Amph What book are you reading right now?

Reading: The Gender Game by Bella Forrest
Easy read, interesting premise, I wish I could read more but I'm just happy that I got through most of my grad school readings last week and can focus on something that I want. For being 1/4 through, I feel like I'm just getting to the meat of the story.

Listening to: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. This is my 4th or 5th time going through this first book of the Stormlight Archive, and I listened to it the last time too. 45 hours of amazing storytelling (at 2.5 speed because I know the voice of Kate Reading & Michael Kramer extremely well by now). I want to get through the 4 books as well as all the other Cosmere books before secret project 4 comes out later this year.
And it's easier for me to finish books via when a course is going on because I am forced to take the mental break driving to & from work.

 

Decided to finally read the series I've been meaning to read since circa 1980 - Michael Moorcock's Elric series.

 

Just finished Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red by Harry Kemelman. It's from 1974, and Rabbi Small takes a part-time job as a lecturer on Jewish thought at a small Boston-based college. There, he deals with uncooperative students, uncaring faculty, and a bombing that may be connected to the death of one of the professors. And, as usual, Small has to deal with his congregation, many of whom frequently disagree with his approach to his job and are looking to get rid of him.
This one was OK, I thought. Like the other books, a lot of space is devoted to Rabbi Small expounding on Jewish history and thought. And I thought the mystery was interesting, and not really easy to figure out. However, there are a few plotlines that aren't resolved by the end (like the repercussions of who really planted the bomb, and how one hassle with the congregation is settled), but it was still a good entry in the series.

 

I swear to God I was going to start with "War and Peace... again" but I got curious and, well:

To be fair, that one wasn't a reread, but a second attempt (and one that I succeeded at). Having nearly finished this reread I feel pretty comfortable saying this is easily one of my favorite books of all time, and the only reason I hesitate to say it is my favorite is that it's duking it out with, like, ****ing Ulysses and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, okay? These are heavy hitters; it's a tough category.

The biggest advantage of a reread is that you are no longer approaching the book like a complete idiot and can watch for clues about where the characters are going. You are richly rewarded for this, because it's Tolstoy, and he was very good at that. Also if you're me you actually catch the fact that one character dies from overdosing on abortifacients even though it can't be stated outright, which on this reread seemed kind of obvious, so maybe I'm just bad at noticing unsubtle clues when I read things. Nabokov (take a shot) was always insistent that the first read of a book never counted because you were struggling against too much unfamiliarity and, um, he may have had a point. This leads someone like me down disturbing thought trains, like, is the only reason I like Tolkien so much because he's the only author whose works I've read more than four times? Would I like a book less if I reread it the same way I basically did a 180 on Zack Snyder's Watchmen adaptation? Is the entirety of my taste and sense of identity bound up merely in fogs of half memories and flutterings of old sense data that without refreshing merely ossifies and stagnates? If person X reads half as many books, sees half as many things, and feels half as many feelings as person Y, but experiences those things twice while Y experiences them once, who has led the richer life?

Anyway War and Peace is really good.

 

Read: TimeRiders by Alex Scarrow, this is the first installment in the TimeRiders series, and for me, is one of the weakest. The premise is very intriguing, but it is definitely a case of setting the scene, explaining the fundamentals of how this method of time travel works, and just not a lot else. It does a good job of explaining all this, and it is a good introduction, but just lacks finesse. That being said, the series as a whole is great, and it really picks up from book two.

Read: TimeRiders: Day of the Predator by Alex Scarrow, this is a really fun story where we are sent back 65 million years when dinosaurs walked the earth. The story is fast-paced, you get a lot more character development, and is certainly a page-turner. With each novel you learn a little bit more about "the agency", and more questions are raised than answered. The author does do a good job with this series' underlying narrative, and keeping the reader interested for the long-haul.

Read: TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code by Alex Scarrow, this is where the story starts to get more nitty gritty, and even more questions are raised and left unanswered. I think this one is even better than the previous two, you delve even deeper into the story, and you meet some interesting new additions to the cast, such as Adam, a nerdy computer whizz.

