SugarFree
I am about halfway done with Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson. Although published in novel form in 1971, it is actually a fix-up of four short stories that appeared in various magazines between 1956 and 1969 that are held together by a thin frame story.
I’ve been hunting down reading antecedents of Charles Stross’ Laundry series and Operation Chaos is fairly interesting so far. Unlike the Laundry universe, the use of magic is a widespread and civilian-led affair rather than the province of secret government agencies. (The same setup explored briefly by Robert A. Heinlein in 1940’s “Magic, Inc.“) In Anderson’s world, magic is studied as just another branch of science and is increasingly seen as working on scientific principles. The leads are a werewolf and a witch that meet in an alternative World War II where the continental United States is invaded and occupied by a jihadist Caliphate–weirdly similar to ISIS but with afreets and magic carpets at their command. The novel moves along at the brisk pace of 1950s magazine science fiction. Although Anderson published a sequel in 1999, Operation Luna, I wish he had spent more of his prime years in the Operation Chaos universe. There is a lot of potential in his world-building that I would have like to see him explore.
Closer to the Laundry universe in both tone and style was Tim Powers’ 2001 Declare, which is so similar that Stross talks about it in the afterword to The Atrocity Archives.
Declare follows an operative of a secretive branch of the British secret services that are focused on occult threats that was created (or maybe just revealed itself) during World War II and was thought to be disbanded after the cessation of overt hostilities. In 1963, an agent of the service is reactivated and sent to Mount Ararat to relive a disastrous mission from 1948 that may or may not involve Noah’s Ark.
I finished Declare a couple of weeks ago and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It mined a more esoteric vein of welding together Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Elder Gods than the Laundry series but it was somewhat unsatisfying. There was an elusiveness to the text about exactly what was going on that left me unfulfilled. But it is something that I have experienced in Powers’ other novels, so it wasn’t surprising.
jesse.in.mb
I’m currently chipping away at three books:
- Arturo Islas’ The Rain God, a bildungsroman and family drama about three generations of a family set on both sides of the US/Mexican border. I first came to this novella in high school when I borrowed a copy from my English Lit teacher with all of his college notes in it, which I kind of miss in the current copy I have. I was distracted enough by the book the first time I read it to have to be pulled out of a swarm of bees;
- Palm Trees in the Snow by Luz Gabás is another trans-generational and cross-cultural family drama consisting of twinned narratives about a Spanish family’s experiences in colonial Guinea and a daughter’s attempts to figure out what was left behind when the family was driven out in a post colonial revolution;
- Dan Simmons The Terror is the SugarFree recommendation on my list. If you like monsters dismembering mid-19th century British arctic explorers (and I know you do), you might enjoy this epistolary novel. I’ve enjoyed the action and personal drama so far, but while there’s been plenty of rum there has been very little sodomy and the lash, but I’m only about half way through, so there’s still hope.
Riven
I used to be a huge reader when I was younger. As I’ve gotten older, I find that my reading is very seasonal–unless I’m laying out on our deck working on my tan with a tropical drink and a smoke, it just doesn’t happen as often as I would like. That said, I do have three books on my reading list right now that I mean to read…soon…ish. SugarFree gave me a copy of Dead Witch Walking, which is apparently part of a huge series called The Hollows. Definitely looking forward to the whole set if the first is worthwhile, and I have it on good authority that it is. Additionally, my sister gave me two collected works for my birthday: an H.G. Wells anthology and a collection of Sherlock Holmes capers. Everything in both of those books is new content for me, so that should be a good time, too.
JW
Bullshit IT service delivery certification,
Old Man With Candy
I can only dream of having as much reading time as SugarFree. Nonetheless, I still have a few on the burner. I’m nearly finished Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, an alternative history novel premised on Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and keeping the US out of World War II by reaching an understanding with Hitler. It is creatively told from the POV of a young (((Philip Roth))), who knows that everything around him is changing and not in a good way, but doesn’t really comprehend why and where things are headed. If it were just released, you’d think it was a tired allegory about Trump, but it’s a bit more prescient than that. Assuming he doesn’t piss me off at the end, it’s a wonderful novel.
I have a childlike fascination with magic, and Corinda’s 13 Steps To Mentalism is a classic text. As with most magic tricks, once you understand the basics of mentalism and the repertoire of classic illusions, you’ll be simultaneously struck at how simple the tricks are and awed by how wonderfully they’re performed by the masters.
Brett L
E. William Brown’s first foray into Sci-Fantasy, Perilous Waif. If you’ve never heard of Brown, he’s a self-published guy in the kindle unlimited sphere. I find his stories fascinating even though his main characters all suffer from what I call the Dresden effect. In order to fight tougher and tougher opponents, your main character essentially becomes a god. I first encountered it in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, and I know Charlie Stross is actively trying to avoid it in his Laundry Files — and more failing than not, honestly. So there it is, I’m outed as a total Sci-Fantasy geek. Brown’s Daniel Black series isn’t bad either, although there are times you can see why it wasn’t picked up by one of the big houses.
sloopyinca
Working on The Neverending Story. I’ll report back when I’m finished.
Comments
377 responses to “What are we reading? April 2017”
I could’ve sworn that said Perilous Waifu.
I’m about halfway through Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami. He had kept us waiting for years since “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” which was awesome, even after the also excellent 1Q84. I was Jonesing so bad during the wait, I picked up Coin Locker Babies by another Murakami, Ryo. Yes, SF, it was amazing, but I also felt like taking a shower after reading it for more than 15 minutes at a pop. Don’t let the review by The Goddamn Japan Times sway you, however. I’m thoroughly enjoying Killing Commendatore.
Yikes. I’m apparently way behind in my Murakami consumption. I have 1Q84 on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it yet. I haven’t even heard of a few of those.
*goes to the shame corner*
Killing Commendatore isn’t out in English yet, so you’ve got an excuse, but 1Q84? Get it down off the shelf, Man.
Check your polyglot privilege then, bro.
Ryū Murakami also wrote the source novel for the Takashi Miike film Audition.
Quick youtube of that and wow. Creepy chick with long, straight black hair to another level.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the creepiest movie ever made.
Have you seen Miike’s Ichi The Killer?
Ichi wasn’t creepy, he was annoying. Dude eating a fist with his snake jaw was pretty cool though.
I choked while I was laughing so hard in Ichi when the one guy finally strips down to fight.
Exactly. For the life of me I can’t figure out why people went nuts about the violence etc. Its like a Troma film, its so over the top that it shoots right into camp hilarity. Miike does it with a bit more style and grace though I think and, of course, that particularly alien Japanese cultural lens.
Miike is always disturbing. I re-watched Gozu a month ago and was triggered.
Have you seen the zombie musical, The Happiness of the Katakuris?
No, but I have an intense aversion to musical drama.
I have tried and tried to like Murakami, but I just can’t.
“Lazy, lazy, fatty, fatty gaijin… weee!!!!!!”
“I mean, how do you not murder her everyday?”
Definitely NOT SFW, but if you have the stomach, google Waifu Basics.
“I do.”
Quick re-read of Uncle Milt’s Capitalism & Freedom before handing it onto Proto-Libertarian Shitlord Highschooler Son , having put aside Paul Johnson’s Modern Times which I will certainly re-commence reading.
Then it’s on to The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia by Brian Hall which was recommended to me by a reliable source, but which I suspect will be somewhat superficial.
I’ve read “Modern Times” more than once. Brilliant. I would also recommend “Post War” by the late Tony Judt. He was a committed leftist but it doesn’t massively affect his analysis.
Right now i am reading catch 22 which i never read before. Its reasonably funny and overall a good book. Just finished To say nothing of the dog. Not bad either, especially since i liked 3 men in a boat.
You should check out ‘Slaughter House Five’ if you haven’t read it already. Similar theme to Catch 22. Slightly more bizarre
Just slightly
I did read that, Vonnegut was on my radar before catch 22
I really enjoyed Cat’s Cradle, for some reason.
So it goes…
Huh. I couldn’t stand that book.
I couldn’t stand that
Do you have that set in TextExpander?
Cat’s Cradle is one of my favorite books….for some reason.
The movie was a surprisingly good and faithful adaptation.
Hoping to brush up on my libertarian/scifi cred a bit by reading all those Wells’ stories. The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and The Food of the Gods are all totally new stories for me. I’m familiar with the subjects of each, but I really can’t wait.
I’ve got a collections of Wells’ works sitting around somewhere, no idea where it is though.
I tried the Time Machine, couldn’t get past his rather simplistic pro-communist allegory.
Eh. I can look past some of that if the story is good…
Not a lot of libertarian thought in HG’s stuff.
He was utterly committed to the Fabian Society and only left it because he didn’t like the management.
That’s disappointing to hear. I guess I tend to think that scifi and libertarianism make a solid pair, but I guess I have read a lot of stuff that’s much more… communisty… blech
“I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest” -H.G. Wells on Stalin.
Well, that’s disappointing AF
If you want sci-fi and not exactly libertarianism, but certainly not communism, Russian/slavic authors are a good one to check out. They were about the only ones in the Soviet era who could get away with criticizing (slightly) the government, since sci-fi was looked down upon and not censored as heavily.
Riven, if you want a scifi and libertarian pairing, try just about anything by J. Neil Schulman. Just finished rereading “Alongside Night” and it’s as ancap as you’ll find.
It’s going on the list! Many dankes!
You’d think that, assuming you believe that freedom is going to be the inevitable winner, given enough time.
Sadly, Asimov, Wells, Scalzi (who?) and many many others think otherwise. If you want ideological purity (or neutrality), you’re talking Heinlein (who is also, obviously, one of the world’s naturally-occurring Montanans), A.E. Van Vogt, Michael Z. Williamson.
Best you can hope for is someone who doesn’t think that the crew of Serenity doesn’t belong at the wrong end of a firing squad.
Also, the above-mentioned Poul Andreson. There’s a whole cycle of his stories and novels where free traders are the heroes, trying desperately to hold off the forces of crony capitalism and metastasizing statism that are gathering against them, and all of humanity.
