in 1980 by UK TV production company ITC, but was a massive flop. ITC’s owner, Lew Grade, later said “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”, but he did like the film. Cussler didn’t. He refused to allow anyone to adapt his other books, and later sued the makers of Sahara, adapted from his 1992 Dirk Pitt novel of the same name. That film was huge flop too. Cussler died in 2020, but some time around the millennium he’d created an atelier, which has since produced a huge quantity of Dirk Pitt and NUMA novels by diverse hands (with Cussler’s name the most prominent on the cover, of course). His son, called Dirk, natch, now writes the Pitt novels.
For reasons I have yet to question, I’ve started rereading Cussler’s novels, which I last read back in the 1980s and 1990s. And even then I thought they were bad. Raise the Titanic! is probably his most famous novel - it’s certainly the one that made him a bestselling author. It was his third novel, the first two had sold poorly, and this one was expected to do the same. But an editor visiting from the UK saw the manuscript at Cussler’s US publisher, and took a copy back home with him. This kicked off a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in Cussler pulling in a huge advance. The novel then went on to become a bestseller. (Soon after, Cussler bought back the rights to his earlier novels, and resold them to his then-current publisher for considerably more than he’d sold them originally.) The plot of Raise the Titanic! sees Dirk Pitt, special operations director the US National Underwater and Marine Agency, and all-round hard man, lady killer and Competent Man, is tapped to head a US project to lift the RMS Titanic from its seabed grave, 3800 metres below the surface (where the pressure is around 400 atmospheres). Because there’s a presidential black project to build an anti-missile screen around the US and it needs a supply of “byzanium” in order to work. The only known quantity of byzanium was secretly mined under the noses of the Soviets on Novaya Zemlya by US miners in 1912, but was shipped home on the RMS Titanic. Oops. The USSR learns of this plan and decides to hijack the Titanic once she is on the surface. Perhaps because of the amount spent to buy the novel, Raise the Titanic! seems to have been closely edited, and the prose is far better than in the earlier novels (although still not, well, good). The plot and setting is also much more science-fictional. The book was written before the wreck was found, and most people believed the ship had come to rest in one piece (she actually split in two). So Pitt’s plan is to plug the many holes in the Titanic’s hull with “wetsteel” and then pump the ship full of air… The novel was adapted for the screen in 1980 by UK TV production company ITC, but was a massive flop. ITC’s owner, Lew Grade, later said “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”, but he did like the film. Cussler didn’t. He refused to allow anyone to adapt his other books, and later sued the makers of Sahara, adapted from his 1992 Dirk Pitt novel of the same name. That film was huge flop too. Cussler died in 2020, but some time around the millennium he’d created an atelier, which has since produced a huge quantity of Dirk Pitt and NUMA novels by diverse hands (with Cussler’s name the most prominent on the cover, of course). His son, called Dirk, natch, now writes the Pitt novels.
6CliffBurns
>4 iansales: For me, the ultimate Jeeves and Wooster are Michael Hordern and Richard Briers.
No one else comes close.
>5 iansales: I have no comment. Cussler's novels make me a proponent of book-burning...at least in his case.
No one else comes close.
>5 iansales: I have no comment. Cussler's novels make me a proponent of book-burning...at least in his case.
7iansales
>6 CliffBurns: Cussler's books are undoubtedly shit - and still managed to nosedive in quality in the late 1990s - but he had an interesting career, and the stuff about the film adaptation is amusing.
8CliffBurns
THE SHADOW IN THE GARDEN by James Atlas.
Atlas is the acclaimed biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow. He is also someone who has studied an enormous number of biographies and can speak knowledgeably about the process of spending many years studying archives and letters, interviewing friends and enemies and coming out with a version of his subject's life that is convincing, fully developed and insightful.
This is a wonderful book and I also recommend Atlas's appearance at a bookstore to promote it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUtEDtnuFZk
Atlas is the acclaimed biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow. He is also someone who has studied an enormous number of biographies and can speak knowledgeably about the process of spending many years studying archives and letters, interviewing friends and enemies and coming out with a version of his subject's life that is convincing, fully developed and insightful.
This is a wonderful book and I also recommend Atlas's appearance at a bookstore to promote it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUtEDtnuFZk
9CliffBurns
FIRE AND STEEL: The End of World War II in the West by Peter Caddick-Adams.
The third book of a trilogy covering the Allied powers' advance after the invasion of Normandy.
This installment reveals the fanaticism of Nazis, even after the war is clearly lost, their country in ruins.
Sobering and impressive.
The third book of a trilogy covering the Allied powers' advance after the invasion of Normandy.
