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Post by EdoBosnar on Feb 2, 2021 15:22:11 GMT -5
Oh, man. Bury My Heart... Very good, but very depressing book. It probably didn't help that I read it right after reading Gloria Jahoda's Trail of Tears. History often is. Oh, I know. I majored in history. And I've been living in the Balkans since the early 1990s...
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 2, 2021 15:23:55 GMT -5
Oh, man. Bury My Heart... Very good, but very depressing book. It probably didn't help that I read it right after reading Gloria Jahoda's Trail of Tears. It really is a great book. I'm planning to re-read it, though it may be a while. It's one of the books that was formative on my world view.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 9, 2021 22:04:08 GMT -5
Saturn's Children by Charles Stross
I grabbed this for the Hugo/Nebula book club... and I was pretty excited for it.. I had read some Charles Stross a while back, but it was in the middle of a series and I never got around to getting back to it.
This space opera looked right up my alley... awesome future world building, some great, thought provoking themes... (almost a 'who enslaves the slavers' sort of theme), and even a few nerdy call outs to other things (Scalzi Museum? Love it!)
So why did it take me over a week to read? The world building is super interesting, detailed, and offers lots of unique things... a post human world of robots? How cool is that? I think now that I've finish the book, I've figured it out.
While it's certainly not boring (there's sex and violence to spare), the plot is so mysterious, by the time the reveals start happening, I was hard pressed to care. I almost think this would work better as an atmospheric.. the world building was that good, and no plot at all might be better than one that swings and misses.
I think it's also the nature of the reveals that are the problem. It made the world, which was exciting and expansive at first... a solar system full of interesting and varied androids, suddenly shrunk immensely, and it wasn't a good thing.
Then, there's the ending, which, while it had a climatic scene and a resolution, ended up pretty much voiding all the action and trauma that had happened in favor of a 'it was a fake all along' type deal.
I may still give the 2nd book a chance, since it's set massively in the future of this one, but I'm far less excited.
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Post by berkley on Feb 10, 2021 1:57:33 GMT -5
Apparently Saturn's Children was meant to be Stross's answer to Robert Heinlein's Friday. I haven't read either book but they're both on my list.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 10, 2021 11:16:06 GMT -5
A German Requiem by Philip Kerr
The war is over. And Bernie Gunther find himself in 1947 traveling from war-ravaged Berlin to slightly less war-ravaged Vienna. He's been hired surreptitiously by a Soviet intelligence agent to get an old acquaintance of Gunther's off of a murder charge. The gentlemen in question was a Kripo officer at the same time as Gunther, is a smuggler in Vienna and is charged with murder by the United States occupying force. The Nazi government is gone, but the Nazi's themselves are neither gone nor forgotten. This book delves fairly deep into both the truth of occupation and the varied tacks taken by the occupying forces toward ex-Nazis...and even the varied way they were dealt with within the U.S. occupying forces. Operation Paperclip, anyone. It also looks at the intrigue that almost immediately started between the western Allies and the Soviet Union. This book tracks along somewhat closely with Carol Reed's film noir classic "The Third Man" and that film is alluded to in the book. We get a decent look at what Bernie has been up too since book 2. He was married, spent some time with the SS, asked to leave the SS and lived, and was a Russian POW. This is a fine finale to the original trilogy of books and Gunther was successfully unsuccessful in his task which seems appropriate given the setting.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 11, 2021 7:50:10 GMT -5
Apparently Saturn's Children was meant to be Stross's answer to Robert Heinlein's Friday. I haven't read either book but they're both on my list For sure.. plenty of similarities... I'd say Friday is a bit better.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 11, 2021 11:23:53 GMT -5
