Amph What book are you reading right now?

So the bowl got even bigger, going quite exotic with its alien inhabitants. Sentient magnetism? Sentient ice? An alternate history expands. Our Sun had a companion they used for the bowl? Their destination is now known to be a shell world who's alien want better visitors. There is an interstellar internet of sorts, using gravitational waves. So if you can use such comms your are worthy. But neither the bowl inhabitants nor the humans can use that but they are going anyway. On to book three, Glorius.

 

Guess I'll read Light of the Jedi since I'm bored.

No spoilers!

Edit: Past the first chapter btw.

 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold - By Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Spoiler: BookCover

It is a book split into 4 smaller storied all centered around this coffee shop which allows customers to go back to a point in time, but there are many rules that have to be followed. So far, it is a very sweet and enjoyable book, although can be rather emotional at times.

 

Not cool man my Rhythm of War decided to begin to fall apart less then 200 pgs away from the end of a 1st read. This book was $40 and I have no intention of replacing this expensive shoddy thing. I keep my books bookstore shelf worthy for decades. This just pisses me off.

 

That is unfortunate.
I got mine from the library but recall how THIN the pages are, so I’m not surprised.
Still Hopefully you can find a cheap DIY solution

 

Went and finished off the Embers of War trilogy:

1. Embers of War
2. Fleet of Knives
3. Light of Impossible Stars

Had started the first one, but not gone back to it as some books I hold for hospital appointments I need to accompany my wife to, but for the last year? Those have gone virtual so have made in-roads on a vast backlog. So finished the first one, pretty smart – liked what it did, moved onto the next one.

The next two are, more-or-less, an AI fleet proving to be a bunch of total morons, who decide to take orders from the total psychopath they were about to kill in the previous volume. Said psychopath then does what psychopaths tend to do – make up for a lack of imagination and creativity with utter brutality. In this way Powell shows everything that is wrong with utilitarian and consequentialist moral philosophy, that it opens the door to too many damn horrors in the name of, cue Hot Fuzz, “the greater good”. But alongside this, it is also a tale of beings seeking redemption – both human and once-human – the relationship between the two Carnivore ships, Trouble Dog and Adalwolf, is particularly interesting here, as are the Druff, a race of alien engineers, excelling at their craft, who play a pivotal role at the finale.

Have moved onto clearing the Trek backlog, after that? Well, there’s no shortage.

 

Mostly Harmless. If the humor has been dark and misanthropic so far, this final Hitchhiker’s Guide book is positively bleak. It feels mostly like another adventure, with Ford trying to contain a multidimensional, dangerous version of the Guide created after the publisher was bought out by Vogons; a version of Trillian that never left Earth being abducted by aliens that have forgotten what their mission was and just watch TV; and Arthur, having had the love of his life simply disappear in a hyperspace accident, wandering in search of her and somewhere like Earth, only to be introduced to his maladjusted daughter with the regular Trillian — until an end in which Earth is finally wiped completely out of existence in all realities, and all the protagonists die. But at least Zaphod is still out there somewhere, because he wasn’t in the book. It’s a bit of a messy, meandering plot with a haphazard and abrupt resolution, even by the relaxed standards of this series. But it’s certainly funny, and Adams continues his emerging trend of digging into messy human emotions and exploring things like parenthood, love, and purpose in life with surprising wit and sensitivity under all the comedy.

 

Think I'll read another book or something.

 

First Battle by Melisa Michaels
Sequel to Skirmish, this one seemed more space opera and less scifi than the first one, maybe because the first one did most of the world-building. There's more action than plot logic, but it's a decent literary analog to a popcorn movie.

 

I thought the series went a bit off the rails in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but in my opinion, Adams really nailed it with Mostly Harmless. It really does all wrap up perfectly in that ending which I remember so vividly. I mean, the realization that all of this galaxy and dimension hopping, time & space bending crazy adventure has ended up with . . . Arthur just come all the way back around to being on Earth as it's about to be destroyed. And then he just . . . laughs. He just laughs. Man, that really landed with me. A five book series, especially one as messy as Hitchhiker's, has no business having a perfect ending, but that last page of Mostly Harmless is absolutely perfect.