They lose. Dark Age falls. A militaristic empire rises. Another cycle of stories set in the waning years of said empire comes, with a James Bondian hero of, again, somewhat libertarian bent.
Of the less known writers, Cristopher Anvil has some excellent stories from libertarian/non-statist perspective. Strangers to Paradise is hilarious tale of three Asimovian heroes stuck on the planet where welfare state went mad ruined everything. They need to get their ship repaired but can’t convince the ruling computer to do it. Luckily, one of them stumbles on a device that can affect emotions of a large number of people. Easy solution, right? Nope – moral of the story is “you may think you can play chess with society but the problem is goddamn pieces keep moving on their own”.
Jerry Pournelle (and Niven) – private companies are going to get us to the stars because the government sure as hell won’t.
Exiles to Glory, High Justice, Birth of Fire, etc.
“He was utterly committed to the Fabian Society and only left it because he didn’t like the management.”
I was trying to eat tomato/basil soup. Dammit.
I guess they didn’t have the right people i n charge.
Riven,
I would try “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” Very good Libertarian SciFi and interesting. Classic Sci Fi that hold up relatively well technically
I will add that to the list! Thank you for the recommendation. 🙂
I second the nomination. It is a classic story.
‘The Castle’ by Franz Kafka
Almost done with ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’. I never really read too much sci-fi so this is a bit outside of my comfort zone.
Also, ‘The Demon in Democracy’ by Ryszard Legutko (a former anti-communist resistance fighter in Poland). Just as bizarre as Kafka and about as uplifting
I always thought TMIAHM to be pretty thin gruel as far as SF goes, being more a matter of social commentary in a frontier culture – especially now when most of the technology of the story is currently feasible.
Alternative recommendation?
For Science Fiction? Or for Heinlein? I’m a fan of Friday but that’s not very SF either. If you want the latter, you then get into the subgenre, because it’s pretty varied.
The only science fiction author that I’ve read a good amount of is Ray Bradbury (Kurt Vonnegut, too, if you can consider that science fiction, which for some reason some people do).
What science fiction books would you recommend that have good social commentary?
What science fiction books would you recommend that have good social commentary?
The kind you would agree with?
Yeah, no ‘woke’ science fiction. I mean something along the lines of ‘Farenheit 451’.
You could check out whaever’s being nominated by the Sad Puppies for Hugos this year. Pretty much by definition, the woke will be excluded.
I wouldn’t want Larry Correia as an enemy for all sorts of reasons.
Avoid The Handmaid’s Tale.
For the most cantankerous writer in
sciencespeculative fiction, check out Harlan Ellison. You won’t always agree, but he’s entertaining.Try some Stephenson. Snow Crash is fun, but
is phenomenal.
“Freehold” by Michael Z. Williamson. His first book so a little rough but a nice planet settled by libertarians.
“The Road to Damascus” isn’t my favorite John Ringo book but it is commentary – a good guide to how Leftists can destroy a country. So is “The Last Centurion”.
The Red Rising Trilogy has some commentary along with huge quantities of blood and guts.
All of the following from some combination of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle with possibile other writers involved are excellent…
Lucifers Hammer – About a comet slamming into the earth and the struggle to survive the aftermath. Very good social commentary
Footfall – The single best example of an alien invasion story in existence and has solid scientific rationale for why aliens capable of invading us are not that much more technologically advanced than us. Contains a fair amount of social commentary and it is very good
The Legacy of Herot – Best in class example of the initial colonization of an alien world by humans
Oath of Fealty – The only thing keeping this from being one of the best Cyberpunk novels ever is that the corporate officers are the good guys in the story and it has way more optimism of the future, otherwise contains all of the elements of cyberpunk and is wall to wall with very good social commentary.
The Prince of Sparta Series (Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell the Spartans, Prince of Sparta) – Excellent military sci fi about the birth of a libertarian monarchy on a colonized world that is forced to accept relocated undesirables from earth and those undesirables basically start a civil war because they don’t get the same free stuff from the Spartan government that they get from the Earth government.
Tran (also known as the Janissaries series) – The story of a group of American Mercenaries transported from the Angolan Civil War to a far away planet in a triple star system to harvest a narcotic drug that only grows once every 600 years. When they get there they find examples of militaristic earth cultures present from every 600 year period (Mongols, Roman Empire, Scottish Highlanders, Greeks, etc.)
As for Heinlein, throw in
Citizen of the Galaxy – an excellent story about the meaning of freedom that follows the life of a boy who was bought at the age of 5 in a slave auction and travels across the galaxy living in multiple different cultures trying to find the secret of his birth.
Starship Troopers – An excellent examination on the nature and meaning of duty and the motivations and mindset of a soldier
When I first started reading the Larry Niven Known Space stories… I was not aware of time or my surroundings when I got pulled in.
Greg Bear – Eon
Also, pretty much anything by William Gibson.
For Heinlein probably Starship Troopers, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
::furiously taking notes::
Cat Who Walks through Walls: No, No, No, and No. Do not read.
I second this nope.
Seconded – only book I ever chucked against a wall.
Dang! Good to know!
Although, I’m starting to think UnCivil just doesn’t like books with Cat in the title…
Hrmm… I also found “The Cat in the Hat” to be an inferior work product by Dr Seuss.
*scours memory for books with ‘cat’ in the title*
Do short stories count? Or are we only talking books proper?
The Cat Who Walks through Walls and The Number of the Beast are probably 2 of Heinlein’s weaker works and realistically should probably be among the last books if his you read because they essentially tie all of his later and some of his earlier works together into a huge shared universe that doesn’t necessarily make sense (travel between parallel universes is a central theme of both)
The Cat Who Walks through Walls is a really weak Heinlein novel, it has tangential relations to a bunch of his other books.
Starship Troopers is way up on the list of good ones, as is the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you’re looking for lighter reading, I enjoyed Tunnel in the Sky which has a similar setup as Lord of the Flies. If you’re looking for a later Heinlein novel that I love, it’s Job: A Comedy of Justice.
Consider also the two shorts: Magic, Inc. and Waldo
What makes Magic, inc. in particular interesting, and not discussed in the article, is that the events of the story revolve around government attempts to provide certification for magicians and the resulting evil that ensues.
ST really again, isn’t very science fiction-y, it’s just looking at what citizenship means and the way of a patriot, set in a futuristic culture. Which is why the lefties consider it a Nazi paean. Admittedly, space shipl blowing up and launching battlefield nuclear devices sounds a BIT like Warhammer 40K.
TCWWTW is … strange … like all the stories in the “Lazarus Long” milieu.
Admittedly, space shipl blowing up and launching battlefield nuclear devices sounds a BIT like Warhammer 40K.
Possibly due to Games Workshop shamelessly ripping off Starship Troopers and Dune and mashing them together.
Heinlein was at his best with his juveniles.
There are SF ‘imaginings’ of all sorts of non-SF fiction.
If you like James Ellroy, there are noir detective procedural SF stories out there (although I’m struggling to find any that I thought were good)
If you like tongue-in-cheek “Mission Impossible” type stories, there are some very old, classics out there like “The Stainless Steel Rat” Series.
If you like “Space Opera” (or if you think Ayn Rand’s stories are complex, fast-paced and innovative) you could try other ancient classics such as “Lensman” Series or “Skylark” series by E.E. (Doc) Smith. But they look very dated.
Hell, you could even try “Enders Game” if you like your explosions to have explosions. You might find later books in the series pretty dismal though,
“you might find later books in the series pretty dismal though”
Totally agree.
I found the stories written around Bean to be far more interesting.
If Ender existed, I would have found it hard to not slap some sense into the annoying bratty emo.
Count of Monte Cristo -> The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Noir -> Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan
Master and Commander -> The Skinner, Neal Asher
Dilbert + John le Carre + Lovecraft -> The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross
Morgan’s cyberpunk books go full commie pretty quickly, though.
It’s sad that someone that can write that well has his head so far up his ass.
Instead of the original Ender’s Game series, I would recommend looking at the Ender’s Shadow series instead. Unfortunately, Ender’s Shadow itself is basically the same story as Ender’s Game, just from a different character’s POV. It then goes into what happens on Earth after the end of Ender’s Game.
For SF with libertarian themes, I always recommend Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. Good sci-fi with a theme of “fuck off, slaver.” Its even got an anit-Top Men thing going on.
Its a prequel to the also excellent A Fire Upon the Deep. But they are totally unconnected and other than a bit at the end of Deepness that is amusing if you know the plot of Fire, there is no reason at all not to read them in either order.
And I guess the amusing part would be amusing on the Fire end, if you read Deepness first.
After Heinlein’s surgery, his material was markedly different, both in content, style and variability.
He’d always “upset” some people with the Lazarus Long series because it involved multi-generational incest and it was downright weird. he also had this thing for “writing as a woman” – sometimes as a transitioned transgender (in a way) which (being a dude) I could never figure out how ‘truthy’ it was. He was always on point with his older stuff, and the more modern stuff grounded more firmly in his “Future History” canon.
Stories like his very early “Starman Jones” were really potboilers with plots you’d find to be very familiar and simple, talking more about things and people. With Starship Troopers he was moving into talking about Ideas. Once he got to Stranger In a Strange Land, it was beginning to be hard to figure out what he was talking about.
Poul Anderson – The Boat of a Million Years.
Greg Bear – EON, City of Angels, Moving Mars
Niven and Pournelle as others has mentioned
Bear: The Forge of God has the best SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Earth destruction sequence I have read.
The sequel blew.
I own just about everything by Niven, but his short stories, with some exceptions, are better than his novels. He needed Pournelle to keep him in line.
Legacy of Heorot should be the basis of a TV show.
Netflix, get on that, stat!
All of the Niven/Pournelle collaborations would be excellent for adaptation to TV series.
