Amph What book are you reading right now?

Norman Wisdom's autobio

blimey , his childhood was positively Dickensian , he went to school barefoot , his dad routinely punched him (in the face!) if he did anything wrong , his mother left home , his dad went away working and him and his brother had to steal food to survive.
When he was 14 he walked 180 miles to Wales for a job , sleeping rough for 2 weeks on the road and when he got there there was no job .

still he's cheerful through it all.

 

More Lee.

Spoiler

At the time martial arts in Hong Kong were lout of fashion. Thanks to a public challenge resulting in two fighters having a draw that was talked about and debated it gained popularity.

Bruce Lee says he took up Kung Fu out of insecurity, as he wondered what would happen if he were caught by others without his gang. he would tell friends who showed up to train that Ip Man was away on some errand and could not teach time so he could hog up private time to himself.

Ip Man actually encouraged his students to go look for fights to prove how good his martial art was.

Lee's first sort of girlfriend turned into his getaway driver as each date would end up with him in some fight and he would then jump in the car to leave the scene.

 

Finished Doctor Who: Rose last night.
The author is Russel T. Davies.

It was a fun and quick read featuring the 9th Doctor (Eccleston), his companion Rose and her friends and mother. The Autons are attacking London which needs to be saved by Rose and the Doctor.

"Rose" is a novelization of the very first episode of New Who that began in 2005.

 

Invoking Darkness by Jeanne Cavelos
Book 3 of the B5 Passing of the Technomages trilogy. There's some interesting background info on the mages, their history, and how technomancy works, and it ties into events in the tv show pretty well. But there's also a lot of pages devoted to Anna Sheridan's story, which wasn't all that interesting and was already adequately covered on tv. Feel free to skim over those parts and concentrate on the good parts.

 

Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, by Nathaniel Philbrick. In the 1830s, before the Mexican War and the Gold Rush, America was still a country essentially bounded by the Mississippi, a growing, bustling, but provincial nation with little international stature, especially in the arts and sciences. Yet in 1838, the Navy finally sent out an expedition of discovery in the style of the leading European nations, and it was a doozy. It accomplished a great deal even by European standards, charting a huge array of Pacific islands, surveying the Pacific Northwest at a time when American influence in the Oregon Territory was tenuous, first confirming the existence of the Antarctic continent, conducting scientific experiments across the world (including at the summit of the gigantic volcano Mauna Loa), and collecting an unprecedented array of specimens and data across scientific and sociological disciplines. That would be enough to give Philbrick a remarkable story to tell, but even more dramatically, the expedition was led by Charles Wilkes, a great surveyor and man of indomitable drive and enthusiasm without whom the expedition would have likely failed to deliver so much — but who was also a raging egomaniac and petty tyrant who was incompetent as both a sailor and leader of men. He defied orders, claimed rank he hadn’t received, mercilessly tormented his subordinates to satisfy his own insecurity, and was court-martialed as soon as he returned. Responsible both for the mission’s success and for its disappearance into obscurity rather than being honored as the amazing American achievement in science and exploration that it was, he’s an incredibly compelling figure that Philbrick digs deeply into. I have always been fascinated by stories of nautical adventure, and this is a true one that’s absolutely gripping, from shipwrecks to battles with Fijian cannibals to volcano ascents to courtroom confrontations. Just an outstanding book, as Philbrick does a great job of capturing the action, placing it in context, and illuminating the personalities involved.

 

1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and The Clash of Islam and the West, by Roger Crowley. Just a few pages in and the scene is set for one colossal confrontation in 1453, after well-depicted precursors in 617 and 678 featuring the use of Greek fire. I'm stoked to read this.

 

The Devastation of Baal. War hammer 40k novel.

iam Catching up with the current state of Warhammer lore in the 40k setting while covid delays the end of the siege of Terra during the horus heresy era of the setting(which is set 10,000 years prior). Tyranids give fleet is approaching the homeworlds of the Blood Angels space marine chapter (think space vampire super soldiers with a Angelic motif, different from the chapter I play as in the tabletop, the Dark Angels who are who have A space knight motif and the Angel of Death in their heraldry). All the blood angels Successor chapters are gathered together to defend the system from the Tyrannies, think the Aliens from Alien mixed with the Borg (the Tyranids are the inspiration for the Zerg in Starcraft). For what are essentially 7 foot tall power armor wearing Vampires the Blood Angels and most of their Successors are surprisingly heroic and one of the closest things the Imperium of Man has to good guys(the other being the Salamanders chapter) but a few of the chapters like the Flesh Tearers and the Angels Excelis chapters are still pretty bad.

