What are you reading?

[Frelga]

Maria, the older I get the shorter my paragraphs become, to match my shrinking attention span.

[narya]

I listen to audiobooks with only one earbud in. I have found a slight mental difference between listening with the right ear and listening with the left ear. You might want to check that.

Maria, I enjoy your posts, with or without gaps. Do what you need to do.

[Maria]

Oh, that was back when I had active Lyme disease. I *can* read large paragraphs again nowadays. I just don't because I'd rather be doing something with my hands at the same time.

Plus, audio prevents me from skimming. Well, sort of. Some readers are recorded too slow and I get bored between words and speed them up in the app on my phone. That's the equivalent of skimming, I guess. Usually I just speed them up to normal tempo, but one book that I was loosing interest in badly I sped up to almost twice as fast just to get the gist of the rest of the story. The plot was interesting, but the actual writing wasn't. If that makes sense. If I'd had it in a paper book I'd have been flipping those pages pretty fast, I tell ya!

[narya]

I just finished "Noor" by Nnedi Okorafor and it was delicious! I highly recommend it. The audio book is 7 hours long, and narrated by Délé Ogundiran, who has a musical Nigerian accent that adds to the experience. It's an Afro-futurist novel set close enough to the present that the science is mostly plausible, and the rest can't really be distinguished between juju and advanced technology. The book covers the sci fi trope of how we treat humans vs robots (or people who are part both) among other things.

Then I downloaded another of the author's books, "Broken Places Outer Spaces", which turned out to be an autobiographical novella (a 2 hour audiobook) that revealed the story behind her unique POV. She was a star athlete and premed student in college, but had spinal surgery that went disastrously wrong. During a long convalescence and partial recovery, she turned to writing sci fi and a literature major, as a way to sort it all out. I recommend reading this book as well. I have her "Binti" trilogy in the queue now. The first in this trilogy won Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella.

[Maria]

I'm still on my quest to read everything Nathan Lowell has written. I've got several different series finished now, and I'm still liking his style. I checked out his blog, though, and he says he's suffering from writer's block.... so that was disappointing to find out. He was producing multiple books per year for a while there. When I finish the trilogy I'm on now, there's only one more.

[narya]

Maria, I searched in all 7 of my library cards on Libby (yes, I shamelessly signed up for 4 more during my recent trip to SoCal) and found four titles in the Los Angeles library system by Nathan Lowell. I downloaded the novella "A Light in the Dark" for starters.

And... I finished "The Race" by Richard North Patterson - novel about the ugly underbelly of a race for the presidential nomination (with a liberal helping of racial issues to give the title a double entendre).The themes were a bit dated, but it was an engaging yarn with a satisfying ending.

[RoseMorninStar]

You can sign up for library cards in places where you are not a resident? I don't think you can do that here. That said, we are part of a large consortium that includes dozens of libraries plus (I believe) the entire state as part of the digital library.

[Impenitent]

I just finished "Noor" by Nnedi Okorafor and it was delicious! I highly recommend it.

Thank you. Downloaded and in my To Read kindle collection.

[Inanna]

The library had Binti, I just got that.

[Maria]

You can sign up for library cards in places where you are not a resident? I don't think you can do that here. That said, we are part of a large consortium that includes dozens of libraries plus (I believe) the entire state as part of the digital library.

My parents live in Missouri and pay a fee to use the biggest library in the area. They don't live close enough to qualify for free access. I don't know how common that is.

[Frelga]

I think Libby allows you more flexibility than checking out physical books. One of my libraries I already had a card for, but the other, in my county, just asked for a phone number. It may have required a local area code? Which is silly, since most younger people use their cell phones these days, and my son has a California area code in New York.

[narya]

Anyone who can prove California residency (with a driver's license showing a current address, for example) can physically go into any California public library and request a library card. During the height of COVID, some even skipped that step, and let you apply on line. Most of the libraries are on Libby and a few other digital outlets I have not yet explored (and shouldn't explore yet, what with the 36 books on my load/hold shelves). The services are all free. Some libraries have even suspended late fees, since those just kept people away, and adversely affected those who could least afford the fines. They will send you a bill for the whole book, though, if you are extremely overdue. That has happened to me twice, but in both cases I politely asked them to look again, and it turns out they just didn't check the book back into the system properly.

