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I've been consistently hitting about 100 books/year since I started keeping track, so I'm going to ramp things up a bit more than I did last year and aim for a nice round 96. Subgoals: - No more than 25% rereads. Last year a third of my books were rereads, and I'd like to read more new stuff and discover more authors I like. - At least 10% nonfiction. Last year it was 5%. The problem I have with nonfiction is that while I enjoy good nonfiction, I seem to have a harder time picking good nonfiction than fiction. If anyone has recommendations, especially for books on space exploration technology and missions (except Ignition) or espionage (except GCHQ, Blind Man's Bluff, or Most Secret War), I'm all ears. I'm probably not going to bother with the Booklord Challenge -- if for no other reason than that I've tried The Blind Owl before and found it completely unreadable, and I'm not going to force myself through a book I hate just so that I can say that I did -- but I might use it as a tiebreaker when I'm deciding what to read next. And it's already generated some interesting recommendations, so thanks for posting it. First up, I think, is flushing my queue from last year: finish Brust's Khaavren Romances, read Dumas's d'Artagnan Romances, and then reread Carol Berg's Lighthouse Duet.
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Jan 5, 2015 04:57
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Stravinsky posted:Also what makes you think it is unreadable? "Unreadable" is a bit of hyperbole.  But I really didn't enjoy it -- I'm not a fan of meandering stream-of-consciousness stuff in general, and if there's such a thing as an uncanny valley for prose, TBO falls squarely within it. The latter can probably be blamed on the translation I had, but it results in the whole thing feeling off-kilter and kind of unpleasant to read.It's been years -- a decade at this point, holy poo poo -- so I'll give it another look once you've posted your recommended translation. And once I've emptied my current queue, which a friend just dumped a bunch of Leiber on.
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Jan 6, 2015 16:24
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Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 15/96 books read 1. The Paths of the Dead by Steven Brust 2. The Lord of Castle Black by Steven Brust 3. Sethra Lavode by Steven Brust This wraps up the Khaavren Romances. Paths is probably the weakest book of the series, consisting as it does almost entirely of setup for the next two books, establishing the setting of the Interregnum and introducing new characters; treated as the first third of one long book (as the structure of the series encourages you to do), it holds up a lot better, and the whole thing finishes with a bang -- and very nicely fills in some backstory of the Taltos books. Including everyone's favourite characters, Morrolan and Lady Teldra. Sethra herself remains as much a mystery as ever, though; even the book bearing her name raises more questions than it answers. 4. What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe A christmas gift, and the book of the website. Which, honestly, is a lot more entertaining than the comic itself. The book is about 50/50 stuff that's already been featured on the website and completely new material for the book. If you like what-if and want several months of updates worth of material in one go, you should read this; if you don't like it you won't like this book either. 5. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas Brust is intentionally aping Dumas -- in particular the d'Artagnan Romances -- with his Khaavren Romances, and I remember liking The Count of Monte Cristo as a kid, so I figured I should go to the source. That turned out not to be such a hot idea, and I almost didn't make it through the book.Somehow, Dumas spends twice as many words as Brust in order to say half as much, and the main characters are all thoroughly unlikeable -- something that the author is well aware of, as he frequently apologizes for them as being a product of their time (or words to that effect). The Phoenix Guards was fun; The Three Musketeers was a slog. (Note: my French is not robust enough to read the original, so I read the English version on Project Gutenberg, which doesn't credit a translator. It's possible it would be more enjoyable in the original French or in a different translation, but it would still be a long book about people I dislike.) 6. Spirit's Oath by Rachel Aaron 7. The Spirit Thief by Rachel Aaron 8. The Spirit Rebellion by Rachel Aaron 9. The Spirit Eater by Rachel Aaron 10. The Spirit War by Rachel Aaron 11. Spirit's End by Rachel Aaron I read the first four books some years ago, only for things to end on a massive cliffhanger with the end of War. Since then she's released a prequel novella (Oath) and the fifth and final book, so it was time to go back and read the whole thing. These books are pretty quick reads and I burned through the whole series in less than a week. They aren't what I was originally looking for when I first read them -- I was expecting something more heist-y and Lies of Locke Lamora-esque -- but they're still a great read in their own right and some seriously cool worldbuilding. And End actually wraps things up very satisfyingly and answers basically all of the questions I had; it's a fantastic finale to the series. 12. Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber 13. Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber The first two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books, a classic series of sword & sorcery short stories featuring a barbarian bard (Fafhrd) and a thief-wizard (the Grey Mouser) -- Pratchett fans will recognize an echo of them in Bravd the Hublander and the Weasel. The first book is pretty weak, consisting entirely of their origin stories -- one for each character, and one for the "Fafrd & Mouser team", as it were -- which can be summed up as "Fafhrd and the Mouser are idiots and get a bunch of people killed including their girlfriends". The second book is a lot more enjoyable, and I'll probably gradually work my way through the rest of the series over the course of the year. That said, part of what prompted me to look these up was reading modern stories inspired by these (among others, like Vance), and it's clear that the Sword & Sorcery genre has come a long way since then. 14. Reasons for the Decision of the Associate Chief Justice J.D. Rooke in Meads v. Meads (2012 ABQB 571) by J.D. Rooke Not, strictly speaking, a book, but a 160-page analysis of "Freemen on the Land" and other, related scams (such as "Sovereign Citizens" in the US) written by a Judge of the Queen's Bench of Alberta who was sick of dealing with this poo poo. It includes a taxonomy of the scams themselves, prominent conmen writing them (and their distinctive styles), a dissection of the legal arguments they use (and why they fail), and suggested countermeasures that the courts, the lawyers, and the marks themselves can employ. If (as I have) you've seen FotL mentioned in passing (say, in the news, or in D&D) and found yourself completely lost as to what the gently caress is going on here, this is a great breakdown of the scam. It's also worth reading this decision from an Ontario court, which cites the above and is much shorter (and funnier). (Although in the end the FotL stuff ends up being irrelevant to the decision; the case is thrown out because you can't charge someone with "resisting arrest" or "assault on a police officer in the course of resisting arrest" if the arrest itself was invalid.) 15. More Than Two: a Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert My wife and I have both found the website very helpful, so when we found out that Franklin was kickstarting a book with one of his partners, we jumped on it. The book covers a lot of the same ground as the website, but it's not just a collection of articles from the site in print form; all of the content was written specifically for the book, so it comes together as a coherent whole. Reading this helped both of us kind of crystallize a lot of stuff in our minds, actually pinning down and putting into words stuff that we'd vaguely thought or known or felt. It's also something that I wish I could send back in time to the me of two, six, or fifteen years ago. It's written from a poly perspective, but a lot of the stuff it covers is useful in any relationship, poly or mono.
