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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Meanwhile, I read a couple of free short stories from the Baen site, which inspired me to download the full Free Short Stories of 2014, a collection of the monthly front page free stories from this year, many of which I had missed for one reason or another. An excellent collection this year, with some real gems in there. And the usual percentage of duds as well, of course.

Keeping with the short story theme, I bought Deeds of Honor, a collection of Paksenarrion world short stories (none of which actually include Paks herself). These were good, but not great with a couple of exceptions -- Ms. Moon is a better novel writer than short story writer, IMO.

Ah - another couple of books to add to my TBR. Tomorrow, that is. For now I have a pleasing reduction in my TBR from 800 to 750, and I'm not going to upset that this late in the year. Also, I have less than $2 of my 2014 book buying budget left!

[DrNefario]

I've just finished The Time Trap by Henry Kuttner, a pulpy SF novella in which the female characters don't seem to be able to keep their clothes on for more than a paragraph. This was a nominee for the 1939 retro hugo this year and I'm kind of glad it didn't win. More importantly, it was my 120th item read of the year, and I'm definitely not going to finish anything else today and ruin that.

If I'm very strict, I count 39 items that could be considered short, which would give me 81 total books, which is a total that would have amazed me a couple of years ago.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

More importantly, it was my 120th item read of the year, and I'm definitely not going to finish anything else today and ruin that.

Congratulations!

[WT Sharpe]

My 77th and last book for the year was The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum & Tim Folger, which I finished yesterday. It contained a very good selection of science essays from a wide variety of sources.

[issybird]

My last two reads of 2014:

Willam Tell Told Again, by P.G. Wodehouse. This wasn't painful, it is the Master after all, but I think it's only to be read if one's got OCD, or pretty near, and I've got a long-term goal of working my way through all Wodehouse's fiction in chronological order. Actually, I listened to the Librivox version and it doesn't fill you with confidence when the reader mispronounces "Wodehouse" right off the bat, but in fact it was competently read. Fortunately, PG seems to have a near-if-not-complete selection of Wodehouse's works in the US public domain and Librivox has most of those available for listening.

My last book was the third in the Otto Prohaska tetralogy by John Biggins, The Two-Headed Eagle: In Which Otto Prohaska Takes a Break as the Habsburg Empire's Leading U-boat Ace and Does Something Even More Thanklessly Dangerous. Another stellar read in this series and I have avantman42 to thank for the recommendation, as I'd never heard of these and they're exactly to my taste. Admittedly, the high humor of the first two books is rather in abeyance here, but it's only fitting as the Great War enters its third year.

[mewmartigan]

Just finished The Bonehunters, book 6 of the Malazan. Boy did that thing pick up steam in the last 100 pages or so.

Now reading The Martian before heading back to Malazan.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by HarryT

"Keeper of the King" by Nigel Bennett and P.N. Elrod. The first book in the "Ethical Vampires" series. Originally bought from Baen probably around 2000-ish, but seems no longer to be available from them, although later books in the series are.

I don't normally go in for vampire stories, but I really enjoyed this one. An excellent romp involving searching for the Holy Grail. Again highly recommended, but I don't know if or where it can still be bought.

Available from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Might be available from other stores.

Baen's web site says, "After a certain period, the rights to a book revert back to the author from the publisher. At that point, the author can choose the next step for his or her work, which sometimes means that Baen Ebooks can no longer offer it for sale. In most cases, any book that you have already purchased should remain accessible to you through your account."

Originally Posted by DrNefario

More importantly, it was my 120th item read of the year, and I'm definitely not going to finish anything else today and ruin that. If I'm very strict, I count 39 items that could be considered short, which would give me 81 total books, which is a total that would have amazed me a couple of years ago.

In my accounting, I'd combine the 39 short items into collections of no less than 140 pages, and then count each collection as a "book" toward the goal. Of course I only read short stories that are part of an established series and then usually in a collection of short stories. So this year, I read two books of Honor Harrington short stories. I also avoid novellas unless there are a series of related novellas which make up a work about the size of a novel. In this situation, I read the three novellas of Shift series which were available individually or in a collected work and I counted them as a single book.

[MickeyC]

Just finished my 48th book of this year, Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie and it was very enjoyable. Not a mystery but a very interesting non fiction account of her travels with her husband in Syrianin the 1930s.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

Available from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Might be available from other stores.

