I don't know what the heck to call this thread!

[CaptainCanada]

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis ("Road to 107", Part 35)

Took a month or so's break from reading any new Nobel authors - good to vary things - but I've got this and Doctor Zhivago lined up for the near future, as well as some other books not related to the reading project. With this, I've read something from all of the American recipients of the Prize. Lewis was the first, ironically. Plus, reading something of his helps to differentiate him from his similar-sounding contemporary, Upton Sinclair.

The two Sinclairs were both leftist writers; Sinclair's tended to write polemics like The Jungle, but Lewis is more of a satirist. This was his second major work, a satire of the emerging middle class mindset, in the person of George F. Babbitt, a caricature of a complacement early 1920s upper-middle income earners. This sort of thing has become a fairly familiar figure in western literature, so Babbitt is a lot more familiar than he would have been to people reading the novel when it came out in 1922. It's about 400 pages long, and takes a while to get going, but it's still reasonably interesting, and Lewis plays things a bit differently than a lot of his successors have.

[AdamYJ]

I just finished A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare and have just moved onto Storm Front (first book in the Dresden Files) by Jim Butcher.

[CaptainCanada]

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

In which H. G. Wells invents the idea of a time machine, which has been not at all influential.

This novella (less than 90 pages) has obviously had a huge impact on the sci-fi genre; on its own, it still hold some interest, though as you might expect with a story this slim, the plot is pretty straightforward and minimal (and the structure means there's no real suspense). Strong ending, though.

[whiteshark]

I have been reading a anthology book of horror stories choosen by Boris Karloff at the moment.

Enjoying it a lot.
There is even a sequel writen to a story by Edgar Alan Poe writen by another writter in the book that i did not knew about.

[Roquefort Raider]

A translation of The secret of life by Paul McAuley, a sci-fi techno-thriller.

I had never heard of McAuley, which is somewhat strange given his talent and apparent success. I guess I've been out of the loop as far as modern SF is concerned for the past few years. This won't be the last book of his I read.

Since McAuley has a background as a biologist, he adds a lot of plausibility to his speculations. However, there are a few glitches that annoy me (as a fellow biologist and as a reader). Things like scientists calling each other by their family names... "Hey, Jones, look at this!" "What is it, Pierce"?... I've always known biologists to be either on a first name basis (even when they don't really know each other), or keeping to the "Dr. Jones" and "Dr, Pierce" level of formality... Things like James Watson's name not being John (although that may be a blunder by the translator, who botched the job in a few places)... Things like technology trying to be too descriptive, resulting in very dated things at times... because let's face it, some technologies move so fast that applying today's standards to what will happen 20 years from now is a risky business. In this case, the characters describe a 2026 DNA sequencing technology that's barely better than what was available in 2000, is far inferior to what we have in 2011, and will doubtless be ridiculously quaint in 2026. Better to leave a certain artistic blur around technical details and just focus on what results machines can provide (something the movie GATACA pulled out quite efficiently).

I also don't really care about writers trying to put forward some kind of agenda and not being consequent with it. Here, the message seems to be that reductionism is bad and that only holistic science is truly worthwhile. People like Richard Dawkins are made to sound like stubborn and myopic old farts. (Well, Dawkins is certainly stubborn, but myopic he is not and is more of a firebrand than an old fart. Feel free to add methane-related jokes here). Now all this would be par for course if the very character who articulates those views in the novel didn't write a convincing simulation of a desert ecosystem with only two lines of code. (That little bit was supposed to awe us with her programming prowess, but if it isn't reductionism I don't know what is).

Besides, no scientist ever argues that reductionism is the only way to go : it's not a philosophy, it's a tool. People having to change a flat tire are damn happy to be able to reduce the problem to "the tire is pierced and changing the wheel for the spare will allow us to resume traveling" rather than have to understand how every moving piece of the car relates to every other piece. Obviously, nobody thinks that knowing how to change a tire is all there is to automobile maintenance; but it's by learning how this piece works, how that piece works, where that tube connects and so forth, that we can understand how the whole thing runs.

Phew! End of rant. The book is still a darn good thriller, with an unknown life-form that may have come from Mars spreading on Earth.

[Gothos]

I'm slowly working my way through Conrad's NOSTROMO for a Great Books group. It's odd, because his shorter works are aces with me. He may be one of those writers who should have been kept away from long novels, if my experience is any yardstick.

[CaptainCanada]

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

Another of Guy Gavriel Kay's books, the only one set mainly in the present. It turns out to be a sequel to the "Fionavar Tapestry" trilogy midway through, due to the presence of two characters, but this isn't advertised, and ultimately it's mainly a sideline to the main story - though I imagine the novel would be a lot less effective in places to those who hadn't read it (the characters' backstory is only slightly alluded to in spots, but their dialogue frequently subtly references the earlier stories). I liked seeing what became of them.

The main story is nicely done, overall. Kay's writing is engaging, though he's got a couple of tics that annoy me - most notably, the tendency to repeat characters' full names constantly (mostly with just two, Edward Marriner and Kate Wenger). Reminds me of Rick Riordan continually repeating "Rachel Elizabeth Dare" in his books. It has two teenaged characters as quasi-leads (though Kate actually turns out to be more than a little unnecessary), but it doesn't feel at all like a YA novel, which I've seen some people call it.

