What Did You Just Finish?

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Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy. As "supernatural carnival" stories go, it's not in a class with Something Wicked This Way Comes (its obvious inspiration) or The Circus of Dr. Lao. But for a first novel, it's quite good, and it's a shame Reamy didn't live to write more.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2012 20:37

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 06:53

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

The Many-Colored Land by Julian May. First in her nine-book-long Pliocene Exile/Galactic Milieu series. Interesting premises and concepts, but thinly drawn characters and dialogue that sounds like nothing any human being has ever uttered.

Also close to finishing R. A. MacAvoy's "Damiano" trilogy (Damiano, Damiano's Lute, Raphael). Pleasantly low-key fantasy about a male witch and his angelic mentor in medieval Europe. The third book feels like a noticeable dropoff from the first two, though.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2013 22:44

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Moktaro posted:

Sorry to bring back a post that's almost a decade old, but holy poo poo I was starting to think I was the only person who ever read that book, thanks for mentioning it (and reminding me of the title). And for a bit of content I thought it was an interesting story, though considering how much I was into the Strat-O-Matic sports games in my teens I suppose I would.

You're not the only one. I enjoyed that book too.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2018 15:42

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Wheat Loaf posted:

Have the Hugo Awards done anything lately that's as silly as the Saturn Awards giving "Best Action or Adventure Movie" to Hidden FIgures and The Greatest Showman this year and last year?

Well, wait till next month! You can see this year's nominations here.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2018 14:01

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

nonathlon posted:

Honestly not as bad as I'd feared. There's a few of the usual names and awards to superhero films (and Zoe Quinn's bio being listed as a "related" book) but at least most of it is SF/F.

Although, buried down the bottom are the fan awards like "Best Semiprozine" which is where things get really weird and clannish. Also, I'm surprised 'zines have survived into the modern era. Unless blogs are now being classified as 'zines.

They are. I don't recognize all the names but at least half the "Best Fanzine" nominees are blogs (File 770, Rocket Stack Rank, Nerds of a Feather....)

# ¿ Jul 10, 2018 16:27

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Lester Shy posted:

Just finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks and Slade House. I can't remember why, but Slade House has been in my to-read list for a while, so I grabbed it from the local library. I didn't know anything about David Mitchell beforehand, or that I probably should have read them in the opposite order.

Even though it's more pulpy and has less to "say," I enjoyed SH more. I found the creepy vignettes and a tiny slice of all the weird fantasy stuff more compelling than TBC's mostly-traditional plot and huge fully explained war between immortal factions. SH makes you feel like a detective, piecing everything together; in TBC, you're just along for the ride, until you get an infodump 2/3rd of the way through. All of the weird fantasy stuff feels more appropriate among SH's little Halloween stories as opposed to TBC's stories about real problems that real people have.

Which isn't to say I didn't like The Bone Clocks; I couldn't put it down. I'll probably pick up Cloud Atlas this week too.

One advantage of reading TBC first is you can anticipate just how badly the ghosts hosed up when the name "Marinus" gets dropped.

And while I agree that TBC's info-dump section is a bit clumsy, there are also some very nicely handled reveals, especially in Hugo's section. I think the slow revelation that Hugo isn't just a trouble-making student, but a murderous sociopath, is well handled. If you liked that bit as well, you should check Black Swan Green too.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 01:08

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

I grew up reading the 1950s-1960s Tom Swift Jr. books, which are slightly more culturally sensitive than the original 1910s series (the comical black janitor is replaced by a comical Texan cook, for instance).

I also note that the CW is doing a pilot for a Tom Swift show, spun off from their Nancy Drew show, where Tom is black and gay. That would have flipped a few wigs back in the day.

(As a fan of the old books, what offends me about the new show is that their Tom is also a billionaire. The books were written long before the explosion in CEO pay and the rise of the tech bro. The Swift family of the books may own a high-tech factory and have hangars full of Tom's atomic-powered airplanes and submarine cars and moon rockets and whatnot, but their home life was thoroughly middle-class.)

Anyway, I just finished Robert Rankin's Retromancer. Like the few other books of Rankin's I've read, it's mildly amusing -- trying very hard to be Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett and not quite getting there.