This installment reveals the fanaticism of Nazis, even after the war is clearly lost, their country in ruins.
Sobering and impressive.
10iansales
Read: Flowers for Algernon, Daniel F Keyes
This seems to be one of those science fiction novels most people know about, even if they haven’t actually read it. Perhaps because it was adapted into a movie in 1968, Charly. But I suspect it’s more because its central premise is one that resonates - although it hasn’t been used all that often, I think (the only other example that comes to mind is Thomas M Disch’s Camp Concentration). The Algernon of the title is a mouse whose intelligence has been artificially boosted through surgery and drugs. The experimenters get permission to use the same technique on a human being, a man called Charlie Gordon who has an IQ below 70. The experiment is a success and Charlie develops into a genius. Unfortunately, as Charlie soon discovers himself, the effect is not permanent. The novel is told through Charlie’s journal entries, initially childish and misspelt and ungrammatical, but becoming analytical and introspective and dropping references to the genius level things Charlie is now capable of doing. The novel is an expansion of a short story, initially published in 1959, but didn’t itself appear until 1966. It is clearly set in the 1950s - lots of mentions of cafeterias, for example (thankfully no mention of hats) - and while it could at a stretch take place in the present day, at one point genius Charlie visits a home for the mentally impaired, where he also briefly lived before the experiment, and the home has thousands of patients, a number I found somewhat boggling. I admit the basics of the story are affecting, but its setting, and its sensibilities, reminded me far too much of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book I studied at school and hated. I can see why Flowers for Algernon has such a high profile - it’s one of a handful of US science fiction novels to have been taught in US schools - but it’s still an historical document and I suspect it’s better regarded as not a science fiction novel.
This seems to be one of those science fiction novels most people know about, even if they haven’t actually read it. Perhaps because it was adapted into a movie in 1968, Charly. But I suspect it’s more because its central premise is one that resonates - although it hasn’t been used all that often, I think (the only other example that comes to mind is Thomas M Disch’s Camp Concentration). The Algernon of the title is a mouse whose intelligence has been artificially boosted through surgery and drugs. The experimenters get permission to use the same technique on a human being, a man called Charlie Gordon who has an IQ below 70. The experiment is a success and Charlie develops into a genius. Unfortunately, as Charlie soon discovers himself, the effect is not permanent. The novel is told through Charlie’s journal entries, initially childish and misspelt and ungrammatical, but becoming analytical and introspective and dropping references to the genius level things Charlie is now capable of doing. The novel is an expansion of a short story, initially published in 1959, but didn’t itself appear until 1966. It is clearly set in the 1950s - lots of mentions of cafeterias, for example (thankfully no mention of hats) - and while it could at a stretch take place in the present day, at one point genius Charlie visits a home for the mentally impaired, where he also briefly lived before the experiment, and the home has thousands of patients, a number I found somewhat boggling. I admit the basics of the story are affecting, but its setting, and its sensibilities, reminded me far too much of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book I studied at school and hated. I can see why Flowers for Algernon has such a high profile - it’s one of a handful of US science fiction novels to have been taught in US schools - but it’s still an historical document and I suspect it’s better regarded as not a science fiction novel.
11iansales
Longish review of Christopher Evans's Capella's Golden Eyes on medium: https://ian-93054.medium.com/capellas-golden-eyes-christopher-evans-f4aae3248bc8
12CliffBurns
Finished Hernan Diaz's IN THE DISTANCE.
Call it a literary western, the tale of two brothers from Sweden who leave home to find a better future in America. Unfortunately, the brothers get separated on the busy docks of New York and Hakan, the younger sibling, spends rest of his life in an epic search for Linus, experiencing isolation, eking out a precarious existence in largely unpeopled regions of the New World.
Compelling storytelling, though at times harrowing.
Call it a literary western, the tale of two brothers from Sweden who leave home to find a better future in America. Unfortunately, the brothers get separated on the busy docks of New York and Hakan, the younger sibling, spends rest of his life in an epic search for Linus, experiencing isolation, eking out a precarious existence in largely unpeopled regions of the New World.
Compelling storytelling, though at times harrowing.
13iansales
Read: Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman
This won the Arthur C Clarke Award last year, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut? Sea of Rust? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker sounded quite good - although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well. It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The Venomous Lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered. An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally obliterated the lumpsuckers. The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a rude awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons… The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works - the billionaire’s motives don't add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless.
This won the Arthur C Clarke Award last year, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut? Sea of Rust? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker sounded quite good - although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well. It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The Venomous Lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered. An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally obliterated the lumpsuckers. The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a rude awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons… The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works - the billionaire’s motives don't add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless.
14CliffBurns
THE MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut.
