What books are you currently reading?


Books

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Just finished 'The Air Loom Gang' by Mike Jay and 'Domnei' by James Branch Cabell, which I particularly enjoyed.


thejeff wrote:
Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
thejeff wrote:
Now I'm reading a biography of Mother Jones, which is neat, but not quite as engrossing.
Which one? We've got one on our lit table that we got from Sister Horan before she passed, but I've never read it.

Eliot Gorn. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America

Yep, that's the one.

In other news, it has been brought to my attention that James Garner died two years ago. Have no idea why his obituary showed up in my Facebook feed.


Because Facebook is experimenting with controlling emotions again and decided to try making people sad instead of happy?

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Carl Sagan is still dead, too. :-(


Finished Wage-Labour and Capital which I remember reading 20 years ago and went on to Value, Price and Profit which I'm not sure I ever read.

Also gulped down quite a bit of Black Liberation and Socialism by Ahmed Shawki, a longtime American Cliffite. Pretty good thus far, but have only gotten to the end of Populism.

In other news, Parable of the Sower's pretty good, but I haven't gotten too far quite yet.


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A list of books taken on Shackleton's Antarctic expedition in 1915

I think I've read one of these - two, max.

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SmiloDan wrote:

Just finished Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding.

** spoiler omitted **

Just started Nemesis Games by James Corey. Part 5 of the Expanse.

I did give you a headsup on that - surprisingly, the Tales of the Ketty Jay have a lot of genuinely dark moments and themes in them, even amongst the zeppelin dog fighting pile of fun.

The series gets better in the next books, and the dark elements also get a further push, so be prepared for that. I actually like it, though it still makes me somewhat unsure about the overall tone of the story. I can't quite figure out if the author intends it that way or if I'm "reading it wrong".

Nemesis Games is a nice one. Have fun with it :)

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Had a long week standing guard duty in front of a gate nobody ever uses in the back end of nowhere (which, apparently, is the most efficient way the army figures it can use a skilled programmer), so had a *lot* of time to read and, even more, listen to audio. In this time frame, I have advanced in and abandoned The Long Way To The Small Angry Planet (Becky Chambers), finished listening to Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie), began listening to Grim Company (Luke Scull) and covered about two thirds of A Memory Of Light (Brandon Sanderson & Robert Jordan).

Grim Company has probably the weakest couple of opening chapters I've seen in years, and so far it strikes me as juvenile and derivative - I'll give it a couple more hours to impress me, but I may abandon this one. It's extremely underwhelming so far.
A Memory Of Light - a long post is coming for this one, a post that will also cover my thought of the series as a whole, so I'll be brief here and just say I'm enjoying the hack out of it and think it's not just a great book but shaping out to be a disproportionately good ending to the series.

Long Way To Small Angry Planet thoughts:
I don't know what exactly this tells about me as a person, but what I've learned reading this book is that I need conflict to find a story interesting. I knew coming in that this will be a story of people from multiple species working together on a spaceship, and that it is a very optimistic and comforting space opera that should feel like being hugged.
Still, I didn't expect what I got. Looking at the structure of the novel, it very much lacks momentum or a central conflict - almost 40% in, and there still isn't any real hook. There are individual characters, and each of them is set up with some personal beggage and an arc of overcoming - or learning to live with - their problems, but for the crew as a whole there really isn't anything going on. The captain has some ambition to grow the business and so he's taking a special job, but come on, we're almost halfway through and we still haven't started on it! Nor have we really been given a great reason to care.
As for the characters and their interactions - the main selling point of the book - I found myself exesperated really quickly. The different species are indeed very different from one another, but almost every interaction seems to follow the baseline of "Oh, how you people must look down at me!", "Awwww, not at all! we love you as you aaaarrreeee!". The entire crew is so open-minded and friendly that it made me feel like I was reading a thread of comments on a tumbler post that explains that demi-romantic, semi-sexual otherkin should be recognized as a community too. I have nothing against open minded and positive interactions, but it has to seem a bit harder, or it's not at all convincing or interesting to read about. I want to *earn* those good moments between characters, not be given them on a silver platter. Different people living together and learning to get along is only interesting if it is genuinely challenging for them.

