Category: Currently Reading

Currently reading: The Castalia House stuff in the Hugo Packet

Let’s tidy up the trash first.

Having said that J. Mulrooney’s An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity is not as awful as I expected. The opening paragraph was readable and interesting. Yes, it went off the boil immediately after that but remember this is a book that at best is likely to have had no editing and at worst some kind of negative editing, in which the book is made progressively worse.

Currently Finished Reading and Typing Up Notes On: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer

I’ve read book 2 of Terra Ignota and I’m writing up a second Notes Ignota bunch of posts – which hopefully won’t take as long but I’ve gone off on a few tangents (e.g. this war film is not actually relevant to the book or referenced by Ada Palmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ill_Met_by_Moonlight_(film) ).

I’ll do a review after I finish the notes. However, yes, lots of things are clearer and yes, this is really the second half of one book that needs to be read as a whole to feel like you read a story. It’s not a conventional sequel but rather a completion of a plot. I assume the reasoning for the split was commercial – which is fair enough, authors and publishers want a book to succeed in multiple ways.

I can’t say that many of the debates about the book are resolved by reading the second half but the scope of those discussions become clearer. This particularly true with the issue of how gender is represented.

Currently watching: Stranger Things

It’s binge watch time again. This time the show that’s like somebody decided that a bike ride that starts with Speilberg’s Close Encounters, runs through other Speilbergia, past Stephen King’s house picking up Firestarter and It and Stand By Me on the way, rummaged around for the good bits of the X Files and then binged watched Twin Peaks, would make a great idea for a themed lego set and then used that lego set to make a new thing but like, real and not lego. Also Winona Ryder.

Currently Reading: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

As I have a dead tree version, I thought I’d take occasional notes on the references made in the story to various things. Hmmm, I’ve made a lot of notes! I’m about a third of the way through and it is settling down and the [plot]:[classical/enlightenment/pre-twentieth century] has increased sufficiently that I’m not stopping every page for a post-it note. Nice to see some of my early ‘this is possibly a reference to…’ be confirmed by later parts of the text.

I’ll do a few posts just of the notes I think. Not sure how it all ties together yet.

Currently Reading: The Liberation by Ian Tregillis (Alchemy Wars 3)

I’ve enjoyed the first two books in this series and the third is off to a good start. A revolution of clockwork robots is now in full swing. The exiled government of France has survived as a consequence and the evil Dutch Empire is in trouble.

Seriously, the Dutch are some of the nicest people in the world – I do like that Tregillis decided to pick on the Netherlands as the hegemonic European power in this alternate history fantasy.