Shigeru Mizuki’s amazing four volume history of the Showa era.
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I finished re-reading Triplanetary and First Lensman this week.
Lensman held a particular fascination for me as a kid. I knew it existed. I knew it was foundational to things like Star Wars I loved. I’d seen the anime, it made no sense to me, and it offered no insights. I couldn’t find the books. My dad was Tom Corbett generation not Lensman and he’d mostly grown out of it so he offered shrugs.
Doc Smith’s language works for me. It’s got energy like Robert E Howard and when it goes technical it feels smooth like Heinlein.
But the dialogue eats at my suspension as I read it. I can’t tell if Smith actually imagined people could talk like this or if he was an absolute magician of writing how elementary school boys imagined adults would talk.
The setting and the frame of the story twist on me a lot too. On the one hand it’s pure military coup de’tat fiction justified by magic jewelry and a juvenile view of ‘crime’. On the other hand folks go undercover with the “zwilniks” in convincing fashion, there’s an admiration for technical know-how and labor, and the lensmen occasionally acknowledge they are doing terrible and unjustifiable things in the name of “Civilization.”
Also it’s such an abundant vision of a universe. There’s genuinely unique life forms that are very different from humans with forehead ridges or pointy ears. There’s a vision that people are so smart and diligent that any innovation observed once will be duplicated and bettered in short order. There’s a confidence about innovation that’s amazing but chilling in a material and amoral fashion that is rarely treated so plainly.
These two books also lead me to consider the phenomenon of the prequel. Because these are prequels written before I was born and I could never have encountered the series without the prequels. It’s fun to see the bones of so much of genre fiction both commercial (series publication, collection for publication, prequels) and core ideas (how does it go faster than light? what problems will be created and how can they be addressed? If the bad guy has a planetoid space station how do you escape it? How ridiculous sounding a made up word can work?)
The opening of Triplanetary is like a how to and how not to simultaneously. It’s a vast tapestry laid out concisely and enjoyably. It falls victim to “all bad guys in human history are alien agents”. It’s got an thinly veiled autobiographical anecdote about war-time explosives manufacturing which never manages to actually grind the axes the author is carrying around.
I can’t recommend the Lensmen series for everyone. It’s too old, too pulpy, and maybe even just too weird for a lot of folks. The bits and pieces of late 1930s fascism and eugenics are distasteful. I can recommend the Lensman series for folks who want to see roots of genre fiction and sci fi television and a place where the pulps broke towards sci fi and away from cosmic horror but still had bits of both.
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Ben MacIntyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes.
Basically, the SAS was formed by a bunch of insanely brave bunch of lunatics that probably wouldn’t have passed the modern day psych evaluations that i believe are now required!
The BBC adaptation of the first half of the book (the African Desert) does a good job conveying the derring do side of the formation of the unit but the book goes much further into the ridiculous hardship these guys cheerfully accepted as part of their job and the possibly fine line between bravery and psychopathic tendencies!
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A battery of Indigenous (American) literature aimed specifically at analyzing the concept of “Tricksters” from multiple cultural points of view.
They have fascinating titles like “Trickster Lessons in Early Canadian Indigenous Communities” (oooh) and “Between Native American and Continental Philosophy: A comparative approach to narrative and the emergence of responsible selves” (aaaahh)…
All this because I decided for my final assignment I’m going to try and do a short narrative/stop-motion (finally putting my LEGO to work!) in which Nanabozho/Wesahicachk has a conversation with Loki… I might even try to do a quick and stupid replication of the MCU “What If…?” introduction (with LEGO… I may be overly ambitious here, since it needs to be done by April 2nd…).
I hate reading literary analysis/scholarly articles. I understand them, I just struggle to maintain focus.
… why are you all looking at me like that?
… fine. I’ll go back to my readings…
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I’ve recently discovered that listening to the text at the same time as reading it can help me to focus. Alternatively, listening to the text while I’m doing something that doesn’t require the language part of my brain and then reading it later.
Given the amount of academic reading I’ve done in my life I could have done with discovering this earlier!
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I’ve finally managed to read a 2nd book this year!
“The Lost Metal” the final book in the 2nd era of Mistborn. I have an idea why it took me so long: it has been quite a while since I read the others and back then it had felt like the era was finished with book 3.
