What BOOK(s) are you reading?

I'm reading The Witchwood Crown by Tad Williams. It's a thirty-years-later sequel to a fantasy trilogy he wrote back in the 80s and 90s (The Dragonbone Chair, The Stone of Farewell, and To Green Angel Tower) which I dearly loved back in the day.

Going back to William's fantasy world so many years later is interesting. There's definitely some nostalgia here, more than I expected. The new book is a slow burn, as is almost everything Williams has ever written. I'm 500 pages into the book, and barely anything of note as happened, but it's fine, because I just enjoy hanging out with the characters, and living in this world.

I picked up Neal Stephenson's The Something Or Other of D.O.D.O., which I didn't even know about. He's got a co-author, and I hope that cuts back somewhat on the pedantism, because that can be really annoying if you are not equally as into whatever he is deep-diving on (for example, the pages of gun arcana in REAMDE). The co-author is a woman, too, so I hope the women characters get more nuance than they traditionally do in his books (they largely are reduced to nymphet men).

Same bookstore also had The Feynmann Lectures on Physics, hardbound new edition, with the Tips books too. Not a page turner, but I will get through them.

Yeah, I fell off Stephenson with the Baroque Cycle. I just couldn't grind through the first one, not least because I already knew a lot of the history that he was using as a narrative structure. I tried again with Anathem and I liked it, but his endings are still awkward. I loved Zodiac, Snow Crash, and The Diamond Age (except for the endings) but, after that, he seemed to take the angle that he could write about any esoteric topic that crossed his mind and people would buy millions of them. And he's right. More power to him. Just not really for me.

jeb wrote: I picked up Neal Stephenson's The Something Or Other of D.O.D.O., which I didn't even know about. He's got a co-author, and I hope that cuts back somewhat on the pedantism, because that can be really annoying if you are not equally as into whatever he is deep-diving on (for example, the pages of gun arcana in REAMDE). The co-author is a woman, too, so I hope the women characters get more nuance than they traditionally do in his books (they largely are reduced to nymphet men).

Same bookstore also had The Feynmann Lectures on Physics, hardbound new edition, with the Tips books too. Not a page turner, but I will get through them.

I liked DODO more than most recent Stephenson (although I liked Seveneves), and you really can feel the influence of Nicole Galland for the better in that book. She was a co-author on some of that Mongoliad multi-author stuff (that I skipped), but I liked DODO enough that I've been meaning to check out her solo novels.

I think I posted about it when it came out (so like last page, given how slowly book thread moves). (edit: actually page 39)

I'm working on Captive Paradise, a book on the history of Hawaii that I bought when I was in Kauai (at the westernmost bookstore in the US) and saved specifically for when it got cold and shitty outside.

Yeah, a lot of Neal Stephenson's books just kind of stop. D.O.D.O. and Seveneves do too, but now I suspect he's looking to start series' with these. REAMDE had a better ending, but then it stands alone better than those other two mentioned above.

Not Sure wrote:

jeb wrote: I picked up Neal Stephenson's The Something Or Other of D.O.D.O., which I didn't even know about. He's got a co-author, and I hope that cuts back somewhat on the pedantism, because that can be really annoying if you are not equally as into whatever he is deep-diving on (for example, the pages of gun arcana in REAMDE). The co-author is a woman, too, so I hope the women characters get more nuance than they traditionally do in his books (they largely are reduced to nymphet men).

Same bookstore also had The Feynmann Lectures on Physics, hardbound new edition, with the Tips books too. Not a page turner, but I will get through them.

I liked DODO more than most recent Stephenson (although I liked Seveneves), and you really can feel the influence of Nicole Galland for the better in that book. She was a co-author on some of that Mongoliad multi-author stuff (that I skipped), but I liked DODO enough that I've been meaning to check out her solo novels.

I think I posted about it when it came out (so like last page, given how slowly book thread moves). (edit: actually page 39)

I'm working on Captive Paradise, a book on the history of Hawaii that I bought when I was in Kauai (at the westernmost bookstore in the US) and saved specifically for when it got cold and shitty outside.

Ooh, no, I'd missed that post! And I even got called out! Alas. Uba! We need slack-style @callouts stat! Anyway, thanks for the that heads' up. I don't always read this thread, I am not sure why. I just skip some of these from time to time and they advance without my insights! Infuriating. Anyway, I will start reading it and blogging it. Sure. That got a bunch of hits last time.

san il defanso wrote: I started listening to the audiobook of The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. It's off to a strong start. I've been really impressed with her world building, because she has grounded so many of her world's details in relatable emotional stakes. Very interested to see how it proceeds, and if it stays this good the two sequels will definitely get my attention.

I liked The Fifth Season alright. The world building, specifically in the history of geologic cataclysms and its continuing impact upon society, is pretty solid, as is the writing. I think my problem with it was the unrelenting bleakness. The novel begins with a world-shattering catastrophe and admits that everyone is going to die. Then it spends the rest of the time convincing you that all of these people deserve to die. Every single one. There is the imperial government and its agents who have turned an entire class of people into things. There is the aforementioned class of thing people who can and will destroy the world. Then there is everyone else who has bought into and preserves this system. Even David Fincher movies have jokes. Not enough there to make me want to finish the trilogy.

I prefer her Inheritance trilogy. There still aren't jokes, but I like the conceit a bit more. The gods are real. One member of the trinity is dead, and the second imprisoned the third on earth as punishment for rebelling against him.

Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) by Matt Czaia. Another contemporary poetry collection. Had a favorable review in a journal I read, so I figured it was worth a pick up.

I don't know. The prose isn't as strong as The Slow Art, but it was really reaching for something different, at least where they could possibly be compared. Czaia's love poems border on the ecstatic, overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotion. On seeing his wife, he writes, "I am standing here in my bath towel/ and you are there on that bed, smiling out at me,/ eyes unsure, and I-don't-want-to-die/ welling up inside me". There's another piece that might literally have been the best man toast at his brother's wedding. Sierra's love poems are almost brooding, tentative, afraid. The most ecstatic her love gets is picking out what pieces to eat from the heart of a hog butchered that day. Maybe I'm just more at ease in that guarded, less vulnerable position.

The most interesting poems, for me, were when Czaia dealt with the fallout of the sex abuse scandal in the Twin Cities and learning that the priest of his teenaged years had been accused of abuse and solicited a prostitute. There's one that opens with sending the diocese's archbishop and vicar general to the deepest circle of Dante's Hell but ends, "And I know people in glass homes shouldn't throw stones./ And, yes, this poem is a stone/ and I aim to hit./ … /Still-watch me cock my arm just so./ Now watch me throw." "Jonah" opens "I wanted a badder God,/ a bigger, badder God." There's some good stuff in there.

jeb wrote: Ooh, no, I'd missed that post! And I even got called out! Alas. Uba! We need slack-style @callouts stat! Anyway, thanks for the that heads' up. I don't always read this thread, I am not sure why. I just skip some of these from time to time and they advance without my insights! Infuriating. Anyway, I will start reading it and blogging it. Sure. That got a bunch of hits last time.

Yeah, but what did you end up thinking about Gnomon (pg 42?)

Miss seeing you (or anyone really) in Book Thread.

Still rating Alan Moore's Jerusalem.

Decided to try reading Jane Austen's Emma just to see what all the fuss is about. Grinding through all the aristocratic idiocy at the moment.

Not Sure wrote:

jeb wrote: Ooh, no, I'd missed that post! And I even got called out! Alas. Uba! We need slack-style @callouts stat! Anyway, thanks for the that heads' up. I don't always read this thread, I am not sure why. I just skip some of these from time to time and they advance without my insights! Infuriating. Anyway, I will start reading it and blogging it. Sure. That got a bunch of hits last time.

Yeah, but what did you end up thinking about Gnomon (pg 42?)

Miss seeing you (or anyone really) in Book Thread.

I'm back, baby! Well, mostly. I go through moods, and some of them don't involve reading books so much.

I had to go look up what GNOMON was, actually. Then I said, oh yeah, yeah, the CLOUD ATLAS thing with the shark and all the cameras, yeah. That kind of sums up my GNOMON feelings. Harkaway is a solid writer, and his ideas are neat, but there's something really forgettable about his books. They are a weird combination of weird-but-not-weird-enough that puts him in a low impact zone on my psyche. You know who he reminds me of? China Mieville. Same kind of thing. I am reading the book and thinking to myself, "IMAJICA is better." Or, "THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM is better." They are stylistically fine, but they end up kind of empty in the final calculus of ideas and execution.

I don't actively dislike them, like I did Cantero's MEDDLING KIDS or late Stephen King. But they are just over the edge of Young Adult triflings and they're just not for me.

ThirstyMan wrote:
Decided to try reading Jane Austen's Emma just to see what all the fuss is about. Grinding through all the aristocratic idiocy at the moment.

....you expect it to stop?

Nah, sometimes you just have to read to find out what the fuss was all about in the mid 18th Century. Innovative new style of exposition, apparently.

In the driver's seat I turned to look at the couple through the plexiglass. The man held his wife and gently whispered to her, cradling her head. Just before I started the engine I could hear the soft sound of her sobbing. As I drove through the unmarked streets of the village, trying to find my way to the highway, I felt for a moment that I had become lost. Beyond the last house, I saw a white dog in the darkness at the edge of my headlights staring into the night.
[...]
Later that night, as I sat in the transport van listening to the calls come out over the radio, I realized I had forgotten their names.

Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border

jeb wrote: I had to go look up what GNOMON was, actually. Then I said, oh yeah, yeah, the CLOUD ATLAS thing with the shark and all the cameras, yeah. That kind of sums up my GNOMON feelings. Harkaway is a solid writer, and his ideas are neat, but there's something really forgettable about his books. They are a weird combination of weird-but-not-weird-enough that puts him in a low impact zone on my psyche. You know who he reminds me of? China Mieville. Same kind of thing. I am reading the book and thinking to myself, "IMAJICA is better." Or, "THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM is better." They are stylistically fine, but they end up kind of empty in the final calculus of ideas and execution.

See, I have the opposite sort of feeling. i think Harkaway has all the glorious turn of phrase of someone like Stephenson (or on a good day, Pynchon), but manages to make a book that's actually readable.

I often finf myself recalling a random scene, trying to figure out where it was, and then discovering it was Harkaway all along. But, I also think Angelmaker was the best of his so far, edging out Gnomon by a bit.

Sure, there are bigger "modern novels", but I find he hits a sweet spot between "I'm slogging through this because it's good for me" and "I'm actually enjoying this book".

But you can be bored by them and that's okay, man! I also like most of China Mieville's stuff.