They all have large diverse casts, plenty of sex, multiple intertwined storylines, well formed characters making believable heroes and villians and when converted to video format could easily fill 1500 hours or more of screen time (approximately equivalent to 4 seasons of Game of Thrones or 2 seasons of a network TV series)
I have started City of Angels 3 or 4 times but can never get more than a dozen or so pages into it. Its not the novels fault, stuff just keeps coming up.
City of Angels was a ambitious book; there are 3 major story lines, mysteries to solve, and socioeconomic, and technical challenges to digest. It also has a sequel Slant.
Currently reading Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy, which is an account of America’s relations with the Middle East from it’s founding in 1776 to about 2008-ish, I think. Quite interesting, especially the stuff about the early American dealings. Quite liked the author’s book on the Six Day War and this one is proving to be just as good.
After that, it’s probably back to obscure Slavic science-fiction.
“Slavic science-fiction”
You mean like “The Man Who Screwed In a Light Bulb by Himself”
I kid
Sometimes, I have to consider if I’m really in the right genre when I choose to drop 50$ on an obscure old-library English translation of a Strugatsky story. But I enjoy the more cynical political angle they take in comparison to Western sci-fi.
Suggestions?
Futu.re, by Dmitry Glukhovsky. One of my all-time favorite books. Also the Metro trilogy, by the same author, if you enjoyed Futu.re
There’s also Andrzej’s Sapkowski’s Witcher books, beyond that, most of what you can get is old Strugatsky books, like Roadside Picnic, The Doomed City, etc. Also Stanislaw Lem. Haven’t read a lot of them yet, so I can’t comment on if they’re good or not.
It’s tough to get the newer stuff in English, but I heard that they’re finally going to release an English translation of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, so I’m excited to get my hands on that.
We by Zamyatin
The Cyberiad by Lem
I tried to get into We, just couldn’t do it. I blame the similarities between it and 1984 (yes, I know We was written first.)
Admittedly, the prose was dense. It took a while to read, but I found it fulfilling.
Roadside Picnic is pretty short but very influential.
GET OUT OF HERE SDALGERRRRR
Goddamn, I need to get around to that.
It shames me to admit it, but I hardly read anything, anymore. The last Book I read was Economics in One Lesson just because everybody talks about it.
It’s been a long time, but I seem to remember theStainless Steel Rat books as being pretty reliably anti-authoritarian, if not libertarian.
As I mentioned the other day, the autobiographies of Grant and Sherman are definitely worth reading.
The last time I looked around a bookstore I was amazed at how much dreck there was on paper. It was like TV turned to ink and paper. I could not find a single book that would make me part with money.
Suthen, Sturgeon’s Observation definitely applies. If you’re interested in scifi, you might try the Belisarius series by Eric Flint and David Drake.
I thought the first few Laundry Files books were pretty good, but they’ve been diminishing returns since book 3 or so. Two was definitely the best.
I’ve had a vaguely unsatisfied feeling with every Tim Powers book I’ve read. He has many great ideas, but there’s something about the execution that’s lacking, as well as keeping too much action “off screen.”
Rhesus was my favorite. i’ve re-read it a couple times just for the ending alone.
I haven’t read any fiction for decades. Last reads were Firearms of the Nineteenth Century, Handbook of Concrete Construction and Wealth, Poverty and Politics – T Sowell.
I am an exciting guy. What can I say?
Have I observed before that you’re old?
You aren’t the only one that has noticed.
Handbook of Concrete Construction
Christ, I thought I was the only one.
I can take one look at any slab, wall or ceiling and tell you exactly what is wrong with it.
Those bastards didn’t use a check rod or a bumpcutter!
“Wasn’t done by my company. Needs replacement by us.”
If y’all don’t already have it bouncing around somewhere, I would highly recommend The Stoneworker’s Bible by J.M. Nickey.
I read the first of Banks’s Culture series, “Consider Phlebas” based on articles and discussions on the old site. While it wasn’t terrible, I considered it basically “meh” and it didn’t inspire me to read the rest of the series.
Am I a cultural barbarian missing something?
Eh, not really. They’re fun and have some interesting plots, but I don’t think you’re missing out if you don’t read them.
I’ve tried a couple different Culture books without even finishing them. They just don’t grab me the way the seem to for other people.
Give The Player of Games a try. If you don’t like it, Banks just may not be for you.
Consider Phelbas is not the first book I ever recommend for someone’s first Banks book.
Thanks for the recs.
The first one I came across was “Excession” which struck me as “Fire Upon the Deep” redone very poorly. Those machines are just too snarky for their own good.
After that though, I’ve gotten into a lot more of them – “Player of Games”, “Matter”, etc are all very good.
The Culture concept is interesting – better than the Federation, but still a bit more on the Utopian side of proper Libertarianism.
So there it is, I’m outed as a total Sci-Fantasy geek.
Massive nerds? On this site? Never.
I hadn’t realized Canada had developed their “Withering Sarcasm” tech tree to this extent.
*redoubles America’s efforts*
… we must not allow … a withering sarcasm gap!
Does it make me a nerd or loser that I loved the Thomas Covenant series?
Are you going to force us to answer that one?
I like that he posed the question as if the two things were discrete concepts that don’t overlap.
The sad thing is that I read 3 volumes of that series.
I read both the first and second Chronicles several times, but book 1 of the Last Chronicles was a huge NOPPPPE and made me worry the first two Chronicles were actually crap.
I was disappointed in the last 3 book arc, but overall, still my favorite fantasy series of all times.
The fact that I hated the main character for what he did and his attitude toward the Land made it a kind of unique experience.
I loved it, too, for probably the wrong reasons. Had to google it, but this:
Unapologetic in it’s over the top dorkiness. It was awesome.
If you have to ask…
Why can’t it be both?
The first book of that series is literally the worst book I have ever tried to read and one of the very very few I was unable to force myself to complete. Hell I made a whole book and a half into the Wheel of Bullshit series before I just gave up. Thomas Covenant, yeah couldn’t get more than about a 3rd of the way through the first book
“Hey, thanks for helping me. Is it OK if I pay you back with rape?”
I read that series (the first) to the bitter, bitter end. Or I may have started paging through the very last book until I just read the last chapter. I can’t remember it’s been so long. But that was one series that made me thoroughly depressed.
Not to mention wary of accepting a free bag of donuts.
Resumed reading the Doc Ford series of novels written by Randy Wayne White recently after an 11 book binge buy and a hiatus. Guilty pleasure mystery thriller pulp about an ex spook marine biologist.
P.S. FLORIDA MAN
I consider Tim Dorsey’s Serge Storms character to be the ultimate literary Florida Man. With Archy McNally being my guilty pleasure.
I’ve read every one of those Dorsey books. Absolutely wonderful. Like Hiaasen on meth.
I’m in the middle of Jackie Stewart’s autobiography – Winning Is Not Enough.
Almost bought that recently. Thoughts?
It’s packed full of gems about racing. My only complaint is that the book is mostly organized chronologically, but occasionally he meanders off on some future tangent, and it may be a few chapters before you catch up to the thing he already talked about. Otherwise, it’s just delightful.
Thank you. I will give it a shot.
Can’t think of the title (I’m an observant reader), but it’s an older book about the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Next on the list is Albion’s Seed. Been doing my genealogy recently so I’m pretty absorbed with all things colonial, up to the Revolution
Fun trivia: Albion’s Seed was the first book I did a seminar discussion on in grad school.
Spoiler alert:
It’s a good book but it’s central argument doesn’t hold up IMHO.
How so? I like to read positive and negative reviews before I start a book. Gives me some good guideposts and help things catch my eye that I probably wouldn’t see otherwise
Basically, Fisher argues that there were four major cultural groups which created four distinct cultures in early America. While there is a great deal of truth to that, it flattens and homogenizes the populations. For example, he argues for a Quaker-dominated culture in the Delaware R. Valley. While there is a great deal of truth, it doesn’t allow for the Scotch-Irish and German migrations. He also tends to lean a little too much on surnames as a way to measure cultural loyalties.
Yeah, just glancing through the synopsis it seemed a little too “clean”, but generalities have their place imo.
That said, specifically on the Scots-Irish and Germans in the Delaware River Valley, weren’t they the ones who migrated to western Virginia/Pennsylvania and Kentucky, while the Quarkers mostly settled and stayed for a much longer time. They definitely settled there, but probably ended being smaller numbers after a short time.
Again, this is all from my basic understanding of who settled where and the synopsis of the book so I’m not trying to argue, by any means.
A lot of the S-I moved south, but many stayed in central (& later western) PA.
“Been doing my genealogy recently…”
Same here. I guess I have become the unofficial family chronologist. I have had reams of photos and info dumped on me in the last year. I am trying to track down all of the older people and get them to just tell me stories so I can record them before they are gone forever.
Any cool finds? If you’re like me, all of it is interesting, but anyone tied to significant events or people?
Nothing sensational so far. Some in every war back to the French/Indian. Mostly just stories about rural life in a time that is gone. It is interesting stuff. Just yesterday I heard the old story about the mythical monster fish no one could catch that my great grandfather finally caught and then felt bad so he let it go. It was my great aunt that told the story. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that is one of those cultural myths and every family tells. I looked on google earth for the spot she described and I have some photos of it but alas, it is now under a lake.
I am sorry Jefe. Yeah, one. I forgot. Carroll that signed the Declaration of Independence. I am a direct descendant on my mother’s side.
On the down side gg grandfather was a cavalry officer for the confederacy. His sword is still in the family.
I would love to find my gggg grandfather’s Cavalry stuff. Like you, no affection for the Confederacy, but having something like the sword or saddle would a tremendous heirloom
I’ve tried to do this as best I can, but really only one of my family lines – paternal grandmother’s – has much to find. The rest of them all came over 1890s or later, and I don’t have the resources to go researching across the pond. Grandma’s family, however, stretches back to some of the earliest colonial days. One of her ancestors was on the Sea Venture when it wrecked off Bermuda in 1609 (one of Shakespeare’s inspirations for The Tempest), arriving at Jamestown the following year. Another landed in Virginia as an indentured servant in 1638.