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Jan 31, 2015 18:25
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RedTonic posted:Are you a Popehat reader, too? That's where I first came across these two items within a shared context. Pretty fascinating stuff. Also, that Alberta judge did a fantastic job writing his analysis. I read Popehat and Lowering the Bar, but not consistently. I didn't get those links from either blog; IIRC, I found them in another thread on SA.
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Feb 3, 2015 15:39
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A bit late for my writeup on February because the baby refuses to let my wife and I use the computers ever. Or sleep. For related reasons, I haven't read nearly as much this month as I did in January, although not having the christmas holiday to read during doesn't help either. On the plus side, nothing this month was a reread. Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 21/96 books read; 6 nonfiction (28%), 7 rereads (33%) 16. The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross The latest Laundry novel. I didn't like it as much as The Fuller Memorandum but enjoyed it more than The Apocalypse Codex, and it's nice to see stuff that happened in the earlier books coming back to haunt Bob. 17. The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance by Kevin Underhill Meh. Too much breadth, not enough depth. I don't want to know that these laws exist, I want to know why they exist and whether, and how, they've been enforced! I realize that's a much larger research project but I think it would also be a much better book. In general I seem to have this disappointment with "PYF books", and should probably just avoid them in the future. 18. Wasp by Eric Frank Russel This book has a premise that appeals greatly to my love of cunning strategems and heist-like things: a single man is dropped on a hostile planet, there to blend in with the natives with the ultimate goal of crippling the government and military with a one-man exercise in sabotage and psychological warfare. The title comes from the observation that "a single wasp can kill several adult humans and destroy tonnes of expensive machinery simply by making the driver of the car panic". The book generally lives up to this; it's dated, but both pleasingly heisty and quite funny in places. 19. Shadows over Baker Street edited by Michael Reaves & John Pelan This is a collection of short stories on the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos crossed with Sherlock Holmes. When it goes right, it goes really right; far and away the high point of the collection is Gaiman's contribution, A Study in Emerald, which I dare not say more about for fear of spoilers. Unfortunately, when it goes wrong you get, instead of a Holmes story in Lovecraft's setting, a Lovecraft story using Doyle's characters. This, I find, is not nearly as enjoyable. Elizabeth Bear continues to be very hit and miss with me; Tiger Tiger was one of the latter type of stories and not a particularly interesting one at that, but her previous foray into Lovecraft, Shoggoths in Bloom, I considered one of the best stories of the collection bearing that name. 20. Deep Space Craft: an Overview of Interplanetary Flight by David Doody David Doody was an engineer on the Voyager missions and is currently engineering and ops lead for Cassini, so he knows his stuff. This book is exactly what it says on the tin: a broad overview of how deep space probes work, starting with interplanetary communication and moving on to navigation and tracking, attitude control, propulsion, the physical structure of the spacecraft, sensors and science experiments, and finally wrapping up with a look at the overall procedure that goes from an initial proposal to a launched and operational probe. The first few chapters are great, but it gets really dry once it starts talking about sensors. Still a pro-read if you're interested in space, but Ignition was much more readable. It's also made me want to play KSP again and install kOS so I can write safing routines for all of my probes. By design, it's more broad than deep, but it goes more in depth than I expected and it is meticulously cited if you want to go in-depth on any of the topics it covers. 21. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein This one was a christmas present from my boss. Short, entertaining, had some jokes I hadn't heard before, but all in all not a lot of substance to it. It could work as an "ok, which fields of philosophy sound interesting to me", but unlike Deep Space Craft it doesn't come with extensive citations, so you have to hunt down further reading on your own. It does make a nice, light break between second half of Deep Space Craft and the next book in my queue, the equally dry The Polyamorists Next Door.
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Mar 8, 2015 00:24
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Kopijeger posted:The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. Arguably counts as absurdist as well. I've never been entirely clear on what counts as "absurdism", but The Cyberiad owns. (I read the English translation, not the original, and that translator deserves a goddamn medal.)
