books
TRX
August 24, 2012
25:
Books check in here, but almost never leave... every available wall is paneled
in bookshelves. Then books started taking over any available space. There are
about ten of them in the bathroom, and each car has several.
I recently finished George C. Chesbro's odd series of detective novels featuring Robert Frederickson, alias "Mongo the Magnificent." They cross genres from "PI" to "techno-thriller" to "urban fantasy" to "horror."
In process: several books on GTK programming. I'm not sure I can say I'm "reading" them, at least not sequentially. Tech stuff like this I generally skim, then go back over the parts that are relevant to the information I want. It's probably a bad habit.
On paper: "Cemetary Dance" by Preston & Child. Another genre-breaker series, it seems. I never used to read two books at once, but I now have one going on paper and one on the e-reader. I read when I eat, so when I go out to lunch or dinner, I always have a book. I find eating and swiping at the e-reader to be awkward; paper is better in this situation.
On the e-reader: a bunch of A. Bertram Chandler. I'd read some of the "Commodore Grimes" reprints while growing up, and some of the craptastic later Grimes books later. Chandler's early stuff varies widely in quality, but some of it is very good. And a Chandler story always has a protagonist, an identifiable plot, and a resolution. Without this triad, I'm prone to consider sending the author a bill for wasting my time. All too often I've read stories that meander pointlessly and then stop so suddenly I examine the binding to see if any pages might have fallen out...
In the paper queue: either William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" or John Robinson's "Dungeon, Fire, & Sword." It has been... uh... a really long time since I read Shirer's book, and I've learned enough about that part of history since that a bunch of stuff I skipped over will probably make sense now. It has only been 18 years since I read Robinson's book, and I've learned a lot more about that era since then, too. (It's a history of the Knights Templar.) There's plenty of new stuff to read, but these two have been creeping up the list for quite a while. History books are odd that way; they all interlock, and every now and then when you go back to something you read long ago, what you've learned in the meantime can give you a whole different take on things, so you have the same experience as reading an entirely new book. Since I first read "Dungeon, Fire, & Sword" I've learned that when the authors of some of the books I read later referred to "the Church", they were lumping the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church together, and at least some of the policies and orders they implied came from Rome actually came from Byzantium. Knowing that now, "what" doesn't change, but "why" sometimes starts making more sense...
TRX
August 24, 2012
60:
@30:
Steven Brust's .-- Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille
--
I put that one down a couple of times before grinding on through. After that,
I enjoyed re-reading it a couple of times. Brust's wrap-up of the story wasn't
completely satisfactory in my opinion, but it managed to snap most of the WTFs
earlier in the story together. I was never sure if the book suffered from too
much avant-garde or too little editing.
As for the cover... just another example of how cover art can annoy the reader. It helps to know what "pain" means in French, though...
TRX
August 24, 2012
61:
@29:
"The Stainless Steel Rat" (in memoriam Harry; a great guy, although that
particular novel has dated somewhat in the past 50 years).
--
Some of the later books seem to have been written long before the "first" one
came out. In one, DiGriz distracts a bad guy by throwing a "sander" at him,
then mentions that a sander was a device to spread powder onto a freshly-
written page to dry the ink.
I was grateful for the explanation; growing up in 1960s America, fountain pens were mostly oddities you found in the back of desk drawers. I thought it was odd that they didn't have ball-point pens, or at least quick-drying ink, in the ???th century.
Either way, even then it seemed like a particularly clumsy bit of writing; obviously Harrison or his editor felt it was an unusual enough object to require explanation, but I wondered why he had it at all. Something like having a 2012 author having a character change the cassette tape in his smartphone, and then explaining what a cassette tape was...
TRX
August 25, 2012
82:
@79:
NOT as good as "Callaghan's Crosstime Saloon" ...also Poul Anderson, the Old
Pheonix as a venue?
--
Ah, I see the problem now. Cowboy Feng's isn't a collection of short stories;
the vignettes at the beginning are simply establishing the backstory as the
characters see it. The bar is actually *going* somewhere, making stops along
the way. Brust doesn't tie it all together until the end, which would make
things very strange if you were expecting something like Callahan's...
The characters have no clue what's going on, and Brust doesn't give the reader anything else either. That's why I put it down a couple of times; it didn't seem to be going anywhere. It's a writing trick that can be useful, but Brust stretched it out way too long.