On the down side, some of her ancestors fought on the wrong side of the Revolution with a loyalist militia in South Carolina. Booooooooooo.
Awesome! I try to take everything with a grain of salt, but I can’t help but get exciting when I see some Jamestown ancestry (Thomas Graves). 5 Revolutionary soldiers (one fought at King’s mountain another at Cowpens) and one Confederate cavalryman. Luckily, the most recent immigrant in my family came here in ~1750, so I have quite a bit to work with. On top of that, a good chunk of my family has been in Kentucky since the 1790s. Have a church in my home county closely associated with my family, gggg grandfather was the reverand there and his dad helped found the church, with 5 generations of her family buried there. So, it makes it pretty easy to verify certain things.
Really neat stuff.
I won’t put anything on my family tree unless I have a primary source (marriage record, passenger list, census, newspaper article, etc.) Lots of my family will just willy-nilly add anything to the tree based on hearsay, and I have to go and correct everything.
Yeah, I’m the only with access to the tree to prevent just that.
The Revolutionary War pensions along with the long stretches of staying in the same place have helped me tremendously.
I do rely a lot on others’ trees, but I do my best verify their sources or at least make sure their assertions are feasible. The biggest hurdle for me has been, oddly enough, my surname lineage. My mom’s side, and my dad’s matrilineal ancestors have been pretty easy to get back pretty far. Stuck at the Revolutionary War vet for my own name
I’m stuck on my Carnagey lineage (dad’s father’s mother) – this dude John Carnagy just showed up in central KY (in the Georgetown/Cynthiana/Paris triangle) with a marriage record in 1796. No idea where he came from at all. I hate those walls.
That area is right next to where I’m from. Less than 20 miles.
Carnagey is Scottish so could have been a direct immigrant. If not, I would guess Pennsylvania or North Carolina would be where he came from. If North Carolina, that’s where I’m stuck with my surname ancestor, so maybe it’s just a records black hole
*caveat, North Carolina Quakers kept immaculate records
The Carnageys weren’t Quakers, I don’t believe, otherwise I’m sure I would have found him. I have some other Quakers in my line that are easy to trace.
Unless that part of KY is a Quaker magnet? Maybe I should do a deeper dive into the Quaker records if that’s the case.
No Quakers in Kentucky to speak of outside of a few Shaker communities. I just mentioned the Quakers in North Carolina to clarify that they were the only people in NC to keep good records, apparently. Didn’t mean to imply Carnagey was a Quaker.
I’m a hard core genealogy addict. Wouldn’t it be fun if some of us were related? If you go back far enough in time, it becomes entirely possible, I suppose.
From the other day, it was discovered that my mother’s family and waffles mother’s family come from the same small county. There is a very good chance that we are fifth cousins or something.
Awesome!!
Well, maybe I should post some names from my tree and see what happens:
Johnson (Missouri, Owen Co., Indiana, Monongalia Co., Virginia/WV)
Megown (Ralls Co., MO, Pennsylvania)
Carnagey/Carnagy (Missouri, Indiana, Scott/Harrison/Bourbon Cos., KY)
Delahunt (Missouri, Ireland)
Boyd (Southern MO)
Sharon (Indiana & Kentucky)
Drape (Missouri, Illinois, Lower Saxony Germany)
Denton (Kentucky, Western Virginia, Quaker-associated)
Claypool (big time Quaker family)
Dean (Indiana and Dorchester Co., MD)
Graham (Kentucky & Indiana)
Conn (Missouri, Virginia)
James (Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia)
Lets see, Bailey, Carroll, Reeder, Huffman, Sandifer, Mitchell, Boyd, Cudd, Coon, Riley, Wade, Moore, and Branch. That is a few. Most of those families came to Louisiana around the Civil war. They were in the Northeast before that.
Your Boyds have any relations in southern MO? Like, Christian or Ozark Counties?
You dont have to go back very far Kristen and we are all related.
Well, we’d have to go back a good 100k – 200k years, I believe, to find the common ancestor for all of us.
I bet we could go back less than 300 and find common 1-4 cousins.
Dad’s side: Dutch farm worker born out of wedlock. Our last name comes from a farm; one that was picked as a surname when the French occupiers had a census for taxation purposes.
There was a rumor that my grandfather was part Native American – he had this incredibly dark black hair that never greyed, brown eyes, and swarthier skin; quite different than your normal Aryan-Dutch giant. But my hair, as a kid, was wild blonde that slowly turned brown the older I got. But still – no gray hair.
Mom’s side: Again Dutch. Can be roughly dated back to the 14th century – merchant class. I have way less information here as no one from this side of the family wrote much down. They were part of the “Dutch Mafia” in Chicago – worked in the trash hauling business, and my grandfather got a huge police escort at his funeral even though he wasn’t a member of the police department. Never figured that one out other than he “knew everyone” in that part of town.
Kenneth James’ “Arundel” series was my favorite historical fiction.
Woops Kenneth Roberts.
Ever read any of Edward Rutherfurd’s stories, like “Sarum” or “Russka”?
Yes – Sarum and a couple others.
Gates of Fire is another great historical fiction novel. My blood was pumping so hard during the battles I was shaking. I had hoped that the 300 movie would be like that instead of cartoony nonsense.
Hmmm besides stuff i read read, I also have stuff i read a few pages at a time, once in a while. Some of the stuff I heard from commenters on the old site, don’t remember which, something called The art of not being governed (which i like in small doses) and Principles of Logic by George Hayward Joyce which puts me to sleep very fast, started months ago and am barely half way.
The logic thing might have been Warty but not sure
I’ve started reading the Death Gate Cycle series again, starting with Dragon Wing. Apparently the Barnes and Noble I went to locally doesn’t have any love for Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They only had one of their novels in the fantasy section. However they had an entire shelf R. A. Salvatore, including a huge section for Drizzt. I’ve read a few of those novels back in the early nineties. Talk about being the definition of what TV tropes now calls “I Need You Stronger” (It was much better titled as “Shonen Ladder”).
Those are great. My sister worked for their agent way back in the day, so I always got copies.
Read The Way of Kings by Sanderson? My library had it available as an electronic audiobook. Damn good and the sequel is even better.
Recommended scifi/weird fiction: the Ambergris Trilogy by Vandermeer, as well as the Southern Reach trilogy. Some of the best stuff I’ve read in a long time, and very little political commentary (that I noticed). Just all sorts of weirdness and good storytelling.
The last for fun book I read was either The Unfair Advantage by Mark Donohue, or a Conan anthology. I can’t remember. I’ve been doing nothing but technical manuals for like the last 6 months.
Bay of Pigs, by Peter Wyden. It’s got some flaws, but he draws a good narrative – you can see the slow moving train wreck and how it happened.
I’m currently reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) Shadowrealm, Sellstaff, Prince of the North Tower and Stanley and the Ship Trap, by me. I want to get at least Shadowrealm to print soon, so I can’t justify picking up someone else’s work.
Shit, I always have too many books going at once.
Taubes’ The Case Against Sugar. If you enjoyed his others, you will dig this one as well. Did you know they add sugar to cigarettes?
The Master and Margarita Thanks, Gilmore. Creepiest book I’ve read in a long time.
Seneca’s The Meditation A little at a time.
I just picked up Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town based on this excellent column from FEE.
Pratchett’s jingo. A timely jab at foreign policy stupidity.
Insomnia has its benefits.
TAAAAUUUUUUBES!!!
Alternatively…
Taubes’s “Bad Science” was the best book about the cold fusion fiasco I ever read. I knew most of the people that he talks about in there, and he had them pegged pretty well.
“Seneca’s The Meditation”
Do you mean Marcus Arelius’ ‘Meditations’ or did Seneca write a similarly titled book?
I recently read ‘The Gallic Wars’ by Julius Caesar. Great, ancient civilization propaganda piece. That Caesar was so magnanimous.
Brain fart. Yes, Aurelias.
I also have some Seneca teed up, but I haven’t gathered the courage to start.
Stoicism is really making a comeback in modern times.
I believe Warty brought it up here or at the other place. Then I kept coming across articles, so I decided to give it a shot.
Philosophy is challenging for me.
Bruno Bauer (one of the Young Hegelians and a contemporary of Marx and Engels) remarked that “Christianity is Stoicism wrapped in a Jewish garb”.
There is some truth to that
Teenage Libertarian Student Daughter said that to me on SMS last night!
*narrows gaze*
Irritatingly part of that resurgence in popularity is related to PUA’s putting on stoic drag because stoicism is super butch and chicks love butch men.
That’s interesting, I read Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome a few months back. I’m told that some of the elegance of the writing is lost in translation, but the subject material was interesting in its own right.
Tundra, I knew I liked you. Although I’m disappointed that the first Pratchett mention is this far down. His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh; Commander Sir Blackboard Monitor Samuel Vimes is an epic character with a great arc through his stories.
The Death series of books deals more with humanity and belief, and I make it a point to read Hogfather once a year.
I always liked that Vetinari quote, given that he is himself a despotic tyrant:
Vimes:
From Hogfather:
I’m leery of calling PTerry a libertarian, but his works contain more then their fair share of libertarian characters. It also helps that his books are laugh out loud funny and well written.
I’m with you. Not sure he’s a libertarian, but he sure writes a lot of them.
He really is funny as hell. From Jingo:
And he does that throughout every book. Amazing man. RIP.
Vetinari believes in the One Man, One Vote form of democracy.
He being the one man.
But he really, deep down, doesn’t like to use that vote.
Just finishing “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss. It’s a how- to on negotiation told by a former FBI hostage negotiator. It’s one of the best books on psychology I’ve read. His negotiations weren’t “You want 50 and I want 100 so let’s meet at 75”. More like “You want $1M and I want you to not kill 6 people.”
Can’t remember who said it, but I always remember “Always negotiate with orthogonal objectives” because in theory both parties can feel they won.
JW
Bullshit IT service delivery certification, invented by the British. Tedious, unnecessary and dull, dull, dull. Eyes started bleeding from the dull walls of text. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.
