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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 25, 2024 16:54:55 GMT -5
Traitor's Blade
Sebastien de Castell
I pulled this off my to-read shelf as one of those books I noted looked decent years ago (probably based on someone else's review or one of Goodreads many, many lists)... I was feeling like something a little different and some Swashbuckling seems like just the right different.
The author is clearly invoking the Three Musketeers here, but not so specifically that he feels like a spoof, or rip off... just that he's clearly a fan. The three main characters are specifically analogues or anything, but give off similar vibes.. here they are fighting for a murdered king and look for that king's last legacy to attempt to save the country from petty nobleman run amok and terrorizing the citizens.
There's a small bit of magic tossed in, but even one of the characters says sometimes he can convince himself it isn't really magic, just a good trick, so if feels like it could be a real place if you squint.
There is a bit of plot armor going on... poor Falcio REALLY gets abused badly throughout the book, but that's a common problem easily overlooked in the interest of telling a good story. The plot twists are a bit surprising, but not out of left field and totally worked, which is always positive. I'll definitely be reading the next one.
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Aug 25, 2024 19:51:44 GMT -5
Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling).
Private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott continue to juggle their professional activities and private lives, while really wondering (each independently) if they're ready to risk their friendship for a more romantic relationship. Plenty of colourful characters; some you like, some you love to hate.
It's clear to me: I like the Cormoran Strike series way more than I ever liked the overrated Harry Potter. This is one series I'll probably read all the way through.
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Post by berkley on Aug 25, 2024 21:27:36 GMT -5
Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling). Private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott continue to juggle their professional activities and private lives, while really wondering (each independently) if they're ready to risk their friendship for a more romantic relationship. Plenty of colourful characters; some you like, some you love to hate. It's clear to me: I like the Cormoran Strike series way more than I ever liked the overrated Harry Potter. This is one series I'll probably read all the way through. I have the first Robert Galbraith book but haven't read it yet. I generally have a positive view of Rowling, in spite of the negative reaction against her the last few years for what many see as her anti-transgender views (I don't think it's anything like that simple). I remember finding the Harry Potter series peaked for me with the middle books - maybe no. 3 and 4 of the seven - but of course it wasn't meant for my age group in the first place so it was a bonus that I was able to enjoy it at all, even to a limited degree, and I'm all the more curious to see how I like her stuff when she isn't writing specifically for children .
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Aug 26, 2024 7:21:38 GMT -5
I'd been in a prose slump while I was reading lots of comics, but I finally managed to finish a novel, revisiting on eof the first Conan books I read as a kid... Conan the Liberator by de Camp & Carter. The series of 6 pastiches that this is from were my first encounter with Conan in prose. This is de Camp and Carter's account of how Conan came to take the throne of Aquilonia. I had read the adaptation of this is Savage Sword of Conan earlier this year, so I was able to kind of read this one on cruise control, helping me get out of the prose slump (we'll see if I can use that to create some momentum into the next book). It's not a bad story, but the appearance of a tribe of satyrs in Aquilonia can be a bit off-putting. While there are often supernatural aspects to Howard's Conan tales, this one doesn't jibe with me as an element Howard would have used, at least not in the kind of cutesy way de Campa and Carter presented them. -M
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Aug 27, 2024 9:29:02 GMT -5
Apparently I was a bit ahead of schedule in reading Conan the Liberator... from Jim Zub's Twitter feed... I will be participating for sure. Any one else want to read some Conan in September? -M
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 27, 2024 10:27:12 GMT -5
White Jazz by James Ellroy
I finished this one five days ago and I'm still trying to sort out how I feel. Ellroy is a special writer and his work took steps forward with each book in the L.A. Quartet. The Big Nowhere was a step forward artistically from The Black Dahlia. L.A. Confidential was a big step up from the earlier two. And this is another step forward....but is it a step too far? This is definitely the most literary work of the four and the most I've personally read from Ellroy. The plot is byzantine. It makes the craziest plot that Raymond Chandler came up with look concise. Dave Klein is an LAPD lieutenant in the vice unit. He's also a mob enforcer. After he tosses a federal witness out a hotel window at the behest of Sam Giancana, he's assigned to investigate a bizarre burglary at the home of an LAPD sanctioned drug dealer. That case begins to obsess Klein as he deals with pressures from Chief of Detectives Ed Exley, the dangerous Captain Dudley Smith and a federal probe of LAPD corruption that has Klein in its cross-hairs. As he did with the Sleepy Lagoon murder in The Big Nowhere, Ellroy adds in a bit of semi-obscure L.A. history with the Battle of Chavez Ravine. Ultimately this is a great read. But it's not an easy read. Ellroy is a controversial writer and his work is not for the faint of heart. That remains the case here. It's also written in a more literary manner than Ellroy's previous novels. And, again, the plot is convoluted to the Nth degree. But it's worth the work. It's the capper to a great sequence of novels. And reading the four shows the evolution and growth of a truly excellent writer.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 28, 2024 16:04:59 GMT -5
