Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The Time of the Dark by Barbara Hambley. I have read this, many years ago, but I remember it only vaguely, except that I liked it a lot. I hope I still like it a lot.

And very good it was, but very much first third of a story, not first novel in a trilogy.

I shall wait for a good offer before buying the rest.

Hmm... next I think it'll be Trial by Fire by Charles E Gannon. The second in a series, and I think I liked the first.

[ReneAZ]

I'm reading "The Hot Zone" (Richard Preston), only because it's next month's selection in my book club. It's about the origins (in the 60s-70s) of Ebola. It is well written (not full of too much medical jargon) and somewhat anecdotal, but I just don't care for the subject. I read for enjoyment, not enlightenment ;-) but will slog through (since I enjoy the actual book club gathering so much). I guess I should have a better attitude, with it being in the news so much lately, but it just so horrid.

[ATDrake]

So, did a reread of Charles Stross' The Apocalypse Codex to accompany the read of The Rhesus Chart, latest in his The Laundry Files series of Lovecraftian bureaucracy urban fantasy spy thriller spoofs which, Discworld-like, are gradually evolving into something more than their original satirical/pastiche concept.

This is one of my favourite series, not least because the juxtaposition of procedurally realistic deadly*-dull middle-management civil service maneuvering and office politics while trying to stave off the worst effects of When The Stars Are Right™ is terribly amusing.

Remember kids, saving the world involves lots of tedium. And paperwork! Especially the paperwork.

So, after devouring the latest-in-series, I thought I'd go back a volume, if only to find out what happened to the JesusPhone whose prior fate I'd completely forgotten about (destroyed during the previous adventure? made obsolete by intervening technological advances during the two-year gap? remodeled into Bob's phablet which seems distinct from his newer work-issued official phone?).

I actually didn't get an answer to that, but I did get to go over a entertainingly fun action adventure thriller spoof, co-starring a highly competent young woman under the codename of BASHFUL INCENDIARY, with a hefty dose of Nightmare Fuel® thanks to the use of not-too-far-off US-styled evangelical fundamentalist practices which do kind of underscore the fact that when you're dealing with extremists with severe control issues, there's really not all that much a gap between trying to rearrange the world to the detriment of others in order to pave the way for the return of Jesus (non-Phone version) and doing the same to summon Something Else Entirely.

It's like what Aslan tells you about evil being done in his name actually being done for Tash, or whatever, though I still think it's kind of petty of him to take the credit for good done in Tash's name for himself, but then in actual nature, male lions just kind of laze around and look impressive while the females do all the hunting and real work.

Anyway, rereading TAC was a nice change of pace from rereading TRC, which I did technically skim over when I got it as a glitch freebie from the iTunes store, but reading non-multimedia things within iBooks on the Mac is sub-optimal, so I was pleased to see it show up on the library's New Books shelf and thus did a second, much more thorough read in paper.

It strikes me that up until now, the various Laundry series of novels & novellas have seemed to have a rhythm of "heavy" and "light", alternating more serious episodes (still with their moments of levity) with more spoofy ones (still with their elements of encroaching darkness).

The 1st Laundry novel was a Len Deighton homage and thus fairly serious-ish, the 2nd was a Bond spoof which made use of the inherent silliness of the film franchise, the 3rd went back to serious, and the 4th was essentially light (well, light-ish; kind of). Similarly, the 1st Laundry novella (included in the back of the 1st novel) was fairly heavy, what with the concrete cows and all, the 2nd was a spoof of those BOFH stories with some MMORPG thrown in, the 3rd was a bit more serious, and the 4th was the festive Xmas office party installment (well, for Laundry values of "festive").

But with both the latest novel and novella (the rather disturbing Equoid, free to read online at Tor.com, along with the previous 2 novellas, all standalone stories which will not spoiler you for the major developments in the actual series) the stories are starting to blend the humour and horror a lot more into each other as the walls of reality start to bleed or however Bob keeps referring to the inevitable doom of the human population.