Reading: TimeRiders: The Nearly Girl by Alex Scarrow, this is a short story that was released as part of world book day and is quite a harrowing tale. Actually reading this in the right order this time, as I accidentally read it between books 4 and 5 last time.

Reading: TimeRiders: The Eternal War by Alex Scarrow, I remember this being my favorite novel in the series on my last read, so really looking forward to delving right in.

 

The Hard SF Renaissance edited by Hartwell and Cramer. 41 short stories, over 900 pages, I may do some jumping around starting with a Poul Anderson story called genesis which starts out with a vast mind in the galaxy accelerating a probe to Earth via laser. I passed on it way back in 2002 and the years it was on the shelves. I got it at a used book store a couple of weeks ago.

 

A Higher Call by Adam Makos
Another true story by the author of Devotion (read the book and see the movie), this book focuses on a Luftwaffe fighter pilot and his encounter with a crippled B-17 over Germany in WW2. It's an impressive and very moving story.

 

The War Girls by Rosie James

Abigail, a young single mother of a three year old leaves her demanding aunt and a life in a rural English village to see a new beginning in a modern city where her beau was originally from and had talked about often. As WWII is right around the corner, Abigail befriends two women in the new city, and they will do everything in their power to keep her and little Emily safe.

 

Finished Elric of Melnibone and The Fortress of the Pearl. The first, being the prequel of the series, the second is one of later written books but only second chronologically.
One can see why this series is a foundational text for Dungeons and Dragons, although the divergence at this point is marked between the series' doomed, tragic hero and, say, Honor Among Thieves, that seems to derive more from the cheesy low budget generic 80s fantasy movies like Hawk the Slayer.
In any case, the series is off with a bang, so to speak - Elric is the rightful ruler of a failing decadent empire, "cursed with morality" which leaves him separate from his people, who goes on a quest to experience the world to better understand people. He has access to some magic, is physically very weak and needing herbs to keep him active, and carries a sentient sword called Stormbringer that thirsts for souls.
The first book deals with his struggles with his cousin for the throne; the second, a tale where he has to find a treasure hidden within the dreams of a child.
Moorcock has a very unique, identifiable style; and the Elric series is part of an overall "Eternal Chsmpion" series that encompasses the history of the universe. It isn't surprising that he's an old friend of Alan Moore, and that Moore featured his characters in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen... including the soul-sucking sword itself.
Onto The Sailor on the Seas of Fate!

 

Just finished: Disasteraology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis by Dr. Samantha Montano

This book is about much more than climate change. It covers several disasters from Hurricane Katrina up to the Covid 19 Pandemic and addresses the Disaster Response or lack thereof to all these things. It's a dire warning of what we will be facing as the planet warms. Yet it's a really good read and I highly recommend it.

 

Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President, by Robert J. Rayback. As I’ve been going through presidential biographies, I often talk about the obscurity of nineteenth-century presidents. But there are a handful of presidents who have reached the next level of obscurity, who barely even appear, outside the occasional acknowledgement of their presidencies, even in all the histories I read of their eras. Fillmore, like Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison, is effectively forgotten by history (Hayes comes with an asterisk: the controversial Hayes-Tilden election is widely noted, but Hayes himself and his administration, barely at all). Yet I have been looking forward to reading about the seemingly insignificant Fillmore.

The Whig party was the opposition party of the second party system in American politics, with a twenty-year stretch in which it functioned. In all that time, they only managed to elect two presidents, both of whom managed to die in office. The Whigs were never a very successful party and certainly not a lucky one. William Henry Harrison died after a month, and his successor, John Tyler, who had joined the Whigs out of personal opposition to Andrew Jackson, turned out to have nothing in common with them on policy and so alienated his own party by siding with the Democrats that they kicked him out of the party while he was in office. Zachary Taylor, the second Whig elected, was a popular Mexican War general with no political background, a pure candidate of opportunity whose inept attempts to be all things to all people so embarrassed the party managers that they had to convince him to shut up for the campaign’s sake. This meant that when he died, Fillmore, his vice president and a veteran of the entire Whig party’s history, became the only actual regular Whig politician to have a real presidency. This caught my interest, and it also caught the interest of Rayback, who approached the biography initially, as he relates, as a vehicle to explore the history of the Whig party as a whole. However, as he read up on the obscure Fillmore, Rayback found himself more interested in Fillmore for his own merits, and the result is a biography closely focused on Fillmore.