 

Ok after exactly 60 days I finished Rhythm of War and even though I down right loath 2 of the MCs I really enjoyed the story here. This book had a lot riding on it after Slogbringer(bk 3) on if I would continue spending the ever increasing $ for these hardcovers or wait for paper. I will definitely get bk 5 in hardcover and hope like hell that one doesn’t fall apart before I’m done like this one which I hope some super glue will fix. I shouldn’t have to do this though on a new $40 book... ugh

 

@JEDI-SOLO , I'd ask for a refund.

 

I think I’m a bit higher on So Long than you are; thinking back on the series, I think it’s really the keystone to it and the way it evolved with Adams over the years. It started as this silly, flippant galaxy-traveling farce that just embraced nonsense comedy and taking the piss out of things like digital watches and restaurant bills, and ended as a much more personal commentary on the profound things of life, largely Earth-focused. And So Long is where that switch really flipped, and after three books of bouncing around the galaxy, having madcap adventures and misanthropically mocking the foibles of humankind, Adams keyed in on the value of home. All these adventures were great, the day-to-day of society was dull and stupid, yet at the same time there was still no place like home, and there was something to be said for the domestic pleasures, for not rocketing all over the galaxy and just enjoying a cup of tea and a good sandwich. The world might be an inside-out madhouse, but a home with the good things could be a haven. Society might be stupid, and you had to be willing to be a little weird not to go crazy, but at the end of the day society maybe wasn’t such a bad thing to be weird in. And nothing sums up Adams’s overall perspective better, perhaps, than the image of Arthur, with a little help from a lifetime of wild adventures, the love of a wonderful woman, some Dire Straits, and the willingness to be a little weird, literally soaring above the workaday dullness of London to enjoy a magical private ecstasy.

 

Yeah, I think you're probably right about that. Adams would later say that the ending to Mostly Harmless was darker than it should have been, that he was just in a particularly dark patch when he wrote it. I think Adams, like all of us, operated on a sliding scale of misanthropy. Mostly Harmless is pretty far down on the negative side, but I expect on any given day, you'd more likely find him in a So Long state of mind. It's been ages since I read them, so I'm due a revisit before I start putting myself on record with any specific opinions.

I couldn't even say with a lot of confidence which bits were in which books at this point. I just remember feeling that Restaurant was the best of the first three and then feeling that So Long was kind of . . . not unnecessary exactly, but, you know, it is the fourth book in a trilogy as Adams himself stated it on occasion. So I was more mixed on it. And so maybe that actually helped Mostly Harmless, that I went into it with lower expectations. It's definitely a series I could revisit. And you should immediately move on to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which is only two books as memory serves and . . . man, that first one is really good.

 

So Long and Mostly Harmless suffer most obviously from the fact that Adams had run out of plot after Restaurant (or really, somewhere shortly before the end of Restaurant) and was just winging it as he went along from there, throwing out a lot of ideas that had the appearance of a plot but, when it came time to come up with an ending, quite clearly were not. The books get more profound, personal, and humane, more literarily interesting, and they stay hilarious, but they increasingly fall apart as narratives, which I think contributes to the feeling of being sort of extraneous or disappointingly aimless.

 

Finished Glorious. It's an interesting trilogy where you really do get a good description of alien environments, how they seem to work, and how aliens think, and even goes off into the realms of very weird alien beings. This book abandons the Bowl as they reach there goal ahead of it in what turns out to be two worlds orbiting each other joined by an artificial bridge. Unless there is a 4th book coming there is no real ending. They get there, assume they are allowed to land an occupy, some of their group gets killed, one of them gets and upgrade, and then that's it. It just fades and ends. Happily the writers are very good, and this moved along rather well.