R. U. R. by Karel CapekIt being the 100th anniversary (year) of Capek coining the word "robot" I figured it was past time that I read the work that has impacted my reading for at least the last forty years. Let's start by saying that I generally don't read plays. Other than Shakespeare you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of plays I've read. They just don't read right to me. Nothing against the form...I enjoy theater well enough, just not to sit and read. So that was, if not a strike against, a potential stumbling block. I guess what I'd say is, this is short, so reading it for historic reasons may not be a complete waste of time. And I'll cop to the fact that the format made this a harder read for me. But, this has not aged well at all. I get that this is an allegorical tale using the robots as stand-ins for the oppressed peoples of the world, but it just isn't strong enough to over-come the myriad problems. Not least of which is that the female protagonist is just a simpering cypher. Let me add that these are not robots in the sense that we think of mechanical robots or androids. They are artificially created biological beings. Which is fine. I read this for historic purposes. And for those purposes it was adequate. But now I never have to read it again. And of that, I'm glad.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Feb 11, 2021 12:36:04 GMT -5
R. U. R. by Karel CapekIt being the 100th anniversary (year) of Capek coining the word "robot" I figured it was past time that I read the work that has impacted my reading for at least the last forty years. Let's start by saying that I generally don't read plays. Other than Shakespeare you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of plays I've read. They just don't read right to me. Nothing against the form...I enjoy theater well enough, just not to sit and read. So that was, if not a strike against, a potential stumbling block. I guess what I'd say is, this is short, so reading it for historic reasons may not be a complete waste of time. And I'll cop to the fact that the format made this a harder read for me. But, this has not aged well at all. I get that this is an allegorical tale using the robots as stand-ins for the oppressed peoples of the world, but it just isn't strong enough to over-come the myriad problems. Not least of which is that the female protagonist is just a simpering cypher. Let me add that these are not robots in the sense that we think of mechanical robots or androids. They are artificially created biological beings. Which is fine. I read this for historic purposes. And for those purposes it was adequate. But now I never have to read it again. And of that, I'm glad. I read this one years & years ago, mainly for the same reason, i.e., it seemed like an important book to read given its historical significance. But I remember feeling the same way about it. A far better work by Capek is War With the Newts ( which I reviewed here last summer). I would really recommend giving that one a try.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 11, 2021 12:49:50 GMT -5
R. U. R. by Karel CapekIt being the 100th anniversary (year) of Capek coining the word "robot" I figured it was past time that I read the work that has impacted my reading for at least the last forty years. Let's start by saying that I generally don't read plays. Other than Shakespeare you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of plays I've read. They just don't read right to me. Nothing against the form...I enjoy theater well enough, just not to sit and read. So that was, if not a strike against, a potential stumbling block. I guess what I'd say is, this is short, so reading it for historic reasons may not be a complete waste of time. And I'll cop to the fact that the format made this a harder read for me. But, this has not aged well at all. I get that this is an allegorical tale using the robots as stand-ins for the oppressed peoples of the world, but it just isn't strong enough to over-come the myriad problems. Not least of which is that the female protagonist is just a simpering cypher. Let me add that these are not robots in the sense that we think of mechanical robots or androids. They are artificially created biological beings. Which is fine. I read this for historic purposes. And for those purposes it was adequate. But now I never have to read it again. And of that, I'm glad. I read this one years & years ago, mainly for the same reason, i.e., it seemed like an important book to read given its historical significance. But I remember feeling the same way about it. A far better work by Capek is War With the Newts ( which I reviewed here last summer). I would really recommend giving that one a try. I'll get to that one. It's a possibility in the next few months. I'm between it, Howard's Almuric and Eric Frank Russell's Sinister Barrier. Maybe I'll put it up for a vote.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Feb 11, 2021 13:19:03 GMT -5
Almuric is also one I keep meaning to get to - I've got it queued up on my tablet with about two dozen other books (that's over and above the massive pile of physical books I have sitting around waiting to be read). Russell is great, too - I thoroughly enjoyed "...And Then There Were None" and Wasp. Next of Kin is also in that queue of e-books...
