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[reading] What have you read recently? (encore again)

Dom said:
Read this - absolutely chilling reminder about the perils of nuclear weapons.
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A friend gave this to me for Christmas. In the queue.
 
In an effort to read some of the many 'proper' books that sit on my shelves (the ones without muskets or dragons or both), I tore my way through The Handmaid's Tale. I'm shocked I haven't read it before, and it was one of the very few books where I had to put it down just to process what I had just read. We reference the book passingly in conversation, as a shorthand for sexism, but I didn't realise that it's so much more than that. You cannot read it and not draw instant parallels not only to the situations erupting across the U.S. when it comes to women's reproductive rights, but also the increasingly intrusive 'safeguards' placed upon our digital lives in the UK, in the name of the children. In fact, the line which made me put the book down and walk away was (paraphrased) 'We have given them more than we have taken from them' - the justification that the brutality of control is worth it to avoid the dangers of freedom. Chilling.
 
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IIRC the author used to attend interviews with a bag of newspaper clippings, so that whenever the interviewer questioned whether an event in the book was plausible, she could show a real world situation where it had already happened.

“Remember, if you want to control someone, first protect them. And if you will protect someone, you need something to protect them from.” – Tolstoy and Winters, Android Karenina
 
What a pulsing joy to return to this sword and sorcery.

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This was my entry into Moorcock. I rescued it from my Dad’s library when he was going to send it to the charity shop.
 
I've just finished The Terminal List by Jack Carr (read by Ray Porter). If it wasn't for the fact that I used a credit on this at Libro.fm and I like Ray Porter as a narrator (and I hate DNF'ing books) I would have DNF'd it. The author obviously knows his stuff but the plot was a bit obvious and full of cliches. The majority of characters are also paper-thin and two-dimensional.
 
Book 2 this year - Domination by Professor Alice Roberts (fnarf). An examination as to why Christianity became so dominant during and after the fall of Rome. This work focuses on the administrative and business development of the church amongst Roman elites, with a gradual take-over of the organisation that had been emblematic of the Empire. A characteristic strongly humanist examination, with little time, or much credence, to possible theological and spiritual propositions to human need.

A good read, with a largely single track economic take.
 
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. How severe trauma rewires the body and brain, what therapies are most helpful in treating patients, and how all this was discovered. A really interesting and in places disturbing read; van der Kolk states that childhood abuse is much more widespread and brutal than I had imagined, with victims greatly outnumbering combat veterans with PSTD; and whether a therapy is investigated and prescribed depends much more on how well it suits the politics of the day and how much compensation would have to be paid out than on whether it actually works.

And, to cheer myself up after that, another five of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. I enjoyed Network Effect the most; it's a full-length novel rather than a novella, gaving the characters and ideas more room to breathe. Although the setting is dystopian and characterised by widespread corporate slavery, the underlying story arc is upbeat and hopeful, as Murderbot builds trust and relationships with the other characters, and together they are able to stop some corporate scheming. Evil corporations are ten a penny in SF, but Wells (an anthropologist by training IIRC) pushes the envelope somewhat more in social matters, with most characters apparently being South-East Asian in ethnicity, and every stable relationship being either same-sex, polyamorous, or both. As with the occasional men in dresses in the background in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the author is saying "the future is different" without pushing an agenda.
 
I am catching up on Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne novels. They're not really procedurals, not at all golden age clue based mysteries, definitely psycho thrillers but very engaging and blackly humourous.
 
I've just finished Sunrise on the Reaping the second Hunger Games prequel book. As a prequel with characters that have appeared in the original series, it has to tread carefully in providing risk when we already know how their lives will end up but does this well. There are elements that felt a bit overdone but, overall, a nice addition to the setting.
 
Actually been doing some reading for a change. Rattled through John Gwynne's Blood and Bone series as I'd read The Faithful and the Fallen series previously. Some nice ideas but pretty stock high fantasy that ran out of puff at the end.
Quickly followed by The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin borrowed from a pal, about a world plagued by tectonic activity that leads to occasional extinction events, where individuals with the ability to quell the quakes are trained and controlled by the Fulcrum. Bubbling up nicely as the three separate narrators are revealed to be the same person at different times in their life. Waiting for them to give me the rest.
Meanwhile tackling Daniel Abraham's Age of Ash as I really like his Dagger and Coin series. Ironically, one of his alter egos is James S Corey and Book 1 of The Expanse is next in the queue.
And in between, dipping into the new Coriolis and Dracula Dossier.
 
Longfingers said:
Actually been doing some reading for a change. Rattled through John Gwynne's Blood and Bone series as I'd read The Faithful and the Fallen series previously. Some nice ideas but pretty stock high fantasy that ran out of puff at the end.
Quickly followed by The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin borrowed from a pal, about a world plagued by tectonic activity that leads to occasional extinction events, where individuals with the ability to quell the quakes are trained and controlled by the Fulcrum. Bubbling up nicely as the three separate narrators are revealed to be the same person at different times in their life. Waiting for them to give me the rest.
Meanwhile tackling Daniel Abraham's Age of Ash as I really like his Dagger and Coin series. Ironically, one of his alter egos is James S Corey and Book 1 of The Expanse is next in the queue.
And in between, dipping into the new Coriolis and Dracula Dossier.
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I had Gwynne on my card for this year. Hmm, maybe...
 
