What books are you reading?

I finally finished [Creation Lake] on my iPad about a month ago while camping on the southern Oregon coast in our van without internet access. I didn't hate it, and parts of it were funny

I am not reading White Noise right now, but I bought a used trade paperback and came across this great passage:

I have been on a Silvia Moreno-Garcia kick ever since discovering her Mexican Gothic last year.

The Seventh Veil of Salome. Parallel story about the kinda-Biblical Salome (niece of King Herod who demanded the head of John the Baptist, but most of what is "known" about her is extra-textual backfill by enterprising scribes), interwoven with a golden-age Hollywood plot about an actress trying to get her big break in a sword-and-sandal adaptation of Salome. The most straight literary work of SMG's I've read. I liked the Hollywood plot more than the Biblical retelling.

Silver Nitrate. Two characters who live in 1990s Mexico City, work in entertainment (one as a sound editor, the other as a washed-up telenovela actor), come across a rumor of a lost horror film from a legendary director. The film is allegedly cursed, has a trail of bodies in its wake over decades, and might have some leftover group of Golden Dawn wannabes pursuing it because they think it has some kind of real power. Great romp, great characters.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell fame. A tight and lyrical second-world mystery, an unreliable naïfish narrator inhabiting a world that is nothing but a sprawling mansion of endless rooms and corridors. One other person exists, shows up irregularly, seems to know a lot more than the narrator. I liked JS&MN, but it really leaned into the Victorian trope of sprawling, paid-by-the-word writing. This is a fast and gripping read. Very fun; recommended.

I thought it was very good. Reminded me of Plato's shadow people in the caves.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal.

A fun combination of alt-history plus hard sci-fi, set in the 1950s at the dawn of the space race. The main character is a Hidden Figures-style calculator; her husband is a NASA engineer. A meteorite hits off the eastern seaboard, killing hundreds of thousands, including most of the US government. The calculator and her husband are out of the area on vacation, avoiding the worst of it. The surviving government asks her to calculate if it could have been a Soviet missile strike. In the course of running numbers, she finds out (a) no, it's beyond their current capabilities, and (b) the meteorite threw enough seawater into the air that there's going to be a three-year winter famine, followed by a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect: water vapor in the atmosphere traps heat, raising the temperature, the increased temperature causes more oceanic evaporation, the evaporation puts more water vapor in the atmosphere, which traps more heat....

She figures humanity has a bit over 50 years before the oceans start to boil, so if the species will survive it has to establish off-planet colonies until it can figure out a solution to the planetary problem. And do this all with 1950s technology.

Very fun and in the best tradition of hard sci-fi, of smart people solving hard problems with ingenuity and perseverance.

I am currently reading Death Angel's Shadow (1973), by Karl Edward Wagner. It is a collection of three stories featuring Kane the mystic swordsman, the protagonist of several novels also written by Wagner. Kane is superficially similar to Conan the barbarian, though more of a cerebral anti-hero who is not adverse to sorcery. Kane is apparently the biblical Cain, cursed to wander forever after killing his brother Abel. His adventures are classic sword and sorcery with a definite gothic horror influence. The style of writing is lurid and fast-paced. Though I am not finished with reading the first story ("Reflections for the Winter of My Soul"), the story feels familiar because John Ostrander was clearly inspired by it while writing a specific story arc for his excellent Grimjack comic.

I'm reading (again) Rainbow Six. I haven't read it since it came out, and it is great fun. It's also making me nostalgic for the original 2 PC games. My friends and I played them on the LAN so much back then, it was so much fun. It was particularly cool having one person designated as the heartbeat monitor guy, telling us when it's safe to move, etc.

hotseatgames wrote: I'm reading (again) Rainbow Six. I haven't read it since it came out, and it is great fun. It's also making me nostalgic for the original 2 PC games. My friends and I played them on the LAN so much back then, it was so much fun. It was particularly cool having one person designated as the heartbeat monitor guy, telling us when it's safe to move, etc.

Man, that would make a great board game.

The wanderers by Chuck Wendig. A pandemic book, post pandemic is always fun. Turned out to be really good. Really liked the punk Rockstar character but that sort of has The Stand vibes. I'm sure Chuck knew that since he says the punk rock band had a Dark Tower concept album.