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Mar 16, 2015 14:41
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Remember how my February writeup was a bit late? This is the March one and it's a lot late. No new Booklord entries this month, either.Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 33/96 books read; 8 nonfiction (24%), 17 rereads (52%) 22. The Polyamorists Next Door by Elizabeth Sheff An ethnography of polyamorous families with children, this is repeatedly cited in More Than Two and is particularly relevant to my wife and I. The results are pretty much what we expected (to boil down an entire book to a single sentence): kids in poly families grow up pretty much the same as kids in mono families, but may have to deal with disapproval from outside the family. Some of the stories are pretty adorable, actually. Apart from that, the book also contains accounts of the author's own experiences with polyamory and her fights with the IRB to get her studies approved, and both are big buckets of  . In the latter case, she had to jump through many more hoops, and clear higher bars for approval, than colleagues making essentially the same studies but of monogamous or single-parent households, because apparently the non-mongamous aspect makes it "sex research" regardless of what she's actually studying. In the former, she tells the story of a long-term relationship with a guy who...honestly, it sounds like a douchebag with a fantasy of having a harem of subservient women who freaked the gently caress out when he realized that his girlfriend would have a much easier time finding additional partners than he would, and that some of those partners would be (horrors) other men. I don't want to get all scotsman fallacy here, but the end result kind of falls down on the "ethical" part of "ethical non-monogamy".23. The M-1 Rocket Engine by Walter F. Dankhoff A technical report rather than a book per se, this is short, dense, and extremely dry. Had it ever been built (individual components were tested, but the whole engine was never assembled) and used, this engine would have been the second stage engine for a manned mission to Mars, powering the departure from LEO of a 500 tonne spacecraft. It dwarfed the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V and ran so hot that the 350°C gas from the turbopump was used to cool most of the engine bell. This report was written when M-1 research was still ongoing. Wikipedia has the epilogue: throughout the 1960s, M-1 funding was cut to support Apollo, finally being defunded entirely in 1965. The complete engine was never built. 24. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 25. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett 26. Pyramids by Terry Pratchett 27. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett 28. Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett 29. The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett 30. Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett 31. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett 32. Thud by Terry Pratchett 33. Making Money by Terry Pratchett A Pratchett binge, for obvious reasons. RIP Sir Terry Pratchett.  For this I picked out books that I remembered liking but weren't my absolute favourites that I frequently reread. It's interesting, I think, to see the overall arc of the Discworld like this. The Things from the Dungeon Dimensions are completely absent from later books, and magic and the gods have a greatly diminished role in general. Overall the world becomes more technological and less magical over the course of the series, and there's increased appearance of reskinned real-world political issues and technologies. Of these, I think the early ones have aged most poorly -- Equal Rites and Pyramids were written when he was still getting a handle on what the Discworld actually is -- but the later ones are weaker out of the gate, especially Making Money. Unusually, it's the middle Discworld books I like most. With most series, either the first books are the best and then there's a steady downward decline as the author runs out of ideas, or the first books are the worst but things gradually improve as the author hones their skills. This has probably completely screwed my reread target for the year, too.
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Apr 18, 2015 13:36
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I'm calling it for April, I think, I'm halfway through Five-Twelfths of Heaven but I'm probably not finishing it by tomorrow. Still need to do the writeup, but stats: 15 books, 1 nonfiction, 2 rereads.Mr. Squishy posted:20: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem as translated by Stanislaw Lem (I assume). Bed time stories for parents to read when they want their children to grow up to be nerds. Very enjoyable. If this is the English translation, it's by Michael Kandel, who deserves some kind of goddamn medal for his handling of Lem's work, especially The Cyberiad. He's done a bunch of other Lem translations, including Mortal Engines (more stories in a similar vein to The Cyberiad), The Star Diaries (short stories not at all like The Cyberiad), and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (I'm not even sure how to describe this).
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Apr 29, 2015 14:48
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A slow month, saved at the last minute by a business trip that involved a five hour plane flight each way and thus saw me read eight books in five days. The booklord challenge update is getting kind of unwieldy, I think I'm just going to include completed challenges that are new this month and sum up at the end of the year. Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 48/96 books read; 9 nonfiction (19%), 19 rereads (40%) Queue: 34. Mélusine by Sarah Monette 35. The Virtu by Sarah Monette There's two more books in the series, but I'm calling it here; The Virtu had a relatively happy ending and I don't want to see what fresh tortures the author has in store for these characters in book 3.  I'm just going to tell myself that Felix and Mildmay sort out their issues and, I don't know, maybe form a stable Z with Gideon and Mehitabel and everyone lives happily ever after.36. Deadman Switch by Timothy Zahn This kind of reminds me of Angelmass, except instead of a cosmic phenomenon that makes the people near it more virtuous, it's a cosmic phenomenon that cannot be navigated except by the recently dead. The plot twist is easy to see coming but it's a fun ride nonetheless, like most Zahn. 37. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (nonfiction) Meh. I think I went into this with unrealistic expectations; I was expecting a history of science, pseudoscience, and superstition and how the former has (mostly) supplanted the latter two. Instead this is more of a book-long argument in favour of the importance of science and science education, which I agree with but isn't actually enjoyable to read. I suspect I'm not the target audience. 38. Heirs of Empire by David Weber (reread) 39. In Fury Born by David Weber (reread) Schlock, but entertaining schlock, and I needed to just turn my brain off for a bit. 40. The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams The standout story for me was "Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study In The Genesis Of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder" by Seanan McGuire. The overall style actually put me very much in mind of Narbonic by Shaenon Garrity, and I would not be surprised to find out that was an influence. The same author has written (as Mira Grant) a few books that I've had in my queue for a while, and after reading this, I'm increasing their priority. "Rocks Fall" by Naomi Novik was also a good read and lends more weight to my friends badgering me to read Temeraire. Third place is probably "Letter to the Editor" by David D. Levine. The low point of the collection was "The Space Between" by Diana Gabaldon. It's thematically inconsistent with the rest of the collection and way too long. I'm not sure why it's in here at all. Runner-up (down?) was "Ancient Equations" by LA Banks, which reads like the journal of a sexually frustrated conspiracy theorist -- which may be what they were going for, but as with KJ Parker earlier this year that leaves me saying "well done, you've written something that's really unpleasant to read, now gently caress off". 