So in a certain way, The Rhesus Chart kind of serves as a setup for the future new status quo, as Stross has stated on his blog that he's gone as far as he can with the spy thriller homage idea and that future Laundry novels are going to explore different subgenre conventions as metacommentary, as his characters begin to move out of the realm of the "real" and more into the increasing unreality caused by The Stars Coming Right at completely the wrong time.

And so we get a look at how well equipped, really, is the Laundry at catching and coping with potential future disasters that are going to be associated with [CODENAME REDACTED], and the answer is "not nearly as well as they thought". Kind of like that moment in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series where the Guide's friendly front cover instructions change from "Don't Panic" to "Panic", in a way.

It's interesting to see Bob unsettled and out of his element on this case and possibly again in the near future, and on his own home grounds, to boot, as while previous novel adventures had him at odds with various dangerous entities, at least his home office had his back and were offering unified support, which isn't quite happening anymore here.

And it was nice to see the introduction of several new characters (well, technically some reappearing from previous books, including a prior sort-of adversary I'm pleased to see re-imagined in an sort-of adversarial role which is rather different than the one before; I kind of like them now and approve of their character evolution) to help fill up the cast before some of them inevitably get eaten by tentacled horrors in future installments of the series.

As for the ostensible plot, TRC was the first of the new-style novels, with the theme of Vampires! Vampires Everywhere!† in a milieu that surprisingly for its mandate to protect the populace against tentacled horrors, doesn't seem to actually believe in actual vampires‡. But it turns out there's a perfectly good (and perfectly terrible) reason for that, in between a lot of satirical metacommentary on how the very idea of most forms of vampires wouldn't actually work if you applied logic to their purported origin stories and habits. Vampire blancmange, indeed.

But as always, it all goes pear-shaped from there in a rather entertaining and more devastating way than usual, and I for one really want to find out what happens next in #6, which thankfully is slated to show up next summer at a shorter inteval than the 2 years between books #4 & #5 and I shall be requesting it at the library once they start getting the pre-order listings in.

Highly recommended as a compelling continuation of an increasingly nuanced series exploring the ramifications of what would happen if you actually were living in a grimdark paranormal urban fantasy world during the transition phase where Weird Stuff is taking over from normal humans and world-ending disaster really is imminent, if you think you'd be interested in that sort of thing and are into unrealpolitik, I guess. It's probably a bit of an acquired taste, but once you get into it, it's very tasty indeed. Vampire blancmange and all.

* With the deadly part sometimes ending up literal, mind you.

† But these are Not Your Teenaged Cousin's Sparkly No-Kill Friendly Sexy Vampires, for reasons that are once again perfectly good (and perfectly terrible).

‡ I'm reminded of that The Far Side cartoon where the guy on the crowded corner standing on a box is preaching his warning about how the vampires are everywhere and have taken over the world and he's the only person there whose reflection can be seen in the giant glass mirror pane that two people are carrying across the street.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

So, did a reread of Charles Stross' The Apocalypse Codex to accompany the read of The Rhesus Chart, latest in his The Laundry Files series of Lovecraftian bureaucracy urban fantasy spy thriller spoofs which, Discworld-like, are gradually evolving into something more than their original satirical/pastiche concept.

This is one of my favourite series, not least because the juxtaposition of procedurally realistic deadly*-dull middle-management civil service maneuvering and office politics while trying to stave off the worst effects of When The Stars Are Right™ is terribly amusing.

Remember kids, saving the world involves lots of tedium. And paperwork! Especially the paperwork.

My husband really enjoys the Laundry Files series as well! He's recommended it to me at least 3 times. It's now on the top of my TBR for my 2015 series challenge.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

My husband really enjoys the Laundry Files series as well! He's recommended it to me at least 3 times. It's now on the top of my TBR for my 2015 series challenge.