Good - I'm pleased it's still available, because it's a good book.

Baen's web site says, "After a certain period, the rights to a book revert back to the author from the publisher. At that point, the author can choose the next step for his or her work, which sometimes means that Baen Ebooks can no longer offer it for sale. In most cases, any book that you have already purchased should remain accessible to you through your account."

This is one of the rare cases where it's not still available to previous purchasers. Obviously I had it safely stored, but I'd be out of luck if I wanted to re-download it.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by HarryT

"Fer-de-Lance" by Rex Stout.

The first book in the "Nero Wolfe" series. This is my first encounter with this author (and series), and I really didn't know what to expect, since I am mainly a lover of classic British detective fiction, in which the clues are laid out, and it's the reader's task to try to solve the crime along with the detective. This isn't like that at all. In case anyone else hasn't read it, Nero Wolfe is an "armchair detective" - an enormously fat man private investigator who never leaves his New York home, but has a team of helpers, primarily Archie Goodwin (the narrator of the book) who does his "legwork" for him.

In this story, Wolfe is commissioned to try to track down Carlo Maffei, an Italian immigrant who is the brother of the wife of one of Wolfe's associates. Carlo turns up dead, and Wolfe is embroiled in a case involving the death of a high-profile university president and booby-trapped golf clubs.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading the rest of the series.

I think you'll enjoy these books. Yes, they're a bit dated, and sometimes include comments that would certainly not be acceptable in the modern world, but if read with an understanding of the time they were written, quite enjoyable. Nero is quite a character, and the entire ménage of that household is much of the fun of the books. Plus they're all quite short, making lovely little bits to use as a break after a really longish book.

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

In my accounting, I'd combine the 39 short items into collections of no less than 140 pages, and then count each collection as a "book" toward the goal. Of course I only read short stories that are part of an established series and then usually in a collection of short stories. So this year, I read two books of Honor Harrington short stories. I also avoid novellas unless there are a series of related novellas which make up a work about the size of a novel. In this situation, I read the three novellas of Shift series which were available individually or in a collected work and I counted them as a single book.

I'm counting everything that shows up as a separate item on my ereader as a separate item, since I'm mainly interested in tracking my TBR. It sometimes works the other way, such as with the collected short stories of Agatha Christie, where 14 canonical collections are rolled into 3 books. Most of the individual shorter works come from the Hugo voting.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

In my accounting, I'd combine the 39 short items into collections of no less than 140 pages, and then count each collection as a "book" toward the goal.

I did that in 2014 with two single-author collections of short stories I made in calibre from Fictionwise purchases.

Only two books in my reading total, but over 50 books off my TBR pile!

[ATDrake]

So, final few (completed) books of 2014:

Finished Oathbreaker by Danish author Martin Jensen, 2nd in his The King's Hounds series of Danelaw-set English 11th century murder mysteries-in-translation starring a Saxon manuscript illuminator and his half-Saxon, half-Danish companion, who are working for King Cnut.

Another fun adventure involving a murder at a monastery and some mysterious past/hidden identity stuff. Once again Winston and Halfdan sometimes work well together, sometimes at cross-purposes, messing up the investigation at points.

Recommended if you like relatively light-hearted historically grounded buddy detective fare. It turns out that one of the things in the setup which I thought was over the top melodramatic but was willing to go along with as an artistic license exaggeration was actually totally true and really did happen, according to the author's note in the back (which also notes that if he hadn't seen it in the history books himself, he'd have thought it was totally unbelievably made up, too).

With that truth-can-be-stranger-than-fiction in mind, the next-finished title was John Wiltshire's Love is a Stranger, an m/m action adventure romantic suspense, 1st in what's apparently called the More Heat Than The Sun series, which was a freebie from MLR Press' Xmas Countdown Giveaway, which I freely admit I started out of sheer morbid curiosity because I have this inordinate fondness for cultures which produce dragon boats, and one of the m's in the pair was supposed to be Danish.

As it turns out, English writers doing fictional Danes can be considerably less convincing than Danish writers doing fictional Englishmen (okay, Saxons, not Angles, but they're all kind of interbred now).

