Book 13 of #HaveRead this year was "The Babylon Eye," by @Zumbador aka Masha du Toit. Some steampunk with some noir plus cybernetically enhanced dogs and their partners in a liminal space between The Real and The Strange. It starts with the standard Bad Corp springs protagonist from their jail cell for "one last job for freedom" but then plays that out well. And, I did not see the resolution coming at all. On to volume two of the trilogy immediately. #books #sf #sff https://masha.co.za/

Back to genre fiction for book ten. Enjoyed Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire after a stop start. Picked it up a few months ago and something, something just didn't click at first. Partly the unwieldy ethnic group naming and agglutinative terms just didn't work. But I kept seeing people praise it and got back to it. Personal scale space opera? Reading the second installment now. #HaveRead #SF

Forgot to post but I finally finished War and Peace like a week ago. Thoroughly enjoyed my first real foray into Russian #literature. Like thirty years ago I bounced off Dostoevsky--hard. Tolstoy is funny, sweet, humane, angry, and brilliant. Would recommend despite the crazy length of the whole thing. Going to take a break and maybe Anna Karenina in the winter. #haveread Book 9.

This #haveread has not been updated in a while, not for lack of attention, but because I have been reading Tolstoy. I got to the epilogue of War and Peace today. Do you know how many fucking chapters the epilogue has?

Twenty-eight chapter epilogue? That's the minor 13th volume after the series ended, dude. And it alone is still a goddamn doorstop.

#HaveRead The Bloodline Feud #AmReading The Traders' War by @cstross

Both make for an interesting read, thanks for the recommendation to go with the omnibus versions (:*

Book 8 of #HaveRead is another Adrian Tchaikovsky, the final in the Children Trilogy, Children of Memory. This one takes a different approach without a species uplift at the core of the story, but the #Corvids are pretty cool.

Off my pace. I thought I would have a lot of reading time while in the US again the past couple weeks, but that was not the case at all. Time just evaporated. Also, slept very well. Did not get much work or study reading done either. Yikes!

And now I have finally labored through Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Eyes of the Void" for Book 7 of #HaveRead. I liked the first volume of this series, but this dragged. Endless spewing descriptions of what? It gets kind of color out of space lovecrafty in the no space but enough. Nothing much really happens until the very end and even then. The essiels are just not interesting. The eugenic conspiracy is not great and not handled that well. Will not continue.

Right. So way behind posting Book 6 of #HaveRead which was Greg Egan again. Perihelion Summer is a great novella? Short novel? Or real page turner with lots of climate change? It glances off some of the physics flyby in "Instantiation" but in this case objects perturb the Earth's orbit so we get instant crisis. A short version of KSR's "Ministry for the Future" is in here. And maybe better for being shorter and local.

#GregEgan #PerihelionSummer #books #sf

Book 5: "Way Station" by Clifford D. Simak. Catching up on some #HaveRead posting.

Don't think I had read any Simak before except for one short story.

This is from 1963-64, as was reading wondered if it had originally run in a magazine (it did). Can see why this and Simak's writing in general was praised as visionary. Reads now as kind of dated, but not in a bad way just as kind of simple naive treatment of things like simulacra.

There was no real ending. It just stopped.

#bookstadon

Catching up on some #HaveRead posting.

Book Five: "Way Station" by Clifford D. Simak.

Don't think I had read any Simak before except for one short story.

This is from 1963-64, as was reading wondered if it had originally run in a magazine (it did). Can see why this and Simak's writing in general was praised as visionary. Reads now as kind of dated, but not in a bad way just as kind of simple naive treatment of things like simulacra.

There was no real ending. It just stopped.

#bookstadon

Book 4: The #SF anthology "#Instantiation" by #GregEgan. This hits some of the points he usually dives deep on: physics, math, escape. If you liked "Orthogonal" this will scratch some of the same itches in places.

Amidst all the chat-GPT #AI hype this is a good antidote.

Sequence starting with "Bit Players" was creative. A good counterpoint to transhumanism mind upload stuff.

The Pane in "The Slipway" from 2019 hit a lot of the slide into fascism we've been living in but sidewise.

#HaveRead

Book 4: The #SF anthology "#Instantiation" by #GregEgan. This hits some of the points he usually dives deep on: physics, math, escape. If you liked "Orthogonal" this will scratch some of the same itches in places.

Amidst all the chat-GPT #AI hype this is a good antidote.

#HaveRead

Sequence starting with "Bit Players" was creative. A good counterpoint to transhumanism mind upload stuff.

The Pane in "The Slipway" from 2019 hit a lot of the slide into fascism we've been living in but sidewise.

Book 3: Was actually finished a couple days ago, but went ahead and continued with Anthony Doerr "All the Light We cannot See."

It has all the tropes of a WWII novel: the young resistance fighter, the old woman who knows all, the young soldier who is trying to remain human. It uses them well though, I thought. The coda at the end was also quite different from the usual war novel and more like CCL.

#HaveRead #AllTheLightWeCannotSee

Book 2: The e-reader recommended "Cloud Cuckoo Land," and I had some vague recollection that a friend had recommended Anthony Doerr, so got it. Read it. Loved it (for the most part).

My dad has been going back to his classical Greek in retirement, so I recommended ti to him. Turns out he had just finished Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See," so that will likelly be next.

#HaveRead #CloudCuckooLand

So, let's see if I can use my enthusiasm for the pachyderm vs the bird to keep my #HaveRead list going this year.

Book 1: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. I loved Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel even better. Picking up the characters and places again and re-examining them just keeps making her work better.

#books #reading #sf #SeaOfTranquility

So, let's see if I can use my enthusiasm for the pachyderm vs the bird to keep #HaveRead list going this year.

Book 1: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. I loved Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel even better. Picking up the characters and places again and re-examining them just keeps making her work better.

#books #reading #sf #SeaOfTranquility

#HaveRead No Better Friend by Robert Weintraub

Couldn't put it down, read it from cover to cover last night.

Great story of bravery by both men and dog.

#History
#Memoir
#WWII
#WarDiary
#Biography

Only one little thing spoiled the read slightly, the author over-explaining things that, to me as a Brit in my 40s, didn't require explaining. But, perhaps I'm being overly critical.

Would definitely recommend!:*