It's a very entertaining series, as long as one finds the premise and execution in line with their tastes to begin with (may not be suitable for some of the more sensitive Gentle Readers in the audience, reader discretion is advised, yada yada yada…).

If you'd like to get an early seasonal head start on it next year, you can read the Hugo-nominated festive Laundry office Xmas party novella: Overtime free online at Tor.com. It's also been a freebie in several of the stores a couple of years ago, is perfectly readable standalone, and contains no spoilers for the main series (just a few veiled mentions of stuff you won't pick up on until you've read the actual novels, but nothing that will either make you wonder " are they talking about?!", or " I didn't want to know so much so soon!"). Actually, this was my intro to the series, and it was after reading and enjoying it that I decided I had to see what the rest of it was like.

So, finished a couple more of my AmazonCrossing-exclusive translated Nordic crime thriller novel purchases.

The Seventh Child by Danish journalist-turned-author Erik Valeur has apparently been translated into some 20 languages and gotten some kind of award wins.

This is actually much more of a psychological drama novel, though there was plenty of murder, mystery, and outright crime involved.

The setup for this is a prominent orphanage that once upon a time handled many secretive adoptions from quote-unquote "unwed mothers" back when that was a major stigma even for Danish society, and seems to have been the site of a potential major political scandal involving its possible use as a laundering facility for re-homing unwanted and potentially embarrassing children of prominent Danish public figures by young women they were having affairs with, with the ensuing threat of a journalistic exposé for one particular orphan's highly-placed parentage, if only they could find proof of it…

At the centre of this possibility are seven former orphans whose pasts have been thoroughly scrubbed, but who once occupied the same room in the orphanage at the same time, and thus have a pseudo-mystical connection, which is exploited by the sending of the exact same anonymous note to each of them.

This was a surprisingly long novel (11,000+ locations, which Amazon says equals 642 pages, at the $2 I paid for this on sale, I certainly got value-for-money in terms of word count) which circled around the central mystery of What The Hell Is Going On, Exactly?!, slowly drawing out the personalities and life circumstances of the seven former orphans by way of explaining how they got so messed up that any one of them could probably have been committing threats and murder, while at the same time using the partial-viewpoint character of one of the orphans to try and probe the current-day mystery/scandal which is rapidly getting out of control of the person who apparently instigated it.

In between, there's rather a lot of deconstruction of Danish middle-class social attitudes and politics and nostalgia and the media coverage thereof.

In the end, the "true" identity of the titular mystery child was not really all that surprising and telegraphed a couple of times in the plot, though rather red-herringly, and the part-time narrator quasi-mocks the apparent coincidences which tie everything together (though that may be a pre-emptive compensatory move on the part of the author to shore up sponginess in the deeply-laid-plot). The actual surprise lay in the culprits behind some of the murders, which was kind of ambiguous because now I'm wondering if a couple of the other apparent accidents were intended not to have been, but there's a rather ambiguous wrap-up to the characters and their fates.

Mild-to-medium-ish recommend if you think you'd like this kind of thing and can pick it up during deep-discount sale. It's certainly an acquired taste with probably a very specific sort of audience appeal, and the ending could be clearer and stronger, IMHO, but as a psychological portrait of the isolation and loneliness of what the author seems to think is the devastation caused by secretive closed adoptions (apparently Valeur himself is an adoptee as well) and the hypocrisy and corruption he seems to see in the idyllically attempted-homogenized Danish society past and present, it's interestingly enough portrayed and probably worth giving a try if it's obtainable at a low cost and you want to read about those sorts of themes.

Earlier, finished Icelandic journalist-turned-author (but apparently not an adoptee, to the best of my knowledge) Árni Thórarinsson's Season of the Witch, another $2 sale buy which was perfectly readable standalone, but which I found out after the fact was actually the 4th in his series starring Einar, a journalist in Northern Iceland but which got translated solo because apparently this was the award-winning volume of the lot.

