Amph What book are you reading right now?

Kiss Her Goodbye

Unfinished Mike Hammer novel by Mickey Spillane (of course). The manuscript was finished by Max Collins of Road to Redemption graphic novel fame.

 

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley. The general treatment of the age of discovery points out that Vasca da Gama discovered the sea route to India and leaves it as that, as if the spice trade simply naturally worked itself out once Europeans knew how to get around Africa. But there’s a lot more to the story, as Crowley points out.

The Portuguese didn’t merely trade; they almost immediately started building the first globalized empire, one that did not last as long as most but pioneered the naval-powered trading empire that the Dutch and British would use to displace them. Crowley, who is a better small-scale historian than big-picture guy, keeps his book tightly focused on the voyages of discovery that found the route to India and Portugal’s first efforts to establish itself in the Indian Ocean. He’s good at showing the cultural clashes and mistaken assumptions, the suspicion and belligerence, that led the Portuguese almost immediately onto the path of conquest, a messy and ill-considered process, carried out halfway around the world, under the attempted micromanagement of a vacillating and over-demanding king with over a year round trip for communications. Yet the systematic acquisition of knowledge, combined with competent subordinates in India — chiefly the belligerent, stubborn, brutal, but visionary, competent, and dedicated Afonso de Albuquerque — Portugal carved out a powerful Indian Ocean empire in only a few decades. It’s a remarkable story, well worth exposing.

Crowley is outstanding bringing sea battles and personalities to life, though he’s not as good at articulating the big picture back in Lisbon. But with the tight focus he works with, he’s excellent. He’s a vivid writer who doesn’t shy away from the brutality and greed of the Portuguese, but doesn’t go out of his way to dwell on condemning anybody. He’s more interested in the fascinating narrative than teasing out the long story of its global consequences. His Albuquerque has the characteristics of both hero and villain, a complex figure Crowley thoroughly explores without providing a simple judgment. It’s a great, lively treatment of an underexposed and fascinating, consequential subject.

 

Siege of Terra the lost and the Damned.

The traitor Primarchs finally start the ground war on Earth.

Angron just landed and Sangiunius is going out to face his brother. The Golden Angel(Sangiunius, he actually has angel wings) vs the Demonic Red Angel(Angron has ascended top a Daemon Prince of Khorne, the god of War). 20 foot tall Daemon with bat wings shouting Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne while wrecking everything in sight leading an army of beserkers in power armor.

Jagathai Khan has gone to try to help the rest of Terra away from the Imperial Palace(which is on Mount Everest)

Dorn is holding the Palace.

Guilliman is trying to break through the Traitor fleet to reinforce his brothers

The Lion and Russ are trying to draw some of the Traitor legions from the siege and also out of the path of Guilliman is fleet by destroying the traitors home worlds.

The Emperor is trying to hold back the Daemons in the Web way from turning Earth into a 2nd Eye of Terror with Vulkan acting as his last line of defense(Vulkan will iniate a doomsday weapon and destroy the planet if it gets to that).

Gotta love Warhammer.

 

MODified: Thanks but no thanks.

 

Well, uh, that's interesting....
How is it so far?

I've judged a book by its cover too and it turned out well

I am listening to: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
I am catching up with TOR's serialization of Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson. So even though the book doesn't come out til Nov. 17th, I'm saying I'm reading it.

 

Portrait of a Killer; Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, by Patricia Cornwell. Maybe it's the unseasonably hot weather or the time of year, but reading about the Ripper's deeds and possible identity proved alluring. Steamy August to November, 1888 must have been unendurable to Londoners and Cornwell's evidence about Jack's identity holds up well. She injects herself into the story by sharing her compulsion to relate her theory to the world instead of continuing with her series of novels as planned. This doesn't take up lots of room and I liked how she was self-revealing, but not too much.

 

A Time For Mercy The latest John Grisham novel, bringing back Jake Brigance for another murder trial.

 

