What are you reading this weekend?

bigred wrote:

Anyone read the Southern Reach Trilogy? Currently in the middle of Authority.

Comments in spoilers

Spoiler:

I am struggling with Authority. I thoroughly enjoyed Annihilation and finished it in a few days. The exploration and intrigue of the world combined with the action was a real joy. Authority is the complete opposite. I acknowledge you can't do the same thing a second time and have to evolve your story but this "spy game/mind game" stuff is half-baked. It feels like the author thought he'd try something he hadn't done before and it shows. Read one Clancy book and then give it a try. I'm hoping things get better (about 60% in) but I'm waiting for this book to actually start.

Also, The Voice is a terribly written character up to this point. Author's attempt at a macho Gman is failing big time.

Can someone tell me to stick with it because the ending or the third book are worth the struggle?

I read it earlier this year and enjoyed it. I found the first book to be the most interesting - the third is a combination of the first 2 - maybe a little more of the second book than first. I would stick with it. I found parts of the story and the explanations to be very frustrating but would still recommend finishing it. As for the "voice", I wouldn't let it annoy too much, it's not a huge part of the story but the reveal is a bit of a twist.

Overall I think the trilogy is a good story that doesn't quite live up to the premise.

Shifter wrote:
bigred wrote:

Anyone read the Southern Reach Trilogy? Currently in the middle of Authority.

Comments in spoilers

Spoiler:

I am struggling with Authority. I thoroughly enjoyed Annihilation and finished it in a few days. The exploration and intrigue of the world combined with the action was a real joy. Authority is the complete opposite. I acknowledge you can't do the same thing a second time and have to evolve your story but this "spy game/mind game" stuff is half-baked. It feels like the author thought he'd try something he hadn't done before and it shows. Read one Clancy book and then give it a try. I'm hoping things get better (about 60% in) but I'm waiting for this book to actually start.

Also, The Voice is a terribly written character up to this point. Author's attempt at a macho Gman is failing big time.

Can someone tell me to stick with it because the ending or the third book are worth the struggle?

I read it earlier this year and enjoyed it. I found the first book to be the most interesting - the third is a combination of the first 2 - maybe a little more of the second book than first. I would stick with it. I found parts of the story and the explanations to be very frustrating but would still recommend finishing it. As for the "voice", I wouldn't let it annoy too much, it's not a huge part of the story but the reveal is a bit of a twist.

Overall I think the trilogy is a good story that doesn't quite live up to the premise.

Yeah, agreed with story not living up to premise.

Spoiler:

Finished Authority. The last 10%, once he gets to the west coast, is a return to the wonder and exploration that made the first book enjoyable even though it's not in Area X. Just started Acceptance.
Looking forward to it after the first chapter.

I started Don Winslow's "The Cartel" on the last segment of a business trip this week, and it's terrific. Written concisely in an almost Noir style, it's a story that pits a DEA agent against a Mexican drug cartel leader over the last few decades. The approach is similar to Puzo's Godfather, but it moves much more quickly.

The interesting thing is that he has deeply researched the twists and turns of the Mexican drug families in the period, and so the events that go around his characters are those of real life. It's as much an exposition of modern Mexican crime and its effects on society as it is the story of the people who surround his two main characters.

Fascinating, exciting, fast-moving, emotional. Quite a read.

Edit - Turns out it's a sequel to a previous book, "The Power of the Dog", and both books are loosely based on the life of El Chapo Guzman. I guess I'll read them in reverse order.

So i'm continuing with the biography of J. Edgar Hoover. I've just finished the section on the Red Scare of 1919/1920 and Hoover's involvement. What a gross, scary time. The people running the Justice Department gave no sh*ts about the Constitution or due process.

I also picked up Crash Override, Zoe Quinn's recently released book about gamergate. I'm predicting this will also make for a depressing and/or infuriating read this weekend.

Crash Override was good. She's hopeful too. First half is mostly her experiences and last half is suggestions.

bigred: I thought the Southern Reach books were deeply strange, and I'm not at all sure you'll find them worthwhile, if you're struggling. They never really change, and never really get any better. They just stay weird.

Just finished Amatka written Karin Tidbeck and just recently translated from Swedish.

The book tells the story of Vanja, an information specialist for a hygiene company on an unnamed planet that's been colonized by humans. Her employer has Vanja travel to Amatka, an agricultural outpost and one of four existing human settlements, to survey the population about their need for new hygiene products.

Tidbeck quickly creates one of the most interesting and surreal sci-fi world's I've read in awhile. She makes it clear that the colony isn't doing very well. There's only a tiny handful of human settlements on an otherwise empty world. One settlement disappeared suddenly and no one is allowed to speak about it. The others are rigidly controlled by a secretive, authoritarian committee that tells you where you work and when you have children--which is mandatory to grow the colony.