Again, like the Danish journalist-turned-author offering I read, this was a sort of psychological circling of a crime, where again a journalist character tries to figure out a motive for a seemingly nonsensical occurrence and kind of solves it unintentionally by accident.

This one has Afternoon News crime reporter Einar looking into the mysterious death of a popular high school student actor who was slated to star in a particular play (and also a woman who mysteriously fell overboard during a corporate retreat trip).

Again, it's done not so much by direct Clue-finding, but rather by indirect sleuthing, as Einar uses his journalistic skills to look into the past and present of the victims and their connections in an attempt to piece together a picture of who they were and what they were involved with that someone could have wanted to try and ultimately succeeded in killing them, in between having to deal with the day-to-day banality of man-on-the-street-reporting and office politics of his otherwise unglamorous day job.

As with The Seventh Child, there are a number of the-cows-are-not-what-they-seem* turns to the investigation which aren't really so much "twists" as naturally occurring but slightly unexpected in direction meanders in the course of tracing the source of the crime-within-a-crime, and some surprising things tie together in the end.

Medium recommend if you're looking for a partial-psychological-portrait kind of mystery-ish sleuth investigation set in an isolated Icelandic environ (actually, Akureyri is Iceland's 2nd largest city, IIRC, but it has something like 15,000 inhabitants compared to Reyjavik's 120,000-ish, so there's a kind of massive disproportionality to their regional demographics, which makes crime thrillers set outside the capital weirdly interesting in comparison).

I actually rather liked this one, enough that I'd have been willing to buy more (on sale) from AmazonCrossing, but apparently they're not translating any more installments. So if I want to read #5 and upwards, I'll have to turn to Seuil, who have the French-language rights (apparently #1-3 only exist in Icelandic, and probably aren't e-book-ized, at least not in a form available to Canadians).

But it's another one of those things where I can see that the appeal might not be particularly generalized, especially for the genre audience that AmazonCrossing is marketing it at.

* Okay, it should really be a Twin Peaks reference with owls, but I first came across this bit of pop-culture trivia via reruns of Darkwing Duck, which had an episode called Twin Beaks featuring sentient bipedal cows which came "from the planet Larson on The Far Side of the galaxy".

[Adrian_I]

A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley

An interesting and entertaining book, useful if you want to improve your learning performance.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

So, I decided to re-read a favourite series, the Rivers of London series from Ben Aaronovitch. These are mostly being read as audio books, and I'm really enjoying them this second time around. Kobna Holbrook-Smith's narration is adding a new take on these excellent books.

Finished Midnight Riot (aka, Rivers of London), along with Moon Over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. These are the first three of the PC Peter Grant books, and all are excellent. I've been primarily listening to them this time around, with the excellent narration by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith adding to the experience. #4 in the series, Broken Homes, will have to wait while I read a couple other books, Carousel Seas by Sharon Lee, and Strands of Sorrow, by John Ringo. These are two completely different books by two favourite authors in favourite series. After which, I expect to return to Ben Aaronovitch in time to read #4 and move right on to #5 which should be out in North America about then.

[HarryT]

Recently completed 4 books:

Firstly, the 3 books in the "A J Jacobs Omnibus". Mr Jacobs, for anyone not familiar with him, is an "experimental author", who takes on projects and writes about his experiences with them in a very amusing manner. I highly recommend his books. The three books in the omnibus are:

The Know-It-All, in which he reads the whole of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica".

The Year of Living Biblically in which Mr Jacobs, who is a non-observant Jew, attempts to live for a year following all the Bible's precepts on how Jews should live.

My Experimental Life, in which Mr Jacobs undertakes a series of shorter, month-long, experiments, such at outsourcing his entire life to India, trying to get an online date for his children's nanny, and passing himself off as a film star.

All very highly recommended!