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 12, 2021 12:21:06 GMT -5
The Dead Don't Care by Jonathan Latimer The fourth and penultimate Bill Crane novel finds Crane and his fellow detectives in Florida to deal with a blackmail case that turns in to a kidnapping. As usual with the Bill Crane books this is a mash-up of hardboiled with a locked door mystery. As usual there is a lot of booze and a lot of wisecracks as well as casual racism and misogny (it was 1938). The change in setting to Miami and the Florida Keys shakes things up from the northern big city rut. The Bill Crane books have generally been good second-tier hardboiled novels with more humor. This is a good entry.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 14, 2021 22:08:27 GMT -5
Brothers of Baker Street by Michael Robertson I picked this up at an actual, in person book store a while back when we were using up an old found gift card... it seemed like a unique way to write a Holmes pastische. ...and it is. The main characters, Reggie and Nigel Heath, defiintely aren't supposed to be Sherlock Holmes, they just rent 221B Baker Street, and part of their lease says they have to respond to mail written to Holmes by fans with a form letter. Apparently, in the first book, one of those letters results in Nigel investigated it... this book is the fallout from that caper, and has an additional conneciton that turns out to be fun (if a bit too high on the coincidence meter). The bulk of the story is a mystery to uncover who is trying to discredit London's Black Cabs... and is just the sort of thing I like to read...I have no idea if the info about the cab drivers is correct, but it certainly seemed so. The mystery is a bit easily solved, but it's fun and moves along nicely. I may be give the book extra love because I've had a few in a row I didn't like, but this was just what I needed. I may well go back and read the 1st one at some point
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Post by berkley on Feb 14, 2021 23:35:33 GMT -5
I read this one years & years ago, mainly for the same reason, i.e., it seemed like an important book to read given its historical significance. But I remember feeling the same way about it. A far better work by Capek is War With the Newts ( which I reviewed here last summer). I would really recommend giving that one a try. I'll get to that one. It's a possibility in the next few months. I'm between it, Howard's Almuric and Eric Frank Russell's Sinister Barrier. Maybe I'll put it up for a vote.
My next classic SF book might be another Eric Frank Russell: Men, Martians, and Machines , which has been cited as an influence on Star Trek.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 15, 2021 20:53:34 GMT -5
I find much of that sort of stuff to be better read ABOUT than read often times... the language can sometimes be a real slog.
Perry Rhodan #16: Secret Barrier X by W.W. Shols
It seems Mr Rhodan has hit a lul... we're still on Venus... with Rhodan trying to get to the fortress to take down the barrier, Thora held captive by the Russians (more Russians, actually) and Bell in space failing to do much.
What I thought was going to be a segway to the next big adventure has turned into an epic saga, and one that really didn't need telling. There's only so much mileage on can get from deserted Russians and crashing landing on Venus, and that was up last book... it seems at least one more volume to go before we move on.
The long promised back up stories also arrived, but were similarly disappointing. there is what is advertised as a serialized sequel to War of the Worlds by Garrett Putnam Serviss, but it's terrible... it reads like bad fan fiction (and I guess it is, since it's not by HG Wells). The (overly long) essay on where it came from says it was lost for many years... perhaps that was not an accident.
There's also a cute 2 page story featuring Burroughsian Martians that is about as good as one can have for a two page story. Hopefully next volume will be done with Venus so I can see if the next big story is worth getting more of the books (I have the 1st 20, then a few random others)
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 16, 2021 13:43:33 GMT -5
The Art of Joe Kubert by Joe Kubert and Bill SchellyArt books are funny things. I think there are two ways for art books to get things right. One is to let the art speak for itself and present the work with a minimum of verbiage, using the prose only to point out what is absolutely necessary. The second is a true hybrid of art and prose that give you a deep dive into both the artists work and their life and work method. Both are valid. Unfortunately an awful lot of them seek a middle ground that provides to small an amount of information to be interesting and thus takes away from the artwork. This books falls in to the latter of the two acceptable methods. There's plenty of great Kubert artwork from across his very long career. It also serves as a pretty decent biography of Joe Kubert. That part wasn't entirely necessary as Schelly had already given us a perfectly fine Kubert biography with 2008s "Man of Rock." But if you're looking for a lovely coffee table book that will also tell you most of what you need to know about Joe Kubert this is a fine choice.
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