First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day

50 Comments

A few thoughts.

Nebula Award nominees are out.  One pet peeve I have with SF/F awards is that so much is series-oriented.  This year 5 of the 6 nominees in the novel category are part of a series and one of them is book 7 in its series.  (To be fair, 2 of the nominees are the first book in the series) and so require an awful lot of someone who uses these awards as reading list fodder.  All that aside, I'm excited that The Three Body Problem was nominated.  I definitely plan to pick that one up at some point in the future, and I was always going to read Ancillary Sword given how much I liked the first book.

I read Player Piano as part of my ongoing passage through Kurt Vonnegut's novels.  It was pretty much as I remembered, not exactly what you think of when you think of Vonnegut, but so many of his consistent themes are right there from the very beginning.

I read some other stuff, but I'll save that for the comments.

Some good things that I found on the internet this month:

"Some Desperado" by Joe Abercrombie.  A short story title that should be read sarcastically.  It's a Western setting with a young woman trying to get away with the spoils of a robbery.

"Weary" by P.E. Garcia.  A quiet, but strong short story.  I'm not sure I can put my finger on why I liked this.  But I did.

"Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov.  The short story that became the first chapter of the novel by the same name.  I actually read this a few years ago and loved it.  But then I came across this reading of it by Alexsander Hemon and I got to listen to it again.  I love the initial description of the title character and his situation.

50 thoughts on “First Monday Book Day”

  1. I read Renee Gladmann's Ravickians trilogy this month. Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge.

    There's a city (Ravicka) that is being abandoned by its residents. Or maybe it's suffering a natural disaster. Or maybe the buildings are moving around and everyone is still there, just not where they are supposed to be. This city has its own language which involves lots of complicated gestures and difficult interpretation. We get to see the city from the point of view of a traveler in the first book. She explores the city, but requires a guide. Most of the guides are flighty and unreliable. At least one is deliberately misleading. The traveler attempts to find a solution to the problem of the city's abandonment, but no one will acknowledge the problem exists. The feeling of isolation was very strong in this first book. In the second book, a resident of the city, the great Ravickian novelist Luswage Amini, tries to communicate the despair and destruction (maybe? there might be a fire - but then again, maybe there isn't) that is sending people away from Ravicka. It turns out that communicating is no easier for a resident than it was for a traveler. The third book is from the perspective of Ana Patova who is as close as one can come to the city itself as a character. She is part of a group that the other narrators have been seeking. There's architecture and writing and a bridge that can't be crossed. It felt like a good conclusion to the trilogy, but certainly not one that wrapped everything up.

    Although short (the three books together don't add up to more than 350 pages), these were still a challenging read. It was hard to find my balance early on because even the narrator was having trouble figuring things out. It's very tempting to try and read these as an allegory for a movement (the difficulty in communicating a new philosophy, etc.) and maybe that's part of it. Still the feelings of isolation and searching for a connection and/or a solution worked for me. Something I'm glad I read.

  2. Currently reading the latest from Jack Mcdevitt from my favorite of his series. Coming Home is an Alex Benedict book - a sort of sci-fi archeological Sherlock Holmesish bent told in the words of his pilot/associate Chase Kolpath. Definitely my favorite SF writer.

    1. Coming Home is one of the novels nominated for a Nebula. (the one that's 7th in the series).

      It looks interesting, but there are so many other series in that genre that are vying for my attention/time I'd be surprised if I ever get to it.

      1. It's very Asimov-esque, in that it's an easy read and has some interesting science (nothing hardcore) that sets up some thoughtful problems to be solved.

  3. Half-way through book 13 of the Wheel of Time series, Towers of Midnight.

    I'm looking forward to finishing my re-reading of the series, but also struck by the number of scenes that I've found to be quite emotional, particularly in the last 2-3 books.

    I'm also looking forward to freeing myself from the Pattern for a while. My next project will be reading Cloud Atlas.

  4. I've knocked out about 300-320 pages in "The Path to Power". LBJ is one hell of a political operator.

    1. Got vols II & III from half priced books for $30 combined. Looking forward to the long haul, thus far it's been utterly fascinating.