The Day of the Triffids (1951) – John Wyndham

About the only thing I knew about The Day of the Triffids was that it was a horror/sci-fi novel about triffids, a species of ambulatory, deadly plants, killing people. I picked up this novel expecting the literary equivalent of a cheesy B-movie. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As this book beings, a strange astronomical phenomenon, a kind of meteor shower of green lights, is seen all over the world; the next morning, everyone who saw that meteor shower has been stricken completely blind. Bill Masen, our erstwhile hero, is one of the lucky ones; he was in the hospital with his eyes bandaged after an injury when the meteor shower occurred, so he’s one of only a handful of people in all of London who can still see. We then follow Bill through a grim, very serious and very dark experience of watching society crumble. Oh, yes, the triffids. Well, it seems they’re a new species of bio-engineered plants that produce a very valuable oil, but they also have a powerfully venomous stinger, grow to seven feet tall and, yes, they’re ambulatory. With human oversight, the triffids have proved not very dangerous. But now, that human oversight is gone, the triffids are producing their airborne seeds in abundance and could those strange sounds they make actually be some form of communication? Then, if things weren’t bad enough, a plague starts to spread. Could this be the end for humanity? This is, if that plot summary hasn’t made it clear enough, a really dark book. It’s also a real page-turner. This book really had to be incredibly influential on the zombie genre in the way that it depicts society crumbling as a massive horde of people are suddenly rendered blind and the few remaining people who can see quickly start to use their newfound power in all sorts of ways. Some people want to help the blind; some want to retreat into their own safe communities. The blind form roving mobs, driven by fear and anger as they struggle to find a way to survive in a world they can no longer navigate in safety. The triffids roam at random, preying on the blind with ease. The ways in which the book really explores all of the various ways in which the world of 1940s London would fall into chaos are creative and surprising at times. The cast of supporting characters is well-written and Bill functions as a slightly pedantic everyman, not at all portrayed as a great hero that’s particularly well-suited for survival, except for the fact that he knows a lot about triffids. I think the one thing that I might have as a complaint about this book is the fact that the ending is extremely predictable; then again, in 1951, maybe it wasn’t and it’s the fact that so many zombie shows and books and movies have borrowed it. And that’s a minor complaint anyway, given just how bracing and compelling this book is. At one point, a wealthy character, struck blind, dying in agony of the plague, begs for Bill to end her life; “So futile to have lived at all,” she muses. That could be from a Graham Greene novel. And no cheese at all; not even a slice. 4 stars.

tl;dr – iconic & influential sci-fi horror novel is bracing, dark, compelling and not nearly as cheesy as its premise might suggest; a fantastic, well-written page turner. 4 stars.

 

Re-Reading: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
Listening to: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Yes, I'm jogging my memory and catching up with the multiverse before "Rhythm of War" comes out.

 

Just finished Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón because it has shifted a **** ton of copies, and so must have had something to recommend it.

Well I was sort of stunned... One of the supposed maxims of literature is not to info-dump at the end (or anywhere for that matter), and yet this novel explains all outstanding mystery near the end in a 30+ page letter from one character to the MC. It's an astoundingly lazy way to end your novel, especially since the writer of the letter cannot possibly have witnessed many of the events described in the letter.

FTR, I loved parts of this book. Having lived in Barcelona myself, I think it's an amazing, atmospheric city and the perfect setting for such a story. I've even been up the Avenguda Tibidabo, and past swanky villas that could easily pass for the novel's climax. I know many of the novel's other settings too. The atmospheric prose could be beautiful at times, but verging into the purple at other times.

A difficult book to categorise on any scale. Give it a go, but don't be too surprised if it leaves you with very mixed feelings.

 

Jack Reacher The Midnight Line .

this might be the best one I've read , it has a little more to the story than usual , at the centre is a character addicted to opiates and the author treats it with a great deal of sensitivity , and I'd guess that he's known someone with the problem

 

Still reading Broken Earth trilogy...but this is next up:

 

Books of Blood: Volume One (1984) – Clive Barker

Love and life and sanity were gone, gone like the memory of his name, or his sex, or his ambition. It all meant nothing. Nothing at all.

I first encountered Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series probably over a decade ago now and I absolutely devoured (hmm, poor choice of words there) the first three volumes. For my Halloween reading this year, I decided to revisit them. I’m just going to give you a heads up; I think Volume One is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. It contains six short stories and the only one I consider a weak entry is the first one and it’s really kind of frame story of sorts for the series as a whole, so I don’t necessarily hold its weakness against it. The first proper story is The Midnight Meat Train and with a title like that you’d expect it to be gory and it is, a super hard gut punch of a serial killer story, but the thing you’re about to find out is that it’s really no gorier than Barker’s typical story because Barker has an unflinching perspective on the horrors visited on the body and the clinical prose of a biologist when it comes to the human animal. From there, the book just maintains the high quality all the way through to the end, which is In the Hills, the Cities, the story of a gay couple vacationing in Europe that come across a couple of rural neighboring villages; nothing scary about that . . . except every ten years there is a very special day for these villages, a day of ritual and remembrance . . . and today is that day. I think In the Hills, the Cities is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read and not just of the horror genre, of any genre. It neatly points out what really separates Barker from a lot of his peers in the horror game and that’s his sheer, boundless imagination. I’m not going to spoil it because you should find out the truth about those villages yourself, but I’ll just say that the premise of this story is something that, when first reading it, I had NEVER seen before; I still haven’t seen it again. And it’s key to Barker’s incredible prose abilities that he’s able to make something that could seem laughable feel instead like absolute sanity-crushing terror. That’s sort of always at play in Barker’s works as well. If he’s invested in the frailties of the body, he’s also consumed by the frailties of the mind and the visions of horror that Barker visits on his characters threaten their sanity with their extremity. But he has a gorgeous prose style that is quite unique to him, I think, couching these awful horrors in beautiful evocative prose that sometimes only accentuates the horror and other times plays off of it nicely in contrast.

