Book Recommendations?

Thanks for the suggestions, all. I'm making a list. Can anyone recommend A Darker Shade of Magic? I was scanning my library and I apparently own it (Tor free book maybe?) and didn't realize. I thought I read that some folks on here recommended it.

FridgeGremlin wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions, all. I'm making a list. Can anyone recommend A Darker Shade of Magic? I was scanning my library and I apparently own it (Tor free book maybe?) and didn't realize. I thought I read that some folks on here recommended it.

I've mentioned that series by V. E. Schwab. Enjoyed it.

FridgeGremlin wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions, all. I'm making a list. Can anyone recommend A Darker Shade of Magic? I was scanning my library and I apparently own it (Tor free book maybe?) and didn't realize. I thought I read that some folks on here recommended it.

Those are quite good. They're not junk food, but they're light enough that you'll probably enjoy them a great deal.

That, by the way, is the first of three books. You probably got it in a free giveaway to interest you in buying the other two.

Thanks all!

Somehow book 6 in Devon Monk's Ordinary Magic series "Hell's Spells" came out and I wasn't even aware of it being on the horizon. Rectified that situation and read it last night into this morning. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read, as is the rest of the series, for fans of urban fantasy I highly recommend them. The premise of the series is that Ordinary Oregon is a tiny little town where the gods can turn their power over to the sheriff and kick back and be mortal (ish) for a while. The books don't take themselves very seriously and definitely fall under the category of lighthearted fare, but nonetheless I find them very fun reads.

Just finished Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen. Fantastic book on all fronts. Fairly high level -it doesn't get overly bogged down in the details- but with enough depth and notation that you don't feel like you're missing information or being misled.

I think this paragraph from the closing chapter sums it up pretty nicely:

Kurt Andersen wrote:

But we really don’t know where the experience of the pandemic and the protests of 2020 will lead us—the overnight upendings, the long traumas, judging how individuals and institutions and ideologies and systems worked or failed. People in 1918 and 1929 and 1970 (and 1347) had no clue what was coming next, either. Will my hypothetical grandchildren grow up as ignorant of these events as I was of the global viral pandemic that my grandparents survived and of the 1919 “race riots” that included the lynching of a black man in my hometown? For Americans now, will surviving a year (or more) of radical uncertainty help persuade a majority to make radical changes in our political economy to reduce their chronic economic uncertainty and insecurity? Will we summon the necessary will to achieve racial fairness? Like Europe six hundred years ago after the plague, will we see a flowering of radically new creative works and the emergence of a radically new economic system? Or will Americans remain hunkered forever, as confused and anxious and paralyzed as we were before 2020, descend into digital feudalism, forgo a renaissance, and retreat into cocoons of comfortable cultural stasis providing the illusion that nothing much is changing or ever can change?

I'm now on to The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

Guardian review wrote:

The Finance Curse is a radical, urgent and important manifesto for improving our country, starting from where Britain actually is – a wide-open, highly vulnerable economy utterly transformed by our finance industry – rather than where our major parties would like it to be, whether they’re harking back to the 1950s or to the 1890s. This argument should not really be party political, but it challenges the decades-long thrust of British politics, and winning it will require a hard fight. If we don’t want to go the way of the USSR, however, it’s a fight we need to have.

e:
Oh, and I finished the fiction book I was reading, Oathbringer (Stormlight Archive book 3) by Brandon Sanderson. It was... okay. Bit of a slog, if I'm honest.

Read "Luna: New Moon" next. Much more than "okay" lol

I just finished Hella by David Gerrold. It was fine. The sort of story that pulled me along quickly and created at least some affection for the characters and had some really interesting ideas for its world, but the plot was a bit uninspired, the characters were largely underdeveloped, particularly the villains, and I had the frustrating experience I seem to have all the time these days where about 80-85% through the book I realize there's no way they're going to have a reasonably clean ending to the story and this is meant as a Book 1.

David Gerrold is still writing? I didn't realize it...

That's funny, in the info on Goodreads it referred to him as something like "Master of Science Fiction David Gerrold," and my reaction was "who?" (Apparently he wrote some classic original Star Trek and some Star Trek novels and nonfiction and I guess his own stuff later too) This is my scifi book club's pick, so I had no role in choosing the book.

He was a decidedly mediocre novelist in the 70's, anyway. I kind of thought he'd faded away, and I guess he kind of did. "Trouble with Tribbles" was great, though.

Apparently, I was confusing David Gerrold with David Brin. I was about to say, 'hey, he was pretty good'. But when I looked up Gerrold on Wikipedia, the only books I remember reading are the War Against the Chtorr series, and they weren't very good. Pretty much nothing else on his list looks interesting.