Ancillary Justice thoughts:
So, one of the most hyped SF books in this century. That kind of thing would normally risk raising unrealistic expectations. However, in this case, a small caveat kept my excitement in check - almost everyone, when praising Ancillary Justice, would talk almost exclusively about eh language trick that the book employees - all humans in the Radch empire are referred to as "she", and the culture does not distinguish between males and females. The idea is OK, though nothing that gets my adrenaline flowing, but it's not all that much of a hook for me to read a book.
So how was it, really? To be quite frank, I'm pretty much indifferent to it. Nothing was offensively bad, but nothing really stood out to me either. The book follows a story pattern of flashbacks, such that the storyline in the present is interlaced with very frequent flashbacks to the past that slowly reveal the goals and identity of the main character, until at some point they catch up, and shorty thereafter the plot reaches it's peak. Except, the plot was rather slow, lacked pacing (in both the past and present storylines, pretty much nothing happens until all of a sudden big cataclysmic events come out of nowhere), the hero is strangely passive and for the most part events seem to happen to her rather than her causing them... the story seems rife with these kinds of flaws.
It also has another aspect that was problematic to me, but is more personal in nature. When I read SF, I'm pretty much OK with the plot revolving around cool scientific concepts or technologies. For example, most major events in an Alistair Reynolds book showcase some neat (sometimes mind boggling) idea as well as advance the story itself - "and here we see how a light-speed chase would look like", and so on. However, Leckie seems to be much more interested in something else: social science. You see, just like in a Reynolds book many scenes feel like excuses to showcase fictional super-technology, almost every single event in Ancillary Justice seems like it's more about examining some aspect of Radchaai culture more than it is about what's really happening in it. Take, for example, the pivotal scene where Awn is murdered - for most of the scene, the book is discussing how questioning and reeducation work (you need to have witnesses, it is only used under such and such conditions, stuff like that) until eventually and abruptly Awn is shot and the story moves on. To me this is less interesting in general and, specifically, I found the Radchaai only mildly interesting and most of the revelations about them seem like pretty standard human behavior stuff.
So we have a book with passable writing, a lackluster and somewhat haphazardly constructed plot that revolves around a subject matter I find only mildly interesting. The bottom lined is that I'm not all that impressed and I'm not emotionally connected to the story, and if I'll ever pick up the sequels it will probably be a long time from now.

On a final note, in regards to the reason the book is hyped - the gender thing - I found it to be somewhat confusing and shallow. First, I am not a strongly visually oriented fellow, and holding a mental image of the characters in my head is tricky enough without me having to second guess if they are male or female. So, just to be contrary, I pictured everyone as overtly muscle bound males. How does it look when Siverdan shakes hands with Breq? Like this. Problem solved.
Secondly, The idea isn't supported enough in the book for me to understand it. We are told Radch culture uses birthing pods rather then natural pregnancies, but that only covers one of the many question such an extreme eradication of gender raises. I mean, I sort of assume most humans are biologically attracted either exclusively or mostly to the opposite sex - if everyone is working as hard as possible to hide their gender, how do people romance each other? In the Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that since Dwarven females have beards like the males, courting between dwarves as a slow and complex process where each part of the duo drops small hints to their own sex while trying to discover the others'. It works as a joke, but I'm going to need some more thorough explanations to actually buy into this premise in a book that isn't as crazy as Discworld novels are.
An additional layer of confusion lies with Justice Of Toren herself - many times throughout the book it is apparent she can observe and understand very small biological signals from her crew - she'd often know Awn's feelings with surgical precision based on muscles twitching in her cheek, and we know she can monitor things such as weight, heart beats and other such data. Correct me if I'm wrong, but biologically, women have distinctly different distribution curves from males. A ship with access to so much data *should* know which is which. Same goes to people Breq meets from other cultures 0 surely she can figure out what differentiates males from females in each culture pretty quickly, right?
The only reasonable way that it wouldn't be so is if biological engineering is involved, but that opens up a new can of worms - such as how comes people aren't modifying themselves more radically than simply changing heights and weights and such - where are the extra arms or the blue-green 40 meter tall elephant people?
In short, whole the gender thing is a theme in the book, I could not quite understand the reason or mechanic to it, and it wasn't really crucial to the plot or anything, so... meh.


