Thread: Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?
View Single Post
Old 01-11-2017, 08:01 AM   #25176
Rev. Bob
Wizard
Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Rev. Bob's Avatar
 
Posts: 1,760
Karma: 9918418
Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: Here on the perimeter, there are no stars
Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rev. Bob View Post
Somehow it feels appropriate to read The Apocalypse Triptych between now and January 20th. It's three anthologies - The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come - edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, dealing with the end of the world: right before, during, and after.

Most (but not all) of the contributions are also triptychs, one part appearing in each volume. This leaves me with a minor quandary in how to read them. Should I read each book separately, maintaining the theme, or read them in parallel to follow each mini-saga? I'm leaning toward the latter option, which leaves me mildly irked that the authors are presented in differing sequence with each book.
As an update, I have indeed chosen the latter option. I whipped up a quick spreadsheet to keep track of which authors have stories where, and to highlight the ones that weren't in all three books. I then read the first story in Nigh, skipped to its sequel in Now, and skipped to the final part in Come - and after each of the latter two, I jumped to the corresponding story by the next author. Thus, all three volumes stay in synch - roughly - as I repeat the formula. I use strike-thru formatting in the spreadsheet to keep track of what I've read where, just to make sure I don't miss anything.

The highlighted stories are a minor complication. As I reach one in Nigh, I read it and then hop to another standalone story in each of the other volumes. That keeps things fairly even, but it's inexact; the first and third books have more stories than the middle one.

The big downside to reading like this is that progress seems to take forever; I'm only at 40% so far. (It's rather impossible to give percentages on the latter two, so I'm using Nigh as my progress key.) But then, I'll finish all three together, so it averages out.

The stories themselves are a good mix. The first arc is about a man who sets up a doomsday cult as a con, but by blind luck happens to get it right. One arc involves a rather more deadly version of the 1910 encounter with Halley's Comet, another uses a plague, there are a couple of asteroid strikes, and so forth. I find myself most unhappy with the few stories where The End is metaphorical, rather than a literal human-race-in-peril scenario; those feel like a cheat. I certainly don't regret the purchase, though.
Rev. Bob is offline   Reply With Quote