Selachian fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Apr 1, 2022

# ¿ Apr 1, 2022 15:10

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Bilirubin posted:

I just finished Solomon Gursky Was Here, a novel by Mordecai Richler. And I had so much fun with this book I hope at least one of you goons decide to try it out.

Sounds interesting. I only know Richler from his children's books, especially Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2022 22:50

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

White Coke posted:

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. It was too short. I didn't hate it but I can't think of anything much to say other than that there wasn't enough material to hold everything together satisfyingly.

Yeah, it felt like he could have done so much more with the idea.

Just finished The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell, which puts me two-thirds of the way through A Dance to the Music of Time. Petty military bureaucracy infighting, punctuated by sudden outbursts of violence from the Blitz.

Selachian fucked around with this message at 00:29 on May 7, 2022

# ¿ May 7, 2022 00:26

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Fighting Trousers posted:

Just finished Gareth Hanrahan's The Shadow Saint, the second book in his Black Iron Legacy series, and I really enjoyed it. The setting is fascinating, and as a mousey historian type, I liked that the mousey historian character is legitimately terrifying by the end of the book.

Now I'm just grumpy that my library doesn't have the next book.

I've been curious about those, since (as Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan) he's well known in the tabletop RPG community for producing many excellent adventures, including Eyes of the Stone Thief and The Zalozhniy Quartet. Guess I'll have to take a look.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2022 12:30

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

istewart posted:

A recent release about recent history, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

I should probably check that out. My dad worked directly under Sumner Redstone at Paramount/Viacom, and I wonder what he'd think about this.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2023 16:03

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Gaius Marius posted:

Bartleby the Scrivner give me 1 reason this isn't Melville's masterwork instead of Moby Dick.

I would prefer not to.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2023 05:25

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

I'd throw in a vote for Robert Kaufman's Inside Scientology: How I Joined Scientology and Became Superhuman from 1972, which was a good read.

# ¿ May 6, 2023 01:31

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

boquiabierta posted:

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

I recently received the whole trilogy as a gift never having heard of it. It sucked me in right at the beginning like I haven�t been sucked into a book in a long time, so that was exciting. It�s a really fun premise � post-mortal �utopian� society has no war, no poverty, no disease, no aging but still needs the population culled by the mysterious scythes who can �glean�, or legally kill who they choose. Two teenagers are chosen to be scythes� apprentices and we follow their journey.

As you may suspect the society is not quite so utopian as it seems. I enjoyed the book a lot and will read the sequels but I do feel like the world-building fell a little flat. I have a lot of questions about this world that the first book didn�t answer; we�ll see if the world is more filled in in the next installment.

I've read some of Shusterman's early books (The Shadow Club, Speeding Bullet, The Schwa Was Here), and they were decent, but I haven't followed up any of his more recent work.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2023 01:38

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

FPyat posted:

The Fifties by David Halberstam presents a broad view of the decade in America, with biographical portraits of figures as different as Nixon, Martin Luther King, Kerouac, and Betty Friedan. The cultural history was more interesting to learn about than the political events because they were less well-trodden ground for me. The accounts of the auto industry and the Korean War probably overlap a lot with the author's books on those topics. As for reading about later periods, Rick Perlstein's work sounds like it will serve me well for the sixties and seventies, but I haven't been able to find any books about the American eighties that aren't predominantly political.

My favorite book about the eighties (as someone who grew up during them) is a humor book: Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor. It's a day-by-day summary of what was going on in the news from 1981 through 1988. You can get it as a pay-what-you-want ebook here.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 12:59

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

jesus WEP posted:

I just finished Slow Horses by Mick Herron and I liked the story and whatnot, but there was something about the author's style of writing that picked away at my enjoyment. Like he would build suspense in a kinda artificial way by just describing something poorly

I picked that one up a while ago, mostly because I grew up with a guy whose name is almost the same as one of the characters. It was all right as spy stuff goes, but it just never seemed to get into gear.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 19:48

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Turbinosamente posted:

It could be worse, I could be in here talking up some Holmes fanfic. I don't think I've read a single one of those that was good and most are forgettable, although I don't think I will forget the one that ended with a transforming mech train because that was hilariously stupid even for a steampunked Victorian setting. And yet I am still foolishly drawn to post Doyle Holmes junk like a moth to a flame even though I know it will be garbage.