  6. After last month's discussion, I read Breakfast of Champions and mostly enjoyed it. The narrator's interjection of himself to the story fell a little flat to me, but otherwise that's some quality satire.

    Speaking of brianS's list above, I'm just about finished with Beloved and OMG I can't stand it. I'm not one to abandon a book, but getting through it has been a chore. Nothing about it interests me.

    Light in August was pretty hit or miss. Some of the characters and settings fascinated me, while others (adult Joe Christmas, unfortunately, who takes up the most ink although young Joe was pretty interesting) were complete clunkers. Still, I love the way Faulkner can tell a tale.

    Finally, I have just a few pages left of Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life (he just got to St Helena, so it's not looking good for him). An excellent, thorough book that totally quenched my appetite for a good one-volume bio on Napoleon after he kept popping up in other stuff I was reading in the last year (like War and Peace and The Black Count, for example). Roberts definitely is pro-Napoleon and seems to be trying to undo 200 years of British slander to highlight Napoleon's enlightened, progressive ways.

    1. I wrote a paper in college about Faulkner's use of light and dark imagery in Light in August! Alas, I don't remember much about the book anymore. Maybe one day I'll pick it up again?

      2. I have vague memories of Beloved, but I certainly don't recall it being a chore. I remember Sula much more clearly--that one I've read two or three times.

        1. I have memories of watching the film at the College of St. Catherine with EAR (then EAP) and her friends. It was a big deal. They had film reel and a projector and it might have still been in theaters.
          It took like fifteen minutes to set up each new reel, and there were like five reels.
          That plus the actual movie made watching the whole thing an ordeal.
          (But it wasn't as un-sit-through-able as the stage production of "Mother Courage and her Children". One of EAP's friends played Mother Courage, and we still left at intermission.)

      3. Chiming in late to say that I consider Beloved to be the best book I have ever read. I've read it at least five times, three of which were in-depth readings for lit classes, and each time I was blown away. The story and characters are incredibly rich, and thematically it works on a transcendent level. I think it's a perfect book.

        And yet, I fully understand why some people hate it.

  7. All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending by Laura Vanderkam. Nonfiction. This is not at all my usual sort of read. A coworker shared a chapter with me that was about children and allowance, and I was intrigued enough to read the book in full. It’s not about getting out of debt or investment strategies—rather it's a conversational exploration of the choices we make about money. The book isn’t about rules and it’s not about trying to be rich, instead Vanderkam offers ways for how to think about money and offers guidance in terms of the types of spending that generally result in happiness. I really like the idea of starting to think about money by first figuring out what’s important to me and then making spending decisions accordingly. In some way, this book probably influenced my recent decision to ask for a raise at work.

    Some good takeaways: smaller, frequent purchases typically provide more happiness than big, one-time purchases. Experiences provide more happiness than things. Anticipating something we want (e.g. going to a movie or going on a trip) provides happiness, so planning those things can be good in and of itself. Giving to others (whether a gift for a friend or a charitable donation) provides happiness. The children who grow up to have the most money sense are those who get an allowance for completing specific chores and those who get no allowance and must ask/negotiate for spending money.

    Outline by Rachel Cusk. Novel. This was a brief but enjoyable read. Cusk is a British novelist who has been on my radar for a long time—I saw her speak when I was a wee 21-year-old; she offered critical commentary on the newly established category of chick-lit. (Bridget Jones’s Diary had been out about a year at that point.) Another year or two later, I read Cusk’s novel Saving Agnes—I don’t remember much other than that I found it terribly depressing. (There’s contemporary literary fiction for you, especially through the eyes of someone young and not yet jaded.)

    Oh, wait, am I supposed to be talking about the actual book? Right. It’s the story of a woman’s trip to Greece to teach writing for a week, and it mostly consists of conversations with different people—some of whom she’s met for the first time and others who have known her for a while. It’s a meditation of sorts on what it means to be middle aged, a writer, a mother, a divorced woman. In a longer book, this might all get pretty weighty, but for this particular book, it all worked for me.

