Sometimes you just need a good book to escape the brutal summer heat, humidity, mosquitoes plaguing America thanks to global warming (or the slushy mosquito filled taiga and bitter cold of Canadia).
SugarFree
Connie Willis’ The Doomsday Book, 1992 winner of the Hugo and the Nebula. Historians time travel to the past in order to record an accurate view of history, perfectly inevitable complications ensue. Not a completely new idea or anything, but Willis does a good job here, even if the novel itself could have used an editor with a strong hand. The book gets bogged down in the scenes set in the current time frame which runs as a comedy of manners set among the bumbling and back-biting academics of Oxford overseeing the project. The scenes in the past also have some repetition in the narrative which should have been caught.
I’ve also been re-reading the Matt Helm books by Donald Hamilton for the first time since I was a teenager. They are satisfying little plot machines that chug along supported by Hamilton’s terse prose.
I read quite a bit of the men’s adventure genre when I was in high school, like the first 80 or so Remo Williams the Destroyer novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, the Proto-Punisher The Executioner series by Don Pendleton, Jerry Ahern’s The Survivalist, the Casca books by Barry Sadler (the artist behind “The Ballard of the Green Beret”) and even a smattering of the further regions of the genre as it overlapped with science fiction in C.A.D.S. (post-apocalypse man-rape Red Dawn) and T.N.T. (nuclear-powered superman acid trip.) It’s strange to think that the men’s adventure genre is almost completely dead. Not surprising, though, given the plunging reading rates for teenage and college-age males.
jesse.in.mb
Rhys Bowen’s In Farleigh Field: A Novel of World War II. If historical fiction about Britain in WWII and ladies working at Bletchley Park is your thing, this book’s for you.
A little more frivolous is Shirtless Bear Fighter from Image Comics. I appreciate Image’s willingness to get weird, and weird is how they get with SBF. Imagine a world where a kickass and pretty frequently naked (and always shirtless) man raised by bears goes on a bear punching spree. It’s absolutely ridiculous and I’m looking forward to future issues.
JW
Playboy, but just for the pictures. He promises.
Old Man With Candy
It’s been a bad month for reading- work crunches, jesus-is-it-Tuesday-already? website demands, and trying to catch up on the writing I get paid for… shitty excuses. But I still did manage to pile through Robert Silverberg’s The Alien Years, which I had somehow skipped when it came out. In a sense, it’s The Aristocrats of science fiction, a story that’s been done a million times, but it’s still fun to watch someone masterful riff on it. There’s a lot of Niven-Pournelle influence on the story, and that’s not a bad thing. But at its core, it’s still pure Silverberg.
Riven
After reading the entire Hollows series last month, I’ve really slowed down. You know when you finish a book series and it feels like you lost a good friend? Yeah. SugarFree recommended to me–you’ll notice I read a lot of SF recs–the Sandman Slim series to help fill the void. The first book was pretty enjoyable, but I’ve yet to pick up the second. It definitely had a pulpy, noir feel to go with the detective atmosphere. While it dealt with supernatural topics–demons, angels, vamps, etc.–it was firmly set in present-day Hollywood, but it managed not to pit these elements against each other. I liked the nuance in the characters: angels aren’t necessarily “good,” demons aren’t always 100% a dick, some characters are flawed and others are biased. I was also pleased that there wasn’t a big, sappy romance in the middle of what was essentially a story about revenge, and a rather gory one, at that. I’m sure ‘Slim’ will eventually meet and settle down with some seriously broken-inside femme fatale (and they’ll magically fix/complete each other), but I’m glad that it’s a story for another book in the series. It’s likely that I will pick up the next book next month, unless I’m still stuck on the Hollows, which I’ve debated rereading in its entirety.
Brett L.
Mark Lawrence’s latest work Red Sister, which I started pimping last month is totally worth your money. Yes, yes, it has the person-equivalent of a nuclear weapon living in a village far from anywhere who just happens to fall into the hands of someone who can train them to be great, but his ability to add some subtle twists and turns to the genre stable is what makes Lawrence a standout writer.
In a disappointing moment, Charlie Stross’ latest Laundry novel Delirium Brief was like re-reading the 5th book of the Dark Tower series all over again. Watching a beloved series just fucking shred itself in front of your eyes is really sad. I will say that the action moves right along, but there are some ginormous fucking plot holes. Somehow this [SPOILER-LADEN RANT REDACTED]. Anyhow, I am disappoint.
Additionally, I found the femlit equivalent to dudelit “harem building”. If you’re not familiar with the trope, somehow the brave male hero manages to attract not one but usually three or more women who should be a match for him and they are all willing to share him. It seems to run rampant in the Amazon Unlimited universe. In the Curse of the Gods series, a young woman of the serving race (yes, race) is taken to be a servant to a school of (basically) demigods, and what do you know the four most powerful brother who are outright demigods basically adopt her, demand that she be schooled with them, and make a pact to not have sex with her, even though they want to (and she seems pretty down), because being demigods they might literally kill her. I will probably not be reading any additional books in the series, but it was an interesting trope inversion.
SP
I’m looking through Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins. If you aren’t familiar with him, you can learn a bit about what he’s about here. Nothing earth-shaking within, but I personally like Jeff, so I picked it up.
With uncertainty swirling around us in the current work world, I’ve started reading Start Late, Finish Rich by David Bach. Not much new here, but Bach at least makes the reader feel as if they can change their condition. Spoiler: spend less, save more and invest more. (On a related side note, I’m a big fan of services that allow one to micro invest on autopilot. <– not intended to be financial advice.)
In fiction, I’ve just started Justice Burning, the second outing for Scott Pratt’s Darren Street character, a traumatized former defense attorney. I am not as big a fan of Street as I am of Joe Dillard, Pratt’s protagonist in his earlier series, but I’ll probably finish it.
sloopyinca
Sloop is reading The Neverending Story and contemplating whether the chapters constitute a countable infinity.
Playa Manhattan
When I’m not enjoying the infographics at USA Today (McDonald’s newspaper of record), I read cookbooks. Currently, I’m reading Modernist Cuisine.
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