First Age said:
Book 2 this year - Domination by Professor Alice Roberts (fnarf). An examination as to why Christianity became so dominant during and after the fall of Rome. This work focuses on the administrative and business development of the church amongst Roman elites, with a gradual take-over of the organisation that had been emblematic of the Empire. A characteristic strongly humanist examination, with little time, or much credence, to possible theological and spiritual propositions to human need.

A good read, with a largely single track economic take.
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Bit old now, but you might enjoy God & Gold by Walter Mead as a "what happened next" to the Alice Roberts one. Emphasis on economic impacts of different forms of Christianity. https://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Gold-Britain-America-Vintage/dp/0375713735
 
Gosh, a rich vein on this, thank you for the recommendations. I'm going to branch away for a while I think, but were I to return I had wondered about Tom Holland's Dominion, as a slightly more open examination of some of the unique aspects of the Christian message and its impact on Western civilisation.

Damn. I'm a Kindle user and now trying to de-Americana. Hmm...
 
Just finished Sharpe's Storm. the latest and possibly last, of the Sharpe novels. In his afterword, Cornwell mentions that he cannot promise that 'Sharpe and Harper will march again', especially has his long time editor has passed away. If this last novel was to be the deciding factor, I don't think we will see any more. The book feels very much like Sharpe-by-numbers, especially as it is set right at the end of the campaign, as Wellington is pressing into France. There are some fun parts - the titular storm makes life difficult for everyone, and there are callbacks-a-plenty to Sharpe's Trafalgar as Sir Joel Chase makes another extended appearance. There's even a reference to a rifleman called 'Keane' which I hope was Cornwell winking at Iain Gale and his Captain Keane books. We also get to see a little more of the disintegrating relationship between Sharpe and Jane, which will come to the fore in Sharpe's Revenge and Sharpe's Waterloo. The main issue I found with the book was that it was beholden too much to the history and not the story. Sharpe has a pretty excellent battle against the French at the Nive, which ends with about 50 pages of the book to go... and those are filled with a weird mission looking for a good place to anchor a river bridge. It felt, to be honest, like a word count was being met.

Worth it if you are a Sharpe completist, and want to read the excellent Battle of the Nive section - otherwise, there are far better Sharpe novels.
 
I have just completed reading the 3 books of the "official" 3-body problem series, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End, all by Liu Cixin, plus semi-official 4th book of the trilogy The Redemption of Time which is a fanfic by Li Jun (pen name Baoshu), but endorsed by Liu Cixin as a legitimate continuation of his work.

(I've also read graphic novel The Devourer, written by Liu Cixin and illustrated by Yang Weilin - not part of the series but shares a few of the same themes)

This is big, epic science fiction with a scale that just keeps expanding throughout the series to take in all of space, time, and what lies beyond. There is a point where it starts crossing out of the realm of hard SF and transitions to Science Fantasy (and is arguably Science Fairy Tale by the time we've reached the end of the story in Baoshu's work).

The style of writing is noticeably different from most western SF. This is both refreshing and sometimes challenging.

The first book is the strongest in terms of hard SF appeal and does not stretch our credulity too much. Gradually, more and more fantastical ideas are introduced and played around with. In fact, taken as a whole the series reads a lot like a playground for the author's 'cool' outside-the-box ideas that challenge all kinds of assumptions we may have about the universe and our place in it. These are the plus-points to the series that make it worth sticking with (if that is what floats your boat).

On the other hand, there are some social aspects to the works, that sometimes make one think "has the author actually met people?" This combination of massive scale in space-time-plus-other-dimensions and mind-bending SF concepts, but delivered with a slightly kooky view of human beings reminded me a lot of Olaf Stapledon one of my all-time favourite authors.

There are a few other social issues that I felt could be problematic and would need a bit of a fix in western screen adaptations (and indeed have been addressed in the Netflix adaptation of the first-book-and-a bit of the series.) I've watched both the Netflix and the Chinese TV serializations of The Three Body Problem - both of them make changes from the book, and it's interesting to see the differences in emphasis, though the Chinese version is more true to the writing (and a whole lot lengthier).
 
I have read other Chinese SF and most of it is quite "different" in terms of human interaction. Maybe it is a cultural thing.
 
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen. Part of my Christmas haul; very downbeat, very informative, based on numerous interviews with people who ought to know over a period of years.

Key takeaways: First, how quickly a nuclear war would unfold; second, how hard it is to stop it escalating once it has started; and third, how much damage it would do.

The scariest bit was reflecting afterwards on who has control of the big missile arsenals: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un. Not who I would've chosen personally, but there it is.

"A strange game. The only way to win is not to play." - War Games
 
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