 

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, by Tim Blanning. Frederick is a pretty notable subject, a monarch obsessed with Enlightenment culture and philosophy who became the great example of the enlightened despot, who raised his German principality into one of the great powers of Europe. Relentlessly bullied by his pious, militaristic father, he responded by embracing the effete culture his father loathed and being pretty openly atheist and gay, while also surpassing his father on the battlefield. It is compelling stuff, and Blanning, in this scholarly biography, does a great job of picking apart Frederick and his image. It’s largely oriented topically, but it works for a figure who gives us so much to analyze in so many fields, and Blanning really lays out a through evaluation, critiquing Frederick and challenging conventional views, but also explaining what set him apart. He’s just really good at dealing with complexity in his portrait of a figure who’s compelling and unique but also smaller than his image in some ways. Just a really fascinating biography.

 

just read my first Dorothy L Sayers book. They feel surprisingly modern even tho they were written in the 1920s. I suppose its because it has a camp quality and also there's some fairly obvious hints at homosexuality.

 

Re-reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. I read the first two books (The Northern Lights & The Subtle Knife) before the televised seasons 1 and 2, so as to remind myself of the story, and am now reading The Amber Spyglass.

I watch very little television but am loving the adaptation of the books so far (and am really excited that they have finally green-lit the third and final season), because they do not hold back on the so-called controversial aspects of the books. If you fancy reading this series, order the UK versions as the US versions are censored.

I can honestly say that this is my favourite book/book series of all time. It has everything in it; it is beautifully written; and the characters and the worlds of the book are textured and complex as they should be; and it may have one of the most perfect endings of any book.

 

Right now I am reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. So, far, I'm only fifty pages in, but I've already been introduced to several characters and perspectives that will be important going forward. The dialogue feels really natural and the themes explored within are relevant even today.

Books that I've recently finished:

Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work by Kim Price-Glynn

Spoiler

An ethnographic account of a rundown strip club in Anytown, USA dubbed The Lion's Den by Price-Glynn for the sake of anonymity. Strip Club is a page-turner, which details the work lives of the dancers, cocktail waitresses and other [male] employees within a gendered workspace which places the women above the men in theory and the men above the women in practice. The strippers are required to share their tips with the male employees, as they are the "main attraction" but are, in turn, vulnerable to the patronizing, paternalism and objectification of the men they work with and the male patrons they work for. Though they make the most in tips, as independent contractors, strippers have no wages. In contrast to the cocktail waitress (some double as both dancers and waitresses) and male employees who do earn a wage, this independent contractor status prevents them from securing access to the more reliable traits of employment i.e., steady pay, benefits, etc. The strippers speak to Price-Glynn (who studied the club while working as one of its cocktail waitress) about their day-to-day work experiences; what they think of the male patrons who solicit their services; how they came to enter the industry and so on, allowing them to articulate their own thoughts. Also given the spotlight are the men who frequent the club. Some come to see the nude dancers, others to watch the game and drink a beer with other men. There are those who are fooled by the fantasies that the strippers enamor them with and there are those who understand that the strippers are there to sell a fantasy.

If you like to read novel-length sociological studies, I think you'll like this one.

The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan. I didn't like this one at all.

Spoiler

I was looking for Altered Carbon, but my library didn't have it, so I picked up this one, since it looked pretty cool from the cover art. It's a dark fantasy, so right up my alley, but the book, in trying to buck the traditional fantasy tropes starts to become too try-hard when characters go around saying the f-word all the time. There are some good lines, but they're ruined by a succession of sentences that inject f-words in for emphasis. If it was isolated to a few characters, fine, but it's not. While I am happy that f-word is confined to dialogue, there is another f-word that isn't: the slur f-word used for gay men. There's something very weird about the amount of times that maggot with an f appears in this story. Characters, "heroic" and villainous, call a specific character the f-word, and the prose in one character's POV chapters (there are three main characters with different POVs) refers to this specific character as the f-word many times...but he's an f-word that he can respect/it's cultural, or something like that. In the first couple of pages I was excited that the lead was a gay character, but once those f-words started rolling in it was a race to finish the book as quick as possible.

As far as the other stuff? Well, there was a story which I barely understood, a rape scene which was full of more f-words, and so-so world building.

 

Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi

 

Aurora Rising by Alastair Reynolds, originally titled The Prefect. I read Elysium Fire a couple years ago and loved it despite it being a sequel. Aurora Rising is the first of the two and both take place in the Revelation Space universe.

Many of the books feature The Glitter Band, 10,000 space habs with 100 million inhabitants orbiting a planet. Most of the books show a plague that has taken place and ruined everything but this one takes place before all that.

 

Forward Me Back to You by Mitali Perkins

Listening to If it Bleeds by Stephen King

 

Starfighter Rising by Daniel Seegmiller
Sci-fi about starfighter pilots, it started OK, but by the end it was ridiculously over-the-top. The enemies were described as all kinds of dangerous, cunning, and skilled, yet the hero was blowing them away six at a time. Something else that bugs me is that the whole story was written in present tense for no apparent reason. Is that a thing now? I found it annoying and distracting. Dialog was better than average, so it's a pity the rest of the book didn't measure up.