Maybe I'm just overly skeptical, but I find my suspension of disbelief tested* by the notion that a foreigner of a background known to the authorities (or at least easily revealed by relatively cursory background check such as the other main character later has performed) to have dubious ties, who also happened to be married to a lesser distant member of the British Royal Family and apparently given a "Sir" for that, which is not the way I think that those things are given out, but I could be wrong, and was apparently secretly employed as a chief intelligence operative who ran other operatives, and seems to have acquired some serious dirt on certain more prominent royals, would just be let go from his work to wander the countryside as he pleased and engage in legally dubious transactions with a newly acquired clientele, with absolutely no surveillance follow-up or the like, although MI-6 is probably experiencing budget cuts like all the other government departments.

Anyway, the entire thing was just set up for the increasingly co-dependent romance between the characters, which I freely admit I am not the target audience for.

Maybe I just don't have enough sentimentality in my soul, but when one character kicks a pub's restroom sink to the ground out of sheer relationship frustration, and another character dramatically stubs out his last cigarette on a beach and announces that he's quitting the smoking which his lover disapproves of and keeps nagging him about, leaving it symbolically behind, I'm less inclined to think "aww… it's such a passionate thing that they're lashing out because they miss the person they're just realizing they love and need so badly" and "oh, what a sweet declaration of conciliatory accomodation to the other's expressed feelings and caring and concern for one's health" and more "I hope you went and paid the pub owner for the damages you made to his property while you were spying on his clientele" and "— you, you —ing litterbug, pick up your —ing litter and don't rely on the —ing seagulls to eat your trash for you".

But once you set aside part of the implausibility of the characters' personal circumstances and interactions with themselves and others and assorted inanimate objects (and I admit I'm kind of impressed and disturbed that the These Two Can Only Have One True Love trope was carried out to the point where the inconvenient former boyfriend literally became an ex-flame who was set on fire in the very first chapter to get them out of the way and provide an angsty emotional revenge motivation subplotline which could be resolved with the help of the True Love, among other such Murder The Hypotenuse happenings) there's some interesting enough reading dealing with (somewhat implausible) mysterious hidden identity elements and what should people do when Everything Is No Longer As It Seemed. And I did like that one of the prospective alternative boyfriends who got beaten up for his troubles as part of the lets-get-the-main-two-together plot did end up turning out to be a reasonably well-adjusted and mostly-decently-treated friend.

This ended on a to-be-continued note, with a particular plotline unfinished in order to lead into the next book, which I admit I'm actually kind of morbidly curious about, especially since apparently there's a visit to Denmark in the next installment. But it's priced high enough that unless they drop it on sale or I get a reasonably decent mid-high-discount coupon and have nothing more compelling on my wishlist to spend it upon, it'll have to wait.

No recommendation status either for or against, since I'm not the target audience for romantic suspenses where the main point of the story is to get the couple together despite every potential obstacle which looks like it might possibly be kind of wandering into their way, which they lovingly steamroller over into flat flatness which is really flat, so I can't judge it on those merits since those elements are actually turnoffs for me in most books. But it did have interesting bits, and if the character setup and/or plotline is the sort of thing you'd find really appealing and you do enjoy that kind of romantic suspense, it probably wouldn't hurt to sample and wait for sale (or actually give it a try if you got it free from the promo like I did).

Next after that, another Nordic-related suspense novel Kjell Ola Dahl's Lethal Investments, a Norwegian crime thriller set in Oslo and apparently 4th in a series, although this seems to be the only one available in e-book form (in English, at least, since there are French editions for other installments in the series, and the earlier ones did get translated into English as paper versions long ago).

This turned out to have been a relatively vintage work, dating back to the early/mid-90s, which in retrospect kind of explained the unusual-seeming level of enthusiasm and trust that characters had that computer software was important and would Make Money FA$$$T.

It was an interesting enough police procedural case revolving around a murder that mixed business and pleasure, since it was ambiguous to the detectives whether it had been done as a crime of passion against the victim from persons close to her/unknown, or for business reasons relating to the shady company they worked for, or some combination of both, since there were office affairs involved.

Overall a decent case, but not a particularly compelling story, although I did like the bits where the detectives were piecing together the puzzles, explaining their thoughts out loud and had their a-ha!† moment.

Mild recommend if you're looking to try Norwegian police procedurals. I got this during a deep discount sale and while I mostly liked it, it just doesn't strike me as a top-tier work in overall categories, so there would probably have to be something particularly appealing about the setting, characters, or plotlines to provide that extra oomph of reading interest.

