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What are you reading in April?
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justifiedsinner
Posted 2013-04-03 11:01 AM (#4892)
Subject: What are you reading in April?



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Sporadically reading through Cyberabad Days, Ian MacDonald's short stories linked to River of Gods. Very good so far.
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Scott Laz
Posted 2013-04-03 2:29 PM (#4893 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Gunnison, Colorado		I'm also reading Ian McDonald -- Be My Enemy, the second in the Everness YA series. It's like a "science fiction's greatest hits" novel: you get multiple alternate universes (with alternate characters), airships, a nanotech apocalypse, aliens on the moon, cyborgs, all embedded in an engaging story with nice characterization. McDonald's "adult" works are even better, but this series is more fun.

And I just finished my sporadic reading of Jonathan Strahan's Sixth Annual Year's Best (covering 2011). Always good selections in that series, and a huge variety from across SF and fantasy. The next volume comes out this month.
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Badseedgirl
Posted 2013-04-03 3:10 PM (#4894 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: RE: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Middle TN, USA		I am about thigh deep (page 376 of 876) into the Fantasy Hell that is Marion Zimmer Bradley's "The Mists of Avalon" for the WOGF challenge. If I ever get through this book (and is is looking bleaker by the second, if I have to read one more page of descriptions of women weaving, or the fields of merry olde England I may have to pluck out one or more of my eyes!) I plan to read Ekaterina Sedia's "Alchemy of Stone" and than Allan Moore's "The Watchman". I am looking for some good "Zombie" fiction, as I am going through "Walking Dead" Withdraw, so I may just fill in with some throwaway zombie fiction to round out the month, assuming that is I make it through "The Mists"
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Switters
Posted 2013-04-04 7:09 AM (#4900 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Working on a couple of more Hugo winners, The Forever Machine and The Gods Themselves, and starting this years Hugo nominees. Captian Vorpatril's Alliance getting nominated gives me an excuse to finish the Vorkosigan series, I should finish Komarr today.

Badseedgirl - I've enjoyed the Newsflesh series by Seanan Mcguire. I was glad to see the third one get a nomination.
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DrNefario
Posted 2013-04-04 7:56 AM (#4901 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: UK		I finished A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin a couple of days ago. A shameful omission from my genre grounding, now corrected. I didn't really mean to start it, but bought a paperback omnibus from a charity shop on Friday and "just had a quick look".

I've moved on to Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood as my April pick for the WoGF.
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Badseedgirl
Posted 2013-04-04 10:01 AM (#4902 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Middle TN, USA		Dr. N I very much enjoyed Oryx and Crake, be sure to read "The year of the flood" as it is the companion to the book. And If you have never read it, read the "Handmaids Tale". It literally changed my life when I read it in high school. What ever you do, DO NOT see the truly terrible movie of it! I took your advise for "Newsflesh". I can use it as one of my WOGF books, so score!
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Rhondak101
Posted 2013-04-04 10:56 AM (#4903 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: SC, USA		I'll be reading some occult detectives from the late 1890's for an Old Weird post. (By the way I have a post about Le Fanu and a post about Robert W. Chambers in the blog queue, so look for them in the next week or so). Because I keep writing about books not on the site and the guys have to add the the books AND because the WoGF is going so well, Dave and Jonathan are having a hard time finding time and space to squeeze these blogs in. It is a great problem to have!
I don't know what else I'm reading this month, but probably something not Victorian and written by a man (!) The WoGF and the blog series have certainly moved my reading away from contemporary male writers.
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dustydigger
Posted 2013-04-04 4:37 PM (#4909 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: UK		Rhonda,I am thoroughly enjoying my short overview of Arthur Machen's tales.I had read The Great God Pan,many years ago,and wasn't too keen.On rereading I found Machen's style a bit convoluted and clunky,and the tale did little for me.Not so with The White People!.This was a fascinating book,as we run headlong with the girl deeper and deeper into the eerie yet oh so tangible landscape and the mysteries of the old tales,Extraordinary.Wonder if James Joyce ever read this,it was written long before Ulysses! lol. I am now halfway through The Three Imposters,very disquieting.I believe it all ends badly - very badly.Cant wait!
Also just finished Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff. Another odd book I also read in small sections,mostly because the style tired me out,The blurb says - ''It is Tom Wolfe at his very best...technically accurate,learned,cheeky,risky,touching,tough,compassionate,nostalgic,worshipful,jingoistic -The Right Stuff is superb.''
I just don't have the knowledge to know just how biased or evenhanded Wolfe may be,but I read the whole book on a seesaw,going back and forth between thinking he really was ''worshipful'',or if the whole book was making fun of the whole thing.My opinion could vary from page to page,hell,from paragraph to paragragh,not helped by the golly gee whiz style of writing.That style made for a lot of fun,but it went on too long,belabouring every point.Wolfe certainly idolised the early test flight pilots.particularly Chuck Yeager,but seemed to find the Mercury programme a bit of a joke..I don't know anything about John Glenn,but Wolfe certainly had his knife into him.And poor old Apollo,astronauts barely got a mention.Talk about damned with faint praise.This is one of the few passages about Neil Armstrong;
''A lot of people couldn't figure out Armstrong.He had a close blond crew cut and small pale blue eyes and scarcely a line or a feature in his face that you could remember.His expression hardly ever changed.You'd ask him a question and he would just stare at you with those pale blue eyes of his,and you'd start to ask the question again,figuring he hadn't understood,and - click-out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long,quiet,perfectly formed,precisely thought-out sentences,fullof anisotropic functions and multiple encounter trajectories,or whatever else was called for.It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer.'' Ouch! :0)
Wolfe loves the old test pilots crazy enough to sit on top of a rocket and blast off to break the sound barrier.The more risk taking the better.The more adulterous,drunken,absent family member and husband,the higher the admiration.The more steady,dull,or boring the person,the lower Wolfe seems to grade him.It all makes for a fun read,but also makes me wonder how tongue in cheek it all is.Looking at reviews etc no one seems to mention this possibility,so I presume it must only be me thinking this,but it added an extra fun layer to the reading
And Wolfe totally outdoes me with the exclamations,brackets,dotted lines and overenthusiastic prose.Good stuff....
Other books on the agenda this month;Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Robert Heinlein - Farnham's Freehold
Julie Kagawa - The Iron King
Laini Taylor - Days of Blood and Starlight
Charlie Fletcher - Stoneheart
Nancy Farmer - House of the Scorpion
Zane Grey - Lone Star Ranger
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Rhondak101
Posted 2013-04-05 11:35 AM (#4912 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: SC, USA		Dusty,
I LOVED "The Three Imposters." If we relate that book to my Old Weird post of Le Fanu, we could say--"now there's a frame narrative that works." I will probably be writing on Machen for the Old Weird in the future. I still have a few more short stories to read before I'm ready to write about him.
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JDowds
Posted 2013-04-05 3:59 PM (#4914 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: RE: What are you reading in April?



