Concurrently with the 'proper' books I've been reading, I've also been reading the GazF series, i.e. fan produced series detailing nations on Brun in the vein of the classic Known World Gazetteer series.
Good stuff.
Finished reading the Millenium series (including up to book 7).
Book 6 was very well plotted (as was book 7), neither of which I'd read before.
Karen Smirnoff, the writer of book 7 (8 is on the way) is a much better writer than Lagerkrantz, who wrote books 4-6. She includes humour, for a start. She has seemed to forgot (pun intended) that Lisbeth has a photographic memory, and also changed some of the details of the original trilogy. Even so, minor gripes. Definitely worth reading if you liked the others.
In case anyone wonders, I thought that Lagerkrantz made Mikael too unlike he is in the original trilogy; too grim. Skip the film version of book 4; it's the only film I've ever walked out of the cinema, it was that bad an adaptation.
"Blue Mars" was a bit of a slog. It's been too many years since I read Red Mars and Green Mars so I had forgotten most of the characters, and just reading synopses, though it helped, wasn't enough to put me squarely back into things. I might have liked BM better if I had read the first two recently.
Without going back and rereading everything back to back to get a more complete and fair impression, an effort that does not seem worth it to me now, I recommend reading the first book (possibly the second) and just ignoring the third.
On to le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. Very obviously her Vietnam War protest book. I came across a guy who didn't like le Guin because she was 'so damn preachy'. That opinion never really made sense to me until I started reading this book. Our first POV character is almost a caricature of a baddie. The only thing saving it is the knowledge that there actually are people as bad as he, or nearly so. In short, the style of this book is more akin to Sheri Tepper than le Guin.
Not that that's a bad thing, just more in your face than I'm used to from le Guin.
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Short and bitter-sweet. Quite good.
On to Edge of Infinity: the Scarred Planes, a manual of the planes for the Scarred Lands setting.
And because I prefer reading dead tree rather than screens where most of my RPG reading is done, I'm reading Hel's Eight by Stark Holborn, sequel to "Ten Low", alongside EoI. The world is sort of a mix between Firefly and Mad Max, or possibly Blood Meridian (based on what I've heard of that book).
Currently reading 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth', by Jules Verne, and J.R.R. Tolkien's translations of 'Gawain and the Green Knight', 'The Pearl', and 'Orfeo'
"Hel's Eight" was decent. I might just pick up the third book in the series.
On to Charlie Stross' A conventional boy, a Laundry story but independent of the main storyline or the New Management. This one is sort of like 40-year-old virgin meets the Laundry, starring Derek the DM, a supporting character from one of the previous books. It's short for a Stross book, 200 pages in hardcover, with a ton of D&D references. Some possible continuity errors from previous installments, since he now runs 1e AD&D rather than 0D&D (though given timeline this change makes sense).
It is also seriously meta with him running what is basically the Laundry Files RPG using D&D, with metaknowledge about future. I assume this will be explained in a sensible rather than being a cheap joke. So far I'm enjoying it quite a bit, as expected.
On December 8, 2022, in this thread, Aaron Bitman wrote: In 2016, I was finishing up my second reading of the Conquerors trilogy by Timothy Zahn when I wrote about it in this thread. Here's a link to that post.
Later that year I began my third reading of the trilogy and wrote about it again. Here's a link to THAT post.
Once again - as in my second reading of the trilogy - I put it down - this time for YEARS - before picking it up again. I plan to finish it this weekend. I still have some gripes with that series. So many details seem to make no sense, and I believe that Zahn obfuscated those details with unnecessarily complicated-sounding babble. Well, maybe I'm wrong. I would love to get some kind of Conquerors source book in which Zahn could clarify those details; if he did, maybe I would revise my opinion and admit that the issue was with my comprehension, not with Zahn's writing. But I doubt it.
And yet, I just keep crawling back to that series! I said it before and I'll say it again: If you're looking for a military sci-fi novel series, or one with FTL travel and a variety of intelligent, space-faring races - in other words, a Star Wars-like book series - I can't think of anything I'd recommend more highly than the Conquerors trilogy.
And now I'm nearly finished with my FOURTH reading! I plan to finish it this week. I was going to write some stuff about the trilogy in this post, before realizing that - years ago - I basically already said everything I now want to say.
It turns out that the book "A conventional boy" contains not only the title story but also two previous Laundry short stories, Overtime and Down On the Farm, making ACB a mere 130 page, very short for Stross. I don't want to say he was phoning it in on this one because I still enjoyed it but it was definitely not his best work.
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