The Buck Passes Flynn by Gregory McDonald
What a disappointing book. Don't get me wrong, it's not actively bad...but it's also not really that good. It's just so disappointing. Francis Xavier Flynn stole the show when he first showed up in in Confess, Fletch. And his first novel, Flynn, was a lot of fun. And this one was just...not that great. We did learn a bit more about Flynn and the organization he works for, but not really anything about his family, who are pretty fun. We watched him work. but it really didn't amount to a lot. And the plot just wasn't really that interesting and, in hindsight, really was incredibly tied to the time and the passage of time has shown that it is just kind of garbage. Flynn is called in to investigate a pair of incidents where every person in a Texas town is anonymously given $100,000. That's about $382,000 in 2024 money. So, a lot. But not nearly enough to generate the responses that we see in the book. Shortly thereafter the same thing happens in a Massachusetts island town, with slightly different (and still silly) results. The issue comes to a head when an entire section of a Pentagon group receives the same payment and almost all of them immediately retire. So Flynn is sent in to investigate. I guess there's a germ of an idea here. But the responses are so over-top for the amount of money that the idea is rendered moot. And the entire thing is so intimately tied to 1981, the economic situation at the time and ideas of Supply-Side Economics and the work of Arthur Laffer, not to mention ideas of commodity vs. fiat currency, that it's irritating. I'll cop to the fact that I don't have the strongest background in economics, but it's better than average. And a ton of what we saw here were the same failed economic theories that have been messing with our lives for the past 50 years. And add in a (sort of) Soviet agent that is both incredibly obvious and pretty unnecessary and it's just a rough read. There are some marginally interesting character moments for Flynn and some okay interactions with other characters, but, by and large, you can skip this one.
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Post by berkley on Aug 28, 2024 17:54:48 GMT -5
Apparently I was a bit ahead of schedule in reading Conan the Liberator... from Jim Zub's Twitter feed... I will be participating for sure. Any one else want to read some Conan in September? -M
Conan isn't on my reading agenda this year but it's a neat idea. Whenever I do get around to reading or re-reading the Conan stories maybe I'll try to time it to coincide with the Cimmerian September, if it's still going by then.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 28, 2024 20:40:11 GMT -5
I re-read the Conan stuff I have recently enough ago I probably don't need to again, but grabbing one of the later books wouldn't be out of the question...
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Aug 28, 2024 20:56:56 GMT -5
I re-read the Conan stuff I have recently enough ago I probably don't need to again, but grabbing one of the later books wouldn't be out of the question... I'm hoping to read the 2 novels in the recently released City of the Dead book as a start. We'll see what else I get to. -M
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 28, 2024 20:58:56 GMT -5
I've been eyeing that too that may be the one
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Aug 29, 2024 12:42:35 GMT -5
Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet by Nicholas Reeves. As something of an armchair Egyptologist, I have long been fascinated by the 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten. The farther of Tutankhamun, he is one of the most controversial and hotly debated figures in Egyptian history. Along with this great wife, the beautiful Nefertiti, Akhenaten rejected the conventional pantheon of Egyptian gods and instead imposed the worship of a single deity – the sun – on the populace. In doing so, he eradicated religious traditions that had lasted for thousands of years and diminished the role of the powerful priests in Egyptian court life, much to their annoyance. He also drastically changed the style of Egyptian art to incorporate a hitherto unheard-of freedom of expression, resulting in iconography that is characterised by strange, elongated faces and thin, paunchy bodies. He even moved Egypt's capital from Thebes to the new city of Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna). In short, he shook-up ancient Egyptian society like no one else. Nicholas Reeves paints a vivid portrait of the heretic pharaoh as an eccentric and tyrannical king, who cynically used monotheism to reassert Pharaonic authority. Unsurprisingly, this provoked civil unrest among the ordinary people of Egypt, which Akhenaten cruelly quelled with his army. The book also paints a rather uncomfortable picture of a lusty ruler, with a wide range of sexual predilections that were catered for by his harem of sex slaves. Reeves also proposes that Akhenaten likely took some of his daughters as wives or lovers in his attempts to father a male heir. As for Queen Nefertiti, Reeves suggests that rather than mysteriously disappearing from the historical record, she simply changed her name to Neferneferuaten, and, after Akhenaten's death, may have attempted to seize the throne by conspiring to marry a Hittite prince. He addresses the mystery of her missing mummy too, as well as speculating on the identity of the body in Tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings – which may well be Akhenaten's, though that is still hotly debated