What Are You Reading??

Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

On my facebook profile my religion is Joseph Campbell, so this book is basically my bible.

My reading these days have been primarily work orientated...read "American Lion" about Andrew Jackson, "Assassination Vacation' by Sarah Vowell, "The Last Stand" by Nathaniel Pilbrick which was a most insigtful tome about Custer and that whole Little Big Horn debacle, "Empire of Liberty" by Gordon S. Wood, a very well-written and extremely informative book about America between 1789 and 1815. Now, as an antidote, I am reading "Chicken Poop for the Soul" a parody of those horribly positive "Chicken Soup" books...I hate those books...nice stories about nice people doing nice things for other people out of sheer altruism.....blithering piffle, I say....

Trying to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Thus far it is very metro-French and gives no sign of letting up.

For relief: Feed by Mira Grant--can't go wrong with a decent zombie holocaust story with bloggers and a presidential election.

Feed turns out to have been the first book in The Newsflesh Trilogy, a collection of three books telling the story of a world gone zombie but with much of the world itself still intact. Many cities are still populated, but with many areas, even whole countries, ceded to zombie infestation, most people live with fear (and near constant bloodtests). Blogging, particularly news blogging, has gained a prominence for its role in spreading information during... The Rising. The books follow the tribulations of two bloggers, Shaun and Georgia Mason, and their news site, After the End Times.

Me likee. The zombie rationale was cool (they came about when a genetically engineered cure for the common cold and a genetically engineered cure for cancer met and mutated--producing a fast spreading, easily caught reanimation virus), and the stories were good.

The first book was a pleasing political thriller of some substance, and had zombies. The second book was something different, and that was really cool. It's not just the difficult middle book. It's a stand-alone book with different themes and purposes, which at the same time continues and deepens the original story, this time as a conspiracy thriller.

And book three.... won't be released until May  I'm making do with The Hunger Games and it's just not the same. Katniss is such a tiresome speculator.

Blackout, the third book in the Newsflesh trilogy is due to be released in two days. How fast before it makes it to the Internet? Meanwhile...

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Has very mild sci-fi elements inasmuch as it is officially set in a future beyond some apocalyptic collapse (which is unimportant to the story and isn't described), but really the story is set in North Africa where a genocide is beginning. The story has magic realist elements, but in the end comes down firmly in the fantasy camp. And although I'm not usually much of a fantasy fan, this story's not bad perhaps because of the almost real setting and the fact that this is really the story of the growth into (one kind of) womanhood for the lead character Onyesonwu (the eponymous "Who Fears Death" herself).

Not entirely for the faint of heart.

I am being very boring and readin FSI, and some fairy tale book aimed at little girls.

Michael Crichton's "The Great Train Robbery".

That guy could write a bloody good story!

shall look out for that one Paul

I have just finished The Hunger Games, as I thought I would read the book before watching the film. I was really impressed ad found it a thoroughly good read.

Must also start The Hobbit soon as that film is coming out at some point this year.

Just finished Call the Midwife and am halfway through the (first) sequel, Shadows of the Workhouse   Gives me a fresh appreciation of what my father's grandmother probably went through as an orphaned child, before she was indentured at about 7 or 8 years of age

Just acquired three delightful series: The Bryant and May novels by Christopher Fowler, The Railway Detective novels by Edward Marston and the Erast Fangorin novels by Boris Akunin...they are just waiting for me on the shelf, eagerly anticipating the end of term which is in two weeks...Already read the first four Bryant and May novels...weird detective fiction with a heavy dosage of English history, especially social history of London...pure and undiluted bliss

The Takeshi Kovacs trilogy:
Altered Carbon
Broken Angels
Woken Furies

Then,
Market Forces

And finally,
Black Man

All of which were written by Richard K Morgan. They all use some kind of sci fi premise and all explore questions of social organisation and effective individual violence. The main character in each novel is a mercenary man of some kind, with aggressive instincts, some kind of differentiating skill, but still with lots of questions about the meaning of it all.

Altered Carbon is set in a world where cortical implants make it possible to transfer the complete and current state of your personality from one body to another through a process of up and download. It is of course hugely expensive and has changed the dynamics of the world and what's possible in significant ways. Kovacs, a man with a history of elite soldiering in and out of wartime custom bodies, operates more as a private detective in this story. The result is very sci fi noir. Excellent stuff. Broken Angels features the same universe and the same main character, but events have moved on considerably. In this story Kovacs is back to his old life of mercenary solider, and we learn more about where the current state of the worlds came from. Woken Furies finishes off the Kovacs lifestory by taking him "home". It's weaker in some ways than the other two books, not least because it has a grand new cast of characters that Takeshi used to know and is meeting again, but we've never seen them before, so it gets confusing.

Black Man (or Thirteen in the US) is a different book. Very similar themes, but better written and developed. The author perhaps is getting closer to what he wants to say. The world of the story is our own, but moved on some several hundred years. Where the Kovacs of Altered Carbon is a man trained to use and be part of technology, Carl Marsalis of Black Man is a thirteen, a product of a program of genetic development meant to produce... well, what? That's a large part of the story. The thirteens are part genetic throwback, part advanced development. And of course, soldiers. By the time of the story, the soldiering programs have been disbanded and Carl is a kind of mercenary until he gets brought in as a consultant on the case of another thirteen whose gone more rogue than usual.

Market Forces is a different book again and doesn't fit exactly with these other stories. It's set a much shorter distance into the future and features a world where what we know as the mercenary and competitive nature of corporate employment has become somewhat more directly physical: executives can and do legally compete in aggressively lethal road rage duels for promotion and position. And the banking and finance worlds have expanded into the realms of conflict investment: they finance and manage wars and regimes, and sometimes regime change too. Mad Max meets Greed. Less of a sci fi book too inasmuch as no one in the story is enhanced by anything other than anger or avarice.


Currently reading Beat The Reaper by Josh Bazell. So far it's an "underbelly of hospital residency" story that's quite familiar these days, but the writing is slick and darkly funny, so it could be okay.

Also, an endnote: sex in novels is, well I don't know if it's ever done fantastically well, but in each and every one of Richard K Morgan's books you're guaranteed two anatomically correct, lengthy, and frequently athletic acts of congress. Two thumbs up.

James Fallows China Airborne. Fascinating book about China past, present, and (envisioned) future aviation industry and culture. Really worth reading, though the Kindle edition is overpriced.

I'd seen this and heard it was good, but I couldn't imagine that a book about the aviation industry would be interesting... I will give it a look now.

For the sake of recommendations:

Demonic Males (tracing human violence to our ancestors the great apes)

God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens' atheist polemic - very well written and entertaining)

The Spy that Came in for the Cold (Le Carre's first novel, it has aged well, genre-defining thriller)

Country Driving (Peter Hessler - I was pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful this was. I will now look up more by the author)

I've been reading 'La Peste' by Camus for almost 2 weeks and I can't knock it but it's very difficult to enjoy. I want to finish it but I think I have a lot to go through....

I was burning through books and this one just slowed me right down, I dread going back into it, it's not really fiction..