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Author Topic: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread  (Read 2401 times)

delphonso

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #15 on: June 05, 2023, 09:03:55 am »

Lost progress in City by Simak when my epub app fucked itself with an update. This was for the best, as I was only plodding away at the book and not really paying attention. May come back to it this year.

Starfish by Peter Watts
The first novel by Watts, who wrote Blindsight that I read in January. Although not as nuanced and clever as Blindsight, this book is very similar. It's a character study of several abuse victims, who sign up (or not) to work a geothermal rig on the bottom of the ocean. They interact with the wildlife, each other, and their own trauma. Small cast of complex characters, and I loved it. Some weak moments that I was willing to forgive, because I know Watts does it better in later books. A common criticism is that it feels like two novellas stapled together, and I'd say that's true, but fine, as the character interactions were enough to blast me through it.

Maelstrom by Peter Watts
A sequel, which is more of a Neuromancer-inspired hard cyberpunk story rather than a personal character story and I hated it. It ground to a halt for me, and the interesting scifi stuff wasn't enough to make up for the scattered narrative and unrelatable character motivations. In general, it covers the spread of an unstoppable pathogen across the Americas and the reaction from an semi-organic internet. Cool ideas, but without a strong and sympathetic cast, much of it felt tacted on. Probably would have done better as a standalone, rather than sequel, as the holdover characters either act out of character or are more or less reinvented for the second book.

The Crystal Shard by R. A. Salvatore.
The DnD movie and running a first time game for some coworkers got me interested to actually read the Forgotten Realms source material. The first book by Salvatore, this was a slow read, but fun, classic fantasy. Light on magic, high on adventure and punch. Drizzt and his crew fight giants, a dragon, a demon, and an evil, childish wizard in a 5-year cycle of conflict and collaboration. In typical late 80's fashion, the few female characters are one dimensional only (though I hear this improves in the series). The main cast is stereotypical and often 2 dimensional, but I wasn't expecting much and was pleasantly surprised by the variety of scenes, interactions, and complex motivations. I'll likely read more of these. Salvatore is a solid writer, but by no means a mastermind.

Chthon by Piers Anthony.
An engrossing, insane read. Ironic for the themes of the book, I loved and hated this book. Chthon is a prisoner-run prisonmine for the terminally insane and violent, often flashing back to the main character's early days, we find out how he ended up in Chthon, escaped, and sought vengence afterwards. I've never read Piers Anthony before (and didn't recognize him as the Xanth (fantasy Florida) guy). His vocabulary is excellent, and I appreciated the skilled weaving of elements in the story. Perhaps some research would have helped. This misogynistic, violent, Oedopean tale is very well written, and I was expecting the sexism to be a sort of Nabokov-style criticism (I mean the main character went to super jail) but it actually seems to have been 'evidence' of the protagonist's good side? It's a weird book, and I just finished it. Maybe some rumination is required, but either way, the prose was great and the story itself was engrossing (emphasis on gross). It's a recommended read for me, but buy a used copy if anything, because I don't think this guy should get money from you.

I'm moving on to Streams of Silver (second R.A. Salvatore book) as a mental respite. The Stars, My Destination is also on the docket from my classic scifi haul. 17 books done and dusted this year. My wife and I are now in friendly competition to see who can read the most this year. It's an endurance race more than anything, but Chthon, Blindsight, Solaris, and Starfish were all sprints.

delphonso

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #16 on: June 26, 2023, 10:11:41 pm »

Streams of Silver by R. A. Salvatore.
A bit of a change of formula from the last book, this follows two parties, one on an adventure and the second party tracking the first. The characters, roughly, get more depth. The weakest of these is the interactions between the dwarf and the halfling - which are meant to be a major driving tension, but come off as childish. Not as engaging or well-written as the first book, but I did enjoy it, and it came with some cool scenes that I'll likely steal for my own campaigns. The ending of this book is much stronger than the first one.

Loot by Tania James.
Didn't know what I was getting into here, literally just judged the book by its cover and gave it a read. I was pleasantly surprised. The book follows the life of Abbas, a naturally gifted toymaker in Mysore from the 1790s onwards. The book actually took me off guard at first, as I thought it was just heavily taking from reality (the story focuses around a historical tiger automaton) and I didn't realize I was reading historical fiction until the drawing of the tiger came into view and I went "wait, I've seen that before." The real object, Tippu's Tiger, was made by two people lost to history, and this book follows the supposed lives of those two. The humor is pretty childish for how sexual the rest of the scenes can get - an odd mix, but not an unpleasant one.
I'm a big critic on authors' use of voice, but this book is really a masterpiece of that. Really really recommend.