Labatut authored WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, a book that made my "Best of..." list a couple of years ago.
This time around his subject is the polymath (and cad) John von Neumann. Neumann was, by any standard, a genius, his range of knowledge extensive, to the extent that he could work in diverse fields like mathematics, game theory, computing, quantum mechanics, etc. etc. Not the nicest guy, capable of stealing ideas or not sharing credit and, to be sure, a terrible husband and difficult, prickly colleague.
Labatut's portrait is convincing, his research peerless.
Recommended.
Labatut authored WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, a book that made my "Best of..." list a couple of years ago.
This time around his subject is the polymath (and cad) John von Neumann. Neumann was, by any standard, a genius, his range of knowledge extensive, to the extent that he could work in diverse fields like mathematics, game theory, computing, quantum mechanics, etc. etc. Not the nicest guy, capable of stealing ideas or not sharing credit and, to be sure, a terrible husband and difficult, prickly colleague.
Labatut's portrait is convincing, his research peerless.
Recommended.
15iansales
Read: The Hood, Lavie Tidhar
The second book in Tidhar’s unofficial “Antimatter of Britain” quartet, although whether he will ever produce the next two books remains to be seen. The first, By Force Alone, was explicitly about King Arthur and the Matter of Britain, started with a Guy Ritchie vision of Arthurian England, only to go somewhere completely strange with a mishmash of folklore Fae and ufology. I liked it a lot. The Hood, set in the twelfth century, is more of the same, and based, sort of, around Robin Hood. I was born in Sherwood Forest, or rather I was born in Mansfield Woodhouse and 800+ years ago it was all part of Sherwood Forest. (There is even a plaque in Mansfield which claims to indicate the “centre” of the old forest. I have also visited the Major Oak, which is actually a Victorian invention.) So I know the mythology well. Anyway, The Hood starts as woodland fae in mediaeval England, with mention of various characters from the Robin Hood mythology. But that’s only the starting point… There are far too many references and callbacks in The Hood, to everything from English folklore and history to Hollywood movies, to mention them all. There’s a lot of Guy Ritchie. Despite that, the novel is a clever pastiche of the mythos and its twentieth/twenty-first century incarnations. To be honest, I didn’t like it as much as By Force Alone - I felt it channelled Ritchie too much, and the final third, where it went off the rails, so to speak, weren’t as interesting as the earlier book. But I still want to see books three and four, if only to discover what mythologies Tidhar plans to rip into pieces. These days, Tidhar is too busy writing mainstream novels about Israel and living it up as an international writer, but I’m still interested in seeing what he does with the Antimatter of Britain.
The second book in Tidhar’s unofficial “Antimatter of Britain” quartet, although whether he will ever produce the next two books remains to be seen. The first, By Force Alone, was explicitly about King Arthur and the Matter of Britain, started with a Guy Ritchie vision of Arthurian England, only to go somewhere completely strange with a mishmash of folklore Fae and ufology. I liked it a lot. The Hood, set in the twelfth century, is more of the same, and based, sort of, around Robin Hood. I was born in Sherwood Forest, or rather I was born in Mansfield Woodhouse and 800+ years ago it was all part of Sherwood Forest. (There is even a plaque in Mansfield which claims to indicate the “centre” of the old forest. I have also visited the Major Oak, which is actually a Victorian invention.) So I know the mythology well. Anyway, The Hood starts as woodland fae in mediaeval England, with mention of various characters from the Robin Hood mythology. But that’s only the starting point… There are far too many references and callbacks in The Hood, to everything from English folklore and history to Hollywood movies, to mention them all. There’s a lot of Guy Ritchie. Despite that, the novel is a clever pastiche of the mythos and its twentieth/twenty-first century incarnations. To be honest, I didn’t like it as much as By Force Alone - I felt it channelled Ritchie too much, and the final third, where it went off the rails, so to speak, weren’t as interesting as the earlier book. But I still want to see books three and four, if only to discover what mythologies Tidhar plans to rip into pieces. These days, Tidhar is too busy writing mainstream novels about Israel and living it up as an international writer, but I’m still interested in seeing what he does with the Antimatter of Britain.
16CliffBurns
Had a lot of fun with Bob Shaw's SHIP OF STRANGERS, a collection of linked short stories involving the exploration vessel Sarabande.
Shaw dedicated his book to A.E. van Vogt and there are many similarities in tone and structure to my favorite van Vogt, THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE.
Charming vintage sci fi, very straightforward, no backstories or tiresome gobbledegook; a page-turner, plain and simple.
Shaw dedicated his book to A.E. van Vogt and there are many similarities in tone and structure to my favorite van Vogt, THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE.
