May, 2023 Reading: “May, more than any other month of the year, wants us to feel alive.” (Fennel Hudson)

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May, 2023 Reading: “May, more than any other month of the year, wants us to feel alive.” (Fennel Hudson)

1CliffBurns
toukokuu 2, 2023, 12:15 am

From the number of posts April was a mighty light reading month around here.

Let's see if we can do better this month.

Starting off May with Baudelaire fragments and whatever I can squeeze in when I'm not laboring on this brain-devouring podcast.

But there is light, finally, at the far end of the tunnel...

2Maura49
toukokuu 2, 2023, 5:04 am

I have just read Noonday by Pat Barker with apologies as touchstone has picked up a different title. It is the last novel in her second wartime trilogy. In this book she tackles World War Two focusing on the London Blitz and the experiences of characters from the earlier two books in the trilogy. She is an utterly unsentimental writer and captures very well the mixture of fear, boredom and heightened emotion which the experience evoked in those who lived through it.
I still feel that her outstanding achievement is her Regeneration trilogy but this novel stands well alongside other fictional accounts of this time by such writers as Elizabeth Bowen

3Cecrow
toukokuu 2, 2023, 6:39 am

Reading Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton, almost a full biography in order to describe all of his influences and sources for ideas for composing The Satanic Verses. Probably the best prereading I can do before tackling the novel.

4mejix
Muokkaaja: toukokuu 2, 2023, 5:20 pm

Finished The Captive which is the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time. It's like hearing your compulsive friend examining in detail why his relation is not working and watching him avoid the obvious conclusion that he needs to move on. The weaker book of the series so far but still a fairly good read.

Before that I had read The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg. An allegedly accessible book about current thinking on the beginning and ending of the universe. Most of it, almost all of it, went over my head. The book does give you insights into the reasoning behind the current theories and helps you familiarize with some themes. Shifts your perspective radically.

5TaylaVirgo
toukokuu 2, 2023, 5:23 pm

Tämä käyttäjä on poistettu roskaamisen vuoksi.

6iansales
Muokkaaja: toukokuu 3, 2023, 10:38 am

Hmmm, seven books and six of them were rereads. Must do better...

Body of Evidence, Patricia Cornwell - the second book of the Scarpetta series, and also a reread from the mid-1990s. I'd pretty much forgotten the plot - another serial killer, of course, again targetting women - but not the ending, which was pretty much the same as the first book: the killer picks Scarpetta herself as his next victim... and is shot and killed when he tries to murder her. This one was a bit muddled: semi-successful novelist, albeit under pen-names, is brutally murdered. She was the protegée of a one-hit-wonder Pulitzer-winning literary "giant", but has been working on a tell-all biography. Which drags in his mobbed-up lawyer in New York. And then the literary giant is brutally murdered. And there are links to a carwash and its manager, the ineffectual son of a slum lord, who spent time as a teen in a mental hospital, where he became friends with a teen who'd been abused by a therapist... Cornwell keeps far too many plates spinning, resulting in a climax that feels rushed and resolves little. Five books more to go...

Protector, Larry Niven . a reread of a book I must have last read back in the very early 1980s. I had the 1980 Orbit paperback with the Peter Andrew Jones cover art, but gave the book away ten years ago. The novel is split into three parts, with the middle one taking up most of the book. A Pak protector enters the Solar System, looking for a lost colony of breeders, and it turns out humanity is that colony but has mutated from the Pak in the millions of years since it was founded. A human intercepts the protector, is himself converted to a protector, realises what it all means, and kills the protector. He then heads off to a colony on an exoplanet. Two hundred years later, a man loses four months of his life, but is paid for it providing he does not try to find out what happened. So of course, he tries to find out. And it's the human-turned-protector, who has been keeping an eye on humanity from the Oort Cloud... but now there's a Pak fleet on the way and they're going to wipe out the humans. In the final section, a colony of humans are uplifted to protector and prepare to do battle with the oncoming fleet. The Pak are an interesting invention, but the protectors are just too good to be plausible. Also, the lack of FTL means the timescales are so drawn out they ruin suspension of disbelief. The protector in the first section, for example, had been travelling for 32,000 years. Nice that Nive gets the scale of the universe right, wrong that he tries to have the same characters active over that entire period. Also, the computing is bollocks - everything is on tapes - and really dates the book. Better in some ways than I'd expected, just as bad in many other ways as I had expected.