This is in a way unfortunate, as Rayback is a victim to what you could call subject capture. Anyone writing a biography is by definition interested in the subject, and unless the biographer comes in with a strong preexisting critical take, there is a tendency after reading endlessly of the subject’s papers and letters, immersing oneself in his history, to come out essentially identifying with the subject’s point of view, to see all the questions of the day in the way he framed them. The subject naturally becomes the hero of the biography’s story. This is to some extent inevitable, but Rayback is one of those who goes a bit too far in being captured by his subject. He sees Fillmore as a noble, unfairly maligned figure, a great patriot and great man, and interprets the narrative through that filter. Rayback is so admiring, it’s hard to credit his interpretation of Fillmore. Writing in the fifties, Rayback also gives too much deference to Fillmore’s Unionism, by which he did indeed succeed in temporarily quieting the clamor of dissension over slavery, and embraces his hostility to antislavery forces as extremist agitators (he does as least portray the southern firebrands as extremists too, but accepts the framework that they had to be conciliated). Rayback is also prone to casting all political developments as cynical partisan ploys, above and beyond putting Thurlow Weed and William Seward as arch-machiavellian villains of the book. In short, I just don’t trust Rayback’s take.

There is plenty of interesting material to work with. Fillmore was a poor youth who ascended to prominence in the law in the expanding commercial center of Buffalo, got into politics through the anti-establishment Antimasonic third party, had a long career as a quietly influential Whig in a subtle struggle with Weed for the direction of the New York party, became president and handled the Compromise of 1850 and was generally successful, before failing to achieve a renomination he wasn’t really interested in, running in 1856 as the candidate of the Know-Nothings, whom he tried to use as a vehicle for anti-sectionalist politics as the Whigs evaporated, and then retired to live a life of intense civic involvement in Buffalo. I enjoyed reading about all of it, but I wish someone with soberer judgment than Rayback had been writing it.

 

I've managed to devour the first four Elric novels, and onto the next set. They are, truly, "Dungeons and Dragons" novels in the very classic sense - not the generic European fantasy that is a muddy mix of now well-established cliches, but an epic saga of monsters, sorcerers, magic, and adventure. (They also are the source for the "Law-Chaos" axis of morality in D&D, running perpendicular to "Good-Evil"). The series really picks up when the gloomy anti-hero Elric gets his regular companion Moonglum, which is his opposite - a carefree fellow who loves life and adventure, and is more concerned with material things (in the good sense, as he berates Elric for paying for stays at an inn with a gem that could buy it); they become unlikely friends. I'm in the middle of a run of stories where Elric battles his second arch-nemesis - a sorcerer who originally attacked Elric because he thought Elric was steeling away a queen he was in love with (the irony being that Elric wasn't interested), after which Elric pursues to the ends of the world (literally) to destroy him.

 

[Re]-listening to Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

also reading Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal, which seems like a continuation of her Lady Astronaut series, but isn't really. It's also Agatha Christie in space. I like the premise but parts of it just irk me, including how the service dog just wants pets from everyone and it's okay. I'll end up giving it 3/5 stars on Goodreads

 

Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song.

Only he would come off of winning the Nobel in literature by writing a book in pulp-prose. Fascinating look into his mind as song consumer more than writer. He falls into the grumpy old man stereotype more than once but it’s kind of funny to see someone who was as big of a generation gap icon as anyone end up there.
The book is also packed with fascinating music history tidbits.

 

Read: TimeRiders: The Nearly Girl
I thought I read this in the right position in the series, but alas, I got it wrong again! Next time, I will remember to read it between books 2 and 3! The story itself is very short, was released for World Book Day, and tells a harrowing story of a young girl who actually dies in the twin tower attack. Liam, one of the main characters, falls for this girl and attempts to save her life by telling her not to go into work. By doing so, a string of events happens which leads to the woman living a sad life of survivor's guilt, and ultimately passing away. So definitely not a happy short story, but still a great little side story for the series.