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Lord Snow wrote:

Had a long week standing guard duty in front of a gate nobody ever uses in the back end of nowhere (which, apparently, is the most efficient way the army figures it can use a skilled programmer), so had a *lot* of time to read and, even more, listen to audio. In this time frame, I have advanced in and abandoned The Long Way To The Small Angry Planet (Becky Chambers), finished listening to Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie), began listening to Grim Company (Luke Scull) and covered about two thirds of A Memory Of Light (Brandon Sanderson & Robert Jordan).

Grim Company has probably the weakest couple of opening chapters I've seen in years, and so far it strikes me as juvenile and derivative - I'll give it a couple more hours to impress me, but I may abandon this one. It's extremely underwhelming so far.
A Memory Of Light - a long post is coming for this one, a post that will also cover my thought of the series as a whole, so I'll be brief here and just say I'm enjoying the hack out of it and think it's not just a great book but shaping out to be a disproportionately good ending to the series.

** spoiler omitted **...

Ancillary Justice:
I liked it quite a bit more than you did, I think, though I share some of your criticism. Most of the first part of the book moved very slowly. The framing sequence didn't interest me particularly, at least until the flashbacks wrapped up and we knew what was going on and then moved into the climax. The climaxes, both of the flashback and the current time did work for me - verbose and philosophical though they were until everything snapped.

The gender thing was actually much less emphasized than I'd expected from all the rage about it. After finishing this and Ancillary Mercy, my theory is that the genderless society is actually more of a cultural ambition than a reality. In practice everyone really is aware of the genders of people they know, they just don't use specific pronouns or terms for it. Except for Justice of Toren and those like her. They're artificial intelligences, remember? They're programmed to match the culture's aspirations, not the reality. She certainly had sensors to know, at least as a ship, but she has a programmed blind spot. She basically has to trick her way around those blind spots to pick up on gender. Or even to realize that others aren't doing the same. Or at least that's my rationalization. We'll see if it holds up in the third book, assuming there's any revelations along those lines. :)

Ancillary Sword by the way is a little more straightforward - no long parallel flashbacks - and a bit more personal. I enjoyed it, but it does suffer from Middle Book problems. It does set some potentially interesting things up for the finale.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Lord Snow wrote:
SmiloDan wrote:

Just finished Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding.

** spoiler omitted **

Just started Nemesis Games by James Corey. Part 5 of the Expanse.

I did give you a headsup on that - surprisingly, the Tales of the Ketty Jay have a lot of genuinely dark moments and themes in them, even amongst the zeppelin dog fighting pile of fun.

The series gets better in the next books, and the dark elements also get a further push, so be prepared for that. I actually like it, though it still makes me somewhat unsure about the overall tone of the story. I can't quite figure out if the author intends it that way or if I'm "reading it wrong".

Nemesis Games is a nice one. Have fun with it :)

Yeah, thanks for the heads up. :-D

Nemesis Games is good so far (at about page 200). And like always, it seems like the title is a non sequitor.

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@TheJeff

Ancillary Justice:
The story in AJ just didn't really work for me even in the parts that were relatively more interesting, mostly because as I mentioned previously the book was heavily themed around exploring Radhcaai culture, a concept that failed to excite me. Add that to the severe structure problems and you get a dissatisfying result, for me personally.

The gender thing was not very emphasized, to the point where I think it was actually under-explained. Probably it could have used a bit of extra exploration, or maybe should have been tied more tightly to the plot somehow. I found it confusing and couldn't understand why it happened or how exactly it worked. I like your explanation a lot though - we really only ever see the world through Breq's eyes, and it makes more sense if she's actually the only one who *really* can't tell *anybody's* gender, because she's programmed this way.


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Have just finished Le Carre's Smiley's People. Excellent. As was The Honourable Schoolboy.


