Marion: After The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler, I read Laird Barron’s Blood Standard, Book One in his action/crime series featuring Isiah Coleridge. It’s filled with quirky characters, gore, violence and the weird, breath-taking scenic descriptions I expect from Barron. It didn’t resonate with me but I always appreciate his writer’s eye and his prose.
Bill: Since our last status I read:
- The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty — a very fun middle-aged mom-as-pirate tale
- Dead Country by Max Gladstone: a welcome return to the highly recommended Craft series
- Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati: a solid retelling of (most of) the Greek story with a strongly realized titular character at its center
- Fields of Light and Shadow by David Young and The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang: pair of poetry collections that just weren’t for me, though the first had some strong pieces
- The Big Backyard by Ron Miller: a concisely informative look at our solar system beyond the outer planets
Sandy: Moi? I recently finished reading another John Brunner novel from the early 1960s, this one being entitled The Super Barbarians, which has never been republished since its initial Ace paperback appearance in 1962. I found this book to be fairly unputdownable. I also recently completed a book by anthropologist/sci-fi author Chad Oliver; his first novel for adults, entitled Shadows in the Sun (1954), which I enjoyed immensely. And currently, I am reading another book by Oliver, this one entitled The Shores of Another Sea, from 1971, which I am also finding to be absolutely unputdownable! I hope to be able to share some thoughts on all three of these books with you all shortly….
Terry: I’ve hit another patch of reader’s block, which means I’ve started any number of books and found none of them really capturing my attention except for a couple of novellas: Magic Tides by Ilona Andrews and Travel by Bullet (The Dispatcher) by John Scalzi. Both were quick, fun reads. I also finally finished The Embroidered Book by Kate Heartfield; it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but I could never quite bring myself to take it back to the library without finishing it. I enjoyed The Unraveller by Frances Hardinge, which has an interesting magic system based on curses. Now I find myself with bookmarks in 11 different books, most notably King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald, his first novel; The Best of Lucius Shepard, Volume One; and a quirky, fascinating study of the history of the tools we use to cook and eat, Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson. I never thought pots could be so interesting.
Broke out of a string of depressing reads with Django Wexler’s Ashes of the Sun, an entertaining pulp fantasy about incipient rebellion in the stagnant human society left after two advanced Elder species destroyed each other in a cataclysmic war. Before that I had to DNF Monica Ojeda’s Jawbone, a horror novel but with no fantastic aspect up through the first third (my stopping point), just psychologically damaged people engaging in self-harm and self-abasement. Before that was Fredric Brown’s massive short story collection From These Ashes–I read many of these stories, but not the 50% I aim for, since most of his stories are only a few pages in length and usually have a nasty O. Henry type twist to trip up the protagonist at the end. “Arena” and “Come and Go Mad” are two longer ones that are more satisfying. Before that was Martian Time-Slip, the most downbeat and unrewarding of the four 1964 Philip K. Dick books that I’ve read, with unlikable characters pursuing self-destructive schemes in a resource-poor (and racist) Mars colony.