Shellhead wrote: I am currently reading Death Angel's Shadow (1973), by Karl Edward Wagner. It is a collection of three stories featuring Kane the mystic swordsman, the protagonist of several novels also written by Wagner. Kane is superficially similar to Conan the barbarian, though more of a cerebral anti-hero who is not adverse to sorcery. Kane is apparently the biblical Cain, cursed to wander forever after killing his brother Abel. His adventures are classic sword and sorcery with a definite gothic horror influence. The style of writing is lurid and fast-paced. Though I am not finished with reading the first story ("Reflections for the Winter of My Soul"), the story feels familiar because John Ostrander was clearly inspired by it while writing a specific story arc for his excellent Grimjack comic.

I went through a "must read all classic sword and sorcery tales" a while back, and the Kane stories were some of the best. Manages to be an ambiguous anti-hero but not a whiny git like Elric.

Too bad there weren't more of them. Wagner drank himself to death at a fairly young age.

Been blitzing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl books by Matt Dinneneman (sp?). I suppose these are litRPG books where "real world" people have to go through a DnD experience with overt rules and stats. Sort of a meta framework of the "system" to govern the game world, though there is no 4th wall breaking in this series like in some others.

Anyway, that's basically what this is, with the addition of some nice gutter humor and the kind of "out of the box" tactical thinking that gives Dungeon Masters headaches across the world. That one player who uses Tenser's Floating Disc to do some unorthodox, but technically legal, exploit that ends the quest and skips allllll the stuff you spent the past 3 weeks diligently preparing....yeah, Carl is that guy.

Pretty fun reads, each book is fairly quick, I'd be surprised if this doesn't get optioned into a streamer series at some point, though the underlying narrative going on is pretty grim.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. I'm in for pretty much everything Abercrombie writes and this sure is some of it. If you've read Abercrombie, you know what to expect. It's not "dark fantasy" in the sense of Warhammer, but it is definitely not heroic in any sense. Mostly morally ambiguous characters, generally trying to do the right thing, or at least survive, but who are thrown into situations where they have to make pretty rotten choices. What sets Abercrombie apart for me is the wry humor that runs through the writing -- the books are very funny, which is a nice counterpoint to otherwise bleak or nailbiting plots.

This is not in the same setting as his main writing (The Blade Itself etc.) but in an alt-history Europe where the Church is gender-swapped: the pope, bishops, and most of the saints are women; the savior was a woman, and male priests have the same status as nuns in the real world -- respected but not really granted a lot of power in the hierarchy.

And there's a handful of sorcerers, werewolves, and vampires. Elves are vaguely analogous to Jews -- they occupy the holy land and are second-class citizens in pretty much every way. Jews don't seem to exist in the setting.

Anyway, I'm about halfway through. Great read, will happily revisit any other books in the setting.

Recently re-read Woken Furies, by Richard K. Morgan. It's the third book of the Altered Carbon series. It's a very good science-fiction story, except that there are a few too many named characters and a few too many plot twists. Like all the best cyberpunk books, it borrows some style from old noir detective fiction. In this case, it is Raymond Chandler, who famously said, "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." Now that I have re-read all three books, I need to seek out and watch the tv show Altered Carbon.

The protagonist Takeshi Kovacs is not a hero. He is a former Envoy, which is like a commando with near-photographic memory, heightened awareness of surroundings, intuition, and an advanced ability to read social cues. Now he is back on his home world and on a mission of vengeance against religious extremists who tortured and killed his friend. Along the way, he accidentally gets involved with a revival of a revolutionary movement that includes some other old friends. A crucial aspect of the setting is that everyone gets a cortical stack implanted at the juncture of their brain stem and spinal cord, and said stack can be implanted in a different body for a significant price, even if the previous body is dead. Said new body might be a real human body, a clone body, or even a bioengineered body with superhuman upgrades. Kovacs is very smart, very cynical, and very angry. The ruling family of the planet illegally uploads an old backup copy of Kovacs into a bioengineered body and gives him resources to go capture the protagonist version of Kovacs.

The Altered Carbon show, and the anime, were both good.

I read The Financial Lives of Poets which did not quite live up to the amazing cover blurbs but was kind of fun. I'm also reading Ron Chernow's biography of Mark Twain. I ended up buying a Kobo reader so as to not have to hold up that 1,000 page volume. I checked it out of the library, which in a way is kind of like torrenting a movie. I'm about 30 percent of the way through it. Chernow keeps foreshadowing Twain's dark future. Twain was a literary celebrity, sort of invented an early version of the TED talk, was notoriously litigious and bad with money, and made multiple fortunes being really funny and outrageous, while hating that he wasn't taken seriously. I think Kurt Vonnegut wanted to be Twain.

The book makes me want to read a little more about the gilded age and reconstruction.