ITIL? I know that feel. That feel sucks.
Oh my fucking god. I’m stuck on the financial management section. I start to read it and then I look up and it’s 2 hours later and I’m still on the same page. I call it IDFS: ITIL Disassociative Fugue State.
Self-paced learning is the sphincter of life.
The best part of learning ITIL is realizing that no one cares about the standard, they just want someone to tell them their current process is OK. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve explained the difference between an asset and a CI only to have the company buttfuck their CMDB anyway, I’d never work again.
So what I’m saying is it never gets better, but it’s Friday so have a drink.
Foundation or one of the other ones?
I feel your pain. It’s waiting for me to finish after I get back to work.
Still trudging through the Black Book of Communism. It’s long, painful, and infuriating. But I didn’t learn any of this in school (naturally), so it’s absolutely necessary to put the resurgence of Marxism in context. As in, it will make you really want to hurt those red-and-black thugs that keep showing up to commit violence against an imaginary evil to further their agenda of actual evil.
I get the notion that when I say that people think I am over the top. I am not.
Ooooh.
I’ve started and stopped and restarted Altered Carbon about 4 times now. Not that it isn’t any good, it’s very enjoyable, but the window I have for leisure reading opens and closes with the duration and regularity of an elderly gang bang.
For pure entertainment, it’s hard to go wrong with Dashiell Hammett.
Spoiler Alert: not sci-fi
The odd thing about reading Hammett now is that he seems so derivative because his been aped by so many people. How many times has Red Harvest been made into a movie without Hammett getting any credit?
According to wiki = Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing (all of which i knew), and Roadhouse Nights (1930) (which i did not)… plus many many halfway adaptations, where the basic idea was jacked, but went off in different directions.
its a great setup. and according to Hammett had some basis in a real life story.
Interesting. I had never heard of that strike. (Too much coal lore talked about around here.)
Or Chandler. The Long Goodbye is brilliant.
That’s a book I try to spend time with at least once a year.
Yes.
I went through a period a few years ago where i read everything by Hammett, then read it again, then read all Chandler, then read it all again, then read all Jim Thompson and read it all again, and then Cornell Woolrich, and then all the Black Lizard anthologies i could get my hands on, etc etc etc.
But Hammett and Chandler are the kings of the whole “crime fiction” genre and remain the easiest to recommend. Chandler being the better stylist, Hammett more of a ‘plot + character’ guy.
Ellroy belongs in that group, too.
I have mixed feelings. Sort of agree, sort of disagree. He writes about the same period (postwar LA), and the same stuff (underworld crime, corrupt politics+cops)…
….but Ellroy is actually a proper Novelist, whereas almost everything else in the “crime fiction” genre are like “short stories that go on too long”. They don’t waste your time giving you too much to think about, or try to make characters ‘complex’ or environments that are richly detailed and real. Ellroy actually writes characters that have internal lives. The Continental Op only internalizes scotch and the occasional left hook.
But i agree if you like crime fiction (as i describe it), you’ll like Ellroy.
I know people who loved the “American Tabloid” series, yet hated the “LA Noir” series.
And for those of you who saw one or more of the movies, don’t judge the books by the movies.
I would add Chester Himes to the list of “great crime-fiction writers”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Himes
he was the only black one – and he wrote about black cops dealing w/ black criminals in NYC. and this isn’t some affirmative-action inclusion in the list = he was as batshit as Jim Thompson was, his books are absolutely bonkers, but still fairly accurate depictions of the 1950s underbelly of the city + the dynamics between black + white cops/black + white criminals.
his stuff is 100% in that same genre-format tho. they’re not novels so much as ‘plots’ decorated with violence
Thanks. I’ve not read him. I will fix that.
the series in particular i’m talking about are the “harlem” books =
“A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, All Shot Up, The Big Gold Dream, The Heat’s On, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Blind Man with a Pistol; all written between 1957–1969.”
i think he wrote plenty of other stuff that wasn’t as “hardboiled”, but those in particular compare well to chandler/woolrich/hammett type stuff.
Jim Thompson… Have you watched From Dusk Till Dawn since you read The Getaway? Tarantino buries a savage little reference in the movie.
Yes – i saw Dusk till Dawn the first time last year. I missed the reference; maybe i need to rewatch it. I actually thought that the entire setup of the story was very much Thomposonesque.
I think my fave Thompson story is “Pop 1280” His father was a sherrif/cop in Oklahoma back in the day. I suspect there’s some of dad’s drunken storytelling in that one, slightly garnished with dad murdering everyone he always secretly wanted to drag out into the weeds and murder.
Clooney and his brother are escaping with the loot to El Rey, the place the couple ends up at in The Getaway.
right. the mythic place where all criminals can escape to, and where they end up cannibalizing each other.
i thought that ending was sort of atypical for thompson. i remember reading it twice wondering why the hell he’d abandoned his gritty realism for this creepy fever-dream.
Love Hammett’s writing, hate his characters.
If you’re looking for the crime side of those, Richard Stark’s (really Donald E. Westlake) Parker series is excellent. If you’re looking for PI books written a little bit later, the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald is good as well.
Lawrence Block gets it done, too.
I liked most of the Bernie the Burglar series – except the most recent one. It was decidedly not up to the standard of the previous installments.
I keep meaning to read other stuff he wrote.
I enjoyed his Keller series.
As I mentioned on an earlier thread, I’ve been slowly working my way through “Now it Can be Told” – a reporter’s memories of the front lines of WW1. It’s disturbing and disjointed, so only a few pages a day suffice for me.
For “time for bed” reading, it’s been a Brother Cadfael – Saint Peter’s Fair which, as usual for many British mysteries, takes its own sweet time to move the plot.
I read the first of the Cadfael novels recently and enjoyed it.
For years ‘n’ years I mostly read and re-read the Matt Helm series written by Donald Hamilton. Started in the 1950s and finally finished sometime in the early 90s, if my memory serves me correctly. I can’t say enough good thing about this series – it’s the story of an assassin who works for a shadowy government agency. But this agent is one down-to-earth guy and his musings on hunting, cars, dogs, sailing, women, fashion, traveling, and politics are very individualistic, darn near libertarian. And it’s not James Bond-ey, with lasers and Monte Carlo; but more gritty – with back drops in the city, jungle, or deep in the woods.
These days I don’t get the chance to read as much as I used to.
Yep. They could have lifted Matt Helm straight out of those books and dropped him into the Harry Palmer role in The IPCRESS File.
Hamilton did the whole thing so much better than Deighton.
Just read The Peloponnesian War damn good.
Next up is The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. My son already read it and recommends it.
That Sajer book is fantastic, but brutal.
There’s a fiction series by Sven Hassel about the Eastern Front about the adventures of a Wermact penal battalion
Agreed. I mentioned the Sajer book down below. Even though I really hate NAZIs, that book had me crying.
I think I read some of those Sven Hassel books as a teenager. If I’m remembering correctly, they were Wehrmacht not SS soldiers. There are several scenes where they kill Gestapo and / or SS officers who seem particularly determine to get them killed. A roadblock where the Gestapo tried to stop them from retreating, so they ran them over with a Panther so many times there was noting left but red mud…
I need to revisit those books.
The Sajer book, IIRC, talks about the Red Army tactic of grinding Germans under the treads of MBTs while shouting Ourrahl Ourrah pobieda!
God yes, Kagan’s book was so good.
Yale Open University has his Ancient Greece course up, it makes for great listening. If you ever wanted to hear a full-throated defense of Athenian democracy, he delivers it.
I guess we could debate whether he’s even trying to defend the system in his book. He certainly points out the irony of a democracy building an empire with force and intimidation on many occasions.
I meant in the course, when he lectures on Athenian democracy.
Of course, given his area of expertise, Peloponesian war gets a lot of time in the lectures, but the most interesting is the post-war part of the course, with the Tyranny of 30 in Athens, democratic revolution, rise of Thebes and subsequent dominance of Phillip II.
Funny how I end of rooting for sides when I read history. The Thebians always seemed like dicks who eventually got what they had coming to them when the screwed with the wrong guy.
The Forgotten Soldier is a book I’ve read many times. There has been some dispute as to how true it actually is. Some of his details call into question whether he actually served in the Grossdeutchland Division, for example, and some of his dates are incorrect.
I still think it’s a worthwhile read. Even those who have poked holes in his narrative generally admit that it’s an accurate portrayal of the life of a German soldier in Russia. Sajer may have been in a different division at a different time, but other German veterans of Russia did believe that he truly was an Eastern Front veteran.
I only read Wahammer 40k as far as fiction.
I’m currently finishing Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy, which reads like a novel.
Next read is a history of the Rhodesian Light Infantry
When I first read you opening line I saw “Only read Warhammer 40k as fan fiction”. Which stuck me as odd.
I find reading gets in the way of my thoughts.
Currently reading =
(both sporadically)
The Age of Napoleon, JC Herold
The Bell Curve, some racist
(just started)
The Open Society + Its Enemies, Popper (recommended here last week, got a copy)
(recently finished = Days of Rage, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, A Choice of Days – Menken Reader, Cobra II (for like the 5th time))
No opinions on anything. I don’t feel like ‘reviewing’ a book until i’ve read it a few times; and i’d only read it that many times in the first place if it was really amazing, and consequently I’d only review a book because i wanted to try and share what i thought was great about it. I can’t imagine the torture of having to review a book you thought was bad. If its stupid, or boring, or otherwise a failure…. having to explain *why* feels like adding insult to injury. Its not worth the effort. The worst thing you can say about a book is, “nothing at all”.
Popper is – of course – excellent, but probably the hardest going of anything I’ve read in a while, with the exception of Leviathan.
I just started Popper as well. He’s actually easier to read than I had feared.
Maybe that’s because I’ve tried to read Locke in the past.
