yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah
The first one especially is such a fun “Ocean’s 11: Fantasy Version” but I think maybe the second starts to get a bit too fantastical for its own good, despite there being a few cool things. I’ve got the third on my reading list despite also losing enthusiasm after all the delays.
Another good “Ocean’s 11 Fantasy” is California Bones by Greg van Eekhout. It’s not nearly as fun as Locke Lamora, but it’s entertaining enough in its own right.
Finished Swords and Devilry. Spent the first 80 pages thinking, “sheesh this introduction is way too long”, then the final two chapters seemed tacked on, as if they had been written completely separately to the first part. Turns out they’d been written over 20 years apart in different magazines, so.
Yeah I wouldn’t think of any fafhrd and the gray mouser book as a novel so much as a collection of short stories featuring the same characters.
The first volume, which you read, is only really worthwhile for Ill Met in Lankhmar (one of the all time great swords and sorcery stories), and things pick up considerably in the second volume.
This is new to me (when packaged as novel-sized volumes in plot-chronological order). maybe reading them in publication order is better?
Nah, the ordering doesn’t matter because the best stories weren’t written in any particular period of Leiber’s life
Think of it like reading Sherlock Holmes, which would be the closest analog: the order you read the stories in has little bearing on whether a given story is good or not.
First thing I thought of.
I finished China Mieville’s latest thing, This Census Taker. It’s an interesting take on childhood memory and trauma, at least as I’m reading it, but it might be his vaguest and most open-ended work yet as well.
Gaddis’ The Recognitions
What is wrong with me
read the most recent haruki murakami novel.
it sure was filled with tacky aphorisms about the human condition! so much a lot of the time there was no weight at all on a scene supposedly important to talk about characters because such characters would be saying the same blow-hard lines to illustrate even further their misanthropy. the metaphores to do that were really bad most of the time. and the dialogue kept going with this as well. sometimes while reading i sort of giggled for how cringey some bits were.
the book has a nice structure though, as usual. it always gave a hook to keep looking forward without making it a big deal. and the plot have a small scale throughout, which is nice.
coming to think of it, it could be that the reason why descriptions and streams of consciousness are so, err, romantic is because it was the work of a translator other than the two usual ones. but then it could be that my memories of 1q84 and norwegian wood (the latter which i read in english, by jay rubin) are not so sharp. i really liked all of those, even though book two and three of 1q84 were a total wreckage. had some pleasant descriptions of hanging out at night and cooking though!
also: the first thirty pages of the colorless tsukuru tazaki had the protagonist talking about his experiences in college and i identified with a lot of his views on that based on what i went through last year. now that’s depressing.
Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak. I think I read it before? I was given a few Simak books when I was young. His thing is ‘alternate worlds, a mere thought away’ (obvious in retrospect).
This book is a strange socialist libetarian fiction? Mutants attack the world’s economy with high-quality cheap goods, people flee the resulting poverty to Earth Two, a ungoverned paradise except robots provide the baseline support (medical, transport, etc.).
have been atoning for my sins of being ignorant about origins of western civilization, so been reading Iliad and Histories. great stuff.
Thanks, I ended up with the Jones & Jones translation, which was first made in the 1940s. I’m having trouble understanding some passages but I like reading things which are phrased in different ways anyway.
Just started Declare. Only other Powers I’ve read was The Anubis Gates which I enjoyed, so I’m looking forward to Cold War + cult mysticism shenanigans.
Finished The Dispossesed by le Guin. The premise is, what if socialist libertarians lived on a mostly infertile desert moon, and the next Einstein is born there & has to emigrate to the neighbouring planet of decadent western culture to get funding/recognition/research time to develop the necessary equations for FTL communication.
It’s soft sci-if, I enjoyed it. It won the big awards so I guess other people also liked it!
Le Guin did a great job of fabricating the jargon and theories of a post-Relativity physics breakthrough.
Delany has a good essay about why he doesn’t like this very much.
As I recall a lot of it is about how it handles space boners.
Is it the chapter about reading The Dispossessed in The Jewel Hinged Jaw? If not, I will proceed to my nearest local library to the reference desk to find out what they know about Delaney’s hot takes re: boners (space).
Shiitttt The Sisters Brothers is the best thing I’ve read in ages.