Read: TimeRiders: The Eternal War
Really enjoyed this one the last time I read it, and did so again. Is one of the best in the series, and having Abraham Lincoln running around modern-day New York offers a few laughs. I just really enjoy how this story pans out, it is fast-paced, and just exciting throughout. It is also cool how they have not gone back or forward in time, it is 2001 New York, and the catastrophic changes come to them, leaving all members of the team in hell.

Read: TimeRiders: Gate of Rome
This book feels like a step back compared to the others, is one of the weaker ones in the series, and is not as interesting. However, we do get more glimpses into the future of time travel, and we meet Sponge Baba and his owner Rashim, who are good characters, yet Sponge Baba is annoying but funny. Also, the entire team ends up going back in time as their position in time has been compromised, so all end up back in 54 AD, and trying to find a way to not only rectify history but get out of this time alive. There are elements of the book that are fast-paced, but there is quite a bit that I just found dull, which is a shame, but it isn't a bad book by any means.

Read: Uncharted DC Comic Collection
I only recently found out that DC Comics did an Uncharted collection, it is made up of 6 parts and set before the first game. It was a great story of when Nate and Chloe meet for the first time and both race to find this "amber room" (and lost city). It is actually a fantastic addition to the series.

Reading: TimeRiders: City of Shadows
Just starting it today, I remember also really enjoying this one and putting it up there with The Eternal War, so of course, looking forward to delving right in.

 

Finished up the first four Witch World novels, by Andre Norton (female sci-fi writer that changed her first name because, well, you know why). Simon Tregarthe, an ex-military guy who gets involved with shady dealings and is on the run uses the Siege Perilous to escape to a fantasy world that is also being invaded by beings from a technologically advanced world. The main story is wrapped up in the first two novels, and then the next three (which I'm in the middle of) continues with his three children. I read the seven volume collection from the 1970s at my local middle school which I just realized today was probably there because she lived in Orlando at the time.

 

The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt. Let's see, we have a far future with gravity control and FTL, aliens who rule everything and a Republic, a spaceship derelict for 1000 years, and a secret of immortality hidden on the ship everyone is after. Just started it, and I wonder what levels of technology will be available. I mean , if they are already all over the galaxy why don't they have life extension and if they do how will this immortality prize differ?

 

Really fighting the urge to pick up Masters of Rome 1 and getting on Amazon to rebuy bks 3-5 I lost in hurricane Laura…

Hopefully I can keep myself in check and finish WoT 1st.

Once I get on my Rome trips it’s hard to get off.

 

The Vicomte de Bragelonne. In less time than it takes to get a movie sequel off the ground, Dumas was on his second Musketeers sequel and already thirty-five years after the original opened. This sequel ran for three years of serialization and is so massive that it is usually split up into three or four volumes. I have a three-volume edition, the first of which shares its name with the overall work. The titular viscount, Athos’s son Raoul, is barely in this volume, however.

Dumas’s overall story appears to center on Louis XIV’s beginning his personal rule upon the death of Mazarin, and the struggle between the young Louis, supported by the cunning, colorless bureaucrat Colbert, and the flamboyant superintendent of finances Fouquet, who is ambitious to set himself up as the most powerful man in the kingdom. However, what happens in this volume is mostly table-setting, with a long stretch of setup at the end that will pay off in intrigue later (and which finally gets Raoul involved). The biggest single coherent event of this volume is the restoration of Charles II thanks to the dashing aid of Athos and d’Artagnan, a complete and entertaining adventure in which d’Artagnan finally makes his fortune (and Planchet’s with him). D’Artagnan, now elevated to the right-hand man of the newly assertive Louis, is then sent on a spy mission that serves to give us notice of what Aramis and Porthos have been up to (intrigue on the behalf of Fouquet, setting up a slightly different opposed pairing than in Twenty Years After). Porthos and Aramis don’t appear until nearly five hundred pages in, giving you a taste of how much Dumas has on his plate.