Downtiming the Nightside, Jack L Chalker - seems my memories of this were kinder to it than it deserved. Can't remember when I last yread it, but I saw a copy in my local secondhand sf bookshop and bought it. A secret US time travel project is taken over by terrorists, who escape to the past - to apparently meet Karl Marx in early nineteenth-century London. The newly-hired security chief of the project is sent after them. They all end up bouncing around history, back and forth during Marx's lifetime, and even further afield, and it's all to do with some time war taking place between an autocratic Earth in the future at war with the biologically-engineered humans who occupy the other planets in the Solar System. I'm not entirely convinced the plot actually adds up, although I suspect Chalker put work into making sure it was correct. The writing, on the other hand, is extremely lazy, with plenty of continuity errors. Avoid.

The High Window, Raymond Chandler - the third novel to feature Marlowe, and also a reread. Marlowe is hired to find a rare coin, the improbably-named Brasher Doubloon (a real thing, apparently), stolen from a rich widow's collection by the estranged wife of her son. There's not much mystery here - Marlowe tracks down the woman relatively easily, and the coin more or less falls into his lap. But then the plot, as they say, begins to thicken, and it harkens back to the death of the rich widow's husband, and mysterious appearance of several Brasher Doubloons... Excellent stuff. This is the first book of an omnibus of three, so I have two more to look forward to.

Artifact Space, Miles Cameron - well-plotted and pacey first half of a space opera duology that suffers badly from identikit space opera world-building and an improbably skilled and talented protagonist. Marca Nbaro escapes from the Orphanage (naval school for scions of patrician families that have fallen from grace) before she can be sold into sexual slavery (it's space opera: let's not invent targeting computers, let's keep human sex trafficking, ffs) she fakes her away aboard a Greatship, one of a handful of ten-km long starships, the only ones capable of reaching the station where humanity trades with the alien Starfish for "xenoglas", which is some sort of miracle magic-tech substance. But someone is trying to destroy the Greatships, and scupper trade with the Starfish. Nbaro manages to save everyone and the ship several times, despite being a lowly ensign with fake credentials. But is it a faction within the Directorate of Human Corporations, or the mysterious aliens in the black bubble ships, who are trying to destroy the Greatships? Not a debut as I'd thought, the author has been churning fantasy novels for a couple of decades - which no doubt explains the awful space opera universe and Mary Sue main character. But he sets up a good mystery and, for the right price, I might even try the second book when it appears.

Timescape, Gregory Benford - well-regarded sf novel masquerading as a techno-thriller that isn't all that, well, thrilling. I wrote about it here - https://medium.com/p/timescape-gregory-benford-137ec465fa76 - but did not in that review mention the ending, where JFK is shot but not killed, and how this change and the alternate history it creates seems completely pointless, other than the fact it happened.

The Faded Sun Trilogy, CJ Cherryh - I also reviewed this on Medium, see https://medium.com/p/the-faded-sun-trilogy-cj-cherryh-172f51541c34

7CliffBurns
toukokuu 12, 2023, 11:10 pm

DARKTOWN, a crime novel by Thomas Mullen.

Set after World War II, the city of Atlanta forced to hire 8 African-American cops with predictable results (we're talking about Dixie here).

Told from a variety of points of view, which gives the book layers of detail and authenticity.

8iansales
toukokuu 14, 2023, 8:15 am

Not a single re-read this time. I brought around a two dozen books with me when I moved to Sweden four years ago. I now have around 600. Fortunately, two-thirds of those are ebooks, and at least half are copies of books I already own back in storage in the UK - which I either last read a couple of decades or so ago, or never got to reading before they were put in storage.

Having said that, my only copies of the books below are here in Sweden. Four ebooks, one paperback and two hardbacks.

By Way of Sorrow, Robyn Gigl - a transgender prostitute murders the son of a rich and prominent politician, and it all looks pretty much cut-and-dried until transgender lawyer Erin McCabe is asked to represent the perpetrator. She and her partner, ex-FBI agent Duane Swisher, soon realise there's something fishy going on. The sex worker did indeed kill the senator's son, but it was self-defence - and McCabe and Swisher suspect the son was a serial killer of transgender sex workers. The senator uses his wealth and power to get the case resolved as quickly as possible, without revealing his son's crimes, but it all soon unravels. The escalation from a word-in-the-DA's-ear to assassination was a little hard to swallow, but the plot was otherwise convincing. I'm not sure why the story is set in 2006, perhaps because back then transphobia was mostly from ignorance, unlike the actual hate sponsored by the US Christian Right we have now. The novel is the first in a series. I liked it. Think I'll get the next book (and a third is due out in a few weeks).

Tales of the Quintana Roo, James Tiptree Jr - foolishly, I thought the Quintna Roo were an alien species but it's actually a coastal region on the Yucatan peninsula. This collection of three long stories / short novellas are set there, and are dark fantasy not science fiction. All are narrated by an American expat who lives on the beach. I think he's supposed to be a writer, but it's not entirely clear. The stories are told to him, rather than him experiencing them himself. Originally published in Asimov's and F&SF in the early 1980s, I'm not convinced they've aged particularly well - while the narrator professes to admire the Maya who live in the area, it all feels a little colonialist. Not Tiptree's best work, but if you enjoy Central American dark fantasy by US authors it might be worth a go.