I also read some of the Pathfinder Golarion short fictions. Maybe novellas, maybe just short stories?
Guns of Alkenstar by Ed Greenwood.
I expected this to be pretty good, because Greenwood is a well-known author in fantasy, even if I haven't really read anything by him. This was absolute shit. The character descriptions are jarring and occasionally disgusting:
Quote
a silly youngskirts not beautiful enough for anyone to desire or molest, nor smart enough to accomplish anything
The rest of the short story is just a slideshow of poorly named characters appearing and then immediately being blown up by bullets or bombs as the characters rush around undescribed scenes on very weak motivations. Pretty shithouse, but at least it was a fast read.
Hold up, I'm not done complaining about this book. There's 3 terms used in the book to describe the three characters: Shieldmarshal, Gunmarshal, and Gunhunter. There are clearly significant differences between these, but fuck me if I know what they are, because everyone mentioned as one of these is also a double agent for one of the other ones and some characters are two but not three of these and aren't double agents.

Plow and Sword by Robert E. Vardeman
Vardeman is also a well-practiced fantasy author, particularly for franchises. Friends of mine are fans of Swords of Raemllyn, though I haven't read that yet. Plow and Sword didn't disappoint like Alkenstar did. It's sort of a Red or John Wick style story - clearly a retired killer who is now working the land in the place of his brother, marrying his widowed sister-in-law and taking the boys as his own. One day, the neighbor's farmhouse is set aflame by brigands and our main character unleashes justified violence on them. Good action scenes and grisly fights, it's a shallow but fun read I did in about 2 hours. It was nice to see some references that I actually understood from the Pathfinder game: Aldori Swordlord and the Riverlands.

That's all I got done this month, but it's better than I expected. Counting the novellas, that's 21 this year. I've got 5 bulky fantasy novels now, so we'll see which one I attempt first, or if I return to Drizzt's stories.
« Last Edit: June 27, 2023, 08:06:02 am by delphonso »
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Telgin

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #17 on: June 26, 2023, 11:50:44 pm »

That character description reminds me a bit of all of Jim Butcher's "older" works.  My brother has most of his works in his collection and I've read most of that by now.  I say older because his very newest books feel better, but even some that are only a few years old have some issues.

Most of the Dresden Files books have at least one creepy or gratuitous description of young women that reminds me of that.  There's more than one mention of Harry knowing a girl "since she was in training bras", and one particularly egregious thing that really stuck with me was a moment where Harry mentally noted two women "sizing each other up to see how much of a social threat they were, as women do."  There was also a moment where Harry took a moment to notice the "modest breasts" of the corpse of a woman who had been partially devoured by a ghoul.

I kind of subscribed to the camp that it was just Harry and I could kind of look past it, but after picking up The Codex Alera I can see that it's just Jim Butcher.  There haven't been any moments I've gotten to yet that are quite that bad, but there's a weird horniness suffusing every female character.  I haven't finished it yet, so we'll see how bad that gets.

On the other hand, I also recently read The Aeronaut's Windlass, which is one of his newest books.  The women in it are comparably much better written and I think he's taking some of the criticisms to heart.  Some women are abducted in the book and the idea of rape is tossed around, but only to emphasize how it doesn't happen to them, and the characters aren't ever sexualized to any serious degree that I remember.

I just wish I could have gotten into the book more.  About 70% of the book is about characters I don't really empathize with, and I can't quite put a finger on why.  I think it's because the book starts off as if it'll be a bout airship battles, then spends most of the book not being that.  When it gets back to it at the end of the book, it's finally interesting again.
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delphonso

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #18 on: June 27, 2023, 12:35:05 am »

I'll have to read more Greenwood to know if it was just tropes and low effort of if that's something that carries through his books elsewhere. There's a police chief-like character we meet with whiplash and most of the only descriptions of her are physical and needlessly so. Something like 'she looked over her sensuous shoulder'. I had wondered if this was meant to be in one of the characters' voices, but the narrator doesn't seem to be any of them. I only wondered that because one of them had previously dated the chief. A detail that never came up or was useful at all.