I've recommended them before, but August Derleth's Solar Pons books are decent. They're Holmes pastiche rather than fanfic, though.

I also enjoyed The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2024 17:45

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Spotted King of the Cracksmen by Dennis O'Flaherty on the shelf on my last bookstore visit, and it looked interesting and had a complimentary blurb from Phil Foglio, so I picked it up. I cannot remember the last time I have been so frequently tempted to throw a book across the room for sheer stupidity. So it's set in a steampunk alt-history in 1877, where President Jackson sold all of the US west of the Mississippi to ... Russia. Lincoln survived the assassination but what's left of the US is being run by his former Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who's trying to drag the country into war with Russia and impose a fascist surveillance state, with the help of a Lincoln impersonator -- John Wilkes Booth himself! No really!

So our hero, Liam McCool, is an Irish street gangster and master thief -- although, of course, incorruptibly honest and moral. He carries not just a sword cane but a katana cane, made for him by a Japanese buddy. Said buddy also taught him the jiu-jitsu skill of knocking people out instantly by touching the right nerve clusters, which is an ancient pulp wheeze I would swear no one since the 1980s has tried to seriously use. The book opens with Liam's girlfriend being murdered and him swearing eternal vengeance, which he quickly forgets when he meets a pretty lady reporter not long after, and then he gets caught up in an underground resistance against Stanton led by, deep breath, Sam Clemens, Frederick Douglass, and Ada Lovelace. No really.

There's a lot of running around and explosions and airships and Tesla gadgets and steam robots and all of it terribly pointless, and at one point Liam uses his katana to cut a five-foot-tall wolf in half with a single stroke. Did I mention that animals are growing outsized and aggressive thanks to some kind of Native American curse? Yes, Native Americans are magic. Crazy Horse shows up, and he's a shapechanger. No really.

I haven't even gotten to the point where General Custer survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn and joined the Sioux. No really.

There's a sequel, which I do not think I will be bothering with.

Selachian fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Feb 9, 2024

# ¿ Feb 9, 2024 16:37

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into the Bond books, I should note that the late lamented chitoryu12's Let's Read James Bond threads are still available in the Goldmine and this forum.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 01:01

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 06:53

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Ithle01 posted:

Elric of Melnibone: the Elric Saga part 1, Stormbringer: the Elric Saga part 2 both by Michael Moorcock, and The Black Company by Glen Cook.

The Elric sagas were omnibuses combining numerous different Elric books from Elric of Melnibone to Stormbringer. I wish I had read these earlier in my life because, wow, it turns out a lot of the media and games I've been consuming over the last two decades have been basically ripping directly from these stories. Elric is a swords and sorcery anti-hero who is basically the opposite of Conan the Barbarian in just about every way and he gets up to all kinds of swords and sorcery shenanigans while bemoaning his doomed DOOOOOMED fate and the miseries that the world has heaped upon him. Some of these stories were mediocre, some were excellent, and some were just weird (Sailor on the Seas of Fate, I'm looking at you). Overall I enjoyed the stories, but sometimes getting through a story was like swimming in the Heavy Seas. Moorcock's resolutions weren't all that great either, major plot events were wrapped up too hastily and were underwhelming in their resolution. Specifically, Yrrkoon and Arioch. You can really tell that Moorcock wrote a lot of these for magazines and that he had bills to pay and deadlines to make. There is - somehow - an even larger collection of Elric stories in a third omnibus that I have not yet read, but I have no idea how this is going to pickup where the second collection left off given that the ending seemed pretty definitive and was actually better than I was expecting.

Looking it up on Amazon, the third book appears to be the three Elric books Moorcock wrote in the early 2000s -- The Dreamthief's Daughter, The White Wolf's Son, and The Skrayling Tree. They're very different in content and style to the original Elric series, not the least because Moorcock was 35 years older. As a longtime Moorcock fan, I'd be interested to see how they read to someone coming to them fresh off the original series.

I might recommend you read The War Hound and the World's Pain first to learn a bit about the von Bek family, who are heavily involved in Moorcock's post-80s work -- and it's one of his better stand-alone books anyway.

Selachian fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Mar 31, 2024

# ¿ Mar 31, 2024 01:35

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > What Did You Just Finish?