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Finished Slaughterhouse Five a while back. Good book.


was able to get a fair bit of reading in over a three week research trip to the Smithsonian. Finished Simon Stranza's Burnt Black Suns, John Langan's Wide Carnivorous Sky anthologies, as well as the 2014 "Year's Best Horror and Dark Fantasy anthology" edited by Paula Guran.

Burnt Black Suns: Overall I found the stories a mix. I assume the first stories are from earlier in his career, and these indeed are fairly weak at times and require a bit of idiot ball holding by the main characters and some cliched writing, or sometimes have things kept just mysterious enough that I wasn't quite sure what was going on, to the determent of my enjoyment of the stories.
The later stories however were quite good, especially the story that gives the anthology it's name. Not sure I would buy another anthology by the author unless I could be sure they had the quality of the last few tales.

John Langan has swiftly become my favorite horror author, and though he doesn't quite publish at the same speed as some other writers, he more than makes up by producing complex stories that frequently employ novel literary techniques and often some very creepy or badass monsters.

Paula Guran is a decent editor, and I enjoyed the anthology, although Ellen Datlow's year's best I think our superior (and their is unfortunately a bit of overlap between the "year's best" both authors produce. One thing that does sort of help differentiate is the inclusion of fantasy, and Paula Guran has no problem publishing straight high fantasy novellas and short fiction, which means some works that don't typically show up in a horror anthology get showcased here. I have just started the 2013 volume and will probably finish it in a few weeks


Star Wars Legacy of The Force: Fury by Aaron Allston. Not really my sort of thing

The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre

and Tiger Claw and Velvet Paw by Malee

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My recent reads are an interlude of non-fiction:

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, by John Lewis Gaddis.
It is more of a defense of history-as-discipline than a deep exploration of methodology, so I was mildly disappointed. I was hoping for more interviews and anecdotes and less deprecation of the social sciences (Gaddis is particularly hard on Sociology for some reason).

The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, by Tom Standage.
This one was fun. It made me think about reading some clockpunk, if that's still a thing.

Now I'm reading Cry, The Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. It's good, but at times I have trouble distinguishing the speakers due to Paton's style of setting off dialog by em-dash.


Limeylongears wrote:
The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre

Vive le Galt!

About halfway done Parable and started reading some comics.

Marx's Capital Illustrated


I'm almost done with American Slavery, American Freedom. I've read some praise of Morgan's prose, but he actually comes off very dry to me. There's also an expectation issue. He said in the opening that he wasn't really writing a history of early Virginia, then wrote a history of early Virginia. Knowing his thesis going in, you can see why he chose to emphasize what he did but for the first three parts of the book there's almost nothing to the point in itself. It's all place-setting.

The back quarter is much better and I can completely see why his arguments still mostly hold up forty years later, except for the bit where he clearly wants the reader to think that slavery just sort of happened and then people adapted to it, rather than being a conscious cultural and economic choice. I feel like it's a bit slavery without the enslavers.


Finished American Slavery, American Freedom last night. I could have done with a more explicit integration of the argument with the history of Virginia. The content's fine, but the presentation ends up obscuring it and makes the more argumentative sections feel like an afterthought.

Now I've got an embarrassment of riches problem. I wanted to read some more fiction, but the idea of it didn't excite me so I went into my wish list and grabbed some interesting looking free samples.

Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South by Adam Rothman
Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James K. Polk by William Dusinberre (great name)
Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification by David Waldstreicher
Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic by Matthew Mason

They all look so good. Dusinberre, Mason, and Waldstreicher all open up delightful historiographical swipes. Dusinberre first calls out Polk's definitive biographer (Charles Sellers, who I do plan to read someday) on taking campaign propaganda at face value. Mason & Waldstreicher take some well-deserved swipes at Early Republic types for a too-intense focus on rhetoric that led them to either dismiss slavery as irrelevant or treat antislavery as strictly a partisan issue when Federalists did it.

I guess it's Waldstreicher on the grounds that he's first, shortest, and cheapest.

Editor

The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
The Melissa Allen Trilogy, by Jennifer Brozek
Updraft, by Fran Wilde
Barsk, by Lawrence M. Schoen

Highly recommended so far, one and all.


During lunchbreaks, 'A Darkness Forged In Fire' by Chris Evans, in which the elves have muskets! Not bad so far.

