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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Not sure.

I decided on Way Station by Clifford D. Simak. I've read this at least a couple of times before. And it was still very good. Recommended.


Next up: Mira's Last Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold. The fourth in her series of "Penric" Novellas.

[kansaskyle]

I finished The Handmaid's Tale, which was a 3-star read for me. I didn't feel like the author developed the motivation enough to warrant the 'handmaid' concept, which was a broken method of 'bearing' children for barren women from the Old Testament of the Bible. It was just as broken in this modern adaption. I'll leave off a more detailed explanation to avoid discussing religion here.

Up next Mr. Mercedes.

[Dngrsone]

Finished Deceiver by C. J. Cherryh and begun In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem and Fun in the Sandbox by Carol Burnett.

[KyBunnies]

Started Silence of the Jams by Gayle Leeson. The second in the Calamity Cafe mystery series. It was just released today.

[issybird]

I'm reading Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York by Richard Ketchum. He tells a good story and I'm particularly enjoying his sense of New York geography, but I think he somewhat oversimplifies the relationship of the colonies to Parliament in the early 18th century. But overall, so far, so good.

[CRussel]

Starting Convergence, the latest in CJ Cherryh's wonderful Foreigner series. My only problem with this series is that she only has one a year!

[bfisher]

Reading Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone by Scott Shane (2016 Lionel Gelber Prize winner) - halfway in and fascinating.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...objective-troy

[ATDrake]

Finished A Dark Song of Blood by Ben Pastor, 3rd in her Martin Bora series which is chronologically the latest available in English (from Italian Wikipedia, there are at least two more after) for the increasingly beleaguered Wehrmacht officer with a conscience, solving crime cases in occupied WWII countries in between his regular German Army duties doing said occupying and trying to work around the more unconscionable parts of that.

This one went back to historical novel with occasional murder-solving in it mode, as a good deal of the story was devoted to how everyone in Rome as of mid-1944—military, civilian, or otherwise—was dealing with the fallout of the last months of German occupation just as the Americans are arriving, plus some more distressing developments in Bora's personal life. That said, there was a decent murder investigation, performed in tandem with the Italian police investigator from #2, who has moved to Rome for reasons that didn't seem very clear and probably just boiled down to the author wanting to reuse a favourite character, who was apparently named after her father.

Overall I liked it, and will be going to the library tomorrow to pick up my hold on the next available English installment, which probably fills in the story of exactly what happened to Bora on the Eastern front in 1941, which will be interesting to see, given how the past two books have referenced his trauma from that heavily (but were written about a decade prior, from the looks of it).

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Mira's Last Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold. The fourth in her series of "Penric" Novellas.

Which was excellent, as expected, and an immediate follow-on to the previous novella.

Next up: 1636: Mission to the Mughals.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Finished A Dark Song of Blood by Ben Pastor, 3rd in her Martin Bora series which is chronologically the latest available in English (from Italian Wikipedia, there are at least two more after) for the increasingly beleaguered Wehrmacht officer with a conscience, solving crime cases in occupied WWII countries in between his regular German Army duties doing said occupying and trying to work around the more unconscionable parts of that.

I really like this series, but the slowness to release the English language titles and the order in which they're released is frustrating. The latest title, The Road to Ithaca, is fifth in the English language order but tenth in the Italian numbering. Though Italian, Pastor writes in English and then apparently someone else translates them into Italian. So the English language versions are there, but they're parceled out slowly and in a bizarre order.

[Dngrsone]

Finished In Such Good Company, now starting Legends of the Nameless Dwarf: The Complete Saga by D. P. Prior. Looks like four books in total.

Don't know how far I will go--finding errors within the first chapter usually bodes ill for a read to me. And what is it with Sci-Fi/Fan writers that they have to come up with the most convoluted/unpronounceable names for anything/everything?