Finishing up William Gibson's Agency, and I found it pretty disappointing. The protagonist is swept up in events without making any decisions, or being privy to decisions being made for her. It's not clear why she seems to be the lynchpin of all of these events, or why various acquaintances of hers keep getting involved. We're told that the stakes of all this are some sort of nuclear war, but no one ever bothers to connect the dots between said nukes and the events of the novel. There are a LOT of extraneous characters. I don't really understand why we spent so much time checking in with the protagonist's roomate. I'm still not clear on whether several of the London characters are actually different people or the same person called alternatively by first or last name. This isn't a Game of Thrones thing where you can't quite keep track of the massive roster of characters. Here, there a lot of characters that don't have many interesting qualities and who don't do anything whatsoever. It's not that they're hard to keep track of, it's that there's no reason to do so. In fact, it's never clear why anyone is doing anything, and all of the important action happens "off-screen".

There's nothing going on in this book that you didn't get a better version of in The Peripheral. This feels, weirdly, like a B-side, maybe a proto-version of The Peripheral that got put together from cuttings off of the editor's floor.

kazooka wrote:

Finishing up William Gibson's Agency, and I found it pretty disappointing. The protagonist is swept up in events without making any decisions, or being privy to decisions being made for her. It's not clear why she seems to be the lynchpin of all of these events, or why various acquaintances of hers keep getting involved. We're told that the stakes of all this are some sort of nuclear war, but no one ever bothers to connect the dots between said nukes and the events of the novel. There are a LOT of extraneous characters. I don't really understand why we spent so much time checking in with the protagonist's roomate. I'm still not clear on whether several of the London characters are actually different people or the same person called alternatively by first or last name. This isn't a Game of Thrones thing where you can't quite keep track of the massive roster of characters. Here, there a lot of characters that don't have many interesting qualities and who don't do anything whatsoever. It's not that they're hard to keep track of, it's that there's no reason to do so. In fact, it's never clear why anyone is doing anything, and all of the important action happens "off-screen".

There's nothing going on in this book that you didn't get a better version of in The Peripheral. This feels, weirdly, like a B-side, maybe a proto-version of The Peripheral that got put together from cuttings off of the editor's floor.

If you read the Peripheral then you should understand the interplay of the different timelines and the actors between them. The London characters are actually fleshed out in Peripheral and the story essentially just continues on from there. The tie-in to the nukes are gone over and the 'big reveal' at the end of Peripheral explains why the protagonist is the protagonist and why she's the lynchpin of events for this book...

ranalin wrote:

If you read the Peripheral then you should understand the interplay of the different timelines and the actors between them. The London characters are actually fleshed out in Peripheral and the story essentially just continues on from there. The tie-in to the nukes are gone over and the 'big reveal' at the end of Peripheral explains why the protagonist is the protagonist and why she's the lynchpin of events for this book...

According to an interview I read somewhere, Gibson originally intended Agency to be a standalone novel. But he made some assumptions in the story about the 2016 US election, and when it went the other way, he decided to call it an alternate timeline and link it to The Peripheral.

ranalin wrote:
kazooka wrote:

Finishing up William Gibson's Agency, and I found it pretty disappointing. The protagonist is swept up in events without making any decisions, or being privy to decisions being made for her. It's not clear why she seems to be the lynchpin of all of these events, or why various acquaintances of hers keep getting involved. We're told that the stakes of all this are some sort of nuclear war, but no one ever bothers to connect the dots between said nukes and the events of the novel. There are a LOT of extraneous characters. I don't really understand why we spent so much time checking in with the protagonist's roomate. I'm still not clear on whether several of the London characters are actually different people or the same person called alternatively by first or last name. This isn't a Game of Thrones thing where you can't quite keep track of the massive roster of characters. Here, there a lot of characters that don't have many interesting qualities and who don't do anything whatsoever. It's not that they're hard to keep track of, it's that there's no reason to do so. In fact, it's never clear why anyone is doing anything, and all of the important action happens "off-screen".

There's nothing going on in this book that you didn't get a better version of in The Peripheral. This feels, weirdly, like a B-side, maybe a proto-version of The Peripheral that got put together from cuttings off of the editor's floor.

If you read the Peripheral then you should understand the interplay of the different timelines and the actors between them. The London characters are actually fleshed out in Peripheral and the story essentially just continues on from there. The tie-in to the nukes are gone over and the 'big reveal' at the end of Peripheral explains why the protagonist is the protagonist and why she's the lynchpin of events for this book...

I did read the Peripheral, and while I enjoyed the premise, I wasn't crazy about it as a whole. Maybe that's why I don't remember it very well. So I probably am missing a few previous connections. That said, I don't think any of that addresses my biggest problem with the book, which is that the main characters don't make any decisions and aren't privy to any of the actions taken.