Charming vintage sci fi, very straightforward, no backstories or tiresome gobbledegook; a page-turner, plain and simple.
17RobertDay
>16 CliffBurns: Not regarded as one of Bob's best back in the day, though it's been many years since I read it. But as an example of his workmanlike output, it's a strong example of what Bob did well.
(Personally, I still think my favourite Bob Shaw book was The Palace of Eternity.)
Still, Bob did once say that he'd succeeded in selling everything he ever wrote, so who am I to be critical?
(Personally, I still think my favourite Bob Shaw book was The Palace of Eternity.)
Still, Bob did once say that he'd succeeded in selling everything he ever wrote, so who am I to be critical?
18iansales
A piece on the best books I've read so far in 2024: https://ian-93054.medium.com/books-of-the-half-year-2024-594da3db179d
And a review of Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree Jr: https://ian-93054.medium.com/out-of-the-everywhere-and-other-extraordinary-visio...
And a review of Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree Jr: https://ian-93054.medium.com/out-of-the-everywhere-and-other-extraordinary-visio...
19CliffBurns
Paul Auster's WINTER JOURNAL--the very best kind of memoir: ruthlessly honest, insightful, intelligent.
Written during Auster's 64th year, mortality starting to make itself felt, a sense of time running out.
Because of Auster's recent death, this one genuinely got to me.
Written during Auster's 64th year, mortality starting to make itself felt, a sense of time running out.
Because of Auster's recent death, this one genuinely got to me.
20iansales
Read: Before Mars, Emma Newman
This is the third of Newman’s Planetfall quartet, and after reading the second book, After Atlas, I decided not to bother with the rest of the series, not liking its corporatised slavery oligarchic setting… But then Before Mars, the third book, popped up cheap as an ebook, and knowing it was a hard sf (ish) novel set on Mars, I decided to give it a go. The corporate slavery is still there, and partly drives the plot, but it’s a minor element of the story. Geologist (areologist, surely?) and artist Anna, the narrator, is sent to Mars, but finds herself embroiled in a mystery. There’s only one settlement on Mars, occupied by a four-person team, and Anna has been sent by the owner of the corporation that runs the settlement to paint Marscapes. The Mars station doesn’t seem to do much, other than broadcast a regular reality “mersive” (VR enabled by a chip everyone has in their heads). Anna is suspicious of the other members of the station, and of the AI which runs everything, and soon finds evidence there is another, top secret, Mars station run by the corporation. It’s all very cleverly done, links back to the previous books in the series, and the whole thing knits together quite cunningly. Too much description of the plot would be a spoiler. However, Anna’s back-story is mostly a red herring, and Newman perhaps relies on it overmuch as motivation for her; but it mostly describes things about the world of the book that are obvious to the reader. I’m impressed Newman has managed to present a future that’s really quite horrible, and with a straight face, and still managed to keep readers sympathetic with the characters who live in it and accept it. Before Mars was definitely a step up from the previous book, and I will at some point almost certainly read the final book, Atlas Alone.
This is the third of Newman’s Planetfall quartet, and after reading the second book, After Atlas, I decided not to bother with the rest of the series, not liking its corporatised slavery oligarchic setting… But then Before Mars, the third book, popped up cheap as an ebook, and knowing it was a hard sf (ish) novel set on Mars, I decided to give it a go. The corporate slavery is still there, and partly drives the plot, but it’s a minor element of the story. Geologist (areologist, surely?) and artist Anna, the narrator, is sent to Mars, but finds herself embroiled in a mystery. There’s only one settlement on Mars, occupied by a four-person team, and Anna has been sent by the owner of the corporation that runs the settlement to paint Marscapes. The Mars station doesn’t seem to do much, other than broadcast a regular reality “mersive” (VR enabled by a chip everyone has in their heads). Anna is suspicious of the other members of the station, and of the AI which runs everything, and soon finds evidence there is another, top secret, Mars station run by the corporation. It’s all very cleverly done, links back to the previous books in the series, and the whole thing knits together quite cunningly. Too much description of the plot would be a spoiler. However, Anna’s back-story is mostly a red herring, and Newman perhaps relies on it overmuch as motivation for her; but it mostly describes things about the world of the book that are obvious to the reader. I’m impressed Newman has managed to present a future that’s really quite horrible, and with a straight face, and still managed to keep readers sympathetic with the characters who live in it and accept it. Before Mars was definitely a step up from the previous book, and I will at some point almost certainly read the final book, Atlas Alone.
21iansales
Review of The Blighted Stars by Megan O'Keefe: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/the-blighted-stars-megan-okeefe-160ea6bb5d0c