Frumple

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #19 on: June 27, 2023, 08:02:25 pm »

I kind of subscribed to the camp that it was just Harry and I could kind of look past it, but after picking up The Codex Alera I can see that it's just Jim Butcher.  There haven't been any moments I've gotten to yet that are quite that bad, but there's a weird horniness suffusing every female character.  I haven't finished it yet, so we'll see how bad that gets.
I don't remember exactly which one it was, other than somewhere in the first three or so, but there's a scene that's just... rape bait, is the best way I can describe it. It doesn't quite go over the line, but it goes right up to it, pulls a cliffhanger, and then pulls back from going the whole way. Was honestly kinda' disgusting on a number of levels, from what I remember of it.

... worse than what I can recall reading from his dresden works, basically. Can't remember if it was that, or something else, that led me to just kinda' putting down the codex stuff and walking off, but it was something.
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Telgin

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #20 on: June 27, 2023, 10:00:43 pm »

Looks like it's the first one, if the scene I just hit is the one you're thinking about.  It's the one with the smokehouse and slave collars and pretty gross responses from one of the women involved.

It feels like it was written to just try to make the secondary villain seem like an irredeemable monster, but he'd already done plenty of that so it feels entirely unnecessary.
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Frumple

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #21 on: June 27, 2023, 10:27:48 pm »

Yeah, I'unno. Quick check 'cause I thought I had mentioned something about it earlier (sorta', but nothing specific enough in regards to relevancy to quote) suggests it's something that might be going to come up more than just that scene, so. Yeah.

It's been the better part of a decade since I read it, but I could half-way swear the one that hit particularly egregiously (i.e. it's basically all I remembered about the Codex stuff offhand, heh) was in the second or third of series, though.

The problem I remember wasn't that it was being used to portray any specific character as being irredeemable, but that it was basically being very clearly written to titillate, more or less being used as a cheap theatrics sort of thing in a way that felt pretty off even back then, when I was notably less likely to really notice that kind of thing. Cliffhanger stuff of some of the worst kind, more or less.

At the time I was more or less hardcore trawling through even more junk-tier fanfiction than I trawl through these days, and if you're standing out as concerning compared to that stuff there's probably something wrong, heh. Codex has some fairly strong points otherwise, iirc, but from the search check I was talking about it in the same breath and same way as I was Piers Anthony, which, uh. That's an author dat got some issues, heh.
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hector13

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #22 on: June 30, 2023, 03:19:31 am »

It’d be cool if I read a book this year. Unlikely.

Pretty sure I wrote a critical analysis of Streams of Silver for a high school English class at college, against the advice of the tutor.

Oh well. I got a C for the class because English is a stupid class.
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delphonso

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #23 on: July 12, 2023, 09:30:02 am »

It’d be cool if I read a book this year. Unlikely.

Pretty sure I wrote a critical analysis of Streams of Silver for a high school English class at college, against the advice of the tutor.

Oh well. I got a C for the class because English is a stupid class.

I love this.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Pathfinder is the only Path. For some reason I only read pathfinder stuff for the last 3 weeks. I'm surprised I got as much done as I did, but I guess I've been doing a lot of reading while waiting for my daughter to fall asleep.

2 full novels:

Nightglass by Liane Merciel:

This was actually super interesting, if not exceptionally well-written. The story is effectively in two parts (a favorite style of mine), the first being the abduction and upbringing of our main character Isiem. He goes to wizarding school in a BDSM darkness-worshipping death cult, in an edgelordy slave-town with human sculptures all around. Normally this stuff drives me nuts, but it was so well-done that it didn't come off as edgy, but rather, just dark. The descriptions of magic (especially spell components) were very cool and the school-days themselves were very interesting. We got to see a wizard, a sorcerer pretending to be a wizard, and a warlock who seeks revenge - as well as vague references to clerics. The second half of the book is equally interesting, as Isiem becomes the sole contact to the native strix (birdfolk) on a silver mine. Really great scenes of complex interactions and motivations. The writing across the board was good. Occasionally there were beautiful lines of prose. One sticks out to me still, describing magic: "blossoming into a chrysanthemum, every petal a dragonfly's wing, and every vein, the border of a continent." That said, there is some poor writing occasionally. Isiem has a random encounter with a landshark for really no reason at all, and the threat that it proposes sort of undercuts later interactions. Easily the best of the lot.

