Typhoon Pact #3. It’ll be my first post show Star Trek novel I’ve read with Sisko in it. It’ll be interesting to see what happened to him after the Wormhole Aliens kidnapped him.
I finished The Kane Chronicles: The Serpent's Shadow by Rick Riordan. I then read Fables: Volume 3: Storybook Love. Then I read the first story from Star Trek: Tales of the Dominion War, "What Dreams May Come" by Michael Jan Friedman, which was a surprisingly short...short story. After that I read the first story in Star Trek: Constellations, "First, Do No Harm" by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore. I'm now reading Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack
Finished Midnight Front by David Mack (Good - and looking forward to the next) I've now made a start on Persepolis Rising by James S A Corey and that looks to be a good read too
I was in the mood for some Star Wars after seeing the Solo trailer, so I decided to take a break from Sight Unseen and The Midnight Front to read the digital collection of Marvel's Princess Leia comic miniseries.
Star Trek V Novelization by J.M. Dillard I liked the movie, flaws and all. The book fixes a few of the weaker parts of the movie, but not everything. Worth a read. I really like the Sybok character. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin I liked it. Particularly the first half. The ending wasn't bad by any stretch, but I was expecting something extraordinary with how creative the first half of the book was. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester Very cool concept, but the execution was lacking. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco A very challenging book for me. I'm poorly educated, but even if I wasn't I think this is a book that could have used some extensive footnotes. If you can't understand German and Latin you are just SOL. There was a single sentence that ran half of a page giving the most elaborate and grandiloquent description of a...of a...actually I'm not sure what he was describing. I think it was an engraving of some leaves on a piece of artwork, but I couldn't swear to it. Having said all that, there are some interesting discussions of religion, morality, and history that make the book worthwhile.
lol I've had bad luck choosing older sci-fi books. As with The Demolished Man I usually like the concepts but find the stories dull or unsophisticated. I've just started reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. So far so good.
Haven't read the book since the early eighties, but I seem to recall a lengthy description of an ornate door.
Just finished Harry Turtledove's The House of Daniel, a (mildly) AU novel about a player on a barnstorming semipro baseball team during the Great Depression. It's a great book if you love baseball -- which I do -- as it really captures the flavor and appeal of the game. There are also a lot of shout-outs to RL players of the era, which I had fun picking out.
You remember correctly. He describes everything abut the door except for the brand of oil used on the hinges. Here is the sentence I was talking about: "And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist’s skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, united in their variety and varied to their unity, unique in their diversity and diverse in their apt assembly, in wondrous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes and to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material—there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, of all the grasses that adorn the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam." The construction of this sentence is so awkward that I wonder if something was lost in translation. I'm reminded of the Mark Twain essay "The Awful German Language" "German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head - so as to reverse the construction" p.s. The sentence I posted above contains another example of something I disliked about the novel. Eco really really likes lists of things. In fact, the stories narrator, Adso, admits that he enjoys listing things at one point. If there is a scene in a kitchen, every single spice therein will be detailed. If there is a scene in a barnyard every animal will be listed and described. It is very tedious. You get the impression that the author did a lot of research for his novel (commendable) but that he is dead set on imparting every single tiny bit of info that he learned to his audience.
The Moth Catcher by Ann Cleeves. A Vera Stanhope novel. So far so good - but I don’t see Brenda Blethyn in my head whilst reading it.
Empire Of Blue Water by Stephen Talty I'd been looking forward to this nonfiction book about Henry Morgan and the pirates and his governorship of Jamaica. It has its moments, and lots of asides to folks and events before and after and tangentially related, and it's fairly conversational, but... There are a lot of big buts, and, contrary to how that sounds, I do not like big buts, and I cannot lie. The first hit came on page 36, when I stumbled into “Privateering [as opposed to piracy] was invented by Henry VIII” - Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The earliest surviving letter of Marque and Reprisal/Commission to a privateer issued in England was issued by John in 1205. Henry IV issued four surviving ones, in 1400, 1404, 1405, and 1411. Henry V issued a surviving one against Genoa in 1413, and *then* Henry VIII finally put one out against France and Scotland in 1543. It doesn’t survive, but we know Edward III issued at least one set somewhere around 1344-5-ish as well. This means I can't trust the rest of the book to be any more accurate, since I'm not familiar with this writer and thus don't know if it's just a rare slip. Then he decides to introduce a fictional exemplar of an everyday pirate of the sort who'd be in Morgan's crew – I can see why, but he doesn't integrate this character (called Roderick) into the style well at all, so instead of saying “an everyday pirate would...” he goes “Roderick now does...” at random, which just makes you wonder who the fuck is this Roderick guy again? For extra shits and giggles, where a primary source (if we're willing to trust any of them) writes something that disagrees with his view of how the lives of the people in the area were – for example Mary Carleton's memoirs that the pirates were all gents to her – he contradicts it with a lecture. Which is fine where there's another contradictory record from the time, but not when it's just how a person felt and there's no evidence otherwise. Then rather than foreshadowing or laying groundwork for stuff that will happen later, he just squeezes bits in at random, without integrating them in a coherent or at least apparently planned manner. (E.g. suddenly diverting to the geology at the end of a chapter on how and why they blew their money the way did, and that financial correlation to social status. It just doesn't work as flow or setup.) And then there are the footnotes. There is a section of footnotes at the back, for each chapter, all nicely numbered. There are, however, no indications of the footnotes, or numbers to link them, in the actual fucking text. (OK, I've edited history books, this one's probably the fault of the copyeditors not getting the correct documents when the manuscript was delivered, or a fuckup with the formatting, but it's still a major pain in what's supposed to be educational, and I've been particularly looking forward to.) And that's a damn shame, cos most of the individual bits are chatty and interesting enough, but really I'm now just so desperate to read something with fewer problems.
FInished Persopolis Rising (Enjoyed it a lot) and now I'm just about to start Drastic Measures by Dayton Ward.
I finished up the Princess Leia comic yesterday, and went back to Sight Unseen and The Midnight Front. The Leia comic was pretty good, I really liked the fact that the whole thing focused on the aftermath of the destruction of Alderaan. The characterization of Leia felt right to me, and her sidekick for the book, another Alderaanian named Evaan was pretty good.
This turned out to be pretty good. Not amazing, but I enjoyed it. I think the books overall message is one that will appeal to fans of classic Trek. I also finished Seven Deadly Sins. All of the stories were pretty solid. If I was to pick an overall favorite, I'd probably go with "The First Peer." Just started Prime Directive by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
NEAR DEATH VOL. 1 by Jay Faerber and Simone Guglielmini. The first five issues of the crime comics series about a hitman who tries becoming a saviour after a near-death experience in which he visits Hell and is confronted by victims... The art is decent, and sufficiently gritty in style, and the story works as a self-contained graphic novel (though there's a second half, Volume 2, as there were 11 issues altogether), with the first three chapters being pretty self-contained themselves also. They all have pretty strong opening hooks too. The problem I had with it is that the protagonist's motivation for change... the Hell bit isn't that bad-looking, it's over too quickly, and it just doesn't strike me that he'd go “chance to redeem, OK” so completely so instantly, as a convenience to get the story going. Yeah, they probably wanted to avoid the whole A Christmas Carol performance, but since the guy's a sociopath I can't help thinking that telling his motivation in flashback would have worked better. But it was OK overall, once past that opening element. The volume also includes a script and pencils for issue 1, but not all the other extras that were in apparently in the original issues. Still, I would get Vol. 2 if I come across it, and it did read nice enough as a crime-thriller graphic novel.