Anyway, we'll see how far I go.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by issybird

I really like this series, but the slowness to release the English language titles and the order in which they're released is frustrating. The latest title, The Road to Ithaca, is fifth in the English language order but tenth in the Italian numbering. Though Italian, Pastor writes in English and then apparently someone else translates them into Italian. So the English language versions are there, but they're parceled out slowly and in a bizarre order.

I actually think the English publication order kind of makes sense. #1-3 were the first three written, and apparently have been revised and expanded in the newer Italian reprint editions, while English #4-5 are among the two most newly-written by the author since Bitter Lemon Press started picking the series up, which they probably want to keep in sync with the latest international volumes. And they're not written in chronological order anyway, so trying to rearrange the series by that wouldn't really work, especially if the author has been revising her earlier work and keeps writing new installments as well.

I'm guessing that the next two to be available in English, if BLP keeps at it, will be #5 Italian, The Dead in the Square, set in Italy of June 1944 following A Dark Song of Blood (since that will be the next reprint volume out from Italian publisher Sellerio in May this year, skipping #4 which is the Spain 1937 adventure) and #11, Little Fires, set in France of 1940, which was last year's new book.

At this rate, it's going to take them a while to get to the one I really want to read out of curiosity, #8, Master of One Hundred Bones, set in Berlin 1939 and apparently involving a Japanese delegation. I'm starting to seriously consider breaking down and just plain learning to read Italian so I can give a try to the e-versions available via Kobo UK (and US, but bizarrely not Kobo CA, and Sellerio only seems to put the reprints of the older ones out every couple of years) since it doesn't look too far off from French and I can usually get around two paragraphs into an other-Romance-language Wikipedia article before giving up and running the rest through Google Translate, and it'll probably be a useful language to be able to read in any case. (I am probably being overly optimistic about the practicality of this.)

Anyway, also finished (okay, kind of skim-read since poetry isn't really my thing) J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun, edited by retired English professor Verlyn Flieger. This was on the library's New Books shelf and turns out to be one of Tolkien's fanfic versions of medieval verse (I was expecting it to be another one of his Middle-Earth shorts which have been getting illustrated editions in recent years), presenting a long poem he wrote in imitation of Breton lays, drawing upon some sort of local fairy tale tradition.

I skimmed the actual poetry, but this was a very nice annotated edition which presented facsimile copies of hand-written pages of the “originals”, alongside notes on the poetry (both footnotes for odd words, and longer endnote explanations for various literary references and stylistic attempts). Plus they included extra poems by Tolkien which are apparently preliminary side works and rough drafts for the finished poem, sandwiched by introductions and commentary by Flieger explaining how they tie together thematically and how the revisions indicate changes in Tolkien's storytelling decisions and the influence of various ancient works on his own eventual style, etc. which I found more interesting than Tolkien's actual writing.

It's pretty nice that HarperCollins is doing these annotated reprint editions of what's admittedly rather obscure work, even by a famous author, and making them available to interested persons, even if they kind of have to resort to a bunch of mentions of how this was a pre-cursor to Tolkien's ideas for The Silmarillion and other Lord of the Rings tie in stuff, probably to increase the sales appeal.

[Strether]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Starting Convergence, the latest in CJ Cherryh's wonderful Foreigner series. My only problem with this series is that she only has one a year!

I finished it yesterday and while I enjoyed it, I don't think Cajeiri is old enough yet to carry the weight of half of the novel. YMMV.

Jim

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Started Daniel Levitin's A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age.

Finish this afternoon.

Next up (at least in audio form) is a dramatic reading of The Iliad. Not my favorite translation, but the dramatic reading makes up for it. Also my first time using the re-read tag on goodreads.

[Fbone]

Finished The Obsidian Chamber by Preston & Child.

I really enjoyed the first half, however, the ending to me fell flat. So much build-up only for it to simply end without incident. No last-minute twists. No extended suspense. It seems the authors became disinterested or bored in this and made for a quick exit. Still, I felt it's a worthy 4-star but only just. Rated B- [4 stars].

Next, is The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth #1) by N.K. Jemisin.