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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Third Nero by Lindsey Davis. The fifth in her Flavia Albia series.

Good fun as usual, but it wrapped up a little quickly.

Next up: The Monastery Murders by E. M. Powell. I liked the first one, let's see how they go on in the second book.

Finished Christina Rossetti on Monday, time for some lighter reading now. Starting on the Lord Peter Wimsey series from book one, and also starting A Delicate Truth for next month's book club

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Next, a more recent purchase, Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon. Vernon won the Hugo award for Best Graphic Story in 2012. Clockwork Boys is her steampunk novel for adults.

Abandoned Clockwork Boys.

Next, is Star Trek: Mere Mortals by David Mack the second in the Destiny series which I picked up last year for 99 cents.

FINALLY ground my way through the collection of anti-semitic, racist and classist slurs that was Whose Body? and in desperate of a palate cleansing before giving Sayers a second shot, so I've started Khushwant Singh's Celebrating the Best of Urdu Poetry (with the poems in devanagari, YAY!), and Le Carré's Delicate Truth for next month's Book Club. Both are calming me after the toxicity of the Sayers book left me seething.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by stuartjmz

FINALLY ground my way through the collection of anti-semitic, racist and classist slurs that was Whose Body? and in desperate of a palate cleansing before giving Sayers a second shot, so I've started Khushwant Singh's Celebrating the Best of Urdu Poetry (with the poems in devanagari, YAY!), and Le Carré's Delicate Truth for next month's Book Club. Both are calming me after the toxicity of the Sayers book left me seething.

The older I get, the less patience I have with this sort of thing as well. I have an additional layer of baggage, being gay, that also crops up. The quality of the literature itself is the measure of how much I am willing to put up with in the name of "they were writing in their time."

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Monastery Murders by E. M. Powell. I liked the first one, let's see how they go on in the second book.

As good or better than the first. I hope she writes more.

Next up: The Quiet Gentleman by Georgette Heyer

[HLS]

I read The Reckoning, Authority, The Andromeda Strain, Woman in the Window, Slaughterhouse Five, and Red Dragon so far this year. Two I technically started at the end of December but finished this month. To my surprise, with the help of Audible, read Slaughterhouse Five in less than two days.

[gmw]

Since I was last here...

Extremes and Consequences, books 2 and 3 of The Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. These are good sci-fi detective stories set on the Moon and telling the interconnected tales of Miles Flint and Noelle DeRicci. Individually these are a comfortable 4/5 for me; both have a slow first half but end up being very good stories. However, when read together they are a bit too much like déjà vu as you go from book to book, so I'll give the series a break for a while.

Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic by Meghan Ciana Doidge, the first of the "Dowser" series. This was a freebie. I liked the title and the idea of zombie werewolves seemed sort of intriguing. It turns out to be a YA romance ... I'd say, VYA (Very Young Adult), it felt quite clumsy to me. 2/5 and just barely that, the main plus being that it was such an easy skim read that I bothered to finish it. It didn't help that, while the ebook appeared to be well produced, my Kobo cut off the endings of many scenes (I quickly gave up trying to read them, they weren't needed to follow the story). I think the problems were probably due strange CSS (negative margins! and perhaps the use of rem unit) but there are also NCX problems according to Sigil. Quite likely the custom font and complexity of the CSS were responsible for the slow loading at each chapter change.

[Pablo]

I (partly) devoted my holidays to Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, enjoyed it like The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now looking for the next Wolfe to read in the near future.

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

The older I get, the less patience I have with this sort of thing as well. I have an additional layer of baggage, being gay, that also crops up. The quality of the literature itself is the measure of how much I am willing to put up with in the name of "they were writing in their time."

I think the only thing I make allowances for these days is historical accuracy, like the language used about black people in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. However appalling it is, slavery did happen and people did talk that way.

I don't remember encountering homosexuality in older books. Maybe it's just my book choices but it seems to be just ignored in old classics and such. Have I missed something? Maybe it's time I read some Oscar Wilde.

[ReadingManiac]

DNF of Age of Misadventure. Another author goes down the present tense black hole.

Now reading Nevernight by Jay Christoff

Which brings up a question that came up in another less appropriate thread. What are people's feelings about what I would describe as graphic porn in novels that are not sold as erotica?

I mean the book is about a young girl who goes to learn to be an assassin. It's a fantasy world and a political plot, but also inter-relationships among the other acolytes. Fair enough that a romance would come into it, but a blow-by-blow description of a sexual encounter that was obviously written by a man blindsided me halfway through. I don't want to read that!

It's something that comes into a lot of modern books and I really thing they should come with a warning.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by Pablo

I (partly) devoted my holidays to Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, enjoyed it like The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now looking for the next Wolfe to read in the near future.

Might I suggest The Right Stuff?

Originally Posted by ReadingManiac

I think the only thing I make allowances for these days is historical accuracy, like the language used about black people in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. However appalling it is, slavery did happen and people did talk that way.

I don't remember encountering homosexuality in older books. Maybe it's just my book choices but it seems to be just ignored in old classics and such. Have I missed something? Maybe it's time I read some Oscar Wilde.

If you go back but so far, we aren't there at all, unless we are summarily lumped into the pederast category. I struggle more with the post-modern era forward when at some points we are criminal, still categorized as child predators, novelty, our just plain to be hated.

I don't expect to see myself in places like Hawthorne, save for being burned at a stake - that is historical accuracy.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Might I suggest The Right Stuff?

Thanks! I've already read The Right Stuff, great!...

[radbaddude]

Book 4 of The Expanse series

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by ReadingManiac

DNF of Age of Misadventure. Another author goes down the present tense black hole.

Now reading Nevernight by Jay Christoff

Which brings up a question that came up in another less appropriate thread. What are people's feelings about what I would describe as graphic porn in novels that are not sold as erotica?

I mean the book is about a young girl who goes to learn to be an assassin. It's a fantasy world and a political plot, but also inter-relationships among the other acolytes. Fair enough that a romance would come into it, but a blow-by-blow description of a sexual encounter that was obviously written by a man blindsided me halfway through. I don't want to read that!

It's something that comes into a lot of modern books and I really thing they should come with a warning.

That was something I appreciated about the Book of the Month clubs when I was a member, the fact that they noted graphic sex and violence as I also do not appreciate being blindsided with an unexpected attempt to sexually arouse while engaging in a bit of light reading. The fact that such attempts tend to backfire for me just adds to the annoyance.