I’ve listened to so many podcasts and speeches on The Bell Curve that if feels like I’ve already read it. I’ve only gone over parts of it, but it sounds like he’s laying the groundwork for Coming Apart. Seems like the same argument anyways. He goes out of his way in The Bell Curve to point out that IQ differences between individuals is much more varied than IQ differences between groups. I don’t understand why they went all ape shit on him when it looks like he was putting racists in their place.
I assume one New Yorker writer declared his work racist, and no one else has ever needed a second opinion.
For Sci-Fi, I found the Night’s Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton entertaining. Some hard SF, sex, possession. Good time waster for traveling at around 4,000 pages.
His other big series – all in the “Commonwealth” universe – are very good too.
In a similar vein I can’t recommend Alastair Reynold’s space operas highly enough.
But for sure let’s give these assholes more money.
Read Nickel and Dimed a few years back and it still pisses me off to no end. The author tries to live as a low wage worker and tries to identify the problems with escaping the low wage hell. Talk about learning the wrong lessons:
So, the bulk of society only functions due to the “Sanction of the Victim”, or somesuch.
Maybe someone should write a 1200 page book about the issue.
The author concludes that someday, low-wage workers will rise up and demand to be treated fairly, and when that day comes everyone will be better off.
Lenin already did that in 1917, and no, everyone was not better off as a result.
The history we choose to ignore will end up repeating.
The enduring belief in alternative facts like zero-sum economics will continue to beget policy that creates more poverty. Seriously, fuck this guy.
It’s a chick, but, yeah, fuck her.
Yeah, the people who fucked around in their youth and failed to develop useful skills or ambition (oh and the people who have kids but are too irresponsible or stupid to actually raise them) are in reality the the most selfless and altruistic people in society, without whom we would all die. Sage insight there.
Way back, Megan McArdle had a good post on the subject
But poor people can’t save, right? Unless they’re Chinese.
I came from a large, poor family. If you look at where the members are now and look at the choices we each made – why those of us who are no longer poor made very different choices from those still stuck there. And they weren’t miracle one in a million things, but decisions and actions anyone could take.
my mom was one of eleven in Chicago, and she was pretty blunt about some of her siblings’ Very Bad Choices. iLike the one sister who couldn’t hold a job/remained on welfare, the brothers who left vs the ones who stayed, etc. Like you say, it’s its own case study in how choices make all the difference, given the same circumstance .
When Ehrenreich sets out to write a book she always finds just what she was expecting. Strange that.
I had to read that back when I was in law school and working for a public interest legal clinic. I don’t think my boss liked me very much for a while after the discussion about the book.
I’m currently trudging through the CompTIA study guides for LPIC and MCSA. All of your above recommendations are noted even though I’ve already got a stack of fiction and non-fiction waiting to be attacked once I’m done with this.
Having a 6 year old and a 3 year old has all but eliminated my reading for my own pleasure. I’m ashamed to say I’ve gotten through 7 adult books in the last 6 years but I can recommend them all quite highly. First up is my guilty pleasure weapons wonk book – Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings Of Albert And Roberta Wohlstetter if one is at all interested in nuclear weapons, proliferation, arms control, etc. it is a great read. Next, a WWII memoir – The Forgoten Soldier by Guy Sajer. Sajer was German Alsatian who was drafted into the Wermacht and sent to the Eastern Front as truck driver on their equivalent of Patton’s RedBall Express, the Rollbahn. Lots of Germans and Slavs are killed, Sajer is captured, it’s very cold outside. Quite honestly, even though my grandpa killed a great many Germans, this book had me in tears. Then we move on to the Desert Southwest with John Nichols’ New Mexico Trilogy – The Magic Journey, The Millagro Beanfield War, and The Nirvana Blues. Magical realism and a great take on Mexican-Anglo relations. Finally, With His Pistol In His Hand by Americo Paredes. It tells the story of Gregorio Cortez Lira, a ranchhand who comes out the winner of a gunfight with an Anglo sheriff, flees to Mexico and becomes a legend of song and story.
I would like to take a moment here and plug some comic books. I have always considered Wagner’s Grendel Saga, the Pini’s Elfquest, and Dave Sim’s Cerebus to be the Holy Trinity of funnybooks but now… there is another. Starstruck by Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta might be the absolute best comic I have ever laid eyes on. An Anarcho-Feminist Space Opera (heavy on the Anarcho part) that started life as an off Broadway stage production and is not to be missed. Seriously, if you do nothing else today, go read Starstruck.
Having the young kids, I have a recommendation that I also mentioned yesterday. If you prefer your christian allegorical talking-animal fantasy to be written by a Hoosier instead of an Oxford don, I highly recommend The Book of the Dun Cow. There are some parts that may cause the room to get a bit dusty though.
Thanks. Saw that yesterday and should have it my greedy wee paws by Tuesday. I am a bit of a Lewis obsessive; perhaps odd for an atheist married into a Jewish family but there it is. I look forward to reading it
At the risk of sounding pretentious, I’d recommend picking up a book of aphorisms. Something like this. If you don’t have time, you can kick around thought provoking ideas during the few minutes of free time you have.
AWESOME! Thanks, I haven’t looked at any Nietzsche since high school many, many, many years ago. I’m told there is nothing he can’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist.
Tulpa a few years back tried to lecture me on how nothing could be learned from Nietzche because he wasn’t a libertarian. I enjoy the aphorisms, not because I agree with all of them, but because they give me food for thought.
HA! My very 1st interaction with Tulpa was a long stupid argument about intricacies of NYC mobile food service law. This is an industry I’ve been for quite a spell now and I don’t think Tulpa has ever even been to NY.
If you’re going that route pick up an unbowdlerized copy of Aesop’s Fables too.
Great call Jesse. I’ve already turned the kids on to Uncle Remus and wifey recently picked up a Japanese release of Disney’s Song Of The South. I truly don’t get what all the animus towards that film is all about. Is it that they portray slaves as not being universally miserable?
The original Aesop’s Fables were actually compilation of a few fabulists stories. Most of the ones we most strongly equate with Aesop, the animal ones were likely from middle eastern or african sources and the ones that nobody remembers (like my favorite Zeus and Shame) were likely Aesop.
I think Song of the South hedges a little too close to both minstrelsy and the wise negro cliche.
OK, I can see where that would bother someone. I guess a lifelong love of The Amos & Andy Radio Show and Charley Chan films has immunized me to that complaint.
Did you ever watch Drawn Together? There’s a story arc where old racist stereotype cartoons are purged. I always feel like the attempt to pack away and hide past stereotypes is counter-productive, but I get the boxes SotS ticks to get it carted off.
I’ve seen the show but not that particular story line. I’ve been on a bit of an Amos & Andy crusade; I make everyone listen to the shows when I have an opportunity (I’m great fun at parties). The roots of every single American sit-com can be found in the old radio shows. Just about any trope or plot device on a TV sit-com made in the US was already done by Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish. Also, that was really about the only work black people could get in media at the time and lot of blood, toil, sweat, and tears went into those performances; it seems disrespectful to damnatio memoriae them just because they clash with modern mores. As always, your mileage may vary.
Gonna get started on this over the weekend, I think
George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (mentioned with tentative enthusiasm by someone here) – not sure if I like it
Just finished Marcus Sakey, Brillance trilogy – very enjoyable thriller with some sci-fi elements
I recommended Civilwarland
I think its a great book. Saunders other stuff can be hit/miss but i thought that book was marvelous. I think its definitely a matter of taste tho. I still laugh when i think of the second story… where the guy who ran the wave-machine at the water park is haunted by the ghost of the dead pre-teen? The ghost is like, “I never even got to jack off. I hope you feel bad about that.” Then there’s the guy with the racoon-catching scam? I just like the scenarios he creates, and the way he creates empathy for his characters caught in these absurd worlds.
Yeah, I like the mood of the stories but the ridiculousness is laid on so thick.
yes. its “absurdist black comedy”.
Its the combination of the absurdity of the scenarios, and the sincere efforts the main-character makes to try and ‘make the best of it’ that provides all the drama. he creates very sympathetic characters.
if there’s a flaw to his storytelling, its the idea that these people in horribly-shitty situations are all ‘inherently ‘good guys’… but the other people in the world are all 1-dimensional douchebags. He wants you to be sympathetic to the victims, but assumes that all the ‘bad guys’ are just unthinking automatons.
its very much the liberal/progressive idea, where the underdogs are always virtuous victims, but the “oppressors” are successful because of their craven greed and lack of ethics. A better novelist would probably be able to grant humanity even to people he hates.
The Revelation Space series is a great read, but Alastair Reynolds has a tendency to build up his stories to what you might assume to be a fantastic a climax only to see it go limp like a wet noodle. He spent a several books leading up to a war with an ancient mechanical sentience then in the last chapter just handwaved away the actual conflict and tells readers exactly what happens for the next 200ish years. Still a great series that I recommend owing to the fact that I find something alluring about Space Operas that bow to the Fermi Paradox. I find universes jam packed with sentient alien civilizations make it more difficult to my suspend disbelief.
Reynolds lost me by the third book. I think he didn’t have a clue where to go with it.
Which one was the third one? The series isn’t terribly chronological either.
Of the Revelation Space material, I’ve always thought the quasi-prequel Chasm City was the best work. Self-contained, well-plotted and fairly fucked-up.
Agreed
I haven’t read that one yet, but I will.
If you like guns, action, monsters and don’t mind the rough initial going as he finds his footing, try Monster Hunter International series by Larry Correia.
Premise: monsters are real, government is more interested in suppressing the truth about it (for what they believe are good reasons) than helping, and it’s up to private sector to pick up the slack and save the day (while getting paid, of course). Lots of loving descriptions of firearms, especially early on, fast-moving action and government-bashing (when told by his boss that company is gonna use the big bonus to buy themselves a senator and if he has a problem with that, protagonist replies “Screw them. I lean libertarian”).
Not to mention maybe the best career-advice for prospective freelance CPAs – learn how to fight dirty.
And pack heat, whatever the office policy says!
I’ll second these and suggest his Grimnoir Chronicles as well. Sci-fi pulp fiction!