Rose, if you are already part of a state-wide consortium, then you probably don't need to get any more cards (unless, like me, you max out the number of holds you can place on any one card). My home town library is part of the Northern California consortium, so the Southern California cards I just got were to round out the rest of the state.

I never expected to be reading several audio books per week, but then, life is never quite what I expect it to be.

[RoseMorninStar]

Heads up! Tomorrow, March 25, is Tolkien reading day!

[Alatar]

Currently reading Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy. Has a YA feel, but a pleasant read.

[RoseMorninStar]

I've enjoyed quite a few books/series from the YA section.

[RoseMorninStar]

Has anyone here used bookshelf.club? I checked 'Is Site Legit' and it says potentially OK/no issues found. It doesn't say anything (upfront) about a fee.

[Inanna]

No, Rose, I haven’t.

Finally reading The City We Became by NK Jemisen.

Brilliant, like all her books.

[narya]

Finally reading The City We Became by NK Jemisen.

Brilliant, like all her books.

Indeed.

I just spent three slightly damp (and sometimes down right wet) days at Pinnacles National Park, hiking until my feet screamed, and then some (13 miles yesterday), while listening to audio books. I ended up with three books with a 1940s/1950s patriarchal, women-as-sex-objects-only style of writing, which is cringe worthy, but the stories are good in spite of that.

The first was "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by Haruki Murakami, which was .... um ... not sure what to say. It was written in 1985, but the author loved Raymond Chandler, of the hard-boiled detective ilk, so it had internal dialogue like the one where the protagonist picks up a skull and wonders what thoughts had been in that skull when it was alive - thoughts of sex, food, dominance? (Which about summed up some of his male characters.) The book was lots of ruminating and dreaming about what "mind" and "consciousness" are, punctuated by a few frantic action scenes. It helped to read the Wikipedia entry afterwards, but since it's very spoilerish, I don't recommend reading the entry until after you read the book. And I do recommend reading the book. It was strange, but well written, and well translated into English.

The second was Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man", published in 1953. Though he wrote comics and pulp short fiction before this, this book was his first novel. When the Hugo Awards were initiated, this novel was the first to get the award. The story is a classic police procedural novel, in which the detective knows the criminal, but it takes a whole book for him to catch him. The book is also a great example of world-building. It takes place in an imagined 24th century New York City, with the obligate hover cars and commuter rockets to Venus and Titan, but the clearly thought out world-building is the way he imagined a society much like our present day (or 1950s era) America, with a hundred thousand telepaths mixed in, and how these telepaths are integrated into society and highly regulated. If you've seen Babylon 5, you'll notice that they lifted most of Bester's telepath "rules" for their Psi Corps from this book (and even named the lead psi cop, the Walter Koenig character, "Alfred Bester"). There's also lots of Freud and pseudo-Freud mixed in, that can be a little squicky at times and hasn't aged well, but I definitely recommend this book, if you can find it. It took me a while to find a copy.

Now I'm reading "Zorba the Greek", and having mixed feelings about it. I remember reading "Gone with the Wind" when I was a teenager, and thinking Scarlet was wonderful, then reading it again as an adult, and thinking Scarlet was an insipid teenager. I'm only partly thru Zorba, but so far he seems to be a 65 year old, highly distractible, skirt-chasing teenager. He's supposed to be the free-spirited hedonist, in contrast to his bookish, highly introspective, passive-onlooker, 35 year old friend and narrator of the book. Characters in this 1946 book say things like (paraphrased) "Being partly deaf isn't so bad. I could have been born blind, or (gasp) a girl." I will finish this book, but I'm not sure at this point that I'd recommend it. The movie was good, if I recall, and not nearly as fixated on objectifying and using women.

I also read "Remote Control", another book by Nnedi Okorafor, in which she delves into fantasy rather than sci fi. I didn't like it as much as Noor, but it was still worth reading. Definitely not 50s patriarchy.

I gave up on "The Vor Game" by Bujold, half way thru. It was action packed, but I was bored. And I stopped "The Devil's Light" by Patterson, because I just wasn't enjoying being in the mind of cold blooded killers. Perhaps I will try one of his other books later.

And I'm just starting "Nudibranchs and Related Molluscs, a Museum Victoria Field Guide" by Robert Burn, about Australian sea slugs. It's fascinating reading so far, but perhaps an acquired taste.

