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

[issybird]

I'm reading two books (and listening to two others):

Zola's Nana as part of one of my 2017 challenges and it's delightful. Only the third book I've read by Zola and I need to go to him more. I am immensely enjoying my 19th century novel challenge.


A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth Century Virginia by Lauren F. Winner, also for a 2017 challenge, but it's pretty meh. Interesting enough, but slight and far too jargonistic.

[ATDrake]

Finished Jan Wallentin's Strindberg's Star, a presumably standalone historical artifact-chasing secret society conspiracy thriller in the vein of The Da Vinci Code, of which I'm starting to think these things are contractually obligated to have some kind of in-story tie to the Knights Templar and their purported heirs (or the Cathars, if the author is feeling like a tradition-defying Gnostic rebel) and/or the Nazi occult department and its immediate precursors.

This was one of the latter, and with a decent reason to link them up, given the Nazi pre-occupation with ancient Norse stuff, and the story starting in Sweden and starring a Swedish Jewish character who has the obligatory dysfunctional academic backstory of being a barely-functioning pharmaceutical-addicted researcher obsessed with the rise and use of ancient religious symbols to Nazi symbology thanks to the generationally passed-on trauma of his Holocaust-survivor refugee grandmother, who rather amusingly uses ploys to avoid the tiresome New Age university students his chosen field has attracted.

Alas, the rest of the book is not nearly as entertaining as that would suggest, although it does start off interestingly with the strange find of an unusually well-preserved body and some cryptic messages. And the problems posed by these are actually pretty engaging while the mystery aspect of figuring out what they mean and how they connect is going on.

But once it gets to the point where they've located the MacGuffin and the chase is reallly on, it turns into a boringly standard action thriller where I admit the author did spend some time setting up hints for many of the twists in advance so that the means of capture/escape aren't quite out of the blue, even if a little improbable. (And I don't really get the impression that the genius hacker helper sister actually is such, since there are a couple of supposedly important details mentioned which would seem to indicate a certain amount of ignorance as to how computer servers and backups actually work, though it's not nearly as egregious as, say, believing that standard ideographic East Asian languages' written text passages are actually a decipherable code.)

That said, the author (who is apparently a journalist for whom this was an internationally best-selling debut novel) did make interesting use of actual Swedish history and other nations' cultural references in this and tied those together in a reasonably plausible way. (And entertainingly lampooned his own profession with the cynical rush to feed the news cycle with sensationalist headlines; fact-checking optional.)

A fair amount of the stuff that I thought for sure he'd had to have made up for the story turned out to be real. Swedish explorer guy stumbles across ancient artifacts in a millenia-buried city of a lost civilization's kingdom exposed by a freak sandstorm? Minus the particular artifacts, actually seems to have happened that way (Wikipedia). Austrian occult dude is the secret society's stealth infiltration agent who presents himself as the scion of a 238,000 year old heroic bloodline dating back from the days when there were three suns and a whole bunch of dwarves and dragons gets carte blanche to completely redecorate a German castle with mystic symbolism before being ousted by Himmler? That one happened, too (Wikipedia), probably minus the secret society, although you never know when it comes to that. And so forth. Truth really is stranger than fiction, sometimes.

Actually, probably the most intriguing bits of this novel were the supposed connections between the historical things going on and the purported cover-ups related to them, not the actual artifact chase and resolution, which was IMHO not particularly well-explained when it came to the apparent very important paranormal elements surrounding them and the eventual rather pat solution to the hero's increasingly complicated situation. Tell me less about your mysterious star and more about the feud between Sven Hedin and August Strindberg*, plz. (I suspect I am reading the wrong genre for this, though.)

Overall, an okay novel for its subsubgenre that I personally would have found considerably more compelling if it had focused on something else entirely, but I did get introduced to some cool-sounding historical figures and events by it, and the apparent preservative effects of copper vitriol and the spelunking practices of hobbyist cave-divers, so I'm going to count it as having been worth the time to read.

* Who, I should probably note, is not the eponymous Strindberg of the titular star, who happens instead to be his cousin Nils, who died tragically in an early Arctic exploration attempt which reads like a how-not-to checklist of Arctic expedition-going, even before one accounts for conspiracy theory cover-up murders. Wikipedia says he was probably dead from polar bear.

[Rev. Bob]

After a couple of bumps in the road, I'm making good progress in Joseph R. Lallo's Bypass Gemini, the first book in his "Big Sigma" series. So far, it's space opera with a decent sense of humor, and I look forward to reading the rest of the Volume 1 omnibus (the first three novels and three short works). The omnibus doesn't go up for sale until March, but it was available as part of a StoryBundle that ended this week - which is why I started reading the book, to see if I wanted to get the bundle.

The rocky start was due to discovering that I had an older release of the novel, and although it's been updated on Amazon and in the omnibus, the Kobo copy is out of date. Rather than keep reading the unpolished copy, I set it aside until I could grab the bundle and use the omnibus's text.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to handle this properly on Goodreads. If not for the added short fiction, I'd count it as the three novels and call it a day, but...

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm reading A Night without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton. The second half of his "Chronicle of the Fallers" duology (set in the Commonwealth universe).