Bill Nye explains biology without Rachel Bloom
This amused me.
Still slogging through Infinite Jest (by way of an audiobook). I really like it, but will admit 52 hours of sprawling absurdity demands periodic breaks.
How does an audiobook handle the extensive footnotes? Just go directly to them when they appear?
No. A female voice just calls out the numbers. You’d have to follow along with the print version. I haven’t yet. But I think I’ll check it out of the library just to peruse the footnotes after I’m through.
Am I the only person here who doesn’t read sci-fi?
Actually, I’ve never read much fiction to begin with. I’ve been grinding my way through Manchester’s bio of Churchill for the past year or so – I’m about 100 pages into volume 2. Also been reading Resolve, which is the true story of a young American officer who fled into the jungle rather than surrender when the Philippines fell to the Japanese in 1942. Just finished up The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, which was about the old American Association baseball league of the 1880s when it was challenging the National League as the top league in baseball by breaking a lot of the rules owners operated by up to that point. The NL of the era was very patrician and WASPy – no Sunday games, no alcohol at the ballparks, high ticket prices kept the hoi polloi out, etc. The AA collected players who were wild men, sold beer at the park, played games on Sunday (the only day off for many workingmen), sold tickets for a quarter, and gained a lot of new fans among recent immigrants.
Boris Johnson’s bio of Churchill is my toilet book. Seems fitting I should be sitting on the pot as I read it.
Oddly enough, I’ve come to realize that I don’t. I think it’s because I kept getting handed books that focused too much on the minutiae of the science and not enough on making sure it was a good story. I care a great deal about whether or not I like the characters and how entertaining the story is.
When I want to know about orbital mechanics (for example), I go specifically for that, and leave out the framing device.
As someone who has read pure reference books for the sake of the information, I don’t know why hard science fiction is uninteresting to me.
I don’t read a lot of sci-fi. I try to avoid “junk fiction” and a lot of mystery and sci-fi falls into that category for me. Like those countless Janet Evanovich books or Dean Koontz’s army of page whores churning out more and more lazy work.
I try to find books that really have a unique perspective or angle, whether they be in fiction or non-fiction.
I’ll second Summer of Beer and Whiskey. Great book if you’re a baseball fan.
Recently wrapped up the Lord John Grey series by Gabaldon. Not bad. Jesse may like it because of all the man ass. A bit less violence than I’m used to reading which maybe is a chick author thing. Now re-reading Asher’s Ian Cormac series.
Speaking of Laundry/magic, anyone read the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher? I’ve only just touched on it by reading a spinoff novella. But the characters, action, and story all kicked ass.
I do like man ass, but it’s not necessarily enough to get me to read a book.
fair enough. if you don’t like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Prisoner-Novel-Lord-John/dp/0385337523, then you won’t like the series.
The Dresden books are excellent. The first one is a bit shaky, but once the series gets going it is incredibly entertaining.
And Asher is just tremendous.
I hate to say that I don’t read much, biggest reason being: every time I’m in a bookstore, in the novels section, I feel a bit like Borat in the cheese aisle.
The last two times I was in a bookstore, looking specifically for Harrison Bergeron (on the advice of Reason/Glibertarians comment sections), they seemed to have everything Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote except HB. Goddammit.
Its a single story in the collection “Welcome to the Monkey House“
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
its a very short story, so you would have to find it in a collection or something.
Kindle, dude. I was a book snob for the longest time (think vinyl snobs, but sillier), but I love my Kindle. Now I can impulse buy hundreds of books at any hour of the night or day and take them all with me wherever I travel.
Harrison Bergeron is a Short Story, You would never find a copy of it by itself on a store bookshelf. in a standard paperback format the entire story might be 15 to 20 pages long. You’d have to find a copy of an anthology that contained it.
That said you can find the full text of the story in several locations on the internet such as here…
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Long time lurker from here and the before time. Currently trying once again to get through the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
Gonzo: Journalist. Outstanding on many levels.
And, since he’s way too humble to do it, I’ll add Shadowboy by our own UCS. It’s a pretty neat take on superhero genre, with a libertarian bent.
Fun fact, I based both Jasmine and Nikki Greeler off of amalgms of attitudes real-world people have – then had to tone them both down because the worlds of real people read as unrealistic charicatures in print.
People criticize Rand for having cardboard villains. But her problem is that she made them 2-D, real life villains are only one dimensional.
I ran into a problem with Shadowrealm where I had no idea why the villains were trying to do what they were trying to do. It doesn’t help that I intentionally reduced the number of subplots to make the story less congested than in Shadowdemon. One of the subplots I retained started in the anthology and is dealing with eminent domain (They want to put a bridge pylon where the narrator’s hideout is). But since that moves at the speed of bureaucracy, it’s crawling along in the background.
Although he disappeared from reason and hasn’t made it here, I also recommend Fluffy’s novels, written under the pseudonym Thomas Brookside (apparently neither that nor Fluffy is his real name).
I highly recommend The Last Days of Jericho . De Bello Lemures was interesting, but not really my thing. If you are into Zombies, you might like it.
I haven’t read The Most Extreme Crueltie and Revenge of Shylock of Venice.
Someone could do a whole piece on the 20th century’s greatest living writers being kicked out of the canon in the 21st century for coming out of the closet as being . . . not on cue for the left and maybe even on the right.
Phillip Roth is surely our greatest living writer. I remember an argument against opening the Booker prize up to American authors because if they did, they’d just have to hand the award to Roth every time he published something. Then, as I recall, they gave him one. The Nobel Prize committee will probably never give it to Roth as he’s openly hostile to feminism, political correctness, etc.–and that’s pretty much what the left is about these days. Still, Roth is the world’s greatest living author.
David Mamet came out of the closet as being on the right, Gunther Grass ‘fessed up about having been in the Waffen SS . . .
It reminds me of the controversy over putting Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame.
You can talk about his sins all day, but who denies that he was one of the best baseball players ever?
This shit gets projected backwards in time, too. The academy prefers Ginsberg to Kerouac–surely not because of their work. I thunk that’s about Kerouac being embarrassed about his gay life, and, besides, he didn’t approve of hippies, perhaps even for their lack of patriotism. Is T.S. Eliot’s work that doesn’t reference Jews at all bad if he was an antisemite in private life?
“Death on the Installment Plan” is interesting and hilarious–even if Celine was a collaborator–just like Sartre’s conception of radical freedom is libertarian–even if he was a communist.
The modern academy and the works they emphasize are just like the hall of fame and Pete Rose. Phillip Roth is our greatest living writer–even if he is a misogynistic, anti-politically correct jackass.
Recently finished the Legacy Fleet Trilogy by Nick Webb. Good sci-fi read. A little cliche at times if you know his influences, but a good read nonetheless.
Currently reading Columbus Day by Craig Alanson. It’s not as good, but I’ll finish it. I’m not sure what I’ll read next on the kindle.
In paper, I have a textbook entitled Portable Seminary that I pick up a few times a month. I want that to become a more regular read.
I’m Also listening to the Sherman bio ive been talking about the last few weeks. Next audio book up is either a book called Atomic Accidents or one of Thomas Sowell’s books.
I recently got through The Cassandra Trigger, by former Florida LP Chair and gubernatorial candidate Adrian Wylie. Dystopian novel from a libertarian perspective. Recommended.
*SIGH*
Okay. I read multiple books in parallel, mostly ’cause I’ve got the attention span of a camera flash, plus I’m doing lots of projects around the ol’ homestead which interrupt my reading. Books I’ve recently finished:
Now: The Physics of Time by Richard A. Muller. I picked this up ’cause I really enjoyed his previous book, Physics for Future Presidents (a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek title). Muller’s a relatively rare breed of science popularizer, a working physicist and an experimentalist. He’s really not that enamoured of flavour-of-the-month physics theories (*COUGH* string theory *COUGH*), mostly because, as an experimental physicist, his attitude is “if I can’t test for falsification, I’m not really interested.”
In Now, Muller discussed physics’ uneasy relationship with the concept of time, or more particularly, “time’s arrow.” His musings on the subject lead him to the conclusion that time has a directionality because, like space, new time (that moving moment that we call “now”) is always being created, just as space is always being created since the Big Bang. “Now” is simply our experiential way of talking about riding the shockwave of the creation of new time. Thus, in Muller’s view, the past is frozen in amber (and we exist in all the quantum moments of the past, but those moments are forever beyond change or alteration because they’re “behind” the shockwave of the “now”) and the future truly does not exist yet (so, for example, we cannot build a time machine to travel into the future, because there’s no “there” there; as well by implication, travel into the past is impossible, because its creation is now complete and “locked-down”). Muller muses on the nature of free will as this interpretation of “now” affects it, and (because he’s an experimentalist), he actually discusses several possible tests of his idea of the “now” that could be run by experimental physicists with appropriate gear. Cool. Still musing on What It All Means, which for me is the essence of a good non-fiction read.
The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I picked this one up because of how impressed I was with Sebag’s previous work, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which was one of the first books to take advantage of the huge amount of material on Russian Communism that had become available to researchers after the Fall of the Wall. Want intrigue, scandal, corruption, sex, gore, massive multi-national tableaus of war and political shenanigans? Put those bodice-rippers down and pick up this book! I’m still not finished it yet, but the picture he paints of pre-communist Russia’s “First Family” is fascinating, and Montefiore’s a damn good writer to boot. Well-deserving of your money.
(Cont’d)
The Court of the Red Tsar was excellent.
Yep. Even if you already believed Stalin to have been a certified, 100%, solid-gold, no-shit, weapons-grade, government-inspected asshole, after you finish Montefiore’s book about him, you will have zero remaining doubts. Easily as bad as if not substantially worse than Hitler, if only because he lived longer and could therefore do more damage. (And yet Hitler is held up as the preeminent example of dictators by the Left . . . )
Dammit, my book list keeps getting bigger. I’m not going to have any money left.
Hitler was a piker. Did you ever read Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin? The Ukranian genocide was almost unbelievable.
