Finished Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol,, started rereading Inferno. I'm pretty sure I'd only read these two once before, and so far (only a couple chaptets in) I temember even less about this one.
My friend Katie Hallahan's debut novel, The Twice-Sold Soul, released yesterday, so I started reading that today.
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More Adrian Tchaikovsky. Just finished Children of Time, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory. Where this guy excels is in world/culture building with non-human intelligences in particular. A more modern David Brin, although most of his non-human intelligences aren't strictly *alien*, so much as very different (like Brin's developments of chimpanzee and dolphin advanced intellects and cultures in his Uplift books).
Note that he deals heavily in Children of Time with spiders. If you're an arachnophobe, this is not the book for you!
I've been checking out various other books he's written, and am eager to see what his fantasy is like, having enjoyed at least six of his sci-fi books. Based on what I've read so far, I'm expecting some juicy exploration of fantasy races, and perhaps even sentient magic!
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Something else is Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey.
Just in case you don't know, there is a sequel to this (The Unforsaken Hiero). Not as good as Journey but not bad (or so I thought many, many years ago when I read them).
I was a wee lad back then but I remember thinking them to be fairly entertaining post apolcalypse fluff.
Copies of 'The Unforsaken Hiero' do turn up secondhand on occasion.
I'm reading 'A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain' by Daniel Defoe, 'Raven - Swordmistress of Vhaos' by Richard Kirk, and 'The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic', by Alan Moore and Steve Moore.
My friend Katie Hallahan's debut novel, The Twice-Sold Soul, released yesterday, so I started reading that today.
I finished this a week or so ago, and enjoyed it immensely. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys modern-day fantasies with clever plots, compelling characters, and a heaping dose of romantic tension.
I've been gaming with Katie for 20 years now (this very month, IIRC?) so I've known for quite some time that she was a talented storysmith. Getting to read her debut novel was a real treat!
In other reading news, I requested Dan Brown's Origin from my local library so that I can read the one Robert Langdon novel that I haven't yet. While I was picking it up, I saw Dante's Divine Comedy: A Biography, by Joseph Luzzi, on the new arrivals display. I've read all three parts of the Divine Comedy, and very recently reread Brown's Inferno, so decided to check this out, too. This book is more of a "bio" of Dante's poem, examining the history of its reception and criticism, rather than of the man himself. It's still fascinating stuff, given the ambitiousness (and bravado) of Dante's work, and its pivotal role in the formation of a vernacular, unified, "Italian" literature and language.
I've finished Luzzi's Dante book, and read Dan Brown's Origin, and enjoyed both. In the latter, the most interesting character is
I am now re-reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and am roughly halfway through it. This was another choice inspired by recent events in an RPG campaign, in which another player's modern-day mage character was in large part inspired by White's Merlyn--an incredibly powerful, but often bumbling and socially awkward, wizard with a quirky perspective on reality. (He's even fallen hard for an enchantress! Though hopefully one more clearly benign than Nimue.)
He was on the Grognard Files podcast recently, talking about the upcoming RPG and his own history with roleplaying games.
Has anyone here read Roy Baumeister's book Evil? (For those who don't know, he's a psychologist.)
I have not.
I am now re-reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and am roughly halfway through it.
I've finished the third of the four books that make up this novel, but then took a short break to read another book. The diversity office on campus was giving away some copies of Trevor Noah's book Born a Crime. I haven't seen a lot of Noah's stuff, just occasional clips from The Daily Show and one comedy special, but I like his sense of humor and storytelling skills, so took a copy to check it out. The book is a series of stories about his life growing up in South Africa, in the last years of aparthied and then in its aftermath.
As a middle-aged white guy in the USA, I knew some basic things about aparthied, but had never really studied it. Noah's perspective was very eye-opening, deeply personal, and written in a very engaging and accessible way. And it's not all grim--he did have many positive experiences amid the chaos of those years, many of them thanks to his mother's unwavering dedication to preparing him for a better life than had been possible for her.
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Just read John Scalzi's Starter Villain, and it was fun. Absurd, but fun. I mainly picked it up for the cover, which had a cat in a business suit, and that said 'quirky!' to my jaded self.
In that vein, Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible! was also a fun romp about a megalomaniacal supergenius that seems almost like it was the starter plot for the animated movie, Megamind.
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Just read John Scalzi's Starter Villain, and it was fun. Absurd, but fun. I mainly picked it up for the cover, which had a cat in a business suit, and that said 'quirky!' to my jaded self.
I think all you need is to see John Scalzi as the author to know it will be quirky :-).
I like almost everything he has written (including Starter Villain) but he is definitely quirky
'Raven 5: A Time Of Dying', by Richard Kirk. The last in the series, and not quite as much of a cheeser as the others so far.
For non-fiction, 'Keywords' by Raymond Williams, and 'The Reason I Jump', by Naoki Higashiga.
I finished The Once and Future King, and have started The Book of Merlyn, which White had intended to be the fifth and final book of the story. It's mostly set during the night before Arthur's final battle, and circles back to Merlyn and his lessons involving animals.
When TOAFK was printed without TBOM, the ants and geese episodes were incorporated into The Sword in the Stone. So I had read them very recently, but they both make more sense in the context of TBOM, when Arthur is old.
'The Ingoldsby Legends', by Thomas Ingoldsby - probably hilarious in the 1880s, but hasn't aged well at all, though there were a couple of good stories in it - and Sir Thomas Malory's Arthurian tales.
Finished Malory, and am now reading 'Tales of the Dying Earth', by Jack Vance.
That's right.
Thanks to a long journey (left at 23:50 yesterday, got home around 4pm today), I finished off 'Tales of the Dying Earth', and also got through 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa', by Walter Rodney, and most of 'La-Bas', by J.K. Huysmans.
'20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' by Jules Verne, and an introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre by the notorious Arthur C. Danto.
I am rereading L. Sprague de Camp's Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature. I first read this book over a decade ago, and am noticing much more this time though how dated (and often pejorative) much of the language is when referring to pre-industrial peoples. (It was written in the 1950s.) On the other hand, de Camp still comes across as far less racist than the Theosophists and other groups he discusses (and frequently ridicules), who had extremely questionable ideas about the origins of various races and ethnic groups. Though I do have to remind myself that de Camp was also one of the most prolific writers of pastiches of the works of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, both of whom were rabidly racist.
I am rereading David Alexander Smith's In the Cube, which is part of the Future Boston shared-world setting created by a workshop of Boston-area SF writers. The main premise of the setting is that first contact with aliens happens just outside Boston, so the city becomes the designated contact zone between Earth and all extraterrestrial species. Boston both profits and suffers from the massive influx of alien tech and trade.
In this novel, set decades after that first contact, we follow a private eye whose latest case takes her all over the transformed city of Boston, from recognizable historic landmarks to completely alien spaces. Her partner is an alien with special senses that help their investigations, but as with any human-alien contact, their relationship is more complex and fraught than it seems at first.
This is the longest FuBos story I've read (most are short-story length) and by far the most satisfying one, in part due to word count. Smith makes excellent use of the workshop's extensive world-building, injecting a lot of background color into the story without bogging down the plot, and many of those details become integral to the story's resolution.
(One personal danger with this book is that it tends to make me homesick for Boston, where I lived for 20 years (during my 20s and 30s). I first read this novel shortly after moving there, and portions of the book take place where some historical landmark still stands, half-buried under all the future infrastructure of the city.)