Currently re-reading both Solaris and From Hell, both of which are very, very good and highly recommended.
As a slight postscript, if you want to understand Hollywood (and why @RogerBW feels the way he does about trailers), read From Hell and then watch the film. It will also at least partially explain why Alan Moore is a grumpy man.
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Or read Save the Cat. How to do scriptwriting, literally by the numbers.
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Ahh I have read this, immediately after watching Aladdin with the kids. Sigh.
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I had an inkling for reading in Spanish, and I am reading a great novel from Santiago Posteguillo, Las Legiones Malditas (The cursed legions, or The damned legions) following Scipio during first, his struggle in Hispania with two legions in Baetica (southern Spain these days) and how he defeats Hasdrubal Barca and then Gisco to become consul, and how Fabius Maximus denies him of a triumph (he was just a private, not a magistrate), opposes his intention of invading Africa in the Senate so he gets the command of the cursed V and VI legions that had been exiled to Sicily after running away from Hannibal in Cannae.
I don’t know if the books are translated to English, but many years ago I read another novel following Hannibal, and it is great to see things from another perspective. The book also jumps sometimes to Hannibal and Plautus perspective, and it is a delight.
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I liked Guy Davis’s art in Sandman Mystery Theatre so much that I’ve tracked down the first nine of ten issues of his Baker Street.
A 1989 Sherlock pastiche in which Watson is a woman and a med student and American; Sherlock is a woman and a punk; and the setting is an alternate Victorian styles 1980s London. It’s solidly weird.
Comments on Arrival elsewhere remind me of Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera, in which Earth is contacted by aliens and, to prove that humans are genuinely a sapient species, has to enter Space Eurovision and not come last.
Some people whose opinions I respect bounced hard off it, and I’m not a fan of Valente’s other work, but I had a great time.
“Well, we are Slekke⁵, lead singers of the Alunizar ultra-indie drip-hop nucleo-vinyl lounge band Better Than You. We’re… uh… between labels right now—”
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I don’t know why Arrival talk reminded me of Embassytown, but it did. Embassytown is great, if you want something with an alien communication theme.
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Both about linguistics, maybe?
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Arrival disappointed me because I was promised a film about Cool Alien Linguistics, and got a film mostly about …philosophy of time? and the Super-Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
And also these two species had learned to communicate the complex abstract term “weapon” in a sealed, peaceful environment - but not “behind you”.
I liked the linguist protagonist and felt that the philosophical angle left the emphasis mostly on ‘marry this guy you don’t seem to particularly like because you are Fated to have a Tragic Child’ rather than ‘establishes communication with an alien species through utterly unprecedented work in linguistics, undoubtedly making her one of the most important linguists in human history, and does this in the space of a few months at best; countless people will idolize her and she will be immortalized in word and screen’ . The former isn’t interesting to me.
To some extent, I think it’s that I was trying to watch linguistics-themed sci-fi but they were showing me literary fiction.
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So I also read Warrior En Garde because I read it is one of the best in the battletech universe but I found it pretty meh and have not continued the series afterwards.
I got a whole bunch of Battle Tech novels back then because I really wanted to get more Mech Warrior but got disappointed somehow.
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The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell.
All about the development and then ‘failure’ of the theory of precision bombing. Pretty interesting so far.
The Norden bombsight is a big part of this @Boydesian
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I’m interested in this. I like Tim Harford and listen to his podcast, I know it’s advertising, but he mentions Gladwell a lot.
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Yeah its different to other Gladwell books but so far, very readable.
Last week we visited the city library, and today I stopped by the University of Kansas library and picked up some books I had requested. So now I have a nice little stack of reading for the coming weeks.
From the city library:
Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Underground
Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Progress
Eric Flint and Griffin Barber, 1637: The Peacock Throne
Harry Turtledove, The Best of Harry Turtledove
[I don’t think the Turtledove volume is accurately titled. It does have “And So to Bed,” but hardly any of his other early short fiction, including several stories I remember favorably. And some of the more recent stories don’t strike me as equally good.]
From the university library:
Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
Padraic Colum, The Children of Odin
Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex
Anthony de Jasay, Political Philosophy Clearly: Essays on Freedom and Fairness, Property and Equalities
Charles E. Gannon, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction
John Garth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-Earth
[The Colum and Crews are books I read in the 1950s and 1960s and want to reread, to see what I think of them now. The Allen was recommended to me by Agemegos, and it and the de Jasay both reflect my interest in political and economic theory. The other two are works of literary criticism; Gannon is another author involved in the Ring of Fire series.]
I love the Peter Grant series, I think that is the third book in the Rivers of London series? Very enjoyable. Specially if you are a bit familiar with the London Tube.
These two I cannot wait to read your opinion on.
It did for John Le Carre, who couldn’t write George Smiley any more after seeing Alec Guinness in the role.
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I believe it was also he who recommended to me Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. Which is sometimes desperately frustrating as it doesn’t give all the references, but will still be a great influence the next time I run anything with knights in it.
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Whats the problem with Nikolaj? (I haven’t seen past season 5 - I’m watching them all now - so if he does something later, then don’t spoil it!)
I think Barbara Tuchman meant A Distant Mirror (which was about the aftermath of the Black Death of 1347–50) to reflect the aftermath of AIDS. It might be rather more apt in the aftermath of covid-19.
The Allen (The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective) I think a very important book, for political reasons that it might be imprudent to discuss here.
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