    A favorite passage that nicely characterizes Cusk’s style:

    I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing—a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball—and becomes increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realize the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn't sure.

  8. Finished Furst's Night Soldiers. Started The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan by W. Churchill, but due to the condensed layout of pages left me getting lost. We'll see.

    After a week of binge-catchup on Season 1 of Penny Dreadful, am back into reading-endurance-mode picking up at page 77 of Pynchon's Against The Day, a nary 1008 pages to go.

  9. Just over 2/3 of the way through The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. It's a book that is both a bit dated (published in 2007) and prescient (discussing the move to the right he expected the court to take following the ascension of John Roberts). I've really enjoyed the vignettes and insight and have been especially impressed with the apparent access to a group of powerful individuals who we so rarely hear anything "personal" about. As the reviewer indicates, it's not too hard to figure out which of the Justices he didn't have much interaction with, but those that he did are humanized in a way I had not previously experienced.

    In addition to the aforementioned Light in August, I also picked up My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C.S. Forester (h/t to Rhu Ru) at the Goodwill.
    Apparently, the Hornblower title is the first in the narrative, but is actually a prequel published 13 years after the first novel.
    I've read My Side probably a dozen times, but not at all in the past 15 years. Between it, Robinson Crusoe and Hatchet, it's a wonder I only attempted running away from home to "live off the land" the one time.

    1. If you like the first Hornblower, you will fly through all of the series. The A&E series with Ioan Gruffudd was pretty good - I checked it out from the library.

      If you like the series, the Patrick O'Brien series is next (Aubrey & Maturin).

      Having exhausted the Navy, the Sharpe series will take you from Spain to Waterloo. There was an A&E series for this as well w/ Sean Bean as Sharpe.

      I'd say read the books first before the mini-series.

      1. Second on the three three-part Hornblower mini-series.

        The Patrick O'Brien set is my absolute favorite series, but I'm hesitant to recommend it because once you start, you'll have to read them all. I have yet to read the Hornblower books, but I need to rectify that soon.

        1. I misremembered which of the Napoleonic series you'd loved. Excited to see how the first Hornblower stacks up against the first Aubrey (all the further I got in O'Brien).

    2. it's a wonder I only attempted running away from home to "live off the land" the one time.
      Maybe you also read Into the Wild?

      1. I did...kept thinking what a naive, delusional, self-absorbed idiot McCandless was.

          1. Something like that. I have a pretty healthy ego, but even I know I'd be ill-suited to actually keeping myself fed for very long via foraging for anything other than wild game. I could probably get enough protein ... the rest of the diet, not so much.

  10. Finished up about a third of the Sherlock Holmes stories last night, and decided to take a break. Grabbed 100 Years Of Solitude off the shelf, since I've been meaning to read it for a while. I'm only 20 pages or so in, but I love it so far.

  11. I started and quit Neil Young's book. I didn't realize he had such a big ego. It seemed to be about name-dropping and listing purchases. Not at all what I expected.

    Just started Flash Boys. I like Michael Lewis.

  12. I finished In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John Marzluff and Tony Angell.
    If you've watched PBS's Nature, episode "A Murder of Crows", you've seen Marzluff. He almost seems a crow-science celebrity. Books, TV, Podcasts.
    I wonder if anyone's tried anything with crows using GPS trackers (like they've done with Snowy Owls the last two winters at Project Snowstorm). I'd love to see a map of how the crows wintering in the Twin Cities disperse and recollect each night and also what they do during the summers (how far they move, etc).
    There's a lot about the intelligence of crows. This somewhat humorous essay may be close to the mark:

    [Crows] suffer from being too intelligent for their station in life. Respectable evolutionary success is simply not, for these brainy and complex birds, enough. They are dissatisfied with the narrow goals and horizons of that tired old Darwinian struggle. On the lookout for a new challenge. . . . Dolphins and whales and chimpanzees get all the fawning publicity, great fuss made over their near-human intelligence. But don't be fooled. Crows are not stupid. Far from it. They are merely underachievers. They are bored.