When on public transport, 'Austerity Britain 1946-1951' by David Kynaston, in which nobody has very much of anything, apart from rubble and (rationed) powdered egg.


I am currently reading 'The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains' by Neil Gaiman. Highly recommended, very atmospheric.

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Blood and bloody ashes, I just finished The Wheel of Time! 0_0


Congratulations, Lord Snow. I hope you enjoyed it!


That's quite a feat :)


Josh Vogt wrote:

The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

The Melissa Allen Trilogy, by Jennifer Brozek
Updraft, by Fran Wilde
Barsk, by Lawrence M. Schoen

Highly recommended so far, one and all.

I've had my eye on Updraft for a while, but 14-book-high TBR pile has had me mostly going for comics and fluffy stuff lately.


Samnell wrote:
I'm almost done with American Slavery, American Freedom.

I've been meaning to read that for a while now. The intro to Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race (which I can't remember if it was written by Allen or the executor of his literary estate, Jeffrey B. Perry) had a ton of stuff on that book and Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black and a bunch of other books I've only heard of due to readings in Genovese. Don't remember much of what it said, alas.

Anyway, haven't made much progress in Butler, although it's not a very long book. It's good, I'm enjoying it, but it doesn't seem all that extraordinary to me. Should dig through the archives and see what Dicey said about her a whiles back.

In the meantime, for easy, bedtime reading, been re-reading Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity which reminds me that I need to finish Tom Paine and The Bible.

Also, was gifted a copy of a FLGS owner's debut novel Monday and the Murdered Man Hope it's fun.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Just finished Nemesis Games, book 5 of the Expanse by James S. A. Corey.

Finally started The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.


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Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
Samnell wrote:
I'm almost done with American Slavery, American Freedom.

I've been meaning to read that for a while now. The intro to Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race (which I can't remember if it was written by Allen or the executor of his literary estate, Jeffrey B. Perry) had a ton of stuff on that book and Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black and a bunch of other books I've only heard of due to readings in Genovese. Don't remember much of what it said, alas.

Anyway, haven't made much progress in Butler, although it's not a very long book. It's good, I'm enjoying it, but it doesn't seem all that extraordinary to me. Should dig through the archives and see what Dicey said about her a whiles back.

In the meantime, for easy, bedtime reading, been re-reading Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity which reminds me that I need to finish Tom Paine and The Bible.

Also, was gifted a copy of a FLGS owner's debut novel Monday and the Murdered Man Hope it's fun.

Parable of the Sower? It makes me want to shave my head, dye myself blue, do some pyro and burn someone's house down! I mentioned the plot to m'lord Dice one time and he summarily banned its possession within within the boundaries of Demesne Dice.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, but Butler felt a lot more extraordinary before we had elected a black president who saw the Supreme Court recognize same sex marriage while in office. I wish she was still around to offer political critiques through a science fiction lens, it's just that the works she did decades ago were products of their time. Jeez, now that I can read that on the screen, it sounds very, very dismissive. Oops.

(Seriously though, was the drug called pyro? I haven't read that book in about 20 years.)


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Yeah, that's one of its street names.

Anyway, using the "search" function on this website reveals that it was the Xenogenesis trilogy you were recommending.


Started reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last night.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

ericthecleric wrote:
Started reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last night.

I know a lot of people find the first hundred pages or so really slow, but it really picks up. I actually like the political foundation at the beginning, but I'm kind of weird.

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SmiloDan wrote:
ericthecleric wrote:
Started reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last night.
I know a lot of people find the first hundred pages or so really slow, but it really picks up. I actually like the political foundation at the beginning, but I'm kind of weird.

I liked the first book well enough - the mystery was interesting and some other small novelties made it a good page turner, and Lisbeth Salender was certainly cool.

It is rather shocking how quickly the series devolves though. The second book is just sort of straight up bad.


I've read up to page 99 now. It's just setting the scene to me, establishing the characters. Curious to know more about them, but I'll learn more as a I read more.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

I found it amusing how precise everyone was.

"I woke up at 11:52 pm, ate 1.83333 open-faced sandwiches, and walked 3.9 meters to the front door."