[narya]

Time for my monthly book report

Currently reading:

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr - a very existential dabble into the lives of several different people, and the meaning of their lives, all tied together by their love of ancient Greek literature, libraries, and trying to fit in while being total misfits in their societies. The stories take place in ancient Byzantium, a Korean War prisoner of war camp, present day Idaho, and a future generation space ship, and they all weave together. Highly recommended by me and by a bunch of other people including Barack Obama, NY Times, and Fresh Air

Finished in April:

Memory's Legion by James S. A. Corey - This is a compilation of the novellas that fit between each of the main novels of the Expanse series. I'd read them all last year, individually, as I could find them, but in reading them all again, I see many connections and recurring minor characters that I hadn't noticed before. I recommend reading this set after you have read all of the main novels, as a way to fill in some of the backstory about the characters. (And, I must admit, in the past month I also reread the first four novels of the main set of novels. Call it a guilty pleasure.)

Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham - this is a fantasy book, written by one half of the duo that wrote the Expanse sci-fi novels. (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck wrote the Expanse series together under the pen name James S. A. Corey.) When writing the Expanse novels, Abraham focused on highly detailed world building - describing sights, sounds, smells, narrator's ruminations, and a sprinklings of apparently random observations that often turned out to include foreshadowing. The other author, Ty Franck, concentrated on action scenes. Together they outlined the story, then each wrote first drafts for half of the chapters, then they traded and each added their own specialty to the second draft. By the time they were done, it was a blend of both styles. While the blend of the two is delightful, I'm mainly drawn to the world building, so a novel with just the world building - Abraham's specialty - was a treat. This book is a fantasy set in the typical pre-industrial European-like setting. There is a little magic involved, but mostly it is a highly detailed look at how life worked, for lower class men, women and children at the bottom of the social ladder, and what they do to survive every day, in very creative ways. Unlike Tolkien, who never seemed to talk about the infrastructures needed to support, say, Rivendell, this book does tell you where each meal comes from, where the sewage goes, and everything in between. Abraham has written a number of fantasy novels, and this was his latest. Now I have to go back and read some of the earlier ones.

Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach - This was recommended by my cousin. Much as I love my cousin, I do not love her taste in books, evidently. In the books by Abraham/Corey, the characters, for the most part, were uncomfortable with hurting others, and it changed them to do so. This book, on the other hand, is about a mercenary soldier who takes great delight in killing aliens (who are all conveniently lizard-like or bloodthirsty). She has named all of her weapons and has a great fondness for each. Her attitude is flippant and self centered. If you took the fight scenes out of this novel, it would be a novella. I forced myself to finish it, hoping it would get better, and so that I could report back to my cousin about it. Just as I was about to finish it in relief, the book ended with a totally unexpected cliff hanger. So now I have to read book 2 in the series. Mumble mumble.

Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn - The author of this non-fiction book runs a chronic pain clinic that uses a combination of meditation, body scanning (thinking about and relaxing each body part in turn), and yoga, as a way to manage life's travails. I finished the text, and now I'm going through the separate audio recordings of the guided meditations. Very soothing.

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - The author's other books are sci fi (the Ancillary Justice series), but this one is fantasy, with an odd look at how both humans and gods evolved through the millennia in one particular location. I would say it's not as enjoyable - to me - as her first novel, but I would still recommend it. It was ... different.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor - another African-futurist novella. Let's call it speculative fiction, since it fits neither into sci fi nor fantasy, strictly speaking. It's about what it is to be alien on two levels - the main character is of the Himba people, who are considered to be very strange by neighboring tribes in Africa. She goes on to find even stranger people when she goes to university on another planet. This is part of a trio of novellas, and I have the other two on my shelf to read.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - Another fantasy set in the typical pre-industrial European-like setting, with a dash of steam punk thrown in (they have air ships). It's a coming of age novel in which a half-goblin-half-elf teenager, raised in a backwater far from his father's court, is suddenly thrown into the middle of court intrigue and is totally out of his depth and can't trust anyone. I recommend it, with the caveat that there are about 100 names to learn, all 4 to 5 syllables long. After a while, I just let the names flow over me and didn't try to keep them straight. So I probably missed some of the foreshadowing.

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis - gave up on this one.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - started this - couldn't get into it - dropped it.

[RoseMorninStar]

I requested Cloud Cuckoo. That sounds right up my alley. However, I'm 46 of 892 on the wait list. Perhaps I'd be better off checking the physical book.