Going back to the primary topic, I’m currently reading three books.
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen: Apparently this is one of her least popular books, largely because there’s very little comedy to it. What’s striking me at this point (early in the second part) is the clear contrast between the central character, Fanny Price, as an introvert, and her romantic rival as an extrovert. I like it that the rival often shows good will to Fanny; it makes for a more interesting story than if she were simply a nasty bitch.
The State, by Anthony de Jasay: A somewhat eccentric work on political theory by a libertarian writer; not so much an empirical study as a sequence of theoretical models, somewhat in the spirit of Plato’s discussion of political types in the Republic. Its opening argument that people who argue for the social contract have in fact never lived in the state of nature and may be too quick to think that those who do would find it obvious that life under the state was superior is an interesting complement to James C. Scott’s study, in The Art of Not Being Governed, of societies whose people have chosen to resist incorporation into the state by retreating to terrain unfavorable to it.
Marooned in Realtime, by Vernor Vinge: A kind of cozy murder mystery involving the small human group who missed the Singularity and were left behind. I picked it up to look for a pullquote for my current project and decided I wanted to reread it and try to follow the logic of the plot more closely. I like Vinge a lot and it makes me sad that we can’t expect any more fiction from him.
The problem for me is that while by no means all, far too many of his characters are are thinly veiled 'Mary Sue’s. Wise cracking genius who it turns out are always smarter and more able then anyone else in the room, or in fact any other room, but have zero character development. A good example is RED where in the Hollywood film Bruce Willis portrays a far more rounded and deep character than the protagonist of the comic, who just kills people effortlessly.
I have at long last got my hands on Pillar of the State, the second volume of Elizabeth Longford’s authoritative biography of the first duke of Wellington.
Look up “Breendoggle” and “Moira Greyland” for the details.
On one hand I do believe in judging the work and not the author; but on the other hand, this particular case exceeds my capacity to do that. When we moved back in 2016 I discarded all the Bradley material on my shelves, because I was never going to reread it.
I found it disturbing to read one of Robert Heinlein’s letters where he offered Bradley his sympathies for the “persecution” she and her husband Walter Breen had been suffering.
I read Alexei Panshin’s Anthony Villiers series (Star Well, The Thurb Revolution, and Masque World) yesterday. Quite a lot of little bits were funny enough that I laughed out loud, but I was always laughing at the asides and observations, at most at lines of dialogue, not at the comedy of the story. I liked it well enough that if the concluding book of the series had been written I would have read it, but the childish characters, their absurd behaviour, and the occasional oddities of narrative structure didn’t really do it for me.
I admit I had to give up with “Baptism of Fire” from the Witcher series, so it is going back to the public library today. I am not in the right frame of mind to read this year, for some reason, unless the book grabs me, I give up very easily.
I received the second installment from Tad Williams new trilogy, The Empire of Grass. Read the synopsis for The Witchwood Crown. Glad he included it, I had forgotten a couple of things.
C decided to invest in the Virginia Edition (the complete works of Robert Heinlein, in 46 volumes), and it arrived yesterday. Happily, we had a set of shelves that was almost exactly the right size; only one volume, the last, Requiem, which is largely memorial speeches and addresses about Heinlein, needs to go on top. So now we’re hoping to sell or donate our previous copies, except for the copy of Stranger in a Strange Land that’s the original published edition, which we’re keeping for comparison with the much larger edition that has the full original manuscript before Heinlein cut it for the publisher. I’ve cleared nearly a foot of our mass market paperback fiction shelves and taken two volumes from the belles lettres shelves; when our new full length bookshelves arrive in a week or so (assuming they get here on time!), I’ll go through the remaining boxes of books and extract the hardback and trade paperback fiction.
I’m a little disgruntled by the VE not being in either chronological order or alphabetical order by title; it’s going to make it harder to learn where everything is. But I’ve learned to deal with Library of Congress . . .
I loved jonathan strange & mr Norrell so snapped up a copy. The notion of retailer exclusive chapters for books is new to me (not new on computer games). I’m pretty against the concept but at the same time I bought into it so can see how it works.
Retailer exclusive chapters?! Is that a thing now?? Curious if it’s like an epilogue or an additional mini story, or genuinely integrated into the main plotline.
(I loved the historical writing style of JS&mN. So many footnotes!!! Definitely interesting in the new book!)
If conventions were still happening one could ask her… I suspect that, like some kickstarter extras, it’s material that the author had chosen to cut for whatever reason.
I just finished Blackstone Fortress by Darius Hinks. Pretty typical WH40K-fare (cotton candy reading) and nowhere near as good as Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series in their mid-to-late novels, but it was enjoyable enough. I’ll probably pick up the new one when it comes out in paperback. If you’re a fan of the Grim Dark, but want to read something a bit more surreal, I recommend it.
I am now reading Richard III by somebody named Billy Twitchpike. I forgot how much I struggle to read his work… I mean, they were never really intended to be read after all. The historical background stuff (about how it was basically political propaganda by Henry VII in an attempt to legitimize his weak claim over the king he had just murdered) was pretty neat, and I occasionally forget what a bunch of horrible bastards (in both the traditional and colloquial meanings) the English royalty are. There are Canadians that maintain we should honour the British Crown as the head of our government (technically not true any more, but only technically… the crown still appoints the figurehead who leads our government, although it’s just a rubber stamp attached to a huge paycheck… I believe the term is a sinecure, but don’t quote me on that).
Anyway. The story is interesting, but the meter is going to get monotonous pretty quickly, and the way my brain works I kinda have to read it aloud, so my partner is also going to be reading Richard III by fragmentation. Poor soul.
It’s not in my queue currently but a friend recently restarted the Caiaphas Cain WH40K books. For what it’s worth I strongly recommend those for the surreal Grim Dark if desired.
To my tastes the black library stuff like Gaunt’s, Gotrek & Felix, and Caiaphas Cain are the closest spiritual thing to Howard era pulps recently.