And then there's the little strange behaviors Tidbeck has her characters do: they methodically and ritualistically name everything around them and even etch the name of the object on the object itself.

It's a pretty short book, about 250 pages, and Tidbeck quickly unfolds the mystery of Amatka.

I should be finishing Crash Override today, then it'll be back to the J. Edgar Hoover biography. I put a request at the library for Phillip Pullman's new novel The Book of Dust, but I have a feeling it'll be weeks before I get my hands on it.

Malor wrote:

That actually still makes sense to me.... for bandwidth. I don't remember whether he explicitly calls this out, but other cyberpunk authors have used the mechanic of wireless for light Net usage, and plugin/hardwire for the heavy-duty stuff. If we ever manage to break the cable monopolies and start to get real bandwidth deployed to our homes, we may see the exact same thing happen; a fiber is vastly faster than any wireless signal could possibly be, at least if you want more than one person to be able to use wireless at a time.

If you want to plug your brain directly into the net, you're almost certainly going to want the speed and reliability of a physical connection. Wireless packet loss, when you're receiving sensory data, could be very distressing.

Sure, it makes sense to you because we live with real-world 2017 tech, where quantum-entangled photonic retinal interfaces don't exist.

I mean, it's fiction. Make some sh*t up.

***

I’ve had The Fifth Season on my to-read pile thanks to you guys, and my girlfriend spent a good portion of the weekend raving about it to me, so I resolved to bail on the two books I’m currently reading and finding it difficult to muster up the energy to finish. One is late-phase Pratchett (Thud), the other is Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, that I got about 100 pages into it over a boozy camping trip a few weeks ago.

Dropping Pratchett is easy – while I loved his work as a teenager, it just doesn’t seem that interesting anymore. Maybe I should go re-read some of his earlier classics.

But Atwood is another story. Turns out my problem was that I was half in the bag when reading it, and when I picked it up again, I could barely remember what the previous 100 pages contained. So I re-read them and Day-um, that’s some compelling stuff.

Once a Panther Moderns analogue exists, we will have opened the sixth seal Neuromancer-wise. Seventh is true general purpose AI.

I'm reading Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore--so far, pretty good.

Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. 30 pages in it's just standard fantasy mumbo jumbo. Sometimes I wonder if fantasy writers just take dice with letters and just roll them to find names for their characters and places.

Any recommendations for cerebral sci fi? I saw the new Blade Runner movie and am in the mood for something else. I'm eyeing the inspiration, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and also eyeing Neuromancer. Any other suggestions?

bigred wrote:

Any recommendations for cerebral sci fi? I saw the new Blade Runner movie and am in the mood for something else. I'm eyeing the inspiration, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and also eyeing Neuromancer. Any other suggestions?

This is Philip K. Dick, so be warned that the movies are VERY loosely based on the novel. But hey, in the book there is an actual electric sheep if I remember correctly.
"The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" and its sequel "A Close and Common Orbit" also deal with A.I. and are much better reads than "... Electric Sheep". But you have to like space stuff.

bigred wrote:

Any recommendations for cerebral sci fi? I saw the new Blade Runner movie and am in the mood for something else. I'm eyeing the inspiration, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and also eyeing Neuromancer. Any other suggestions?

Neverness by David Zindell

Brainsmith wrote:
bigred wrote:

Any recommendations for cerebral sci fi? I saw the new Blade Runner movie and am in the mood for something else. I'm eyeing the inspiration, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and also eyeing Neuromancer. Any other suggestions?

This is Philip K. Dick, so be warned that the movies are VERY loosely based on the novel. But hey, in the book there is an actual electric sheep if I remember correctly.
"The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" and its sequel "A Close and Common Orbit" also deal with A.I. and are much better reads than "... Electric Sheep". But you have to like space stuff.

Came across this on the Verge's best sci fi lit of 2016. I'm in.

Beuks33 wrote:

Neverness by David Zindell

Also looks good. Thanks!

Anything by Ian M. Banks would fit the bill, but start with "Consider Phlebas". The later novels, after that and "Use of Weapons", contain some subtler themes that the reader might not pick up without being familiar with The Culture.

Also try "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delaney (reminiscent of James Joyce), or "A Fire Upon The Deep", by Vernor Vinge, or "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons.

Started reading a book called All the Way Home by Ann Tatlock. It's one of the kindle books I got for free a few years ago and has been on my "to read" list since then. The part of the book I've read so far is written from the perspective of a girl who made friends with a Japanese American girl and her family in the 1930's three years before the U.S. government deported them into concentration camps after the Pearl Harbor attack.

