So I’ve taken to audible to give me something to listen to when at the gym. It’s brilliant and I’m now annoyed at years of listening to the same playlist. Also a nice pallet cleanser while I get through the wheel of time.
My last two books I listened to were: Kings of the wyld - enjoyable fantasy romp with a rock and roll veneer. Gideon the Ninth - which I just finished and loved. The characters well realised and the world shrouded in enough mystery that when I finished it and was left with even more question I immediately started Harrow the ninth. Wish me luck.
Yeah jumping between the two books in the same sitting showed a very stark change in narrative tone let alone the shift to 2nd person.
Although having read the first book the change in tone and perspective seem appropriate although my opinion may shift when I’m more than 20 minutes in.
I’m hoping that the fact it’s an audiobook and the actor is brilliant helps as I feel like so far there is a twinge of Gideon’s voice in the narration that is softening the contrast.
Now I’m torn between starting Senlin Ascends or Broken Homes. And I’d conveniently forgotten my wife gifted me a couple of Sci Fi novels awhile ago that I still haven’t touched, The Ministry for the Future and World Engines. So they’re on the table too!
Well I’ve not read the latter but I read Senlin Ascends quite recently and really enjoyed it. Will definitely carry on with the series once I pick them up.
I finished Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy in quick succession and they were … fine. I think I might have had a better time with them if I had read Justice more recently.
I then breezed through Redshirts in a couple of days which was a fun time. Not sure what’s next to read. I did just pick up Count Zero but it’s been ages since I read Neuromancer.
I just finished and enjoyed Provenance, also by Ann Leckie. It is more of a murder mystery but there are still a few cultures and planets and lots of politics involved. I feel obliged to say I got my copy from the public library but that is more of a personal flaw.
I enjoyed The Ravens Tower, but it wasn’t as good as her other works. Provenance fits within the same universe as the Imperial Radch trilogy, but it is standalone with different characters and cultures.
I’m currently reading a short essay by George Orwell (Link here) that is about why “modern” (1940s) English writers suck.
It’s fine. I agree with some of it (basically, remove most unnecessary words and don’t be lazy with your metaphors), but a lot of it strikes me as very gatekeeper-y.
That stated, most of the examples of bad writing he uses I agree are bad examples of (what I would term “academic”) writing. But it’s worth a quick read if any of y’all are looking for an interesting (albeit dated) analysis of good writing.
Oh, yes. It’s a classic. Especially Orwell’s redoing of Ecclesiastes is often quoted (I believe Koestler does so in The Act of Creation); and his example of how an English intellectual might write in favor of killing political dissidents seems like a perfect example of the sort of thing Saruman might say. Though Saruman at least uses shorter words: There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.
For another discussion of style, you might like to look for Le Guin’s “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”
Currently I’m rereading A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which I haven’t looked at in at least a decade (this is why I don’t rush to dispose of books after I’ve read them!). The occasion is partly that one of the campaigns I’m thinking about offering could use some additional sources of inspiration, and Byatt’s story is thematically relevant. But this time through I’m spotting clever bits of theme-setting and foreshadowing as well, which I don’t think I noticed the previous time. I might watch the film, but I think the film was somewhat different from the novel.
Finished the “second” Witcher Book (Time of Contempt), and it was… hmmm. It was good, for the most part, but the ending is… not… good. Like, I get that it specifically leads into the next book in the series, but… sigh
I guess the only thing I can really say is that there are some tropes I was hoping Sapkowski would sidestep, and he instead drove straight into them, leaned into them to some extent, and that was really disappointing. Which is too bad, because overall a really solid high fantasy up until about three-quarters of the way through. And then a whole lotta cringe.
I’ll still finish the series, but I doubt I’ll pick up another one afterwards unless Trial by Fire really blows me away.
Almost entirely other problems.
The story is quite strong, honestly, and the characters are well-fleshed out and interesting.
And then in the last quarter of the book “a thing” happens to one of the characters, and after that point there is just a constant barrage of “things” that happen and a bunch of characters with the depth of a tissue paper show up and they’re all tropes and the things they do are tropes and the things that happen around them are tropes and all the tropes are super stupid and cringey.
Like… if you see elves singing in Lord of the Rings, fine, Tolkien kinda defined elves as singing/dancing/fey, and therefore it’s not a trope. But now you have Sapkowski having all his elves singing and dancing and being fey without any effort into justifying it… and all sorts of male-power-fantasy bullshit…
It’s hard. But again, 3/4 of the book… great! But then it just jumps off the rails at the end.
