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bluegargantuaHi,
Between GenCon and my honeymoon, I've read a ton of books and I haven't said much about them.
This here post is where I change all that.
I'm listing these roughly in the order in which I read them.
OK, first up The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson. This is the sixth book in the Malazan Empire series (of an estimated 10). I still really enjoy this series, but I'm starting to have some serious problems keeping track of people. Especially because a.) it's been several months since the last one and b.) there are a heck of a lot of "ultimate warriors and their sidekick" types running around...ok, maybe just two, but still. Also, the various non-human races all have pretty much the same names (Tiste Andii, Tiste Edur, Tiste Liosan) and pulling the various threads together about how the three groups set the stage thousands of years ago for the conflict playing out now is a little rough (oh, and there are other races, demons, deities in on the act). There really needs to be an annotated version of this (or a really strong wiki). Still, despite all this, Erikson continues to churn out writing that I'm really interested in reading and the sense of scale and sweep is impressive.
Next, we have an anthology series. Normally, I really detest anthologies, but this one was edited by the same guy who did All-Star Zeppelin Stories, so I was very interested to see what he would select for his new collection Twenty Epics. The rules were simple: submit an epic story of 10,000 words or less, the 20 best submissions made it into the book. For the most part, the selections were inspired. There was a wide mix of genres and lots of great angles on what constitutes an "epic". Especially good were Cup and Table by Tim Pratt, The Dinner Game by Stephen Eley and Five Hundred and Forty Doors by David J. Schwartz, but really there were lots of great stories here and it's highly recommended.
In the Lakes District I read Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. This is the first a series of children's books by Mr. Ransome with adventures based off of his childhood summers in the Lakes District. In fact, many of the places in the first few books are directly inspired by Coniston and Coniston Lake where we stayed. So it was an imperative read. It's an utterly charming and delightful book. Four children on holiday sail their boat off to an island in the middle of the lake for a week-long camping excursion. They run into Amazons and Pirates and find buried treasure and everything. Totally and completely charming. Highly recommended to children and kids at heart.
I read a lot of Neal Asher during the trip and the first book I read was The Voyage of the Sable Keech. This is the sequel to The Skinner and, I have to say, it really felt like a sequel. Remember eveyone in the last book? Yeah, they're all back. Well, except for that one guy. And those other two. But the protagonists? They pretty much all come back. We get no new faces (or at least no one who gets enough spotlight time to be memorable or important). It's not an unpleasant read, the story clips right along and stuff does happen. But at the end you think to yourself that what happens isn't nearly as interesting as what happened in the previous book. I will note that there a very stong component of Moby Dick in this particular book so perhaps it's operating on that Herman Melville level that I just never get. Happily, it's nowhere near as boring as Moby Dick, but not a favorable match for the previous volume.
In London, I picked up a used copy of The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. This would be the third of his "Culture" books that I've read and I think I can pretty much sum up this book (and all the others in the following way:
Welcome to the Culture, the AI-run super-utopia of the far future. Everyone here is completely free
and has all their wants and needs fulfilled. It's a total paradise. Unless, you are an exceptional individual in a society of hundreds of trillions of people. In that case, life in paradise eats away at your soul. Luckily, exceptional people like you get signed up by Special Circumstances (sometimes willingly, sometimes...not so much) and you get to go off on an Adventure! This can cause you to find complete fulfillment of purpose, or maybe it just grinds you down to nothing, but in either case you get to show how completely special and awesome you are. One the Adventure is over, of course, life back in the Culture becomes even more hollow and artificial and you wind up killing yourself (life is so good, self-inflicted death is about the only way to die. Fortunately, no one in the Culture would dream of stopping you).
Perhaps it's best if you just read these books and skip out on the last chapter. That's where he tends to say "and then everyone kills themselves from unremitting despair".
Whilst in London, I also picked up some more Neal Asher (as an aside, British book covers are like, ten thousand times better than American book covers). Among the selections, I've finished up was Line of Polity. This is a sequel to Gridlinked which I read a little while ago. Like Sable Keech above, this one has pretty much every protagonist (and a few antagonists) back in action, but there was a pretty solid influx of new faces who actually counted for something. We also got a few new locales for the action which helped alleviate the "been here, did this" feeling. Most importantly, the book really dug in and went somewhere. I've heard people say that it retreads the ground of Gridlinked but that was more of an espionage/investigation kind of story and in Polity we get more of a geurilla warfare, Delta Force kinda feel. I really rather liked it. I probably wouldn't jump into this without reading Gridlinked first, but it's a real fun read.
One final book in the pile (told you I got a fair amount of reading done in August). This last one is Motor Gunboat 658 by L. C. Reynolds. Not surprisingly, it's Mr. Reynold's tale of serving abord MGB 658 in the Mediterranean during WWII. I picked up this book because I'm getting very interested in small boat battles after playing in a game at GenCon. First-hand accounts from people who were there are invaluable in getting a sense for what it was like and cooking up scenarios to play out. Sadly, I was really disappointed in this book. The problem is that Reynolds entered the war in late '43 so much of the conflict was over within a year and a half. But an even bigger problem is that while 658 participated in a few sharp actions, these were few and far between and sometimes, Reynolds wasn't even present when some of the hottest fighting happened. To be fair, ships that were heavily involved in lots of scraps often wound up getting scrapped themselves so perhaps a survivor would have less interesting stories to tell, but I was really disappointed and hope to find some other first-person accounts in the near future.
