I understand the intended meaning too. But only because I don’t need the chapter.
I’m not an examiner, reading material I know to check if the writer knows the material. I’m a student, reading material I don’t know in order to learn it. In the chapters that actually interest me, when it’s wrong, I won’t be able to tell.
Hence the power of double checking. Which is slippery. I am the first to raise my hand by being gullible and not double checking most of the interesting stuff I read. Call me lazy…
I think “Moon over Soho”, being a big tribute to the London jazz musical scene, follows that premise of “the difficult second album” very well, being the weaker of the series. I think from “Whispers” onward, the books improve remarkably. Some are better than others, and I still rate well Moon, don’t get me wrong, but I think you’re in for a lot of fun.
There are times when I want to do that. I read a lot of books on comparative neurology and psychology when I was writing GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses. But there are times when I want just to be able to look stuff up in a reference book and trust it to be right. I try to make the content of my GURPS books as accurate as possible for people who want to be able to use them that way.
It has become such a big problem these days, with so many fake news and so on. One would think technological advances have made it easier for us to distinguish what is true from what isn’t, or is only close to it, but I am afraid it is going the other way.
Things like flat-earthers do make me laugh. It’s clearly obvious the Earth cannot be flat, or cats would have pushed everything out the edge by now…
There are sometimes ways around it. For example, there has been a lot of online rhetoric about the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United; but the entire text of that decision was published online, so I was able to read it and see that most of what people said about it bore little relation to what Anthony Kennedy had actually written. Going to primary sources is a good idea. I don’t have any particularly useful advice about events as opposed to texts, though, except maybe “don’t rush to judgment.”
I feel the same way, by the way, about intellectual history. I’ve read books by authors as varied as Aristotle, Hume, and Keynes to see what they actually said, as opposed to what secondary sources have said about what they said, which is often quite different. I’d like to do the same with Marx, but the university libraries I’ve checked had only abridged versions of Capital, which doesn’t help me in following his actual arguments. Of course there are intellectual historians who are really good at conveying the actual substance of people’s ideas—Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis is quite a solid work, for one—but a lot of what you read about major figures, let alone minor ones, is superficial at best.
As a quick aside here: a dear friend of mine was taking a PhD in English. Their particular field of study was scientific writing, and they were focusing on a particular element of Sir Francis Bacon’s work (which I will admit I forget).
Part of their PhD involved going back to Bacon’s original research and finding out that a fundamental axiom of his work was translated from Latin incorrectly. Bacon made a clear mistake, a relatively simple one, but decades of research was then built upon that mistranslation. My friend found the original text, re-translated the Latin, showed that Bacon did not translate it correctly, and then moved on.
They failed their PhD because “You can’t be that arrogant to go back and ‘correct’ the work of a giant in the field of science.”
(I mean, I say they “failed”… they defended, had to do revisions due to “arrogance”, defended again without changing their stance because Bacon made a fundamental mistake that can be easily proven, had to revise again, and then gave up. They have since moved to Colombia and are happily teaching English while writing novels)
After Who’s Afraid of Beowulf, I continued with the second (and last) novel in the collected work I have by Tom Holt, My Hero. Still rather Douglas Adams-y, which I must assume is Holt’s wheelhouse. An author receives a message on her computer from another author who has been trapped in his own work, asking her to write a novel which sends her hero to rescue him. Lots of silliness ensues. A lot of fun, and I feel like I need to track down more of Holt’s works when I am in a silly mood.
Moved on to the latest Dresden Files novel, Peace Talks, by Jim Butcher. Only one chapter in so far, and so far so good.
Holt is probably one of my most-read authors and I’ve still got a fair amount of his stuff left to read. I’d recommend the JW Wells & Co series (starting with The Portable Door).
I didn’t expect to, but I also really enjoyed the historical novels of his that I read. There’s still humour there, but obviously toned down compared to his other stuff. I really liked Meadowland (about the viking discovery of America) in particular.
A thing I would never say to him in person is that I think his first two novels (Beowulf and Expecting Someone Taller) are his best.
Note that K J Parker is apparently now an admitted alias. They’re a lot more grim.
I much prefer his works published as KJ Parker to those as Tom Holt.
My fellow GURPS writer, James L. Cambias, has changed careers (at least largely) to writing fiction. I just reread his first novel, A Darkling Sea, which I thought was excellent, with good planetary design and two well thought out alien races. Looking around, I discovered that he has a new novel out, The Initiate. Its blurb on Amazon described it as being about a struggle against an ancient hidden order of magicians who secretly control that world, which made me wonder if it might be a possible nominee for the Prometheus Award, so I took a closer look—and ended up buying it.
From reading the first two chapters, I can see some of Cambias’s influences. It shows the use of decanic magic, approximately as described in GURPS Thaumatology; its supernatural beings are clearly those of ancient Mesopotamia, and its protagonist has to take courses in Classical Greek and Akkadian. Its portrayal of magic is well handled and creepy. Beyond that, I can see that it’s in a noir style, which I like, and it also seems to fall into the older literary form of revenge drama, as seen in works from Eumenides to The Count of Monte Cristo. I have to say that at the end of the second chapter I felt a little shiver of pleasure; I’m expecting to enjoy reading the rest.
I rather enjoyed Cambias’ Corsair too – not perfect by any means, and he’s clearly not aiming for profundity, but if you enjoy tech-heist action stories but wish they had better female characters it’s definitely one to try. (Longer review on my blog.)
I remember that one, and I know I’ve looked at it, but I’m not sure if I finished it; it didn’t satisfy me as much as A Darkling Sea, at any rate.
Huh. I knew it was an alias, had no idea he was Tom Holt.
The two styles couldn’t be more different, the K J Parker stuff is SO dark!
I find much of Tom’s comic fantasy humorous in the “you’ve got to laugh, because otherwise you’ll die of despair” vein, so it wasn’t such a jump for me. (Also I provided an email address for KJ when the alias was a secret, before I’d read any of the books.)
I have a question for you all. Do you often laugh out loud when reading a book? I have read a lot of Terry Pratchett,Tom Holt, and Jasper Fforde, and I do appreciate the jokes, but I very rarely laugh involuntarily while reading. The blurb on the cover of these books often implies that the reviewer has been left helpless with mirth, which I always assumed was an exaggeration. Is that a reasonable assumption?
(Yes, I know this question probably makes me sound like an alien or a robot…)
I don’t. (I first met this reading comics as a child, where in the world of e.g. Beano or Whizzer & Chips all it took for someone to be convulsed with laughter was to glance at a copy of the comic in question.)
But I regard laughter as essentially a social/group activity anyway.
(Also I have weird tastes in comedy: I abhor the motif that has a straight man digging themselves further and further into a hole, while the audience knows better. Overdeveloped empathy I suppose. But a lot of comedy has this and it just doesn’t work for me.)
I have been known to have an occasional involuntary guffaw when reading. I wouldn’t say I was rolling around with laughter but there would be noticeable merriment. Usually its a big grin tho.
I do
Pratchett and Fforde not so much, I love those books and the humour but I find i appreciate the cleverness of the joke rather than lol-ling.
Christopher Brookmyre, Carl Hiaasen always make me laugh out loud. Stark by Ben Elton is still hilarious imo. My youngest banned me reading him bedtime stories for a bit because I totally lost it during a Paddington story.
Also, I think the only time I ever got in trouble at school is when Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler and my part in his downfall (iirc) appeared in our year 9 reading library. Our teacher was pretty strict and was not happy when I was crying with laughter during silent reading.