41. The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold 42. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold A while ago I tried Shards of Honour and couldn't get through it. The Warrior's Apprentice is a more enjoyable introduction to the series, and I enjoyed both books well enough, although neither will ever be numbered among my favourites. As usually, I don't have a lot to say about books that I neither loved nor hated. 43. Doomstalker by Glen Cook 44. Warlock by Glen Cook 45. Ceremony by Glen Cook Wow, Glen Cook is all over the map, isn't he? I loved The Black Company, hated Garret, PI, and found The Dread Empire a slog. This? This actually reminds me a bit of CJ Cherryh, which is never a bad thing. He does some of the same casual skipping forward across years that shows up a bit in The Dragon Never Sleeps and a lot in Dread Empire, but not enough to make the book hard to follow (as in the former) or enjoy (as in the latter). 46. The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski The first* Witcher short story collection. Pretty good stuff, and a good translation; I'll definitely check out the novels at some point. This also explains where the opening FMV from the first Witcher game comes from, since it seems to have nothing to do with the game itself -- it's a surprisingly faithful recreation of the climax of the first story in this collection. *ok, second published, but the stories in it predate the novels, the games, and the first-published collection, AIUI. 47. Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling 48. Stalking Darkness by Lynn Flewelling Fantasy thieves who are also super double secret spies for the queen! This breaks no new ground but is plenty fun, and I also think the career of the Rhiminée Cat would make a fantastic Thief 2 mission pack. This is also the second pair of books this month to feature unrequited gay wizard romance (Mélusine and The Virtu were the first), which is an unusual coincidence. The books are larger than they look at first, and the second book neatly closes out the first major story arc, so I think I'll take a break from these and read Roads of Heaven to start May. Dienes posted:17. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest - My first steampunk book ever. A giant drill goes nuts in Seattle and hits a gas vent that turns people into zombies. To contain the gas, a 200 foot wall was built around the city. For something with zombies in it, that was the hardest part for me to accept. The setting was interesting enough, and there were highly enjoyable characters....but neither of the main characters were. Both the single-minded mom and the stubborn teen lacked personality, and both were nearly entirely passive the entire book, being lead like a cow from location to location by far more likable, interesting people. The Clockwork Century books get better as they go on, but my introduction to Cherie Priest was Bloodshot and Hellbent, aka "vampire cat burglar vs. the men in black", which I liked a great deal more. I'm probably not going to read the last two CC books (the last one I read was Ganymede), but if she ever releases a third Chesire Red book, that's a day-one buy for me. quote:18. Unbound by Jim Hines - Signed copy! This was the third book in the Magic ex Libris series, easily the strongest of the series so far. Outlandish sets and plot points that are just so crazy you have to love it, like stealing vampire blood from a satellite or pulling a prison globe from a poem. This sounds highly relevant to my tastes. Definitely checking these out soon. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 02:39 on May 2, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 14:41
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8one6 posted:40. Chanur's Homecoming by C.J. Cherryh This is definitely the most rushed of the five Chanur books, I think, but I love it just because the epilogue is so drat  (Even if the sequel is a bit of a downer coming off that ending.)WeaponGradeSadness posted:edit: Also, what's the policy on counting one book for multiple challenge categories? I did it for Palace of Illusions since Divakaruni is a non-white woman (I could also count it as a book about love and hate being that the power of both is a solid theme throughout but I thought counting the same book three times was pushing it) but the book I just started is also by a woman so I can count that one once I finish if it's frowned on. I generally count a book for all the categories it applies to, but if I later read something else that counts for some of those categories I count that one instead to minimize duplicates.
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May 4, 2015 13:58
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A slow month in number of books read, but no rereads.Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 54/96 books read; 10 nonfiction (19%), 19 rereads (35%) 49. Five-Twelfths of Heaven by Melissa Scott 50. Silence in Solitude by Melissa Scott 51. The Empress of Earth by Melissa Scott Space opera where FTL drives work by way of "the music of heaven". Pilots are conductor-mystics, engineers are organists. It starts with an inheritance dispute, a polyamorous marriage-of-convenience, and space pirates, and never really slows down after that. The last book was not what I expected, but in a good way, and the ending was quite satisfying. Definitely going to look for more books by her. 52. Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni A novelization of the Mahabharata (which I have heard of but never read), from the perspective of Panchali (the wife of five of the main characters in the original epic). Good, but kind of stressful to read; I find tragedies easier the less you know about them in advance, and this one you can see coming from a long way off even if you haven't read the original. A horrible Rube Goldberg machine of vengeance where you insert Unforgivable Insult into slot A, and three generations later pipe Q dispenses Everyone You Love Is Dead. 53. Rockets and People, Volume 1 by Boris Chertok The first volume of Chertok's massive four-volume history of the Soviet rocket program, from the 1920s to the fall of the USSR. A combination autobiography, collection of memoirs, and comprehensive history of the space program, the first volume extends from Chertok's childhood and prewar work as an aircraft electrician, to the end of Soviet rocket research in East Germany a few years after WW2, when they pack up and move everyone and everything back into Russia. It's not as smooth a read as Ignition!, but is still fascinating. The first volume is primarily concerned with aviation, as Chertok didn't become heavily involved in rocketry until the war, but the BI-1 rocket-powered interceptor sees a fair amount of discussion. One thing that I found fascinating was reminders of what aeroplane design was like in those eras by mentions of when it changed. For example, he describes their first experience designing a plane with these fancy new "flaps" that let it change the wing cross-section for takeoff and landing -- thus reminding the reader that everything mentioned prior to that in the book didn't have them! I was stoked to start Volume 2, which is where things really get off the ground -- so to speak -- but it's a double-page PDF which my e-reader chokes on, so I took a break while figuring out a way to reformat it. 54. The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake The first Dortmunder book! The best way I can describe Dortmunder's crew is that they are the A-Team of thievery -- which is to say, they're very good at what they do, very unlucky, and more than a little crazy. By the end of the book they've conducted six heists, cons, or raids of various kinds and started work on a seventh and still haven't really gotten what they were after. It's rather more slapstick than, say, the Lies of Locke Lamora. Groke posted:16. Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker. Well, Tom Holt, it turns out. Collection of shorter works themed around the study of what is certainly not magic in a fantasy world where magic certainly does not exist (it's just a kind of science that's not entirely understood, you see). Clever and funny as poo poo. Wait, do we know for sure that KJP is Tom Holt now? I've never read any of Holt's stuff, but I've heard of him mainly as a comedy author. KJP's books are about as far from comedy as you can get.
