That one I always remember very well. The problem is the order of their names for me, not the order of their fates.
I did not have any issue with the Colleen McCullough books on Rome at all. But the version I read had a great glossary of names, and I am a great fan of the later Roman Republic history. That has to be a great advantage.
Funny enough, I had read so much about Rome that on my first weekend break there, I had hardly any problem to find where everything was. On my second holiday there with my parents and partner, I was the guide. Besides the day trip we took to Florence, we had to buy a map for that.
Just started Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Had only read House of Suns, which I really enjoyed, and the novella Slow Bullets so I’m looking forward to starting one of his series.
Just finished A Fire Upon the Deep by Verner Vinge which started really slowly for me but I blasted through the second half of it. It has some great alien cultures, including some that made my head hurt trying to imagine them!
I really like the Tines; Vinge did some brilliant work on them. I remember asking him about their unity of consciousness at a convention, and he answered that he had worked out that the bandwidth of the corpus callosum was about the same as the bandwidth of their frequency of ultrasound! And I found the mollusclike alien who saves some children (human and Tine) from a fire very moving.
Yeah, it took my brain a while to piece the Tines together though Vinge does drip feed the descriptions a little at the beginning. Great book though overall.
Have you read the quasi-prequel A Deepness in the Sky? I found it even better than A Fire upon the Deep. It was somewhat in a different key, but the two both had marvelous alien races.
There’s no excuse though. I remember Mark Kermode reviewed Black Panther, and despite not being a superhero fan in any way when it came to the battle at the end he knew:
a) who everyone was
b) who they were fighting and
c) why he should care in each case.
And that’s just damn good writing, because that was a BIG cast.
Exact Thinking in Demented Times by Karl Sigmund. A history piece on the Vienna Circle, math, physics, philosophy and the interwar period.
Four of the Three Musketeers by Robert Bader on the stage career of the Marx Brothers. Particular detail on 1905 to 1934 and the 1920s height of Vaudeville.
17 Carnations by Andrew Morton. Edward VIII and Wallis made significant errors in judgement over and over and over again.
And for comics, I’m into the second of three hardback compilations of all of Alan Moore’s Promethea. Slow and steady.
Inspired to do so by a viewing of the bad Ghibli adaptation, I read the whole Earthsea set of six books, and found them quite satisfying. Not at all like the half-remembered story I had in my head from a childhood reading of probably only the first book. For some reason I had an idea that it had some resemblance to Harry Potter, but good, and I’m glad I can put that misconception to rest.
And I forgot, for a slow read I am going back to Dracula. The first entry date in the book is 3 May. So I’m trying for a third time to read each day’s items from the book as the year goes. I’ve made it to August twice and petered out as other life events impinged. Think I’ll make it to Halloween this time like I keep wanting to.
I’m not sure if I’ve encountered the Ghibli adaptation. Is it animated? I’ve seen about ten minutes of an adaptation (C and I agreed to stop watching after that), but it was live action.
It was adapted by Miyazaki’s son Goro. I believe Miyazaki took a break halfway through to smoke during the premier, and said something to the effect of ‘it felt like 3 hours even though it was 2.’
Yeah, neither Le Guin or the elder Miyazaki were very complimentary about it. I think after a viewing, Miyazaki said something to the effect of “I was looking at my kid. He’s not an adult yet. That is all.”
The anime itself mashes together elements from at least 4 of the books into one mish-mash of a story, essentially using character names and events to create a new story.
Oh, “from a title by Ursula Le Guin,” like Starship Troopers being from a title by Robert Heinlein. Not uncommon in “adaptations,” I’m sorry to say.
What C and I saw was live action and purported to be A Wizard of Earthsea. When we saw the proud and reckless Ged turned into a self-pitying whiny farmboy apparently modelled on Luke Skywalker, we couldn’t bear to watch any more. And it didn’t help that the actor was white.
Love the EarthSea books. Must read them again - I’ve only read the original 3 - didn’t even know she’d written more in the 90s.
Currently reading my way through the Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell. Bought them all off Facebook Marketplace for £20 - all in hardback. Not exactly high literature but they are always fun and exciting to read, even if they do get a bit repetitive, like the Sharpe books. I love Sharpe, but he didn’t half crowbar him into every single major event of the Napoleonic Wars!
I recently finished rereading the first Dune book in preparation for both Dune Imperium and hopefully the new movie. I must say it holds up so much better than I expected (it’s been many years since I first read it). I generally do not have high expectations for older SFF books even if I loved them when I first read them. I have started the second one but haven’t gotten very far yet.
I really enjoyed the way Herbert invents words and language. This is what I love about SF (even more than F) being dropped into a “new” (1) world not quite knowing or understanding everything and slowly figuring out what is going on.
(1) as stated I have read this one before so new is relative.
Has anyone else noticed a thing that I call “starter SF”? (Not meaning to be pejorative.) Brookmyre’s Bedlam and Places in the Darkness, or MacBride’s Halfhead, are the canonical examples for me: science fiction that feels familiar to a modern non-SF-reading audience, that’s very gentle about introducing SFnal ideas, presumably so as not to scare off the people who’ve read the same author’s crime/mystery/thriller books. Some of them can be pretty good, but there can be a strong sense of frustration if you do know SF as you say to yourself “well, obviously standard SF trope X has happened! Think about it!” for half the book until the protagonist finally works it out. Not the same thing as simplistic writing, because they can still carry all the complexity of a thriller set in the real world, they just soft-pedal the weird SF stuff.
I listened to an interesting conversation with Lee Child the other day when he was saying about the ‘respinsibility’ held by a commercial writer. As he says, many highly literary books, if their readers aren’t totally satisfied but there are interesting ideas or beautifil prose, the readers will still take something from it and will probably happily pick up that authors next book, 10 years down the line. With many of Child’s readers, his books are possibly the only books they will ever read, or at least amongst few others, and if he fails to deliver, they may just stop reading altogether. Now, having known my brother who was never much of a reader (how that happened in our family, I’m not sure…), I think its a really interesting point. (this was all in response to the criticism that writing commercial thrillers like he does is less skillful than writing literary fiction)
So I guess that might play into a lot of what you’re were saying above - these writers can’t afford to disappoint their readers as many will never come back.