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Finishing Embassytown, then it's on to Woman of the Iron People, Wise Man's Fear, Neuromancer, Doomsday Book, The Shadowed Sun, Existence, a whole of stuff.
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Badseedgirl
Posted 2013-04-10 10:32 AM (#4937 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: RE: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Middle TN, USA		I FINISHED "THE MISTS OF AVALON"! Review will follow. I hate that I disliked the book so much, has anyone of Marion Zimmer Bradey's sci-fi work? I saw that she had written several and was just curious. I am off to start "The Alchemy of Stone", Hello Steampunk!
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justifiedsinner
Posted 2013-04-10 11:49 AM (#4941 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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I read several of her Darkover books many years ago and liked them at the time. Whether I would like them now that's another question.
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Scott Laz
Posted 2013-04-10 1:29 PM (#4943 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Gunnison, Colorado		Finished Ian McDonald's Be My Enemy (review posted). On to The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens for the challenge. Work is sadly cutting into reading time for the next couple of weeks, so I'm not sure when I'll start the novel, but am reading short stories and comics when time permits. I got through the February 1953 issue of Galaxy magazine--a great issue from an amazing SF year. Robert Sheckley's "Watchbird" (a cautionary tale of a surveillance society), Theodore Sturgeon's "Saucer of Loneliness" and Damon Knight's "Four in One" are among the best stories of that year, and are all in that issue (along with the conclusion of Simak's Ring Around the Sun). I also recommend Robert Reed's new Great Ship novella "Precious Mental," in the current issue of Asimov's.

Badseedgirl: I haven't read Mists of Avalon, but in my background reading for my blog series on fantasy, have seen it discussed as an acclaimed and important novel due to its female perspective on the Arthurian legends--something that was considered groundbreaking in its time and seemed to have really resonated with lots of readers, as it was very popular. Now that female protagonists have become common in fantasy (partly due to the popularity of Mists of Avalon helping to break that new ground), maybe it's been left behind by its successors, and no longer seems so interesting... I'm curious to read it.
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Badseedgirl
Posted 2013-04-10 2:13 PM (#4944 - in reply to #4943)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Middle TN, USA		Scott Laz: For me it was just too long, filled with too much needless description, and endless repeating of the themes. I'm not scared of a long book, I've read The Stand, all the books in "The Song of Fire and Ice" , heck I even read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", but this was just too much for me. Some it has to do with being forced to read Malory's "The Death of Arthur" in school, because after that I never liked Camelot fiction all that much, so maybe I was doomed to dislike it from the start. But I wanted to like it, I feel I must have missed something in the book, because it has such a good reputation from so many sources, but I guess we just like what we like. I would consider reading some of her sci-fi in the future, I guess. I tend to trend towards sci-fi over fantasy in general.
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Tim_Eagon
Posted 2013-04-22 8:29 PM (#4970 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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So far this month I've read Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death and Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. I've been trending towards the darker aspects of sci-fi and fantasy for a while, so I decided to self-correct and read Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain for the first time in nearly 30 years. Currently, I'm on the Book of Three. If I manage to finish all five books in April (which is doubtful), I'm going to return to the darkness via Dan Simmon's Song of Kali.
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DrNefario
Posted 2013-04-29 7:52 AM (#5004 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in April?



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Location: UK		I've read a pair of Hugo winners since my WoGF selection: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card and Double Star by Robert A Heinlein. I enjoyed both of them, although they didn't blow me away.

Just 4 Hugo winners left. I might be able to get them all in before the next one is announced.
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Badseedgirl
Posted 2013-05-01 12:30 PM (#5008 - in reply to #4892)
Subject: RE: What are you reading in April?



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Location: Middle TN, USA		I had a pretty good month when I totaled it all up, I read:

Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
The City, Not Long After - Pat Murphy
The Alchemy of Stone - Ekaterina Sedia
The Forest of Hands and Teeth - Carrie Ryan
Zombie Fallout 1 - Mark Tufo
Watchmen - Alan Moore
1/2 way thru Swan Song - Robert McCammon
2 chapters left of - Ringworld - Larry Niven


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