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Jun 5, 2015 17:26
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Radio! posted:All four volumes are available on Amazon for 2$ each if you don't want to have to mess with them. I got it working in the end, and also I don't trust Kindle DRM fuckery to work properly with my e-reader in the first place. quote:I ran out of steam partway through vol. 3, personally. Mostly because Chertok introduces people like once and then assumes you remember them way later and it's hard to keep track of everyone (also I'm not very technical so I had a lot of moments of Yeah, I have a lot of trouble keeping track of the different people and organizations, but I'm mostly here for the tech, the overall history of Russian spaceflight, and the "and then the landing gear fell off and he had to land on one ski and one wing" stories, so I just roll with it. The stuff I read about the space race growing up was mostly written in the 80s, so there was lots of information about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, but the Soviet side of things was just a bit about Sputnik and Vostok and then "and then they were working on a moon rocket, probably, but who the gently caress knows" because most of this information was super-secret until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. quote:Do you have any recommendations for other space race books that are worth picking up? I loves me some early spaceflight history. It's not about the space race specifically, but Ignition: an informal history of liquid fuel rocket propellants is a fantastic read and the PDF is available for free online. I've heard Stages to Saturn and The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword both recommended, but haven't read either. The Spaceflight Megathread over in SAL might have some good recommendations if you ask.
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Jun 10, 2015 15:26
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No updates for last month, I'm still working my way through Rockets and People. I'm almost done volume 3 and think I'm going to take a break before 4.quote:The Pride of Chanur was fun. I know there are others in the series, but even as a stand alone, it was a good story. Pride is great and is really meant to work as a standalone; the series consists of five books, but it's basically a prologue (Pride), a trilogy containing the "main" story (Venture, Revenge, and Homecoming), and an epilogue (Legacy). For some reason there was an omnibus edition in print for a while that contained the first three books (i.e. the prologue and the first two-thirds of the trilogy), but I'm pretty sure that's been fixed now. The Pride of Chanur carries a lot of responsibility for my love of SF in general and Cherryh in particular growing up (and to this day). quote:Monster Hunters International, I picked up for free. It was okay if you just skip the gun porn sections and don’t mind being blasted with anything and everything the author can come up with. Could have used some parts cut/leave some of the mystery about the Shacklefords in. I couldn't make it through MHI. I found the Grimnoir trilogy to be a lot of fun, though.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:38
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Guy A. Person posted:I've gotten some good recommendations for absurdism, philosophy, and plays from within the bowels of the thread. The last few I'm thinking through are "unreal" and "hate or love" and I am wondering if people could explain their reasoning behind their choices, just to see if I could get some inspiration. It seems like a lot of "unreal" picks are sf/fantasy or magic realism where bizarre poo poo happens. Likewise "hate or love" can easily default to a love story which are a dime a dozen, although I saw The Berzerker chose a book about the science of annoyance which is pretty cool. I generally just read a book I was planning to read anyways and then look at what categories it would check off; if I'm trying to decide what to read next I'll use that as a tiebreaker. For those specifically, I picked More Than Two for Hate/Love (it's a book about polyamorous relationships, so the connection is pretty obvious). For Unreal, I felt like counting fantasy or SF would be kind of a cop-out, because the stuff those books are writing about is real within the setting of the book. Instead I went with The Demon-Haunted World, which is largely about superstitions and pseudoscience -- belief in things that aren't real, and unreal explanations for things that are. ulvir posted:I'm thinking of going the incredibly obvious path and see if I can't find a book that has some sort of backdrop of communism in it, but not have the word "red" anywhere in the title. I'm counting Rockets and People as my Red book. And I'm almost done volume 4, so my monthly update will probably be sometime this weekend. After that I think I need some very light reading. Maybe I'll finally read the entire David Starr, Space Ranger series by Asimov -- I had some of the books when I was growing up, but I was missing the first and last ones.
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Jul 31, 2015 15:34
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June + July in one post, and only four books. Rockets and People murdered me. I'm only three days into August and I've already read another four books, though, so things should pick up again. Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 58/96 books read; 13 nonfiction (22%), 19 rereads (33%) 55. Rockets and People, Volume 2: Creating a Rocket Industry by Boris Chertok 56. Rockets and People, Volume 3: Hot Days of the Cold War by Boris Chertok These, for me, are where the meat is. Volume 1 was interesting, but these two volumes deal mainly with the R-7 (more commonly known today as the Soyuz rocket) and UR-500 (Proton) rockets, and the many missions launched on them -- primarily the Sputnik, Luna, Mars, and Venera probes, and the Vostok and Voskhod manned missions. 57. The Rook by Daniel O'Malley I needed a break before tackling volume 4 and a friend recommended this. I loved it. The one sentence summary sounds a lot like Stross's Laundry books, but those have a kind of "Pratchett does Lovecraft" feel, whereas this is a lot less Lovecraft and a lot more X-Men. It can get a bit expository at times (and feels more than a little "I've written all these cool setting notes and want to show them off" when it does), but it also has a convenient built-in explanation for it -- the expository text is the contents of letters the main character is reading, written by her predecessor in an attempt to give her a crash course in how to be the Rook. The result is a rather pleasant oscillation between present-day events, explanations of the setting and characters, and reminisces about the previous Rook's missions. My biggest complaint is that, if you call the base of operations "The Rookery", the rank should be Rook as in birds, not Rook as in chess.  I was expecting a rank structure based on corvidae and instead I got one based on chess pieces.Apparently he's working on a sequel. I'm excited. 58. Rockets and People, Volume 4: The Moon Race This, honestly, is where it rather bogs down. After the Luna probes -- already well covered in volumes 2 and 3 -- the USSR didn't really participate that much in the moon race. There were four failed N-1 launches, which get described here, but for the most part the book is focused on the administrative and political reasons behind the failure of the N-1 and the Soviet moon program in general, which I don't find nearly as interesting as the technical aspects. A number of interesting programs happen in this era -- the Salyut and Mir manned stations, the Energiya heavy lifter, and the Buran spaceplane -- but as Chertok was only tangentially involved in these, they get only a few paragraphs each. On the whole, Rockets and People was worth reading, but I think if I had known going in how long it would take I might have sought out something a bit more focused on the rockets and less on the people. After that, I think I need a break for some very light reading, so I'm starting off with Isaac Asimov's David Starr, Space Ranger series. I had some of the books as a kid, but now I have the entire series and it's past time I read it.