 

I finished reading 1453 by Roger Crowley. I'm stunned at the details given of the siege of Constantinople: the different methods of defense and attack, the besieged speaking only as necessary as they frantically plugged holes in their wall as the seven week siege proceeded, the besiegers screaming as they charged amid musical accompaniment by tambourines, castanets and drums; the enslavement of the Byzantines after all was lost; Sultan Mehmet's nervy movement of some of his fleet overland on rollers to bypass the protective outer harbor chain of the Byzantines to reach the inner harbor, next to the great wall ... Other details included the defenders' advantages of plugging holes in the wall with earth (because ensuing cannon balls mired in the dirt with less damage than when they smacked into the stone walls) and the eerie near-success of Ottoman tunnelers digging 250 yards to the walls from their encampment, only to be heard talking from above ground and thwarted many times.

According to Crowley, a debate ensued whether to defend the outer wall or the higher inner wall around the 12 mile city perimeter. The layout was this, working inwards to the city: 10 foot deep ditch (not called a moat because apparently it was unfilled with water at that time), then a terrace 20 feet wide, then the outer wall, followed by a space (about 15 feet wide) and then the nice high inner wall. The vote was to defend the outer wall. This is Monday morning quarterbacking, but wouldn't the advantage of height prove the better deal, along with trapping any enemy between the inner and outer walls if they did break through and smashing them from above?

Among the cultural differences one stood out to me: the Byzantines ensured proper succession by scrutinizing the parentage of the next Emperor, while the Ottomans ensured proper succession through the father only. The mother of the next Sultan could be Muslim or not, of any social standing. I'm impressed by the scope of this book and Crowley's afterword: he wanted to "capture the sound of human voices ... to reproduce the words, prejudices, hopes and fears" of the protagonists and I think he succeeded.

 

Outlaw Hearts a Western romance novel by Rosanne Bittner. Quite the fascinating story, full of intriguing characters and even the romance between the main characters is believable. Not usually my kind of novel, but this one I like.

 

Started Death Masks by Jim Butcher. Excited to be back with Dresden.

 

E-book: Windup Girl, forgot the name of the author, a cyberpunk novel as I got hooked on the genre.

Audiobook: The Stand by Stephen King

Paperback: rereading Knife of Dreams (book 10 of The Wheel of Time)

 

Audiobook:
Subtle Knife, second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, it is very good so far.

Book:
Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe by Prof. Brian Cox. (It is two books in one)

 

Skirmish by Melisa Michaels
Pretty good sci-fi (not quite space opera) about a hotshot shuttle pilot from the asteroid belt who gets drawn into the political schemes of the usual mix of belters, oppressive Earth government, and overbearing corporations.

 

The Atlas of Unusual Borders, by Zoran Nikolic

An interesting collection of the quirks of manmade borders across the world. Enclaves, weird old treaties, overseas borders, lots of cool stuff to read about. Generally quite good, though it sometimes crams in a lot of exotic place names to keep up with, and not every border written about has a map to go along with it, making it a little hard to follow at times. Could do with some actual location photos too, the book is strictly limited to map overviews, and I was curious what some of the described locales actually looked like in reality.

If anyone wants another recommendation for a book about maps, I heartily suggest The Phantom Atlas, by Edward Brooke-Hitching. That book actually displayed historical maps, rather than uniform modern ones, and had both more photos and more text per entry.

 

JSA: The Golden Age by James Robinson and Paul Smith.

Finally, a JSA comic that isn’t about Hitler. Seriously, Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz were obsessed with the latter’s decision to make superheroes not winning World War II be down to Hitler controlling the Lance of Longinus SPEAR OF DESTINY, and so it showed up again, and again, and again, the generally well-regarded America v. The Justice Society was literally about an alleged plot where Hitler controlled the JSA... too much Hitler. So imagine my joy when, in the first ten-odd pages of this prelude to Starman, Robinson says that was all a load and there was actually just a Nazi super villain who could negate super powers. ****ing finally. And then it goes in some really neat directions as it carefully navigates a balance between real and alt-history to keep the details in check (this was DCU canon until it wasn’t or maybe it is again because everything is canon or... um...) while still spicing them up. Starman, who was a leading physicist in the golden age comics, is shown here rattled by this inadvertent contributions to the atomic science that led to the atomic bomb. The masked man secret agent who claims to have assassinated Hitler (it could go either way and I’m not sure what angle the book will take on it, but I’m keeping in mind that Marvel canon says the Human Torch - no, not that one, the other Human Torch - killed Hitler. Seriously. So nothing’s off the table.) has become a vicious McCarthyite firebrand taking the further step of using anti-Slavic rhetoric. There’s a lot of potential for this to go to some compelling places, and hey, there’s a lengthy, critically acclaimed follow-up series to check out afterwards. Comics, man, when they’re good they’re good. When they’re bad their author makes EiC and... sorry, lost the happy.