[dupersuper]

I have been reading a anthology book of horror stories choosen by Boris Karloff at the moment.

Enjoying it a lot.
There is even a sequel writen to a story by Edgar Alan Poe writen by another writter in the book that i did not knew about.

Which Poe story?

[whiteshark]

Which Poe story?

Its a sequel writen by another writer to Poe´s "The Cask of Amontillado".
The sequel is not as good as the original story,still was surprising to see a sequel to it in the book i was reading.

[Expletive Deleted]

Hard Day's Knight, the new "Nightside" novel from Simon R. Green.

Plot summary: John Taylor, now the Nightside's chief enforcer/problem-solver, suddenly finds himself the owner of Excalibur. Hijinks ensue.

It's entertaining, but it's not Green's best work. The previous book (The Good, The Bad, and the Uncanny) promised some big changes to the series' status quo, and while those changes are evident here, they're largely passed by on the way to the apocalypses-of-the-month.

Speaking of this volume's big threats . . . eh, I wasn't feeling it. The first major set of opponents are pretty much Mirror Universe versions of King Arthur and Merlin, and the second set (two warring factions of elves) are underdeveloped. The stakes never seem particularly high and the characters' victories seem unearned.

Honestly, as much as I like John Taylor as a protagonist, I think the series might benefit from branching out into other viewpoints. He's starting to get predictable, and he's also gotten too powerful and established to be credible as an underdog. After the next book (which, based on the last page or two of this one, will have to be more than a little John-and-Suzie-centric), I wouldn't mind seeing a Nightside novel starring, say, one of the Oblivion Brothers. Or Razor Eddie. Or Leo Morn. Or even someone new, like the doomed con artist from Green's Nightside short story "Some of These Cons Go Way Back." Just as a change of pace.

All that said, Green keeps things moving with his usual brisk, breezy pace and snappy banter. If you already like the characters and the setting, it's worth a read.

(Also: for fans of Green's other series, Hawk and Fisher have a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo, there's a major guest appearance by Gayle from Drinking Midnight Wine, and Green tosses in the usual cavalcade of namechecks for the Droods, Haven, Shadows Fall, and so on.)

[clayholio]

"The Wordy Shipmates" - Sarah Vowell

It's a book about John Winthrop and Roger Williams, and basically the ensuing theological wars (and literal wars with the local Native American tribes) that result in the founding of Rhode Island and Connecticut. I blew through this book - it was such an easy read. Vowell is a gifted writer, especially at turning history into storytelling rather than a laundry list of dates and names (which is, unfortunately, how pretty much all of my history teachers approached the subject).

I know that I've got another of her books, "Assassination Vacation," laying around. For some reason, I never started it, but it's on my short list to read now.

[SlightlyMad]

Just finished The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart and the die has told me to read One Hit Wonderland by Tony Hawks next.

[SlightlyMad]

Tao Te Ching--Lao Tzu.

Really liked reading all the passages from this book. Lots of wisdom here, endless actually.
I am on an Chinese Philosophy buzz lately. Something different I suppose.

Have you read The Tao of Pooh and Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff? I picked it up a few years ago as I've always been curious about it since seeing it as one of the recommended reads in the back of an issue of Dennis O'Neil's The Question series & would highly recommend it myself.

[CaptainCanada]

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak ("Road to 107", Part 36)

In the course of this Nobel reading project, with some authors there are a host of works to choose from; in some cases, though, there's really only one really legitimate choice if you want to say you've "read" them, and with Pasternak that's Doctor Zhivago.

I'd previously seen the famous movie, which I suspect coloured my impression of this a bit. Normally when you read a famous novel of this length, compared to film versions, there's varying degrees of important stuff that really adds to the film (the most extreme case would be something like The Count of Monte Cristo, where whole sections running for hundreds of pages get cleaved out). I didn't really feel like that was the case here; of course, Lean's film was quite long, and so pretty comprehensive, but the result is a broad sense of reading something I'm already mostly familiar with. There are some supporting characters who didn't make it into the film, many sequences go on for longer (Zhivago's time with the partisans, for instance), and some things have been rearranged (Zhivago's half-brother is considerably less prominent than he is in the film, for instance). Oh, and sporadic speculation about the nature of art and beauty (note to all aspiring artists: when tempted to include this in your stories, as a general rule, resist it; it's almost never as interesting as you think it is). In particular, I was disappointed that the book didn't really improve on some of the problems I had with the film; most notably Yuri separating from Lara, which has never made much sense to me, and his relationships with the various women in general (the novel even adds in another woman he falls in with on returning to St. Petersburg at the end). Still an interesting read, and its historical impact can't be denied, but for most people I'd just say watch the movie.

[Gothos]

I'm slowly working my way through Conrad's NOSTROMO for a Great Books group. It's odd, because his shorter works are aces with me. He may be one of those writers who should have been kept away from long novels, if my experience is any yardstick.

Just to let the other shoe drop, I gave up on straight-reading this and just scanned enough of it to discuss in my group. Only a couple of the other 5 people had a moderate liking for the book, which is overwritten in a big way. Hard to believe this was labelled no. 47 in a list of greatest books ever written by some critics.