I'm still not even halfway through the book yet, so it's what I will be reading this weekend. I can't help but compare the treatment of the Japanese citizens then with how Muslims and Hispanics are often treated today. Racism is truly evil.

Brainsmith wrote:

Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. 30 pages in it's just standard fantasy mumbo jumbo. Sometimes I wonder if fantasy writers just take dice with letters and just roll them to find names for their characters and places.

Stick with it. It's fantasy, no doubt about it, but most agree it's better than most of the stuff out there. It's a long book that's part of a long story so it takes some time to set the groundwork.

I'm reading Deep Work by Cal Newton. Just started it so i can't say much about it. Also started East of Eden by Steinbeck. One of those books I've had on the list for a long time.

Shifter wrote:
Brainsmith wrote:

Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. 30 pages in it's just standard fantasy mumbo jumbo. Sometimes I wonder if fantasy writers just take dice with letters and just roll them to find names for their characters and places.

Stick with it. It's fantasy, no doubt about it, but most agree it's better than most of the stuff out there. It's a long book that's part of a long story so it takes some time to set the groundwork.

I'm reading Deep Work by Cal Newton. Just started it so i can't say much about it. Also started East of Eden by Steinbeck. One of those books I've had on the list for a long time.

Or don't. I didn't horribly dislike the first book but it didn't make me need to pick up the next one either. Add on that it's another N+ length series that's like on book three or four of however many it'll end up and I decided to pass.

bnpederson wrote:
Shifter wrote:
Brainsmith wrote:

Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. 30 pages in it's just standard fantasy mumbo jumbo. Sometimes I wonder if fantasy writers just take dice with letters and just roll them to find names for their characters and places.

Stick with it. It's fantasy, no doubt about it, but most agree it's better than most of the stuff out there. It's a long book that's part of a long story so it takes some time to set the groundwork.

I'm reading Deep Work by Cal Newton. Just started it so i can't say much about it. Also started East of Eden by Steinbeck. One of those books I've had on the list for a long time.

Or don't. I didn't horribly dislike the first book but it didn't make me need to pick up the next one either. Add on that it's another N+ length series that's like on book three or four of however many it'll end up and I decided to pass.

Well, I've managed to read the first 350 pages over the course of the last days and it has turned out to be better than I had initially expected.

The world building is better than in most fantasy novels, as there is only little exposition - something I like about good fantasy is finding things out on my own and this novel certainly expects the reader to fill in the gaps or read between the lines. At least, most of the viewpoint characters make me want to find out more about their story.

I couldn't care less about the elements that make it into a fantasy novel though (names, magic, creatures, weird weapons). There is not much there that makes it stand out from the crowd.

At times it seems like a mixture of Game of Thrones (thedifferent viewpoint characters) and The Wheel of Time (especially the fantasy elements and the lore). As he wrote the last three books of The Wheel of Time, it seems like the obvious influence.

I’m reading Phillip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, the first in his new trilogy of books set in the same world as His Dark Materials.

It is really, really good to be back in this world again. So far it seems to be an espionage story more than anything else. I wasn’t expecting that, but I’m into it.

Malcolm Mackay's "Every Night I Dream of Hell". Another of his Glasgow crime books, every bit as good as the others (so far, anyway, but he probably won't drop the ball this time either).

Have been reading The Outsorcerer's Apprentice from Tom Holt. It's been a long while since have read any farcical fantasy.

Edit. +1 for The Culture books.

Just started a new book, and will certainly be reading it through the weekend. But the opener is strong enough that I want to recommend it (with the caveat that I've read about 10 pages so far):

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. The setting is a star ship in a world of ubiquitous cloning. It's a normal thing to save your mind state and reboot yourself into a new clone. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone horribly wrong, and all six crew members appear to have been knifed and reborn... but they've all lost significant (years) amounts of time. They need to clean up after their own murders, restart the grav drive, fix the ship's computer, and figure out just which one of them killed everyone off. (Or at least, that's where it seems to be going...)

First chapter is up over here.

That sounds like a strong premise, Katy.

I'll be finishing up The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, then it'll be, once again, back to J. Edgar Hoover's biography. I like the book, it's just something that's sort of hard to make myself sit down and read.

I'm about 1/3 through The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden (sequel to the excellent The Bear and the Nightingale and am picking up Artemis from the library tonight.

I've let this lapse in recent months, but am back at it now!

This weekend I'll be reading the classic A Wizard of Earthsea, as well as starting N. K. Jemison's The Fifth Season, book 1 of her Broken Earth trilogy.

I'm in the back half of Name of the Wind. Can't say enough good things about it. Wonderfully crafted.

A fresh batch from the library, I can't decide which to begin with... I Am Legend, or Half the World by Abercrombie, or The City by Stella Gemmell...