And finally, back to medieval (proto-Renaissance) England, this time in the Tudor era under Henry VIII with C.J. Sansom's Dissolution, 1st in his Matthew Shardlake series starring the eponymous hunchbacked lawyer who at this point is working under Lord Cromwell on the breaking up of the monasteries and is sent out to investigate the death of another such worker-for-Lord-Cromwell at one of said soon-to-be-broken-up monasteries, which happens to be a current freebie for Canadians as part of an iTunes promotion carried out to other stores as well.

I basically prioritized reading this to see if I wanted to spend the $3 a pop for Random House's Vintage Canada editions of #2-5 which are currently discounted as the tie-in sale, and the answer turned out to be "most definitely".

This was a very good mystery with well-done atmosphere and usage of historical detail both in the background and in the attitude of the 1st-person-narrative (all too often, lesser writers create "historical" sleuths who approach things from a very modern mindset without taking into account the likelihood that while someone of the past might be as "enlightened" in currently-desirable social outlook as someone of today, they'd still go about it from a very different starting perspective and general attitude, as classicist Peter V. Jones notes in his "Ancient and Modern" series about the fundamental similarities yet structural differences in modern British and ancient Roman/Greek societies).

And the whodunnit was played out reasonably cleverly, with a number of makes-sense-in-retrospect surprises.

Medium-high recommend if you're looking for a well-done Tudor historical murder mystery, which actually makes good use of Tudor history to underlie the murder. A very promising and excellent in its own right start to a nice-looking series.

* But not gonna lie, the thing that grated on me more was how the narrative kept going on about how a supposed career diplomat who'd lived in the UK for 10 years had this nearly-incomprehensible obviously thick accent and shaky grasp of common English grammatical constructions and popular idiomatic usage which apparently wasn't done for purposes of Obfuscating Stupidity.

IIRC, from at least the 70s onward, actual Danish and other Scandinavian people learn English in class throughout middle and high school or whatever grade equivalents they have, and are reputed to have some of the world's better non-native English due to that and the fact that they mostly don't watch dubbed movies, preferring to listen to the original soundtracks with the help of subtitles. And if that didn't do it, years in a foreign service diplomatic posting and a long-time marriage to and household and workplace and social circle surrounded by native anglophones should have considerably improved at least one's listening comprehension, if not anything else, by sheer osmosis.

Also, there was this icy repressed-emotion covering a potential homicidal maniac stereotype in play, for which I dunno, maybe another Nordic country that fits it better than Denmark, who are widely supposed to be the laid-back fun-loving party animals of the lot. Finland, perhaps, might have been a better fit (and with closer ties to Russia), if you go by the Scandinavia and the World webcomic.

Actually, I kind of suspect that Danish was a nationality that was picked relatively randomly for reasons other than plausible backstory building, since the character in question is a tall athletic blond named "Sir Nikolas Mikkelsen", and one of the cover identities that the other main character uses is "Jaime Lancaster". Maybe in a future installment one of them will serve up some liver with a nice Chianti and some fava beans on the side.

† Not to confused with an "a-ha" moment, which involves Norwegian former boy band pop music from the 80s.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I think you'll enjoy these books. Yes, they're a bit dated, and sometimes include comments that would certainly not be acceptable in the modern world, but if read with an understanding of the time they were written, quite enjoyable. Nero is quite a character, and the entire ménage of that household is much of the fun of the books. Plus they're all quite short, making lovely little bits to use as a break after a really longish book.

Thanks - I look forward to reading them. Your point about books containing "comments that would not be acceptable in the modern world" is true for many books, and doesn't bother me in the slightest. Books and their authors are a product of the society they are written in, and societal attitudes change with time.

[BelleZora]

I recently read C.J. Sansom's Dissolution and agree with ATDrake's medium-high recommendation. If you like historical mysteries, this is one of the better ones.

...and "— you, you —ing litterbug, pick up your —ing litter and don't rely on the —ing seagulls to eat your trash for you".

This made me laugh because I recently read a book that I was loving until the protagonist littered in the wilderness when I decided that he was an arrogant, irresponsible, offensive jerk and I almost quit reading. It ruined the book for me. Maybe I'm just f---in' tired of picking up after people while hiking. Murder and mayhem are fine in books, but environmental irresponsibility is seriously upsetting.