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Aug 4, 2015 12:07
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Things are back to normal.  No new challenges completed this month, but lots of books.Someone wildcard me please. ltr posted:I liked The Spirit Rebellion, more world building, a little more backstory plus mystery. I think the heist was a bit background to expanding the world and setting up the next book(maybe?). It was good enough that I will get to the next in the series sometime. No maybe about it; The Spirit Rebellion and The Spirit Eater are where the overarching plot starts getting into gear and The Spirit War is where everything finally hits the fan. Rebellion is probably the weakest book in the series, which finishes extremely strong with War and End. quote:Next up, I'm taking a swing at a few of the booklore challenges I have left. To that end, someone want to throw me a wildcard? Preferably available for the Kindle. Pick one: Nonfiction: Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Fuel Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark. Out of print, but available in PDF. (I'm working on cleaning up the PDF and generating an epub version, but it may not be ready this year. It's a big project.) Fiction: Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 75/96 books read; 14 nonfiction (19%), 25 rereads (33%) 59. David Starr, Space Ranger by Isaac Asimov 60. Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids by Isaac Asimov (reread) 61. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus by Isaac Asimov (reread) 62. Lucky Starr and the Sun of Mercury by Isaac Asimov (reread) 63. Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter by Isaac Asimov (reread) 64. Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn by Isaac Asimov A series of kid's SF from the 50s, I had the middle four books growing up but never the first or last. Now I finally have all six, so it was time to read them. These were initially published as "Paul French" -- there was talk about making a TV series of them, and Asimov didn't want his name anywhere near television -- but he didn't try very hard to conceal who the author was, and after those plans were scrapped, later printings were under his own name. These versions have prefaces that the ones I had as a child lacked, discussing how our knowledge of the solar system has changed since these were written; for example, we now know that Venus has no oceans and Jupiter's moon Io is a volcanic hellhole rather than a relatively serene ball of methane snow. Re-reading them as an adult, two things in particular stood out: - There's a lot of science facts inserted into the narrative. It's hard to read these and not come away with at least some knowledge of astronomy, the solar system, and physics. And while they aren't always inserted particularly smoothly, they never bring the book to a grinding halt for a science lecture either. - There are no women. I don't just mean "all of the pro- and antagonists are male"; I mean in all six books the only female character who gets page time is an engineer's wife in Oceans of Venus, who has a line or two. Apart from that, there's a space pirate who mentions that some of them have wives and children back in the asteroids and...that's it. 65. Dream Park by Larry Niven (reread) 66. The Barsoom Project by Larry Niven (reread) The Dream Park books are basically commercial LARPing + murder mystery, but they predate organized LARPing (and indeed some modern LARP organizations take names and procedures from the Dream Park books!), and this being near-future SF, the game is augmented with holographic projections, force fields, and the like, with the GM controlling a multi-acre playing area and coordinating dozens of actors from a central control room. You end up with a sort of layer cake of plot, with the in-character progress of the game, out of character interactions between the players and NPCs, and murder investigation all occupying different layers -- and inevitably the murder investigation overlaps with the game in some manner. Dream Park and The Barsoom Project were rereads; Voodoo Game was new. And I didn't like it; I read a few chapters in and it completely failed to engage me. It leaves me wondering if the first two books would suffer the same fate if I were reading them for the first time now, rather than getting that hit of nostalgia when I open them up. 67. Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach This is not really a book about what happens to our bodies after we die -- chemically and biologically, I mean -- but about what people do with dead bodies. Some of the book is devoted to various forms of funeral rites, including a new and rather promising approach where they free-dry the corpse, pulverize it, put it in a biodegradable urn, and plant a tree over it, which sounds much more to my taste than either traditional cremation or being interred whole -- but most of it is about the medical and scientific uses to which we put human corpses. 68. The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey Recommended both in this thread and on IRC, recommendation was extremely solid. Loved it. As usual I don't have a lot to say about books I really liked. Even if you hate "zombie books" (and god knows there are enough terrible ones to make anyone hate them), this is worth picking up. 69. Feed by Seanan McGuire (as Mira Grant) 70. Deadline by Seanan McGuire (as Mira Grant) 71. Blackout by Seanan McGuire (as Mira Grant) After Stiff and Gifts I decided it was time to keep riding this corpse train and finally read McGuire's Newsflesh trilogy. These are more books with zombies but they aren't zombie books, if that makes sense; in this setting the zombie "apocalypse" happened ~25 years ago, and civilization didn't collapse, it just changed. Blood tests to get indoors, licensing (with mandatory firearm training and ownership) to travel in the countryside, and suchlike. As such, this is actually a political/conspiracy thriller in a post-zombie America. The computer security bits strained my suspension of disbelief a bit. If I were a virologist or biologist, the biology bits would probably strain it a lot. But despite that these books were fun as hell and I enjoyed every page. 72. San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Seanan McGuire (as Mira Grant) A novella in the Newsflesh setting, detailing the first fully documented large-scale outbreak of the Kellis-Amberlee virus: San Diego Comic Con, 2014. Good, but you don't really have time to get fully invested in it before it's over, and if you've read the main Newsflesh books, you kind of don't want to, because you know how it ends. 73. Cold Magic by Kate Elliot 74. Cold Fire by Kate Elliot 75. Cold Steel by Kate Elliot Kate Elliot keeps coming up in recommendations, and I tried her Jaran books and did not like the first one. I decided to give her another try with the Spiritwalker trilogy, and while I liked it enough to read through it, I don't think I'd recommend it and I probably won't be reading any more of her work. The first book I found repeatedly jarring because I consistently failed to build a working mental model of most of the characters. I don't know if this is what actually happened, but it kind of felt like she wrote the book out of order, during which time her model of the characters changed, and then stitched it together, resulting in dramatic changes in tone even within a single scene. In the second and third books this largely goes away, revealing the other major problem I had with it: the main character never wins. In any conflict, the best she can hope for is to escape with her goals unmet. There is no ally who will not betray her, no protector who will not sacrifice her, and no safe haven that does not conceal an ambush. And this applies to everything from small verbal skirmishes to the climatic showdowns at the ends of books 1 and 2, where, for example, her starting goal is "take revenge on those who betrayed me", this gets quickly revised to "get my family out of here safely", and even at that she fails. It does actually end on a very upbeat and hopeful note, but it's a long and wearying grind to get there. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 13:16