among Egyptologists. Reeves also details the shift back towards traditional Egyptian polytheism following Akhenaten's death, with successive rulers waging a propaganda war against his memory by dismantling his monuments, destroying his statues, and excluding his name from lists of Egyptian rulers. As a result, Akhenaten was all but lost to history until the late 19th-century discovery of his buried capital at Amarna. Overall, Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet is very readable, for the most part, though I found some of the chapters about the Egyptian priests a little dry. But there are plenty of black & white photos and illustrations to break up and enliven the prose. I've read two of Reeves' earlier books – one on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, and one on the history of the Valley of the Kings – and they were both similarly enjoyable. This is a must read if you're interested in this heretic king and the power politics within the royal court of ancient Egypt.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 30, 2024 11:35:44 GMT -5
After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson
William "Kid" Collins was a boxer until he killed a man in the ring. Now he's a drifter, floating from place to place, in and out of mental institutions. After his latest escape he meets Fay, a youngish widow, who becomes more attractive the more time that Collins spends with her. She's also a drunk and when she's in her cups she can be more than a handful. But Collins doesn't do well when he's pushed so it's a volatile situation. Add in Uncle Bud, who may or may not be an ex-cop, but who is absolutely a con man with a plan to kidnap the young son of the local rich family. Uncle Bud needs a patsy and Collins seems like the right guy. And while we're at it, we can throw in Bert, who owns a local roadhouse, has a thing for Fay, and hates Uncle Bud with a murderous passion after being conned by him. The whole thing is a recipe for disaster. Or, you know, a Jim Thompson novel. This is a very good Thompson novel. Not on par with his best (The Killer Inside Me) but very solidly in the upper echelon. Collins is a typical Thompson protagonist, mentally unbalanced (or is he?), drawn to a woman he knows he shouldn't be, and smarter than he lets on. There's also every possibility that he's an unreliable narrator and that honestly makes the book that much more interesting. Watching his views of Fay morph depending on her actions and how he's feeling in the moment. And it definitely makes the ending more interesting. Thompson's work is almost always worth your while and this is very good work by Thompson.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Aug 30, 2024 15:17:03 GMT -5
It’s Superman!Tom De Haven, 2005 Well, I guess I’m going to buck the general trend of the mostly rave, or at least very positive, reviews I’ve seen for this book. This is a very literary approach to Superman; it’s set in the mid- to late 1930s, and there is very little in the way of superheroics. It’s more focused on character studies, so you get into the minds of a young Clark Kent (from his late teens to early twenties), Lois Lane (ditto) and New York alderman Alexander ‘Lex’ Luthor – but also of numerous other characters, to the point that Clark himself is basically a secondary character in most of the book. De Haven has a particular interest in the Depression Era, so the book spends a lot of time fleshing out that setting. While I could appreciate what De Haven was trying to do here, and I’ll readily acknowledge that it is a mostly well-written book with many evocative descriptions – I particularly liked the way it started, as young Clark very accidentally stops the armed robbery of the Smallville movie theater’s cash register – I found it very short on story (despite the 450 pages in the edition I read). It’s mainly just lengthy build-up, with parallel narratives following Clark and a photographer named Willi Berg (a New York tabloid photographer who’s a fugitive from the law because he was accused of a crime he didn’t commit) tooling around the country and taking odd jobs (including Clark briefly working as a movie stuntman in Hollywood), young Lois Lane getting her start as a newspaper reporter and Luthor plotting to eventually take over the city and possibly the world. Things don’t come together until about the last quarter of the book, when the plot finally thickens. But ultimately I just found it all a bit dry and, frankly, boring. And another thing that kind of annoyed me – although it has nothing to do with De Haven or the book itself – is one of the newspaper review blurbs which asserts that this “(...) is not the first Superman prose novel ... but it’s the first great one (...)” Obviously written by someone who’s never read either of Maggin’s books, which blow this one out of the water as far as I’m concerned.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 31, 2024 15:57:45 GMT -5
Iron Hand of Mars By Lindsey Davis This was a random pick of at a recent library book sale (I did a good job exercising restraint and not add to the to read shelf too much)... I just loved the cover and then reading the back sold me. The style is pretty unique, and a bit odd. The author is trying to write Falco as a noir-ish private eye, but he's actually more like the Emperor's troubleshooter, with more diplomacy in his job (at least THIS job) than detecting. In a few places the attempts to have his lead act and sound like a hard boiled PI threw me out of the story... some of the language was at odds with the setting for sure. On the other hand, his history was spot on and he did a fantastic job of bringing the early era Imperial Rome to life. I'm not sure how realistic his senator's daughter chasing after her boyfriend in the wilds of Germany to make sure he's ok, then actually helping in his investigation. It was entertaining though, and the characters were all fun.
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