August 2022 Reading Thread

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Individual Choice was always my favourite, but that's quite a departure from the what are you reading thread. :)
 
I also listened to an intriguing short story, The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster. This is a look at where technology may bring us in the distant future as humans reach a pinnacle in development and stagnate. This leads to a disastrous fall as the machine which maintains them needs maintenance the people lack skills to provide. But this is not the end, however, and there are signs that humanity has not forgotten itself after all.
Gary Numan based a lot of his early stuff on that book
 
The Path of Thorns by A. (Angela) G. Slatter

The Morwood family has its secrets. The new governess is aware of many of them, and has come to fulfill promises, a fulfillment that could leave the Morwoods shattered. Familial love and betrayal, the relations of mothers and daughters, and the shifting power among the monied classes, all merge to affect the eventual denouement and direct the future of the Morwood family.

This is set in Slatter's Sourdough and Bitterwood short stories. It is a beautifully written, immersive, Gothic with overtones of fairy tale, examining the lives of women, specifically of women in a mid- to late 19th century setting different from but rather like England. (Note: Slatter does not skimp on her portrayal of the ugliest side of women's lives, and there are scenes and language that some will no doubt find offensive. For me, both scenes and language were appropriate to time, place and the class(es) of women involved.)
 
Finished Orbital Ascension by Igor Nikolic. It is the sequel to The Ship in the Stone in The Space Legacy Series. It was pretty solid MIl S.F. Unlike so many of the S.F. books set in the present the "discovery" of a space ship passes the plausibility test for me. I liked the story and give it an ordinary 4 star rating. My biggest concerns with the books fall into moral and sociological realms. (I know everyone who knows me is not in the least surprised about that.) First, the book takes a very libertarian point of view. (It always makes me chuckle that so many of the people who hold libertarian views of government believe the best for of government is a benevolent monarchy. --- I mean really!?) It has a lot of vigilante justice in it and the body count is very high. Another morally repellent feature is the use of torture to gain information. But interestingly either the characters grow or the author has a shift in his thinking because as the book goes on these features are dialed down. All in all I think if you like things like Hammer's Slammers, you will likely enjoy these.
 
Genesis by Chris Carter
The latest in his Robert Hunter detective series
 
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Herman Hesse "Demian"
I liked this. Not big like, but I liked it. Apparently it was Hesse's first best seller: published in 1919, it caught the mood of post WWI Germany. However, as a known and outspoken pacifist who had spent WWI in Switzerland, it was thought best to publish it under a pseudonym, the name of the narrator in the book. My reason for reading it was an odd one - the Gnostic deity Abraxas was significant in the writings of Carl Jung, and the same deity plays an important role in Demian.
 
I finished Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher :LOL:
It's an entertaining anthology of short stories by various authors published between 1844 and 1932, all featuring some sort of man-eating plant (and one fungus).
 
"Anyone want to please Recommend a John D. Macdonald novel?"

Any of them. The worst of them is very good.

One Monday We Killed them All
Where is Janice Gantry?
The Only Girl in the Game
The Deep Blue Goodby
Etc.
 
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James David Victor Martian Academy - a SF military space opera. (Book 1 of a new series)

Interesting so far .. Earth is now united under one government (based on the Roman Empire) and eventually becomes a space going society, all goes well until the nasty lizard aliens attack.

Now they need to prepare for other aliens from out there
 
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I started to read Max's Logs Vol 1, The Space Legacy Book 1.5 by Igor Nikolic. This is the same story as The Ship in Stone as told by the A.I. (that's not quite right, but not sure what would communicate what Max is, but A.I. is close.) I did not finish it. It seemed to me that no one would much care to read it as it went over a lot of old ground. But there's no accounting for taste, because 2.5 is the next book published.

On the other hand I read a short story (not too short 57 pages) Signal Moon by Kate Quinn. I found it a really nice story about a time skip communication between two communication tech's in the armed forces skipping between 1943 and 2023. The story was nice, believable and made me want to read more. So I did something I almost never do I bought a full price Kindle book of hers. The Diamond Eye, which is one of her best sellers. She specializes in finding little known WW II "heroes" and writing an historical fiction about them.

I've only just begun the novel and I expect it to be great, but still I normally read about 20 K.U. books for what reading this one is costing me.
 
I just finished the audiobook A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. This author is known for Robinson Crusoe, but I had not even heard of this work until recently. In the past I would not have been interested in this work, but in current times it is relevant. This is a very thorough account of life in London during the 1665 outbreak of Plague. There is a resemblance in social and economic aspects to our current pandemic. People don't change.
 
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. This author is known for Robinson Crusoe, but I had not even heard of this work until recently.
I read this book many years ago as research for something I was writing at the time. It was a great resource, but I also enjoyed reading it.

Yes, it does seem like Defoe is best known for writing Robinson Crusoe, though his Moll Flanders is the work that seems most often adapted for television or film. (I don't think I've ever seen a dramatization of Crusoe, though I am sure it must have happened, whereas, I have seen at least three different dramatizations of Moll.)
 
I read a short story (not too short 57 pages) Signal Moon by Kate Quinn. I found it a really nice story about a time skip communication between two communication tech's in the armed forces skipping between 1943 and 2023
@Parson
Cheers for this, I downloaded it and enjoyed it a lot - the one annoyance is I'll never find out the punchline to that joke about the 2 Nazis and the Russian peasant girl :) :oops:
 
Alfred Bester "Extro" (1974)
I gave up about halfway through. Maybe only my second DNF in the last ten years. However, I had realised that I had read it before, even though I remembered almost nothing except one aspect of the ending. Some good ideas in it, but....
Sad really, Tiger Tiger/ The Stars My Destination was probably the first adult SF I read and had a deep effect on me, for instance I spent weeks on and off trying to teleport. Extro (it has various titles) was the follow up some twenty years later.
 
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