So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[bdub76]

Currently alternating between three books:

* Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2)
* Skeleton Crew
* Jeeves Stories (a compilation of Jeeves short stories from StandardEBooks)

Keeping the reading mostly upbeat. Planning to read The Memory Police once I finish the Murderbot Diaries book. Future Boy is now on my radar too. Once I finish the Jeeves short stories, I'll read the Jeeves novels that are in public domain. Once I finish Skeleton Crew, I'll return to Sherlock Holmes.

I had a business trip, so I fell behind on my reading again this month.

 

[JD]

I finished up STTOS: All of Me last night, it took me a while to try to decide what I wanted to read next but I finally settled on The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, the first collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. I've seen the Momoa movie and the first Schwarzenegger movie, but that's my only experience with Conan, so I'm very curious to check these stories out.

 

[Greg Cox]

E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon

 

[bdub76]

I finished up STTOS: All of Me last night, it took me a while to try to decide what I wanted to read next but I finally settled on The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, the first collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. I've seen the Momoa movie and the first Schwarzenegger movie, but that's my only experience with Conan, so I'm very curious to check these stories out.

I have this collection for later this year. Might read a couple.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/conan-33?sId=b4284f86-5e23-4d10-866a-c8e1f384dcae&ssId=xwR2-QYnwA-doaTMrLaYS&cPos=3

It's a good price. Looks like they're mostly novelettes or novellas.

You can find the public domain ones here:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/robert-e-howard/conan-stories

 

[JD]

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=bYQeX5a-PVoC
I don't really trust free public domain books, I like to get stuff from professional publishers so I know that I can trust what I'm getting, and that it will be full, professionally edited text.

 

[bdub76]

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=bYQeX5a-PVoC
I don't really trust free public domain books, I like to get stuff from professional publishers so I know that I can trust what I'm getting, and that it will be full, professionally edited text.

I haven't had any issues with public domain books other than less than great TOC. However, with Project Gutenberg, I'll submit an errata about it, and they'll usually fix it within a week or two. StandardEBooks generally does a pretty good job. I'm reading through the Jeeves stories now, and it looks great.

They're already professionally edited. The same professionally edited book is now out of copyright. If you're going to pay for a public domain book, then at least purchase it from a good publisher, especially if it's a much older book. I've had good luck with Penguin, but I've only purchased older books with newer translations.

Another source for public domain that is well done:

MobileRead Forums - E-Book Uploads

MobileRead - the resource for mobile geeks seeking information and advice for keeping their gadgets happy.

www.mobileread.com

 

[JD]

Yeah, I usually try to go for one of the big publishers like Random House or Penguin, and I've gotten a few Barnes & Nobel Classics when I had my Nook. The one thing that's nice about those, is they will often extra introductions and stuff that can sometimes help provide some context for stuff that modern readers might not always understand.
And they're usually pretty cheap too, unless it's some kind of big special edition.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I bought small-press print editions of both the "Lensman" and "non-Lensman" versions of Doc Smith's Triplanetary. As I recall, one had great typography, and a ToC, but was full of typos, while the other was in painfully fine print, with no ToC. And I couldn't tell you which one is the "Lensman" version and which is the "non-Lensman" version. Of course, both were filled with absurdities, like radium as a currency metal (that would spontaneously transmute into other elements, and give everybody radiation poisoning), and iron (the most stable nucleus on the whole Periodic Table, with both fission and fusion reactions producing a net energy deficit) as a source of energy, and everybody and his dog smoking. I pretty much lost all interest in Doc Smith, although I can certainly see his influence on others.

 

[Christopher]

and iron (the most stable nucleus on the whole Periodic Table, with both fission and fusion reactions producing a net energy deficit) as a source of energy

Reminds me of the episode of the Canadian Starhunter TV series involving a rare allotrope of carbon that turned out to be an immensely powerful fuel source for nuclear fission. Oy...

 

[bdub76]

Finished Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2). It was an enjoyable, but it wasn't as good as the first book in the series. It was too short. I didn't get to spend enough time with the characters, so I didn't much care what happened to them.

I thought I was going to start Memory Police next, but I have decided to read the Notebook as I have the musical coming up. I don't want to be rushed in reading it. It's short, so I should finish it up this week.

And I'm still enjoying the Jeeves stories. I do need to go back and read some more of that Stephen King book.

Heading to a book festival this weekend, so I might end up reading new authors. We'll see.

 

[Steve Roby]

I finished up STTOS: All of Me last night, it took me a while to try to decide what I wanted to read next but I finally settled on The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, the first collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. I've seen the Momoa movie and the first Schwarzenegger movie, but that's my only experience with Conan, so I'm very curious to check these stories out.

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=bYQeX5a-PVoC
I don't really trust free public domain books, I like to get stuff from professional publishers so I know that I can trust what I'm getting, and that it will be full, professionally edited text.

In the case of the Robert E. Howard Conan stories, the three books currently available from Del Rey are definitely the way to go. You get good introductions and occasional bonuses like early alternate drafts of stories.

Robert E. Howard's Conan is not the Conan of the movies and popular culture. He doesn't go for fancy swordplay or have a magical sword or a special sword his daddy made; he'll pick a random axe up from the battlefield if he's lost his sword. He doesn't have a nemesis. He doesn't have a destiny. He doesn't spend his life seeking revenge for anything or anybody. He's an adventurer, a thief, a traveller, a pirate, a mercenary, and eventually a king.