    Mammals are probably lucky that birds completely ditched the digits that could have been used as opposable thumbs.

    I'm also about 30% through The Goldfinch.

    I'm reading books! Like a grown-up!

    1. Those dudes definitely know what they're doing. I was once an unwitting participant in a crow suicide.

                1. 1. I don't see the comic online... I did see this one though.

                  'Spoiler' SelectShow

                  Wait, now I find it...
                  I found four crows hanging out on the small trees in front of the Mpls Central Library this morning (Nicollet Mall Side). I threw them four peanuts. They were gracious enough to take them, unlike some of the stuck-up crows that spend their days around my neighborhood.

                  2. My big take out of this is how do I join team Bahls?

                  The activist most familiar with how and where birds crash is Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis President Jerry Bahls. During the spring and fall migration seasons, every morning Bahls leads a group of about 20 through downtown Minneapolis collecting dead and injured birds. “You really get a sense for which buildings are good and which are bad,” he said.

  13. Benito Cerreno by Herman Melville. The other shortish story paired up with Bartelby (last month). Oblivious American sailor Captain Delano spends the day visiting a ship that has been taken over by it's cargo of slaves. He and his men eventually save the day, but he doesn't really deserve any credit.

    I started Anna Karenina by Leo Somebody. Seems alright so far. Silly Russian society bits are almost unfathomable to this middle-class American who has to go to work on a regular basis and doesn't attend balls or entertain guests daily as a matter of course.

    'Spoiler' SelectShow
    Actual Spoiler SelectShow

    1. Oooh, Anna Karenina. Yet another book I read a long time ago and have vague memories of!

        1. Was it any good? This was recent, right? I can probably google that for myself, I suppose...

          1. Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Ewan MacGregor, and ____ MacFayden (Who played Darcy in the Knightley P&P).
            It was interestingly done, almost as a play where the scene changes were visible, but still in grand buildings.
            The manic opening showing off the style was great and disorienting, but I think overall it distracted from the story, as it made us pay more attention to the setting and the fact that we were watching a movie, than to the story or acting performances.
            So it was almost like a Baz Luhrmann movie.

            I'm not sure I'd like the story that much, I mostly advised Anna to become violent and/or self-destructive all along the way. (But just in my head.)

    2. I read Anna Karenina two years ago and LOVED it. I saw the movie afterwards and thought it was decent enough considering that they had to leave out about 90% of the book to make it work. I preferred the book to War and Peace and it was probably the second best of all the Russian (both fiction and non-fiction) books I read the last couple years after Robert Massie's incredible bio of Peter the Great.

  14. Hey Scot, did you ever start on those Rick Perlstein books? I've just started the 3rd book The Invisible Bridge, about the rise of Reagan. Promises to be good.

    Also read The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. One of the biggest selling books of all-time and is beautiful in its prose and message. A quick read and high endorsed.

    1. I did start. I finished Before the Storm over Christmas Break. I am about halfway through Nixonland. I am enjoying the way Perlstein weaves a story together a great deal, but I am also finding that when I get home exhausted and put the kids to bed I need something that requires a little less brain power to read, so I would characterize my current pace as a "slog", but that is not a reflection of what I think of the book. I have Spring Break shortly, so it will pick up.

    2. I also started The Invisible Bridge the other day (once I finished Napoleon) and have really enjoyed the first 125 pages or so. I also recently watched The Candidate (starring Frankenstein and Sundance) so it got me in the right frame of mind.

  15. The mention of Greekhouse in today’s CoC reminds me I meant to share a picture book that might appeal to certain citizens: The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdös by Deborah Heiligman, illustrated by LeUyen Pham. It’s an affectionate portrait of an eccentric man. Did you know he referred to children as epsilons? It doesn’t skimp on math either—there’s a lot to unpack in the illustrations if you’re so inclined. (Or if you’re like me, you can just read the illustrator’s notes at the end of the book and be impressed.) The jalapeno is on a numbers kick, so although parts of the book are over his head, he's been enjoying it too. After we read it, he'll say things like, "anyone who does math with me will have an Erdös number of 16."

    Read more about the book here.

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