I have read 3 books by Cory Doctorow: Overclocked(good), The Rapture of the Nerds(Amazingly good), and Down and out in the Magic Kingdom(bad). Moving on to hsi book Attack Surface. It is a stand alone in a world with 2 other books, though I have not read them.

Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she'd chosen the winning side.

In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for an transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene.

Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable.

When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she’s devised are directed at her friends and family--including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naïve idealists--Masha realizes she has to choose.

And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt.

 

I just finished rereading The Hunger Games. As always, it makes me wish the film hadn't nerfed Peeta, as an ambiguous, calculating Peeta is more interesting than an idiot-savant child-man Peeta (no reflection on Josh Hutcherson, who I really like). The simple style of prose makes this a pretty fast read, and I enjoyed it as much the second time as the first.

 

Started How to Solve a Murder: True Stories From a Life in Forensic Medicine by Derek and Pauline Tremain
as my non-fiction book today. It's fascinating so far. He's a Chief Forensic Medical Scientist and she (wife) is a Forensic Secretary. Probably not for the squeamish though.

 

Jack the Ripper : 100 Years of Investigation: The Facts the Fiction the Solution? by Terence Sharkey (1987) This starts out with setting the 1888 scene perfectly, in particular the crowded nature of Whitechapel with 16 people living in shifts in a small flat a common thing along with bars closing at 3 a.m. and reopening at 6 a.m. for "morning breakfast." The book is short at 144 pages and dispenses a basic, impersonal descriptive tone. I'd previously read Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer, which zeroes in on the author's prime suspect quite soon, so this book offers a change in approach with a lengthy list of suspects at book's end and no firm decision. With police patrols every half hour, the mystery to me is not why (a maniac, duh) but how the crimes took place with next to no sightings of the criminal. Of additional interest is mention of the Ratcliff Highway Murders of 1811 in London's dock area, with seven fatalities in two attacks in December of that year; each attack took place indoors, however.

 

Listening to Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Pérez.
FANTASTIC

Reading the Number of Love by Roseanna M. White.
A good book but I am being slow with it

 

I’m so mad at myself...I told myself I would become a snooty movie only fan I used to hate so much after they axed my precious EU and I stayed firm all these years until today when bought this new High Republic book. No way in hell I’m going on a spree with all the past NU books so I ll just limit myself to this arc if I like it.

 

Last War by Melisa Michaels
Her 3rd book about hotshot asteroid belt smuggler pilot Skyrider. As usual, the action stuff is OK but not great, and the character development is getting better.

 

Germinal by Émile Zola.

God, this is a grim book. Reminds me of Angela's Ashes for some reason, but more because of the grinding poverty, and close-to-starvation narrative of the POV characters, rather than the story, which is completely different. I could feel myself practically gasping for air reading the passages describing working underground in a French coal mine in the most appalling conditions imaginable.

The characters are brutally hewn out of the landscape in which they live, just like the coal that they mine; and that landscape is an unforgiving industrial nightmare, full of bleak treeless plains, shaped by endless rain, grime and pollution from the mines and factories, and the helpless/hopeless lives of the mining families.

Extraordinary portrayals of late 19th industrial northern France, and a very accessible read. But it plays on your soul more than a little.

 

^^^ I totally second that review @CairnsTony

Germinal has got to be one of the most gut-punching books I ever read. If you ever get to travel to France, I highly recommend visiting that region. The entire landscape was shaped by the coal mining industry. There are these giant mounds of soil/mining waste all over the place (more like small hills, really) and because the temperature of soil extracted from below the surface was different it has given rise to forms of vegetation that just don't belong in northern France. The mining towns are still as bleak as ever, although now it's because of the economic disarray that hit the area when the mines closed. It feels very much like stepping into the novel at times. (On the upside, the region has fantastic beer to wash down the bleakness )

 

Haha! Thanks!

I first went to France in 1982, and have been back several times since, but I haven't been to the Lille/Lens/Douai area. If I do end up moving back to Europe, then I fully intend to travel around much more of Europe.