Never had the pleasure, but it’s going in the list.
The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen. I picked this up as a lark (I know very little about the history of Asia), and I’m glad I did. Hansen’s burden was to show that the Silk Road was not nearly as important to trade between The West and India/China as is usually imagined. She uses very careful examination of the existing written materials and archaeological evidence to show that most of the trade was local or regional in nature, was far more sporadic than usually imagined, and was driven in many instances by China’s military requirement to guard its northwestern frontier. Hmm, military spending driving economic activity. Where have we heard that before? I learned a lot about Samarkand. I learned a lot, period. Which brings me to the next title:
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. In consonance with my lack of knowledge of Asia and its history, I know almost nothing about Genghis Khan. Didn’t he and Captain Kirk cross swords at some point? Oh wait. Wrong history.
Anyways, I’m still plowing through this one (it’s multiple times larger than Hansen’s book). Weatherford comes across as an unapologetic admirer of Khan, and like Montefiore, much of his telling of Khan’s life and times comes from source materials that were largely unavailable to earlier generations of researchers. I’m not far enough into the book to get a good sense of whether Khan’s life and times really did shape the modern world we live in to a significant extent (I’m only up to the part where Khan finally unifies all the Mongol tribes under his banner, no mean feat), but this book promises surprises galore for my preconceptions, another test of whether or not a book is good IMNSHO.
(Cont’d)
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography by Graham Robb.
My family background’s mostly French with a little bit of Welsh thrown in, and I’ve been to France many times, so naturally I’m a bit curious about the country itself. Robb’s book is yet another preconception-buster; to the typical North American, France has always been more or less the way we see it today, with a unified political geography, language and culture, but nothing could be further from the truth. Up until approximately WWI, much of France was incognito even to the residents of places like Paris, who rarely if ever traveled beyond the region of the Île-de-France. Robb opens the book with a story of a traveling cartographer (whose name is lost to history) who worked on the first great set of modern maps of France back in the mid-1700s: “One summer in the early 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc.” It’s that “the last day of his life” part that makes you immediately sit up and go “huh?” As it turns out, the place where this young cartographer found himself had residents who spoke a dialect of presumably-French that he could not understand at all, and who were ignorant of the larger world more than a few kilometres from their village (as it turns out, this was extraordinarily common in France). They regarded him and his instruments with deep suspicion, and upon deciding that he was up to no good, they hacked him to death.
The whole book is like this to a greater or lesser degree, and helped me to understand why my academic French (poor as it is) still doesn’t seem to help me in so many different places in France, where gobs of the regional or even local dialect find their way into the “national” French that folks get off of the nightly news from Paris. Another book that surprised me.
That’s enough for now, otherwise I’ll blather for hours.
Thank you! I love history, especially the stuff you don’t get in standard high school ed.
I’ll try to remember to put this in the PM links, but the Thomas Jefferson Center has given out ironic “awards” to people and institutions who have allegedly violated either the First Amendment or its spirit.
The Thomas Jefferson Center has been giving out the Muzzies for a while now. I’m pretty sure it’s been discussed on That Other SIte ™
Bradley County (Tenn.) Sheriff Eric Watson for deleting comments by atheists and blocking atheist commentators from the county Facebook page.
God complex?
Love Poul Anderson and Jim Butcher.
Have they tried passing anti-acid attack legislation?
Why acid attacks are on the rise in Britain
Though he only wrote two books, one of which was made into a really bad movie, I’d like to recommend John Steakley.
Armor and Vampire$.
Conflicted characters who don’t properly fit into their standard roles and some good Sci-Fi stuff in the case of the first one.
Wish he would have wrote some more.
Wasn’t Armor the one about the middle-aged guy who joins up to fight aliens or something?
Think I mused over it on Amazon, didn’t grab me though.
Armor is all the action scenes that Heinlein left out of Starship Troopers.
And Vampire$ contains the immortal line: She spread her legs so wide I could see her liver.
I’m shocked that line stuck with you.
Shocked.
I keep thinking I need to read Starship Troopers, but then I remember that I’ve already read The Forever War.
There are two stories going on, centered around a suit of combat armor.
Because the armor has some sort of haptic connection to the owner and records what is happening, the people in the 2nd story can experience what he went through in fighting bug creatures, ala Starship Troopers.
the 2nd story within Armor revolves around the people who are ‘listening’ to the Armor story, while dealing with bandits on this off-the-beaten-path planet.
It is really about the soldier’s experience in fighting and sacrificing himself in the battle.
The nifty thing about Vampire$ is that the author uses the same set of characters in completely different settings. One story has nothing to do with the other story.
A Line in the Sand by James Barr
Subtitled “The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948”
Describes how the British and French stabbed each other in the back to further their colonial goals, thereby setting ME on course to the mess it is today.
That really Sykes.
Ugh.
*drops gloves*
+1 Picot de Gaulois
Let’s not ignore that little issue of the US stabbing someone in the back in Egypt in 1956 either.
The Suez Crisis was an astounding fiasco. I’ve heard that Ike later said it was his most regretted mistake.
thanks, just bought that
Google says “blessed are the cheesemakers,” honors Marie Harel.
Currently reading The Hungry Brain. Much better that Taubes, in my estimation.
Recent non-fiction:
The Lonely American – About the atomization of modern-ish American culture. Not bad, if you skip over the ‘individual living is harming the environment’ bullshit. I guess no one told the author that the people with the lowest ecological impact are natives of Manhattan and Hong Kong, not Vermont. Also, as a hard-science oriented person, its fascinating to see how terrible critical thinking is in the medical field. Recommended for the observation that youths today have 1) a drastically increased score on a narcissism test 2) never had to share a room or engage in play that wasn’t mediated by parents. Written before the Great Campus Freakout and Punching Fad of 2016 and 17, but follow the dotted line.
1491 and the follow up 1493 – First one is highly entertaining, the second one not so much. History told by a journalist. So possibly more entertaining than accurate, but very dense on the cool-ideas-per-page metric.
Practical Heat Treating – Possibly only of interest if you are heat treating metal. But who knows. Maybe you just really like graphs. Written in a decade when the authors felt compelled to explain how to wire an electrical furnace into an “outlet” by way of a re purposed lamp wire. They spent like 1 paragraph describing a coal forge because like who doesn’t have one of those lol.
The Righteous Mind – Final ready it, you know, cuz of Trump or whatever. Should have read this years ago. Highly recommended. Not nearly as popular-science-for-the-IFLS crowd as I expected.
Fiction
Babylon’s Ashes – Sci Fi with libertarian themes in spite of the best efforts of the authors. Fun.
Stand Proud – My first dip into cowboy fiction. Very enjoyable. Need to find some more. A crotchety old man is vindicated due to his healthy excess of crothetyness.
Lies of Locke Lamora – Renaissance Italy era heist story with fantasy elements. Wildly popular among the sewers of genre fiction readers, where I am a resident. You’d think I would like it more, but was barely lukewarm.
More cowboy fiction? Try a modern take on detective novels, the Walt Longmire series (now into its sixth season of filming for TV — Netflix took over the property from A&E a few seasons ago). Written by Craig Johnson, a genuine Wyoming rural d00d and cowboy. Emotionally conflicted but suck-it-up-as-all-Hell main character doing impossible work in the back-and-beyond of Wyoming in the fictional Absaroka County. Great stuff, and weirdly popular in translation in France, of all places . . .
I forgot all about Tim Powers. I loved his poker playing trilogy. Thanks for the suggestion.
I probably should way for the afternoon links thread, but this was just too damned funny to sit on. Who doesn’t enjoy mocking rich, gullible Millennial hipsters?
That’s awesome.
“Instagram-filtered terror and disappointment”
That’s a classic line right there.
I don’t know if anyone’s coming back to this thread –I always miss the good discussions– but I do want to recommend these books.
I’m currently reading Fascism: Comparison and Definition, by Stanley H. Payne. I’m only about halfway through this but it seems like a good non-partisan look at what the fascists of the inter-war period really believed, where they come from and their positions to the other left and right movements of the time. This should be required reading before calling other people fascists and has to be better than whatever partisan shit the proggies are using to define fascism, given the easily refutable lists I’ve seen from some “expert” that keep getting posted that just prove that Trump is a fascist.
I’ve started The Iron King, by Maurice Druon, but haven’t gotten back to it in a while. It’s book 1 of a series that is a fictional retelling of the c. 14th French Monarchy, starting around the trials of the Knights Templar. I’ve enjoyed it so far, but having a <1 year old really eats into my reading time. Also, GRRM said it was a big inspiration for ASoIaF.
I've been trying to read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Heinlein, to my daughter, but as she gets older she has less patience for books without pictures. I also tried Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, but that had worse results.
I have a stack of books to read, but part of me just wants to go back a read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. I just finished it before my daughter was born and knew while I was reading that there was more going on than I was picking up and it would require a re-read. I highly recommend for any sci-fi/fantasy fans out there.
Thanks for these. The Fascism: Comparison and Definition title sounds particularly useful.
Seeing its publication date, I’m surprised I didn’t run into it during Uni days, but there were a lot of titles I wanted to read back then and couldn’t get to for one reason or another.
I have nothing to add, but just wanted to say that some of us try to poke our heads in and read the later comments.
I haven’t read much lately because I’ve been binge-watching Person Of Interest on Netflix.
And I have about a dozen of Gardner Dozois’ SF annual anthologies waiting in the wings.
YAY!! Thank you for book club! I love it. Definitely going to bookmark these posts for later perusal.
(had a long day at work, so I am just now getting to relax with a cocktail and Glibertarians)
Pardon me for corpsefucking this thread but I’m on vacation and I’m a bit behind.
Currently reading Erle Stanley Gardner. Up to The Case of the Lucky Legs. I used to read a lot of SF & fantasy when I was younger but my volume of reading has fallen and I find myself reading more mystery.
Kindles have been a blessing and a curse. Easy to read here and there but even easier to pile up books to read from here and before at the Other Site.