This table-setting, scattered-focus bloat that takes a lot of focus away from our favorite characters in order to spend time on the intrigues of Louis’s court makes it hard to enjoy this volume, on its own, as much as the previous entries. Still, it has its merits. Dumas remains an entertaining writer who is fluid enough to cover up how scattered the book can really be. He also continues to develop his heroes rather than standing still. They are all old men now, and d’Artagnan, the main focus of the book, has grown cynical and bitter over a long career of royal neglect. His youthful sunniness, selflessness, and daring have been overshadowed by calculation and a selfish desire to get his recompense, yet they remain under the surface. He can hardly believe that he finally has a boss in Louis who appreciates his heroic qualities, rousing some of the old fire to mix with his cautious cunning. Athos remains as upright as ever, but his misogyny and desire to establish Raoul well at a later date make him an obstacle to Raoul’s romance with his childhood love. Aramis, now a bishop and vicar-general of the Jesuits, is a more powerful and cunning politician than ever, one whom we see only a little of, but whose taste for intrigue and overwhelming ambition threatens to position him almost as a villain. And Porthos, as ever, remains himself, a bluff, jovial, dim companion, who gets to display new qualities as a military engineer. This volume can’t entirely satisfy as a standalone, but it leaves me eager to continue the story.

 

DNF Immortality Thief. Dialogue was good, pros moving right along, interesting setup. But I had no idea what anything looked like. They got in a ship, and went to a ship, and one of them was vaguely shown to be a wheel. Then aliens were described as tall and majestic but later on the lead towered over them. Bla.

Conan Blood of the Serpent by S.M. Stirling. This is a prelude to Red nails and even includes that story.

 

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I’m a few chapters in and I’m finding it a bit of a slog. McCarthy’s style is quite jarring to me (it’s the first of his novels that I’ve read), but I’m going to persevere. McCarthy presents a brutal picture of the old west, stripping it of any romanticism. I am quite invested in the story and I want to see what becomes of the kid.

 

Sarah (2000) – Orson Scott Card

Yeah, that’s right, acclaimed (and controversial) sci-fi author Orson Scott Card wrote, not just a novel, but a series of novels about the wives of the Old Testament Patriarchs. Who knew? Anyway, not me, until just a while ago and it seemed like an interesting enough pairing that I decided to investigate the series. I’m really glad I did. This book is the first in the series and it’s the story of Abraham from the perspective of Sarah, his wife. It begins when she’s a little girl and, well, I’m not going to say when it ends, because that was a really great stroke, pulling off the ending. The problem with Sarah’s perspective on the story of Abraham is that the climax, Abraham’s thwarted sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, happens away from her; she doesn’t even know that it happens in the Biblical narrative. So, how do you have a satisfying climax without that moment? Well, Card pulled it off; it’s a really beautiful and moving ending. But it’s a beautiful and moving book all the way around. Card expands on the Biblical narrative of course and adds in a lot of details around the edges, like bringing in elements of other religions of the period and location. He expands the Biblical characters of Hagar, Sarah’s servant, and of Eliezer, Abraham’s right-hand man, and I really loved the emotionally fraught relationships Sarah had with both of them. One of my favorite chapters in the entire book was a chapter that was essentially just a long conversation between Sarah & Eliezer that delves into their characters and their respective relationships with Abraham and how the social structures of the day complicate their relationship. Lot’s wife is retconned into being Sarah’s sister and Lot and his wife get some nice development. What I’m getting at here is that, though the book doesn’t deviate much from the Biblical narrative, what Orson Scott Card has managed to do is bring all these literal icons to life. They have emotional and psychological reality and both the descriptive prose and the dialogue are really well-written, somewhat elevated but not flowery, brisk but not lazy. I’m going on a bit of a “art based on Genesis” project right now, but even if you’re not, this book is very worth picking up. It’s surprisingly great. 4 stars.

tl;dr – acclaimed/controversial sci-fi author succeeds surprisingly well with this series about women of the Old Testament; excellent prose brings these icons to emotionally complex life. 4 stars.

 

@Rogue1-and-a-half , have you read any Taylor Caldwell? I vaguely remember reading her Great Lion of God, an epic novel about St Paul, as a teen. I don't know if she wrote anything based on Genesis or the Old Testament, but her New Testament books seem to be highly acclaimed. Great Lion of God: A Novel About Saint Paul - Kindle edition by Caldwell, Taylor. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.