And now I can finally go to the spoiler infested wikis to check out the details on some characters that I seem to have forgotten from other books.
I did enjoy the story and finished the 2nd half of the book reasonably quickly. But reading novels has become a struggle in the last few years–and among my friends I am not the only one. I read a lot: news, learning stuff for work, lengthy articles, recipes, rulebooks for boardgames… just not fiction. When I do pickup a book, I struggle to concentrate.
But I have books in the reading pipeline that I am keen to get to. So… I’ll see how it goes.
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We’ve got that book and I’m struggling to remember what happened in the others!!
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It regularly takes me months to get through a book, mostly a few pages at a time before going to bed, but often not at all for days at a time.
When I was young, I had my nose in a book for as much of the day as I could, and would devour them as quickly as I could get my hands on them.
My priorities nowadays are clearly out of whack.
(Case in point: I am approximately half way through the book I started at the very beginning of the year.)
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I read 100-200 books a year, mostly fiction, mostly quite light. (And I review all of them on the blog.) The main thing that affected that was stopping commuting: all of a sudden I didn’t have 2-3 hours each day in which I couldn’t usefully do anything but read, and had to make time for it instead.
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I was in a similar position, although books were taking me weeks rather than months.
I’ve made a real effort since the start of last year to get back into reading more. While I’m not always keen on the idea of setting targets/challenges for stuff I do for fun (I’ve stopped trying to set board game targets, for example), I did get the goodreads app just to give me a bit of a nudge.
I don’t use it for anything except setting myself an annual reading challenge. I set a target of 36 new books last year (which I narrowly achieved), and this year have gone for 52 books including new ones and re-reads.
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@ WolfeRJ
Harsh, but fair review of a classic. I liked this bit, the sheer bravado is breathtaking.
From Project Gutenburg:
ARISIA AND EDDORE
Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other. A couple of hundreds of millions of years either way do not matter, since at least that much time was required for the inter-passage. At about that same time—within the same plus-or-minus ten percent margin of error, it is believed—practically all of the suns of both those galaxies became possessed of planets."
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It is one of the all-time great opening lines.
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Just finished Lock In having read Head On a while back. Only took me a bit over a day to read.
While it was written in 2013, some aspects of it almost felt prescient with recent happenings.
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Absolutely blitzed The Kaiju Preservation Society, is it obvious I’m on holiday this week?
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I have managed to finish another book.
It is my first time reading the Thrawn trilogy. I have a feeling that I may want to know all there is to know about Thrawn in this era. Even if these books are not canon. I only read the first book so far. It is better in some aspects than I expected, in others not so much. I also feel like The Force Awakens completely destroyed my sympathies for Han Solo due to how I perceived Harrison Ford in that movie.
I will read the 2nd Sanderson mystery novel next and then continue with the trilogy.
One of the reasons I am reading so much less are my eyes. I have had glasses since about one and a half years and my eyes get really really tired when reading. I think my bi-focals (Gleitsicht?) are not meant for reading a lot. I should maybe try my work glasses instead.
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Are The Adventure Zone graphic novels any good? I enjoyed the podcast (I haven’t enjoyed any of their others games as much so pretty much dropped out of listening to it)
I’ve enjoyed them, but also felt a little underwhelmed each time I’ve read one. They don’t seem to capture the energy of the podcast as well as they could.
Obviously just translating everything directly wouldn’t work, but they seem determined to not bring in stuff like jokes from the podcast, and often they’re just not as good as what’s been replaced.
I fell off the podcast after their last arc (Ethersea) disappointed me with its rushed ending that came out of nowhere (not as bad as Graduation, which was pretty much terrible all the way through, but the promising start giving way to that was the final straw).
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Currently reading Game Over, about the history of Nintendo. I like reading about the early days of computer gaming (which probably dates me a bit). I remember my first computer, and programming it. Who knows, without that start I may not have gone into a career in IT. I’m sure most people would not have heard of my first computer (DIck Smith Wizard), but I also owned a ZX Spectrum, which I’m sure people have heard of.
And received some books today in the mail, my last order (just in time) from book depository. The books are Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water, both by Joe Dever. These are Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I was vaguely aware of as a kid.
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It may just be Old Bloke Nostalgia, but I think one ends up as a better programmer having started out thinking “what can I make this toy do” than ditto “if I pass this course I can get a job doing it”.
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