While I enjoyed the back-and-forth of The Void Trilogy, I can't say that I'm loving the vast swathes of story taking place outside the Commonwealth in these two books. They're OK, but they've taken me a long time to read, and I find myself longing for something taking place entirely in the Commonwealth proper. The backwater, lowtech settings of Makkathran/Bienvenido are getting a bit tiresome for me--as is Hamilton's seeming obssession with law enforcement as of late (The Great North Road, Edeard and his constables in the Void Trilogy, and now the detectives and secret police in A Night without Stars).

I know he'll at least make it interesting, but I guess I just had higher hopes for what could very well be the last books of the Commonwealth Universe. Ah, well. I'll always have Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained.

P.S. If this does mark the end of the Commonwealth, there better be tons of cheesy cameos from the iconic rockstars of its past/present before all is said and done!

A little silly, a little sappy, but ultimately fun and quite relentless. Much better than the first half of the duology. I look forward to something entirely new from Hamilton.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu. A very recent purchase that looked interesting. I hope it wasn't a mistake.

It wasn't a mistake, but it was also a bit of a disappointment. It's almost brilliant, but the time scales of the aliens mean their motivations are ridiculous.

Spoiler for background of the aliens in the story:

Spoiler:

The aliens are immortal unless deliberately killed, and arrived on the Earth 65 million years ago. They can only survive in the Earthly environment by inhabiting animals. They strive to develop creatures that can build a civilisation that can build what's needed to get them home.

OK, we grant that they found an artificial breeding program impossible, and so had to wait around for an intelligent creature to evolve naturally (us).

We're then suppose to believe that the best they could do for at least 100,000 years was get us to neolithic culture.

And then agriculture and technology start taking off just 10,000 years ago. And now, they're within a few hundred years of us having the technology they need.

But, after 65 million years working together, just 400 years ago, within a millennium of their target, they split into two factions that actually start killing each other, in an argument over whether to spur us on best by warfare or not, the difference in the strategies being at most a few hundred year difference in the achievement of their goals.

It just doesn't add up I could just see it if they arrived 10,000 years ago, and were the cause of agriculture, etc. But 65 million years ago? Chu seems to have no appreciation of deep time.

So only a 3/5, and I don't think I'll bother with the rest.


Next up: The Black Wolves of Boston by Web Spencer. Looking wonderful already.

[Ravensknight]

Gridlinked (Polity: Agent Cormac #1)
Neal Asher
4.5 Stars


Mega-Action packed with Ultra-Violence science fiction. Just the way I like it!

[Rev. Bob]

Bypass Gemini turned out to be pretty fun, but rather than dive into its sequel right away, I'm trying Christopher Nuttall's Schooled in Magic, first of eleven in the series. The first chapter sets up a "portal fantasy" without a portal; the familiar/contemporary main character is flat-out abducted into the fantasy world, where her education will presumably commence soon.

As with Bypass Gemini, I'm using this to test the waters and see if I want to get more of the series. Later volumes run from $1-$4 each, and it looks like different ones are on sale at different times - so if I do like it and can be patient, I should be able to keep my eyes open and pick each book up inexpensively as sales pop up.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by drjd

Next I am planning to read The Atlantis Plague by A.G. Riddle.

Finished The Atlantis Plague by A.G. Riddle. A complex plot but not fit for my mood.

Next up, Nothing Lasts Forever - No Secret Can Stay Buried by Vish Dhamija.

[astrangerhere]

Just started Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is my first Sci-Fi of the year. I got through 50 pages this morning while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I can definitely feel the Firefly vibe that many folks told me it would have.

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Just started Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is my first Sci-Fi of the year. I got through 50 pages this morning while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I can definitely feel the Firefly vibe that many folks told me it would have.

I enjoyed it. I am waitlisted for the sequel, which came out last year.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Just started Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is my first Sci-Fi of the year. I got through 50 pages this morning while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I can definitely feel the Firefly vibe that many folks told me it would have.

I really enjoyed both of Chambers' "Wayfarers" books.

I'm just beginning Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes: billed as an interstellar closed-room murder mystery--with clones.

From an NPR review:

Imagine waking up on a malfunctioning spaceship: The artificial gravity is disabled. Blood floats through the air. And the corpse that blood is coming from is ... your own. Kind of. You're a clone — and your original self, along with most of your crewmates, are dead. As your ship plummets through interstellar space, off course and carrying thousands of hibernating colonists to the planet Artemis, you and your fellow clones take on a daunting task: solving the mystery of what happened to the six people from whom you were cloned. Was it mass murder? Mass suicide? Or something far more complicated and sinister?

[issybird]

I'm reading Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, written and illustrated by Edward Sorel, a fannish account of what the title says. There's not really anything new here for the fan of Hollywood's Golden Age, certainly not for anyone who's read either or both of Mary Astor's terrific memoirs, but it's still good trashy fun.

[Fbone]

Finally, finished Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio.

I thought this was the weakest one so far. Too much flirting for my taste, fourth grade style. Not enough action. It seemed the story line was hung up in one plot roadblock; two steps forward one step back. It left me irritated. This might have worked better in the comics but not when converted into a novel. And the book ends on a cliffhanger with no sequel in sight. Rated C- [3 stars].

Next read tbd.

[Dngrsone]

Finished Deliverer; to me. one of the better books in the series, but that might be in part due to this being one I haven't read before.I think next I will try Cornelia Funke's The Petrified Flesh.

[mewmartigan]

Just finished up Robin Hobb's Rain Wild Chronicles. I think I may have liked them better than the Fitz books.

Now reading John Scalzi's Redshirts.