The most recent book, for a complete change, was "Gust Front", by John Ringo, which I bought from Baen in April 2001. The second book in his "Posleen War" series, and excellent military SF. It's a direct sequel to the first book, "A Hymn Before Battle", so don't read it in isolation. Again, highly recommended: this was the time when Mr Ringo wrote good military SF, as opposed to his more recent books, which are unpleasantly right-wing political diatribes (to my eyes - I'm sure they appeal to some people).

[MickeyC]

Just finished The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. This was a riveting, non fiction account of the Chicago Word's Fair in 1893. Fascinating view of the planning, politics, crime and innovation involved. A must read!

Next up Dave Barry (because I need to lighten up). Just started his History of the Milennium (So Far) which, so far, is quite a giggle.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Finished Midnight Riot (aka, Rivers of London), along with Moon Over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. These are the first three of the PC Peter Grant books, and all are excellent. I've been primarily listening to them this time around, with the excellent narration by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith adding to the experience. #4 in the series, Broken Homes, will have to wait while I read a couple other books, Carousel Seas by Sharon Lee, and Strands of Sorrow, by John Ringo. These are two completely different books by two favourite authors in favourite series. After which, I expect to return to Ben Aaronovitch in time to read #4 and move right on to #5 which should be out in North America about then.

Finished Strands of Sorrow and Carousel Seas, both from this month's Baen Bundle. I absolutely hate zombie books, and I am not much on thinly veiled, ultra-right, gun porn. And yet, I read and enjoyed Strands of Sorrow. Really, I end up finishing these books and feel like I need to take a shower to remove the blood. And yet, I keep reading them. Sigh. Something wrong there.

To cleanse my brain of that crud, I read Carousel Seas next. This is the third (and likely final) book in the Archer's Beach series, and just as with all Ms. Lee's books, I enjoyed it immensely. Not the book you want to start the series with, but a fitting and appropriate end to this story arc.

Finally, I was poking through my TBR, and came across a book I bought about a year ago, The Backup Men, by Ross Thomas. When I bought it, it was $7.69, but it's now available in Kindle Unlimited. This is the third book in the Mac's Place series, though all of them can be read standalone. The Backup Men was written in 1971, but is still a fun read today. And for the price of a KU book, hard to beat. (A bunch of Ross Thomas' books are now on KU, and I've not read a one that wasn't fun, and with lots of action and witty characters.)

Next up: The Brass Go-Between, the first of the Philip St. Ives books written by Ross Thomas (as Oliver Bleek). Again, a KU book, and one I didn't have before, so I'm looking forward to it.

ETA: No, I decided to read another Campion first - #9 in the series by Margery Allingham, The Case of the Late Pig.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by samhy

I'm currently reading The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstein.
It is a very detailed and slow paced story, but so far I like it.

I really enjoyed The Night Circus and highly recommend it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Also one of my favourite solutions to recovering from a bad read! Right now, I'm reading Venetia in audio book format. Quite delightful.

Unless you can read an audio signal, you are actually listening and not reading.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Unless you can read an audio signal, you are actually listening and not reading.

No, I'm reading. Would you claim that reading a Braille book was "touching"? While it is certainly true that the experience is somewhat different, it is still very much reading.

[pdurrant]

Amazon's 12 days of Kindle has jut come up with a good offer for the complete Darwath Trilogy, so I think I know what one of my first purchases of 2015 will be

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Hmm... next I think it'll be Trial by Fire by Charles E Gannon. The second in a series, and I think I liked the first.

Well, this was OK. But I found the motivations of many of the characters (human and alien) hard to understand. And essentially it just didn't engage me very much. A book that really holds my attention will keep me up late at night reading it. Not so this one. So a slight disappointment.


Next: One of my most recent purchases: Relics of War by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The latest in his Ethshar series.

[Dngrsone]

I liked the Darwath series, myself. Wish that Hitchhikers guide set was available in the US, though... I only have it in paper, stowed away somewhere.