I just back-to-backed Don Quixote (inspired by this very thread) and Anna Karenina, and found both to be fascinating in totally different but also strangely similar ways. DQ was surprisingly heavy on the meta-fiction (especially part two!) and kind of astonishing in the way it was constructed without having any blueprint to really borrow from. I was also shocked that the windmill scene was such a dotpoint and fascinated at the origin of ‘Lothario’. I’m really glad I read it but it felt like I was slogging through large portions of it, although there was enough humour to buoy me through.

AK on the other hand was much easier, and as I put it to a friend, felt like a ‘grand, burly Russian Jane Austen novel with heavier Romantic (period not movement) influence and a steadily increasing dose of ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ thrown in’. Tolstoy’s characterisations are intricate, intimate, and deftly interwoven, and his communication of the gentle sadness of an agrarian society struggling with the onslaught of industrialisation was quite beautiful to read. Also, some of the most honest and uncomfortable writing on adultery, pregnancy and childbirth I think I’ve ever read, but it was touching to read the inner thoughts of the Russian aristocracy at the time and find unexpected parallels in such a different time and place.

Overall, I’d recommend DQ only if you’ve got the minerals for a dense, sly, sometimes difficult to follow but genuinely monumental achievement in early literature. AK is much easier to push as it’s an smoother read but it does deal with much more personal issues and will test your emotional fortitude a lot more.

On to Jane Eyre next! It’s half the size of those last two, but I’m told it’s at least twice as depressing

Jane Eyre is awful. Try Thomas Hardy’s stuff instead.

Robear wrote:

Jane Eyre is awful.

Dude!!! Seriously? I couldn’t disagree more. It’s sad, but it’s beautiful.

And it’s incredibly iconic. The mad woman in the attic? Super super relevant text.

I can’t stand any of the Brontes. Probably the only major 19th century English writers I really loathe. And I adore Jane Austen, so... I dunno.

You want sad and relevant, “The Mayor of Caisterbridge”, about a man whose past comes back to bite him in the ass later in life. And the writing is interesting, too.

For what it's worth, I didn't enjoy Jane Eyre either. And I read Les Miserables in high school and loved it. Maybe I should revisit Bronte when I'm not gobbling down adolescent power creep fantasy novels.

*edit* Thought it was Brontes, not Bronte. Shows how much I know. *shrug*

Robear wrote:

Jane Eyre is awful. Try Thomas Hardy’s stuff instead.

INFIDEL!!!!!

*sigh* I know I announced a while back that I would be reading Don Quixote before reading any other fiction, and I failed at that goal, multiple times! Alas, I am still in the midst of reading it! I need to put it on some sort of "habit tracking" schedule I think.

Jane Austen - "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."

Charlotte Bronte - "And if I had loved him less I should have thought his accent and look of exultation savage; but…I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow. Again and again he said, “Are you happy, Jane?” And again and again I answered, “Yes.” After which he murmured, “It will atone—it will atone. Have I not found her friendless, and cold, and comfortless? Will I not guard, and cherish, and solace her?...It will expiate at God’s tribunal. I know my Maker sanctions what I do. For the world’s judgment—I wash my hands thereof. For man’s opinion—I defy it.”

Which one more clearly expresses the same thought?

Robear wrote:

Jane Austen - "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."

Charlotte Bronte - "And if I had loved him less I should have thought his accent and look of exultation savage; but…I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow. Again and again he said, “Are you happy, Jane?” And again and again I answered, “Yes.” After which he murmured, “It will atone—it will atone. Have I not found her friendless, and cold, and comfortless? Will I not guard, and cherish, and solace her?...It will expiate at God’s tribunal. I know my Maker sanctions what I do. For the world’s judgment—I wash my hands thereof. For man’s opinion—I defy it.”

Which one more clearly expresses the same thought?

Which one more emphatically expresses the same feeling?

Are they expressing the same feeling? Bronte's saying more with more words - contrasting two peoples' distinct rationalizations for committing to getting smoochy.

If Austen is compressing all that in one sentence, I'm too dull to extract it. Points to Hufflepuff!

Austen for both. There's no excuse for all that flowery crap. It's over the top even for the period. It should be taught as an example of how not to write. Its virtue was that it was new; but unlike Austen, whose language is so natural as to be clear and understandable today, the Brontes approach is one of artifice and an almost baroque affectation.

That's my feeling, anyway. But I get other people like it. I just don't *understand* that.

The adjective I first thought of, when reading that second paragraph, was 'florid'. It's writing that's about the writing, not about the subject.

Danjo - Perhaps not exactly the same, but close enough. Austen writes like real people spoke; CB writes like a teenage girl with a large vocabulary writing a diary she fully expects her peers to read one day...

Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe were similarly baroque in their writing styles. More recently, Ray Bradbury. There's nothing wrong with florid or baroque as long as it doesn't get in the way. Obviously, everyone's MMV.