Celestial, MD Lachlan - the author's Claw quintet is an excellent werewolf fantasy, tracing an epic battle of the Norse gods from Viking times to World War II. When I saw the description for Celestial, I got a little excited - a secret Apollo mission to the Moon in 1977, after a Soviet Moon mission finds a hatch in the lunar surface? I'm up for that, I've written enough fiction myself about the Space Race. Except. This novel did not go at all where I expected to. Once the astronauts are inside the alien spaceship, the novel turns into one long Buddhist mind-fuck trip, in which each of the astronauts, and the cosmonauts they meet up with, finds their personal demons manifested and they must do battle with them. Certainly an interesting take on the premise, although I'd have preferred something more hard sf.

Enigma Season, Keith Brooke & Eric Brown - the first of a new quartet by Brooke & Brown from PS Publishing. Sadly, we lost Eric earlier this year, so I've no idea if further books will appear. It's pretty typical stuff from the pair. Humanity lives in a series of domed cities connected by tunnels on a poisonous Earth. Decades before aliens called Enigmats arrived on Earth and now help maintain the current oppressive regime. Four young people stumble across something they shouldn't have while exploring some abandoned tunnels, and have to make a run for it before the authorities catch them. That's as far as this volume gets. It's more of a story in four parts than other novella quartets by the authors, so it will be a shame if it's never completed.

All That Remains, Patricia Cornwell - somehow or other I missed this one when I read the first half-dozen or so Scarpetta novels back in the 1990s. It's another muddled plot. Which apparently takes place over several years, with some of the earlier murders happening before the events in the first two books in the series. A serial killer targets young couples, kills them and leaves their bodies to be found months later by hunters. Again, Cornwell muddies the story, this time by throwing in the president's drug czar, who has a very public breakdown after her daughter becomes the latest victim, and clues which suggest someone at a nearby CIA training camp may be the murderer. But Scarpetta stumbles across the real killer completely by accident, and then it's just a matter of gathering the evidence. I remember later books in the series being better, but these have been disappointing so far.

Kon-Tiki Coda, Keith Brooke & Eric Brown - the fifth book of a quartet, and it's barely a short story. The main protagonists of the last two books of the quartet return to the planet humanity settled, and discover a village of humans with a hive-mind in a symbiotic relationship with one of the giant telepathic fauna that underlay the premise to books two and three. I'm not sure Kon-Tiki Coda adds anything to the quartet, but then it is a coda after all.

Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters - another transgender author, but this time the novel is set in the present day and inside the transgender community. Ames used to be Amy but de-transitioned after his relationship with Reese, also transgender, imploded and he was beaten up by Reese's ex-lover (and sugar daddy). Now, Ames works for a successful ad agency and is in a relationship with his boss, Katrina. Only Katrina is pregnant and Ames, who assumed his earlier transition had rendered him sterile, is the father. Neither feel they can manage a child, so they approach Reese and ask her to join them in a family of three (soon to become four, of course). The novel flips between Reese's and Ames's points-of-view, including flashbacks to when Ames was Amy and living with Reese, and even further back in their lives. Good stuff, if not as funny as advertised - I'd call it more "witty" than "funny". Recommended.

9mejix
toukokuu 14, 2023, 8:50 pm

Finished Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz. Babitz is fun company. Great writer, talented and super smart. For whatever reason though, I am left with the same sensation I had after reading Eve's Hollywood: this should have been so much better. Something like 3.5 stars.

10CliffBurns
toukokuu 17, 2023, 11:04 am

THE APHORISMS OF FRANZ KAFKA, edited, introduced and with commentaries by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.

Brilliant, sublime, brain-bending...and Stach's commentaries are the icing on the cake. He wrote the definitive 3-volume biography of Kafka and is ideally suited to flesh out these sometimes obscure snapshots of the inner workings of Kafka's mind and spirit.

Highly recommended.

11CliffBurns
toukokuu 25, 2023, 7:19 pm

HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholson Baker
BOOKED TO DIE by John Dunning

Two very different books: a history of World War II made up of snippets and damning quotes which confirm how complicit Western countries were in the Holocaust and how ugly and inhuman the true face of war is.

...and the latter is a fun mystery relating to the rare book field.

12iansales
toukokuu 26, 2023, 1:18 pm

Been doing a lot of reading this month. No idea why - especially since I'm visiting two countries and moving apartments during the last couple of weeks of May and first week of June...