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SmiloDan wrote:

I found it amusing how precise everyone was.

"I woke up at 11:52 pm, ate 1.83333 open-faced sandwiches, and walked 3.9 meters to the front door."

The books are certainly over-descriptive. The effect is magnified in the second book,

Spoiler:
When you get every single scene from three points of view - Salender, Blomkvist and the police - each of them going over every agonizing detail of every single thing. The story threads are always sweeping enough to make the book a page turner, but it feels like 95% of the words in it could be cut and not much lost to the story

Maybe it's because of the "investigative journalism" theme of the book or something.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

I like how it has a criminal investigation, a journalism investigation, and a private investigation all going on at once.


Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
Samnell wrote:
I'm almost done with American Slavery, American Freedom.
I've been meaning to read that for a while now. The intro to Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race (which I can't remember if it was written by Allen or the executor of his literary estate, Jeffrey B. Perry) had a ton of stuff on that book and Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black and a bunch of other books I've only heard of due to readings in Genovese. Don't remember much of what it said, alas.

I still haven't gotten to Genovese, though I was just in some footnotes where both Genoveses featured heavily yesterday. :) Jordan is also on the list. So many books. My plan to alternate them with fiction is in tatters. I suspect that fiction will shortly turn from novels to comic collections, since those feel rather different to read and usually don't pussyfoot around between story beats for so long. When you read a lot of 19th century prose and academic prose talking about 19th century prose, sometimes you just want a man wearing a belt and body paint to punch something every few pages.

The frequently operatic styling is more or less a lateral move. One of my sources turned a guy's wry crack about getting shot, as reported by people actually there, into a Shakespearean death speech. In her defense, she wrote it probably from memory while under house arrest by the same people who shot him.


I just began reading The Inexplicables. Cherie Priest is a fun read!


The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is just so well written. Really enjoying it; roughly 120 pages to go. Good stuff. Lisbeth is such an interesting character!


Finished it. Well worth a read.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Yeah, I really liked it too.

I just finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

I did not expect the Lane:
to be Lois....

;-)


Finished The Girl Who Played With Fire.

What a cliff hanger!

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

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Started Half a War by Joe Abercrombie.


Coriat wrote:
Babies in the Well: Archaeological Evidence for Newborn Disposal in Hellenistic Greece.

Further reading along these lines:

Child Exposure in the Roman Empire in the Journal of Roman Studies.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Reading Wit'ch Storm...book 2 in the The Banned and the Banished series by James Clemens. It's pretty good


Finished up Waldstreicher. Read the last half in something close to a single setting, so I suppose I quite enjoyed it. A founding era work that isn't celebratory or morbidly bent on how deep down they all agreed is a nice change. That he was willing to admit that debates over representation were explicitly also debates over the place of slavery, while the main focus of the book, is almost an added bonus.

Started Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic by Matthew Mason. It's good so far, but the kindle version is a really bad cash-in. Poor justification, notes not hyperlinked. I'm sure it was entirely automated.


The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was great as well. Such a shame he died. Has anyone got an opinion of Millenium book 4 (written by someone else)?


1. I liked GwtDT. It helped that I was on a 10-day trip to Europe when I read it, and that I'm a fan of the Icelandic Sagas with their long, involved genealogies.

2. I liked GwPwF, too, but mostly just because of the character Paolo Roberto, who evidently is based on a real person who was unaware he was a character in the book. (When they made the Swedish film trilogy, some genius decided to cast Paolo Roberto as Paolo Roberto, a choice it's hard to argue with). The ending of the book was very weak, though, with the super-corny Bond movie-ripoff villains.

3. I disliked GwKtHN, and just found it silly.

4. As a general practice, I eschew any continuation of book series by other authors. That includes James Bond, Dune, Amber, Spenser, Bourne, and I don't know how many others. I tend to feel that if an author is good enough, he/she can publish their own stuff, and not have to ride on someone else's legacy.

Liberty's Edge

I'm a few books into Neil Asher's Polity series.

Fun British Neo-Space Opera with some cyberpunk spice in a techothriller style. Recommended to anyone who enjoys Richard Morgan or Peter Hamilton.

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