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Only one reread this month, and knocked down a whole bunch of challenges.Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 84/96 books read; 15 nonfiction (18%), 26 rereads (31%) 76. Homes and Other Black Holes by Dave Barry (reread) Found this while doing some cleaning and read it in passing -- it's quite short, and like all Barry goes by very quickly. Still funny, and especially relevant right now with my mom moving into a new house. I prefer his columns to his books in general, though. 77. The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen The frame story here is that Dracula -- having survived his supposed death at the end of the novel -- has tracked down the descendants of the Harkers in an attempt to tell his side of the story and set the record straight. This book does a pretty excellent job of showing how a lot of Dracula's actions in the original novel can be explained as genuine misunderstandings or mistakes (such as might be made, for example, by a centuries-old nobleman used to living in isolation trying to reintegrate into society), inflated by fear and superstition in the retelling, and portraying Van Helsing as a murderous lunatic, while at the same time showing Dracula himself as someone who, while thinking of himself as a genuinely good guy, can't quite bring himself to view ordinary humans as people rather than livestock or, at best, favoured pets. Apparently he teams up with Sherlock Holmes in later books, which sounds just crazy enough to be awesome. 78. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller A black comedy about WW2 where everyone is insane. Funny, but gets increasingly dark towards the end. Reminded me a lot of Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, actually. 79. The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, tr. Iraj Bashiri  Taken at face value, as a novella about a destitute painter's opium-fuelled descent into madness, this is a difficult and not particularly rewarding read. According to the commentary, it is actually a brilliantly constructed allegory for Buddhist philosophy and beliefs, but one that requires years of study of said philosophy, the author's history and reading habits, and the text itself in order to unravel. Since I do not have the time or the inclination for such a study, and my understanding of the work in light of this is based entirely on blind acceptance of Bashiri's analysis with no way of verifying or refuting it, it remains unrewarding. 80. The Martian by Andy Weir I haven't read a proper castaway story in years.  As usual, you can see the hand of the author setting things up for the protagonist -- the potatoes here, the crates full of suspiciously useful supplies in The Swiss Family Robinson, and so forth -- but that doesn't detract from the fun. You've never in any doubt that he'll survive, but the enjoyment is in finding out how.81. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard What do minor characters do when off stage? Have existential crises, apparently. It was funny, but I think I'd have gotten more out of it if I'd read or seen Hamlet recently -- I kept having to context switch to look up characters and plot points I'd forgotten. 82. Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey. It's not bad, it just completely failed to take or hold my interest at any point. It doesn't help that I don't like any of the characters. A book from 1904 about hazardous working conditions, especially occupational diseases (as opposed to hazards). Weird to think that as little as recently as a hundred years ago things like "should children spend all day in the factory, or should they spend half the day in school" were still being debated. This book is the result of contributions from many experts in their various fields, and in the preface Oliver notes that he has not imposed any editorial "voice" on the contributors, as the book is meant to be informative rather than opinionated -- but is also quite open about the fact that his personal opinion is that worker protections do not go nearly far enough. Unfortunately, the copy I was reading is a very bad OCR. I had to read it "in software", consciously correcting mis-scanned words, which makes for a slow and unpleasant reading experience. I gave up when it started consistently rendering "if" as "\{". 83. Germline by T.C. McCarthy You know, I think a lot of interesting stuff could be done with the idea of a "subterrene war" (as the trilogy is called). Strategic manouvers in three dimensions, limited by the speed of a boring machine and impossible to hide from seismometers. Cramped firefights that either side can retreat from with impunity by collapsing the tunnel. A surface patrolled by drones and automated defences that no human can escape. The constant psychological weight of never seeing the sky. This is the picture painted by the first few chapters. Unfortunately, after that, McCarthy completely forgets about the original premise, everything moves on to the surface and what we get is boilerplate MilSF from its plasma artillery to its vat-grown supersoldiers. Meh. 84. Sled Driver: Piloting the World's Fastest Jet by Brian Shul You won't find any details about the Blackbird's capabilities or specific missions in this book, but it does a good job of getting across what it felt like to fly it. Short, though. I think the main draw of the book is meant to be the pictures, which are amazing and take up about a third of the book. At some point I'd like to read something more detailed about the Blackbird's design and operational history, though. Next up is Neal Asher's Owner trilogy, and by the time I'm done that Ancillary Mercy should hopefully be out and I can finally read those as well.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:28
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A month of few books. The Silo trilogy took up most of it.Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 89/96 books read; 15 nonfiction (17%), 26 rereads (29%) 85. The Departure by Neal Asher Um, wow. Were the Polity books this heavy-handed and overtly libertarian and I just didn't notice? Or has Asher just started caring less about keeping his politics out of his fiction? The main character is a Randian superman, a child prodigy who grew into a genius polymath (and cybernetically enhanced master of several martial arts styles and expert marksman, of course). But rather than being able to take his natural course and become a Captain of Industry™, he was declared a Societal Asset and forced to work for the government. When he rebelled against this, they erased his memories and sent him for execution -- but he saw this coming and set up an intricate system of failsafes that would see him free and more dangerous than ever, ready to enact his revenge. That's the setup and backstory. The actual book is revenge porn as he sets out to bring down the one world government, which is of course omnipresent and all-powerful but also so inefficient and corrupt that one man can plausibly destroy it (and so incompetent that billions will inevitably die in the next few years anyways, so it's OK if the main character sets off armageddon). There also some jabs at contemporary socialized medicine in there. I think I can safely not read the next two books. 