Summer, Ali Smith - the last of four books named for the seasons about the UK between 2016 and 2020. So there's Brexit, Austerity, immigrant detention centres... all the shit the Tories have pulled over the period (and before). But there's other stuff too. In this one, it's the internment of Germans in the UK during WWII (most were released after a short period), and a family from Brighton - mother and two precocious children - who accompany a young couple to Suffolk to visit a 94-year-old man (his flashbacks form the internment narrative). This one is more readable than the preceding three, but it also seems lack their bite. I'm not sure the WWII bit works as a counter to the present-day narrative, or indeed the present state of the UK. But the quartet is definitely an achievement. Recommended.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré - the fifth George Smiley novel and the first of the Karla trilogy - and it's very different to the books preceding it and much more like the sort of novel people think le Carré wrote. Control is convinced there's a Soviet mole in the Circus, and has narrowed it down to five candidates, all senior officers (one of whom is Smiley). But then a trip to Czechoslovakia by an agent to speak to a defector goes horribly wrong, and Control is out, as is Smiley. Meanwhile, Alleline and his cronies have their own new super-secret Soviet source, who is feeding them top-notch intel. So Alleline takes over as chief. After Control's death, Smiley is called out of retirement by the minister after an agent who'd gone rogue re-appears and more or less confirms Control's fears. So Smiley has to figure out the identity of the mole. It's not a great mystery, but the way Smiley resolves the mystery is very cleverly done. The best of the series so far. Recommended. The Tomas Alfredson adaptation, incidentally, makes a number of changes (Hungary instead of Czechoslovakia, not sure why) but pretty much follows the main points of the plot. Worth seeing.

Beasts, John Crowley - a reread, although I'd remembered very little of its story, as I discussed when I started reading it. A future US, split into several independent nations, and the rump of the old federal government which is trying to exert control. This is played out against the lives of the leos, man-lion hybrids, who live a nomadic life and do not follow the laws or mores of humankind. Reynard (fox-human, the only one of his kind) engineers the collapse of the Northern Autonomy, partly to safeguard the freedom of the leos. An odd book, that never goes quite where you expect, it feels a little dated, but the prose is excellent. One for fans, I suspect, although everyone should read at least one novel by John Crowley.

Old Food, Ed Atkins - a short stream-of-consciousness novel about food and eating by an artist better known for this video installations. It's his second novel - his first was A Primer for Cadavers, which I've also read. To be honest, I prefer his video installations to his books, but they're an impressive... outpouring of - often funny - blocks of text, which don't so much tell a story as sort of document snippets of many different ones. An acquired taste.

The Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler - patched together from three earlier stories, the novel makes an impressive whole of its parts. Marlowe is off hunting a missing wife, gets embroiled in a murder (of the titular victim), some shakedowns, corrupt police, and an earlier murder that was allegedly a suicide. The first twist is not hard to guess, but later ones come as a surprise, without coming out of the blue. This was a reread, and I've always liked Chandler's books, but the more I read them, the more of a fan I'm becoming. Recommended.

I also wrote a longish review on my blog of Artifact Space, a sf "debut" - https://medium.com/p/artifact-space-miles-cameron-4c6431f69303

13RobertDay
Muokkaaja: toukokuu 26, 2023, 4:45 pm

>12 iansales: I also wondered why Jim Prideaux's takedown in the film of Tinker, Tailor was relocated to Hungary. I assumed that Budapest made a better offer for facilities and locations than Brno - and the film locations were pretty stunning, what with that gorgeous stripy 1960s locomotive at Keleti station and the café in the arcade (though I'm fairly certain Milan has a very similar arcade).

I've never succeeded in identifying where the BBC filmed that portion of the story - I've never been to Brno, but I would have been surprised if they'd secured permission to film there back in the Cold War era.

(Edit: well, I had to check, and according to Wikipedia, Glasgow substituted for Brno. Some things are better left unchecked.)

14justifiedsinner
toukokuu 27, 2023, 8:05 am

>12 iansales: If you only read one book by John Crowley it should be Little, Big.

15iansales
Muokkaaja: toukokuu 28, 2023, 7:02 am

>13 RobertDay: The scenes set in Czechoslovakia take place mostly in a forest, which could have been filmed pretty much, well, anywhere. But perhaps it wouldn't have looked "Warsaw Pact" enough.

A more puzzling change is renaming Sam Cole - ex-Circus, now a casino manager - as Westerby, in the book a stringer who occasionally acts as a courier.

16iansales
toukokuu 27, 2023, 12:06 pm

>14 justifiedsinner: I've read pretty much all of Crowley's books - I still have Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr and Flint and Mirror on the TBR. But my favourite is probably the AEgypt quartet.

17iansales
toukokuu 28, 2023, 7:00 am

I posted my best of the year to-date on my blog - https://medium.com/p/books-of-the-first-half-of-2023-57eac880ce69