So there you go, a huge slew of books read and reviewed.
later
Tom
Between GenCon and my honeymoon, I've read a ton of books and I haven't said much about them.
This here post is where I change all that.
I'm listing these roughly in the order in which I read them.
OK, first up The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson. This is the sixth book in the Malazan Empire series (of an estimated 10). I still really enjoy this series, but I'm starting to have some serious problems keeping track of people. Especially because a.) it's been several months since the last one and b.) there are a heck of a lot of "ultimate warriors and their sidekick" types running around...ok, maybe just two, but still. Also, the various non-human races all have pretty much the same names (Tiste Andii, Tiste Edur, Tiste Liosan) and pulling the various threads together about how the three groups set the stage thousands of years ago for the conflict playing out now is a little rough (oh, and there are other races, demons, deities in on the act). There really needs to be an annotated version of this (or a really strong wiki). Still, despite all this, Erikson continues to churn out writing that I'm really interested in reading and the sense of scale and sweep is impressive.
Next, we have an anthology series. Normally, I really detest anthologies, but this one was edited by the same guy who did All-Star Zeppelin Stories, so I was very interested to see what he would select for his new collection Twenty Epics. The rules were simple: submit an epic story of 10,000 words or less, the 20 best submissions made it into the book. For the most part, the selections were inspired. There was a wide mix of genres and lots of great angles on what constitutes an "epic". Especially good were Cup and Table by Tim Pratt, The Dinner Game by Stephen Eley and Five Hundred and Forty Doors by David J. Schwartz, but really there were lots of great stories here and it's highly recommended.
In the Lakes District I read Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. This is the first a series of children's books by Mr. Ransome with adventures based off of his childhood summers in the Lakes District. In fact, many of the places in the first few books are directly inspired by Coniston and Coniston Lake where we stayed. So it was an imperative read. It's an utterly charming and delightful book. Four children on holiday sail their boat off to an island in the middle of the lake for a week-long camping excursion. They run into Amazons and Pirates and find buried treasure and everything. Totally and completely charming. Highly recommended to children and kids at heart.
I read a lot of Neal Asher during the trip and the first book I read was The Voyage of the Sable Keech. This is the sequel to The Skinner and, I have to say, it really felt like a sequel. Remember eveyone in the last book? Yeah, they're all back. Well, except for that one guy. And those other two. But the protagonists? They pretty much all come back. We get no new faces (or at least no one who gets enough spotlight time to be memorable or important). It's not an unpleasant read, the story clips right along and stuff does happen. But at the end you think to yourself that what happens isn't nearly as interesting as what happened in the previous book. I will note that there a very stong component of Moby Dick in this particular book so perhaps it's operating on that Herman Melville level that I just never get. Happily, it's nowhere near as boring as Moby Dick, but not a favorable match for the previous volume.
In London, I picked up a used copy of The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. This would be the third of his "Culture" books that I've read and I think I can pretty much sum up this book (and all the others in the following way:
Welcome to the Culture, the AI-run super-utopia of the far future. Everyone here is completely free
and has all their wants and needs fulfilled. It's a total paradise. Unless, you are an exceptional individual in a society of hundreds of trillions of people. In that case, life in paradise eats away at your soul. Luckily, exceptional people like you get signed up by Special Circumstances (sometimes willingly, sometimes...not so much) and you get to go off on an Adventure! This can cause you to find complete fulfillment of purpose, or maybe it just grinds you down to nothing, but in either case you get to show how completely special and awesome you are. One the Adventure is over, of course, life back in the Culture becomes even more hollow and artificial and you wind up killing yourself (life is so good, self-inflicted death is about the only way to die. Fortunately, no one in the Culture would dream of stopping you).
Perhaps it's best if you just read these books and skip out on the last chapter. That's where he tends to say "and then everyone kills themselves from unremitting despair".
Whilst in London, I also picked up some more Neal Asher (as an aside, British book covers are like, ten thousand times better than American book covers). Among the selections, I've finished up was Line of Polity. This is a sequel to Gridlinked which I read a little while ago. Like Sable Keech above, this one has pretty much every protagonist (and a few antagonists) back in action, but there was a pretty solid influx of new faces who actually counted for something. We also got a few new locales for the action which helped alleviate the "been here, did this" feeling. Most importantly, the book really dug in and went somewhere. I've heard people say that it retreads the ground of Gridlinked but that was more of an espionage/investigation kind of story and in Polity we get more of a geurilla warfare, Delta Force kinda feel. I really rather liked it. I probably wouldn't jump into this without reading Gridlinked first, but it's a real fun read.
One final book in the pile (told you I got a fair amount of reading done in August). This last one is Motor Gunboat 658 by L. C. Reynolds. Not surprisingly, it's Mr. Reynold's tale of serving abord MGB 658 in the Mediterranean during WWII. I picked up this book because I'm getting very interested in small boat battles after playing in a game at GenCon. First-hand accounts from people who were there are invaluable in getting a sense for what it was like and cooking up scenarios to play out. Sadly, I was really disappointed in this book. The problem is that Reynolds entered the war in late '43 so much of the conflict was over within a year and a half. But an even bigger problem is that while 658 participated in a few sharp actions, these were few and far between and sometimes, Reynolds wasn't even present when some of the hottest fighting happened. To be fair, ships that were heavily involved in lots of scraps often wound up getting scrapped themselves so perhaps a survivor would have less interesting stories to tell, but I was really disappointed and hope to find some other first-person accounts in the near future.
So there you go, a huge slew of books read and reviewed.
later
Tom