Pirate's Honor by Chris A. Jackson:

Jackson is clearly a sailor first and a writer second. The whole book was well-written enough to get me through it. It's pithy, easy to read, and straight-forward. There's a lot of boat porn, describing all the ropes, bits and bobs, and using as many nautical terms as possible (the afterward by the author suggests he even wrote this on a boat.) The entire book's premise is a sort of Oceans Eleven gambit, however the core conflict lies on bad story-telling. Basically one of the members of the plot has a change of heart because their mark "seems like a really good guy." Then, when the plot gets spoiled, that really good guy is suddenly actually just a super bad as the other characters told us - though, from the reader's point of view this is doesn't come off as a clever reveal, the mark just has a 180 on his personality in the last 15% of the book. There's also a lot of romantic drama that is just...high school level, and doesn't reflect the apparently years-long deep love that is supposedly shared by our main characters. All in all, it was a fine read - very much like watching a Fast and Furious-quality film. The fight scenes were fun and the characters were simple, but distinct. The humor, however, missed the mark for me. Honestly wish I had read this on the beach or in a boat, which would have probably made it better.

3 short novellas:

A Lesson in Taxonomy by Dave Gross:

Sort of a boring short-story about a single clever thing one guy did to get away from some other guy. Not really sure what else to say - it was fine, I guess. Wasn't a fan of anything in it - the twist, the writing style, or the characters.

A Tomb of Winter's Plunder by Tim Pratt:

A similar story in structure to the one above, but more cleverly done. This story is effectively a chess game between an alchemist and a rogue. Both of whom are trying to get the better of the other as they work through a trap-filled tomb that happens to have a sleeping dragon in it. It was a fun read.

Blood Crimes by J. C. Hay:

A strong dismount to my reading this month. Blood Crimes follows a rogue, a ghoul, and a spy who dresses as a zombie as they dig up dirt on a mobster who is trying to poison the vampiric overlords of their undead-infested town. Overall it was a ton of fun. The writing style really jived with me, especially giving the main character (the female rogue) the inner monologue of a 50's detective. I love a good one-liner and there were a couple here. The weakest character was the ghoul, but some of the most interesting moments came from him - slipping off a roof's ledge and they don't go to grab him because touching a ghoul can paralyze you.

I was interested to see what else J.C. Hay had written and apparently he's a romance-novel author, setting everything in sci-fi/cyberpunk settings. Honestly could be tempted to read one of these based on his writing in the short story. Also he looks cool as fuck.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm counting that as 26 for the year, because novellas count and this is a competition. My wife said she's stopped reading, which puts me firmly ahead. I'm going to try "The Stars My Destination" next and lean more into scifi/space opera for the next few.
« Last Edit: July 12, 2023, 09:32:11 am by delphonso »
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delphonso

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #24 on: August 06, 2023, 01:43:47 am »

I 'joined' a Sci Fi book club online. I say joined but really I just read the first book and found everyone's commentary on the book shallow and distracted, so I'm still on the fence. I could read the next one and give them another shot. We'll see.

Book club: Provenance by Ann Leckie.
Provenance is at its heart, a mystery novel - the sci-fi dressing neither detracts nor amplifies the core mystery - that is, who is the murderer? The main character's internal monologue shows her anxious nature, which makes her really endearing as she attempts to distinguish herself and get out from her brother's shadow. The main story isn't particularly impressive, and neither is the world building, nor characters. However, the whole thing feels incredibly real. The character motivations make sense for people in their world - a sci fi far future. The murder mystery and greater plot is incredibly tied to the world that Leckie has built, but reads as if you're there as well, just along for the ride.
Leckie also has non-binary characters who us 'e, em, eir' pronouns. This took a while for me to catch, sadly, assuming it was an epub error, but it reflected Leckie's understanding of the future very well - the people in the book really do feel like us in the far future, with some of the same issues (anxiety) and with a lot of progress as well (identity politics are finished, everyone has employment offered, but realistically, much of it is shitty). Very happy I read it, overall.

Digimon Adventure Vol 1 - fantranslated
I...don't know why I read this. This was a retelling of the first 3 arcs of the Digimon tv show when we were kids. That is - the devimon black gears arc, then meeting etemon and forcing agumon to evolve, and finally defeating etemon and nanomon with metalgreymon.
Roughly novel length, it covered about 25 episodes of the anime. The story itself is fine, if not distinctly comic and cartoony. The best part was finding very awkward translation choices. Some, the fault of the original light novel author, and others by fan translators - an email from delphonso@the-forums.bay12games, then a paragraph explaining that this must be an email from delphonso who we met at the forums. The forums for bay12games!