Howard only wrote one full-length Conan novel; the rest are short stories and novellas. You get everything in three volumes. There are dozens of other Conan novels by other writers. They aren't the real thing, but some of them are enjoyable in their own right. Some... really aren't. Kind of like getting into Star Trek novels. If you really like it there's a lot to keep you busy for a while.

My current reading: Peter Gunn, a novel based on the TV series, written by Harold Kane. Before that it was Johnny Staccato by Frank Boyd, based on that TV series. Both good noirish TV shows from around 1960 that I've been watching lately, both with a lot of jazzy sounds on the soundtrack (Elmer Bernstein for Staccato, Henry Mancini for Gunn), so I've been listening to some jazz as background music for the books. Booker Ervin's The Book Cooks just ended, and since this is a books topic, I figure I can mention him as well.

 

[JD]

So far in The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian I've read the poem Cimmeria, The Phoenix on the Sword and The Frost Giants Daughter. I'm not really a poetry person, so I was kind of meh on Cimmeria, but I did like The Phoenix on the Sword with one issue, Conan really wasn't in it that much. I did not like The Frost Giant's Daughter, the whole thing with Atali felt very rapey, and if that's the approach all of the stories take toward women, I'm not sure how much more I'll be reading. I'm a little ways into The God in the Bowl, and I'm enjoying it so far, I did not expect one of these stories to be a murder mystery.

 

[bdub76]

So far in The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian I've read the poem Cimmeria, The Phoenix on the Sword and The Frost Giants Daughter. I'm not really a poetry person, so I was kind of meh on Cimmeria, but I did like The Phoenix on the Sword with one issue, Conan really wasn't in it that much. I did not like The Frost Giant's Daughter, the whole thing with Atali felt very rapey, and if that's the approach all of the stories take toward women, I'm not sure how much more I'll be reading. I'm a little ways into The God in the Bowl, and I'm enjoying it so far, I did not expect one of these stories to be a murder mystery.

Makes sense.

Maybe try an anthology to figure out what you do like that came out during this period of time. I'm having good luck finding new authors to read from Dangerous Visions, and that came out in the 60s. However, I'm realizing that stuff from that period is hard to track down. Some is out of print and won't hit public domain in my lifetime.

 

[JD]

I'm not really looking for other stuff from that period to read, I'm just interested in Conan because I've seen so much about the character, and I enjoyed the movies.

 

[Commander Troi]

The Rebis (a journal of stories and articles inspired by Tarot cards), The Star issue.

 

[Greg Cox]

So far in The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian I've read the poem Cimmeria, The Phoenix on the Sword and The Frost Giants Daughter. I'm not really a poetry person, so I was kind of meh on Cimmeria, but I did like The Phoenix on the Sword with one issue, Conan really wasn't in it that much. I did not like The Frost Giant's Daughter, the whole thing with Atali felt very rapey, and if that's the approach all of the stories take toward women, I'm not sure how much more I'll be reading. I'm a little ways into The God in the Bowl, and I'm enjoying it so far, I did not expect one of these stories to be a murder mystery.

The Frost Giant's Daughter is way more rapey than the average Conan story. I would regard it as an outlier, not the norm.

 

[JD]

OK, good to know.
I took a short break from Conan today to read Star Trek: Lower Decks #17, which was a ton of fun. I love the last page reveal, and I can't for next month's issue now.

 

[Greg Cox]

Today’s comic book acquisition: issue 2 of the Planet of the Apes/Fantastic Four crossover.

 

[JD]

I finished up The God in The Bowl last night, and I really enjoyed it, the ending was a bit of a suprise. Once that was done, I was in the mood for more Trek comics, so I'm setting The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian aside for now, and I'm currently reading Star Trek Archives: The Best of Deep Space Nine, which collects the first five issues of Malibu's DS9 comics, which were written by Mike W. Barr, with art by Gordon Purcell & Rob Davis. I finished two part story arc, Stowaway, and it was pretty good. There was a bit of early tie-in weirdness since it was written just a few months after the show started, but not enough to totally ruin it for me. I'm on issue 3 which has the biggest inconsistency with the later episodes of the show, it has a Cardassian named Gul Trelar, who the refer as General and the former commander of DS9, and who is also old and dying, but was supposed to have been born on Bajor.

 

[JD]

After my last post I finished up issue #3 of the Malibu DS9 series, and I enjoyed it. And then I read the two part story line in issues #4 and #5, which had a another pretty big mistake that had to be a typo or something, because it doesn't even fit what the early episodes established. In it the DS9 crew is dealing with a new Gamma Quadrant race that Dax and O'Brien came through the wormhole with, and at one point one of the aliens wants to blow up the wormhole, and then they're talking about how without the wormhole it'll be 60-light year journey back to their home planet. I double checked on Memory Alpha, and the wormhole jumps across 90,000 lightyears, which is pretty far off from 60. I'm wondering if perhaps it was supposed to take 60 years to get home, and he or an editor got the time and distance mixed up and accidently added "light" to the "years".
Once I finished that I started Enemies Old, Enemies New, the second collection of IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the TMNT Micro Series Vol. 2 collection. The issues in the two go back and for chronologically, so I've jumping back and forth between the two.
I had work yesterday, and I didn't feel like trying to read the comics on my phone, so I started ST: Strange New Worlds: Asylum by Una McCormack.
All three have been really good so far.