86. Wool by Hugh Howey 87. Shift by Hugh Howey 88. Dust by Hugh Howey  Holy gently caress, I'm reading a lot of soul-crushing books this year. This is another one where I'm constantly going "oh poo poo oh poo poo oh poo poo" because I know any temporary success the protagonists may be achieving is, indeed, temporary. It ends up on an upbeat note, kind of, but honestly I'm not optimistic about their chances (or the fate of the other silos). The theme of these books can be pretty well summed up as "The person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." Hell, the entire second book is basically about what happens when smart, dangerous, powerful people panic. 89. Broken Angels by Richard Morgan I had a persistent feeling of deja vu reading this. I'd swear I've never read it before -- I have Altered Carbon and Woken Furies in hardcopy, but didn't have a copy of Broken Angels until this year. Maybe I read a plot summary before starting Furies? Anyways, it's a typical Kovacs novel, more or less. A simple job gets progressively less simple, there are double- and triple-crosses, some people get horribly hosed up, Kovacs needs a new sleeve. A fun ride, but I didn't like it as much as the other two, I think. I picked up Black Man along with Angels, and I've had Market Forces on my bookshelves for years -- maybe I'll get around to reading them before the end of the year. For now, though, I'm reading The New Space Opera, a short story collection.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:30
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My reading has slowed way down, and I think I've figured out why. In the warmer months, I'd take my son out to the park in the afternoon and read while he played. These days, it's cold -- and more importantly, dark -- pretty much as soon as I get home from work. I'm only one book away from finishing the Challenge, though -- a collection of poetry. The temptation is to read something by Service or Kipling, since of all the poets I was forced to read in school they're the only ones I enjoyed more than not, but the challenge is all about branching out, so maybe I'll read something completely new to me. I know my wife is a big fan of E.E. Cummings and has a collection of his work on her shelves; maybe I'll read that. Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 94/96 books read; 16 nonfiction (17%), 26 rereads (28%) 90. The New Space Opera edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan A mixed bag, and more miss than hit, honestly. My favourite was probably Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? by Ken MacLeod; what I've read of his novels didn't do much for me, but I really liked this. The low point was -- unsurprisingly -- Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons. Like Hyperion, he spends so much time pointing out that he's read the classics that he forgets to do anything else. 91. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien A semi-autobiographical collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. Powerful stuff. Also prompted me to do some reading on the war, which I knew almost nothing about -- it's not really covered in Canadian history classes, or wasn't when I was in school. 92. Ancillary Justice 93. Ancillary Sword 94. Ancillary Mercy  I can see why everyone loves these. This year has involved a lot of books ranging from "meh" to "it's ok, I guess", but very few that I greatly enjoyed and was hugely enthusiastic about. These are in the latter category. I think I actually liked Ancillary Sword the most overall, although my favourite individual scenes were in Justice (specifically, the bits where Justice of Toren is carrying on multiple conversations at once and the narrative is interleaving all of them). They're all great, though. I also finished The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg this month, but I'm pushing that writeup to next month when I can discuss it along with its sequels.
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Dec 1, 2015 11:51
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Finished the Booklord Challenge! I know I originally said I wasn't planning to, but in the end I'm glad I did. Update for the month follows, year-end summary at the end of this post. I might finish one or two more books before year's end, but if so I'll count them as part of the next year instead. Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 105/96 books read; 17 nonfiction (16%), 26 rereads (25%) 95. The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg 96. The Soul Mirror by Carol Berg 97. The Daemon Prism by Carol Berg This is a slow burn that doesn't really get going until halfway through the second book, but once it does, oh boy. It's not going to make it into my top-books list, but it's nice to see Berg is still writing good stuff that isn't Lighthouse or Song of the Beast, and this trilogy mixes things up a bit more than her earlier work, which I felt was kind of rehashing the same basic plot structure each time. 98. A Review of Criticality Accidents, 2000 revision, by Los Alamos National Laboratory https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf Wow. People are stupid. The takeaway here is that (a) there is no safety system so foolproof that someone won't disable it and (b) plutonium solutions really want to kill you. I now know more about criticality physics, too! 99. Mating Flight by Bard Bloom 100. World In My Claws by Bard Bloom These were an unexpected gem; I know the author, but didn't know anything about these books until I saw them getting all excited over Mating Flight making it onto the Nebula reading list. I enjoyed the poo poo out of them and powered through both in two days, though. They're basically a fantasy portal exploration story, science fiction alien invasion story, and romantic comedy where all the protagonists are dragons. Adolescent dragons, no less -- the twelve-year-long titular mating flight is the final ritual that marks entry to full adulthood -- and they are quite believably flawed and bad at relationships and at being mature adults. Which would normally drive me a bit crazy, but they do learn from their mistakes and get better at things over the course of the books. The first book drops a bunch of nasty surprises on them and sets up some big problems; the second one largely involves them trying to fix the things they broke in the first book. 101. Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky I played STALKER before ever opening this up, so a lot of the content was already familiar to me. Good to see where it all came from, though, and it's a much smoother read than most Russian literature I've looked at -- not sure whether to credit the Strugatsky brothers or their translator for that. The foreword and afterword were quite interesting; the former by Ursula K. LeGuin, on the reception of cold-war-era Russian SF in the US, and the latter by Boris Strugatsky on the troubles they had getting it published in the USSR in the first place -- apparently the original Russian edition was quite badly butchered. 102. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik 103. Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik It's Honor Harrington in 1800 England with dragons in place of both spaceships and treecats, basically. Fun, but I do worry that like Harrington it will get less fun as it goes on. 104. Departmental Ditties by Rudyard Kipling 105. Barrack-Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling These are two of his earliest collections, and reading them, I think I like his later work a lot more. The fact that he's trying to render what he thinks of as a lower-class soldier's accent in text doesn't help the readability any, either. The introductory essay by George Orwell was worth the price of admission, though. Year-End Update Booklord Challenge Report posted:
Top 7:
Bottom 7:
ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 29, 2015 21:06
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