Echopraxia by Peter Watts
Echopraxia introduces The Bicamerals, a faith-based hivemind who make better predictions than science can, despite having no explanatory power - merely faith. They, and a rag-tag crew including out main character, fly off to the sun to run into an alien lifeform on a giant solar-array, then blast back to earth to see it all go to shit.
This sequel to Blindsight has some of the same issues I had with Maelstrom from Starfish. More characters, wider scope, larger scenario. Honestly there's just too much going on here - vampires, two additional types of undead, fear-based memory enhancement, The Bicamerals, Bleeding edge teched folks, pre-programmed soldiers, genetic mutation, tele-printing life-forms, predicting the future, a rampant disease that is mentioned in a single line, but is also the namesake of the book... I can go on, too.
Watts knocks it out the park when there's 5 people stuck in an elevator, but everywhere else I think he flounders a bit. That said, he is clearly a much more skilled author now than when he wrote Maelstrom. Echopraxia was very good, beginning to end, and hit more topics closer to home for me than what Blindsight did. Topics on faith and coincidence, things like 'what could overthrow the scientific method', and fear in the face of technological advancement. The stuff with vampires in this book I think went too far, explaining things better left unexplained, but Watts doesn't mitocholoreans the whole thing. Great read.

City by Simak
Abandoned this earlier this year and am so happy I went back to it.
City shares 8 short stories about the uplifting of dogs to human intellect and the removal of humans from earth - to avoid tainting their pure hearts with our inherent violence. This book predates a lot of tropes, and has a lot of novel ideas that I haven't seen frequently reflected in other material. Notably, what happens on Jupiter (I'll let you read it yourself) is poetic and perfect.
It has a lot of interesting ideas, especially coming from just a few years after the a-bombs dropped. People spread out to avoid cities, because they're giant bullseyes. There's a lot of solarpunk aspects to this book that predates most (if any) dialogue on climate change, and it hits on many of my personal favorites: uplifted animals, entirely different perception, and long-time tales. The whole book covers 12000 years, but is told as a annotated version written by some dog philosophers even further past that point. Super cool concepts!


30 done this year, I went back to my wife's hometown and finished 3 books in 6 days. I've got a lot of half started books on my list, so might just leisurely move through them from now on.

EDIT: Came back to rewrite everything because it's not a good synopsis of the books. I've finished Fahrenheit 451, and am now reading "The Last Castle" by Jack Vance
« Last Edit: August 11, 2023, 03:29:57 am by delphonso »
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Travis Bickle

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #25 on: August 13, 2023, 03:32:03 am »

Haven't actually done that much reading lately, so it's probably time to get back into it. I read The Marvelous St. Philomena by Marian Horvat et aliae in honor of the saint's feast day. It was short and to the point, perhaps too much so. A lot of popular books on saints don't have enough meat, in my opinion.

If I can find the copy that I know I have buried somewhere, I might try to read Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky was probably the only fiction author I was ever assigned in my undergraduate years that I feel any desire to revisit, except maybe Camus.
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delphonso

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #26 on: October 24, 2023, 12:48:46 am »

Some of this was on my old phone, so I might be missing one...though if I can't remember it, did I really read it?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
So I was never assigned this in High School, so I never read it back then. I don't even remember why I picked it up, but damn if it's not still riveting. Well-deserving of the praise, it's a prescient novel. The interesting thing for me comes down to the dystopia Bradbury builds. It's a world of shallow happiness, which is 'evil' because it is 1. totalitarian in ideas and 2. without deeper happiness/meaning. I honestly don't really come down so hard on those two, referring to the whole, "who is happier? a pig or socrates?" debate. Anyway, it was a super fast read, and the prose is beautiful beyond comparison. The description of a nuclear strike was impeccable.

The Last Castle by Jack Vance
The Last Castle is about slavery, at its roots. The ultra-elite live in their mile-thick castles across Earth, with a hierarchy of subservient species doing all the labor necessary for their luxury. The primary labor class (Meks), rise up and begin wiping the humans off the planet. One castle remains, and the denizens argue over what must be done. This is an incredible piece of world-building. In just over 100 pages, Vance builds a thicker tapestry than any fantasy I've read. The humans are themselves alien - committed to weird ceremony to the point of helplessness. The world is built up in such a strange way but it immediately registers as factual in-universe. Almost as if Hitchhiker's Guide wasn't a comedy. Don't really know how else to describe the book - it's great. It's all about people trying to make a plan of action, who haven't had to perform any actions for generations.

Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (pseudonymed as Murray Constantine)
A very short book that I savored - reading each page slowly and meticulously - which is indeed fitting for the story. The story is set mostly in Germany, 700 years after the Nazis conquered all of Europe, Russia and Africa. The Japanese split the rest of the globe with them, in an eternal standoff. The story of Hitler has been turned into a myth and religion - exploded directly from God's head, Hitler was a 8 foot-tall blonde Aryan goliath, who conquered the world himself. The story follows Alfred and Hermann, a Brit and a German who are informed of this great lie by one of the Teutonic Knights (the nazi aristocracy) and tasked with protecting a book which contains a few threads of the true history of earth. Burdekin was a feminist writer and wrote this book during Nazi expansionism. It is fundamentally a critique of the end-goal of Fascism: the destruction of all independent thought and the absolute authority of the man. Women in this book are below second-class citizens. Literally confined and treated as breed-mares, they're not considered humans, merely animals. The book is mostly dialogues between the Knight von Hess and Alfred. It's a wonderful critique, particularly as it was written before the true breadth and depth of the Holocaust was understood.

Redshirts by John Scalzi
Redshirts is (supposed to be, at least) a comedy along the lines of Galaxyquest. The crew of the Intrepid (basically, the Enterprise) discover that whenever they go on away missions with the bridge crew, their life expectancy suddenly shortens. No matter how bad things go (and they always go bad), the main crew are safe. They then take it into their own hands to save their own lives. Honestly the dialogue in this book drove me insane. It's smarmy and pithy but in the way that TV shows are 'clever' - i.e., earnestly trying to get a laugh every 3 lines. It's exhausting, annoying, and sometimes extremely frustrating. Characters ask about some event and the answer is "do you really want to know???" and they back down, leaving the reader also ignorant. And maybe, just maybe, I did want to know what the fuck is going on or how such-and-such happened. This book would be as big "don't recommend" for me if it weren't for the 3 codas at the end. There are 3 short-stories which address the more deep philosophical questions the book rises. The gimmick of these short stories did nothing for me (written in the first, second, and third person) other than occasionally distract me. But it gave me what I wanted from the story that the dialogue never served up: a bit of deeper thought and reflection.

The core mystery to the book is never satisfactorily addressed: somehow this thing is happening. I would have happily taken 'psychic temporal-space gas' as an answer and homage to old Star Trek, but we didn't even get that.

Final criticism: the characters names are all too similar. Dahl, Duvall, a few other D-names in the first chapters. Hanson, Hester are both side characters and very easy to forget about/mix up. There are two Nicks introduced within 5 pages of each-other, and get referred to as their first names most of the time. C'mon man.

I'm halfway through The Stars My Destination, after finally really starting it. It's so fucking good. I'm at 34 this year. Hoping to break 40. If I can, that'll easily stomp my records for the past decade.


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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #27 on: October 24, 2023, 09:58:49 am »

I'm re-reading old sci-fi. I need to actually read my genre but I hate it.

<p style="diatribe">Old sci-fi, I think, would be more approachable if there wasn't a weird subgroup of people around certain authors that romanticize incessantly about their idiosyncrasies. PKD was a great author but making him out to be a kind of matyr-seer is beyond my understanding. Though I could be spending too much time elsewhere on the internet, and observing the strangeness of people in strange lands.</p>

I finished The Myth of Sisyphus. I read it kinda-sorta at the behest of an absurdist friend of mine, and I understand why he likes it so much. The discussion of Kirilov's suicide resonated with me, but I was already a reader of Dostoyevsky and Kafka before reading the piece. I plan on finishing Moby Dick next, the chewy nature of the novel warrants a rereading, I think, so I'll hope to have that done soon so I can start rereading it next year.
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TD1

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #28 on: October 24, 2023, 10:16:00 am »

Ah, Moby Dick. Superbly written. Almost... superbly overwritten.

I've not read much old sci fi. Do the Honor Harrington books count? I really enjoyed them up until.... ehhh, pretty spoilery. But an event which changed the tone to even more political than previously.
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zhijinghaofromchina

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Re: 2023 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread
« Reply #29 on: October 24, 2023, 10:18:38 am »

 :)嗨,朋友们,在我看完乱世佳人电影的几个月后,我花了一个月的时间完成了乱世佳人(gone with the wind)的阅读,今天上午我刚去图书馆换完书,我将开始愤怒的葡萄的阅读。
It is said that the angry grapes got a high remark in the American literature field ,right ?If there is anyone know about it , you can send personal message to me ,if not offended .:)
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