The three middle stories, which I haven’t discussed, are also all knock-outs of very different kinds, including one of the only comedy horror stories I’ve ever actually liked. It’s worth noting that these stories are pretty nasty in terms of their endings. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that one of the stories ends with every single character in the story dying in a huge conflagration; I don’t think it’s a spoiler because every story in this book could end that way and you wouldn’t be surprised. I bring it up because . . . well, because that ending, where everyone burns horribly to death . . . that’s the story with the HAPPY ending from this book. So, if you like your horror with at least something like a redemptive ending, well, the Books of Blood are probably not for you or maybe they are if you have the stomach for something a little different. But that’s another part of what really elevates this collection. Barker says these are stories written by a young man and as he aged, he mellowed, at least somewhat, and began to explore visions of redemption. Not here though. These stories hit you like hammers; they’re disturbing psychologically and emotionally, graphically horrifying, often quite scary and then they end with a nasty fate for most everybody. But they’re also beautifully written, emotionally evocative, well-characterized and incredibly imaginative. I hope to be digging deeper into Barker in the near future, but I haven’t yet. Still, his Books of Blood retain their incredible power to haunt, disturb, mystify, awe and horrify. 4 stars.

tl;dr – a knock-out short story collection is among the best horror has to offer; Barker is intense, visceral, beautiful and incredibly imaginative in this jaw-dropping debut collection. 4 stars.

 

The Warbirds by Richard Herman Jr
A novel about fighter pilots flying F-4 Phantoms in a fictional mid-east conflict, written by an F-4 pilot who knows how to write. Published in 1990, I imagine the war would look rather different if it had been written after Desert Storm in '91. Characters seemed stereotypical at first, but grew deeper and more interesting as the story progressed. The author obviously knew a lot of people like his characters; so did I, and they ring true. There are a couple of sub-plots involving C-130's which totally nail the atmosphere and life of a Herk crew (I believe the author piloted the 130 as well as the Phantom, two of the ugliest airplanes in the USAF). This one gets an enthusiastic Sarge's Stamp Of Authenticity.

 

The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard - you can never get enough of Cthulhu.

 

The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston
Fantasy novel involving 50 immortals, one of whom can fly, protecting their world from invading insect hordes. Parts of it are very imaginative and creative, but most of it is too gritty for my taste.

 

Despite being far longer than needed Way of Kings is good enough I will continue the series. There are four viewpoint characters. One is a powerful warrior who loses his troops in battle and becomes a slave. One is a commander in the army the other is a slave in. One is an assassin who unwillingly serves. And a girl who tries to steal a magic talisman. The revelations at the end are, shall we say, ominous.

So on to Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, a measly 1080 pages.

 

I just started that myself after taking a break following Way of Kings.

I think I'm in a bit of minority of the fandom (apparently, based on anecdotal evidence), because every time Dalinar isn't on screen, I want other characters to be asking "Where's Dalinar?" He's already gotten louder and angrier in addition to his access to a time machine, so that's handy.

 

I'm personally finding the assassin the most interesting and loved his Inception hallway fight scene abilities.

 

Swords Against Darkness
An anthology of "heroic fantasy in the tradition of Robert E Howard". Lots of sword-swinging barbarians who come to town, kill the monster, then move on. Meh. Just watch Conan instead, it's more fun. Yes, that includes, Conan The Destroyer.

 

The Flight Girls by Noelle Salazar
In keeping up with my current them of reading novels featuring extraordinary female characters set in World War II (my last one was The Paris Orphan by Natasha Lester), this story features a small group of young women whose dreams are up in the air; already with hundreds if not thousands of hours flying experience, these women are called upon to be among the first women in the US Airforce. This is loosely based on a true story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots program (WASP) which was formed only a few years after the US joined WWII.

 

I thought the writing was pretty good, and the history was basically true, but there were a few historical/technical kinds of factual errors. Still worth reading though; it gives a good impression of how far we've come since the 40's. I think about half my combat missions over Iraq were with women as pilot, copilot, navigator, or loadmaster, and I'd willingly fly with any of them again. Wish I could say the same for all the men I flew with...

 

As with a lot of historical fiction, the authors must give themselves a degree of flexibility to tell their own story as opposed to the novel being nothing more than an autobiography. Many of the novels I've been reading over the past several months include real life people who influence the story (may even be related to the title characters) but their major roles in the story are entirely fictional.