Our reads in Jan 2024

Happy New year.
Hope you all got good books or book tokens to make a satisfying start for a new year. Hope its a better and happier one than the last one.
Shre your plans for the year or just January. Happy reading!

Dusty's TBR for January
Robert A Heinlein - Podkayne of Mars ✔
Gordon Dickson - Soldier,Ask Not
Jack Vance - Book of Dreams
C J Cherryh - Brothers of Earth
K M Shea - Games of Enemies and Allies ✔
Philip Latham - Five Against Venus ✔
Lester Del Rey - Attack from Atlantis ✔
Lucius Shepard - The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule
Annie Anderson - Dead to Me ✔
Annie Anderson - Dead and Gone ✔
Annie Anderson - Dead Calm ✔
Annie Anderson - Dead and Buried ✔
Annie Anderson - Dead Wrong✔
Annie Anderson - Dead and Buried ✔

I already have lined up The Splinter in the Sky, The Art of Destiny, The Hidden Legion, Chaos Terminal, and Season of Skulls.

I'm planning on:
A Memory Called Empire - A Martine
A Desolation Called Peace - A Martine
All Systems Red - Martha Wells (a re-read)
York: The Shadow Cipher - Laura Ruby
Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr
The Seventh Bride - T Kingfisher
Mort - Terry Pratchett
The Book that Wouldn't Burn - Mark Lawrence

In Progress
A Deepness in the Sky
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

On Deck
Tales from Earthsea
Final Incal
Medusa's Web
Cryptonomicon
Veniss Underground
The War Amongst the Angels

Plans for January
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Find a list of Heinlein's juveniles, check what I reread in the past 6 months, and use the remaining books as a reading plan
Mythology Abroad
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Red Mars (Santa Thing)
Now reading
Equal Rites
Second Stage Lensman
Den of Vipers

Heinlein's Juveniles
1. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
2. Space Cadet (1948)
3. Red Planet (1949)
4. Farmer in the Sky (1950)
5. Between Planets (1951)
6. The Rolling Stones (1952)
aka/ Space Family Stone
7. Starman Jones (1953)
8. The Star Beast (1954)
9. Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
10. Time for the Stars (1956)
11. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
12. Have Spacesuit - Will Travel (1958)
Read all of them,some several times over the decades
My faves are 4,5,9 11,12.
Many are corny ,cheesy today,but still fun. And its amazing haow many of the prominent SF authors two ,even three decades later fondly looked back on them as getting them into SF.
For some reason I always think Podkayne of Mars is part of that series. Very similar style and vibe.That is what I am now reading! :0)

I rang in the New Year with A Memory Called Empire. It is giving me Babylon 5 (TV series) vibes, and I am quite pleased.

I am currently reading A City on Mars, can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? Kinda of smashing all of my dreams.
Next up will be Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi. I like to pair my Non-Fiction with a themed Fiction.
This month's theme is space settlements.

I started Too like the lightning by Ada Palmer, but although the ideas seem interesting, I have a really hard time with the contrieved narrative choices. It reminds me a bit of Babel by R F Kuang in that I find the artificial framing very offputting. So I may have to abandon it for something more congenial.
Hoping the new Martha Wells Murderbot, System collapse arrives soon. Other than that, I expect to get to Ray Naylors The Mountain in the sea, since it has to go back to the library in a few days.

About 1/3 of the way through Children of Time. It is meeting my somewhat high expectations.

Almost halfway through Dune: House Corrino. After that my aim is to re-read Frank Herbert’s 6 volumes in his Dune Chronicles and follow it up with the two concluding volumes by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson which I have never read. I have been told to stop with Chapterhouse Dune but I feel compelled to see how Brian and Kevin finish Dune based on Frank’s notes.

>7 dustydigger: Thank you for the list! I, too have read them all more than once in the past. I decided sometime last year to re-read them all but I derailed.
I love them all, it's hard to pick a favorite, but Star Beast, The Rolling Stones, and Red Planet have special spots in my heart.
Poddy is great and I fall in love with the fairies every time.

When it started off Podkayne of Mars definitely gave off similar vibes to all these teenage boy heroes in the juveniles,but as it developed,there were more adult themes,and there was lots of satirical cut and thrust in among the humour.Then I saw the book was published in 1963,quite a bit after the juveniles,in fact, a year after Stranger in a Strange Land!. No wonder RAH wanted a darker ending.I am reading the 1970s version now.

>10 amberwitch: My response to Too Like the Lightning is much like yours, and I personally didn't get enough out of it to make myself pick up the next work in the quartet. To put it another way, I'd rather read an actual history book about an unpleasant, but important topic, if I'm going to have to invest that much effort. I get your point with Babel, but Kuang has an emotional investment in this novel that lifts it above being an academic exercise; at least for me.

>10 amberwitch:, >15 Shrike58: My local remainder bookshop has a pile of Babel going cheap. but every time I pick it up, the packaging and blurb shout out to me "Philip Pullman knock-off!!" and I put it back again. Am I right to do this?

>16 RobertDay: Babel is a love/hate note to Great Britain in its imperial prime; it still might not be your cup of tea but I don't think of Pullman as being a relevant comparison.

>15 Shrike58: I do agree with you on Babel, it seemed more accessible by way of having characters that provided emotional anchoring of the ideas and ideals. And I did finish that one:)

Just finished Mountain the sea by Ray Nayler.
Very good exploration of themes around consciousness, language and othering in a slightly William Gibson or Liz Williams cyber punk way. Intelligent octopuses, androids, hackers.

>17 Shrike58: That's probably the fault of the packaging, not the novel. I've now had sufficient opinions from here and other correspondents to think it worth acquiring.

>19 amberwitch:

Wishlisted!

Starting Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald.

Unfortunately, my final book of 2023 was a DNF. I have really enjoyed other Chuck Palahniuk books but not Haunted; I threw in the towel after ~125 pages.

Starting off 2024 with a pair of non-genre reads: Silver Nitrate and Silk. I have read quite a few Silvia Moreno-Garcia titles and find her stories compelling even though the writing is sometimes a bit uneven. Caitlin R. Kiernan has really become a favorite of mine and, so far, I am enjoying their first published novel.

>15 Shrike58: I thought Too Like the Lightning was very confusing at first. I ended up borrowing the audio from the library and reading along in print while listening, which certainly took a lot longer than simply reading the book. That said, the voice-acting by the narrator really helped bring the characters to life, (for me).

The overall story arc doesn't fully begin to coalesce until the end of Too Like the Lightning and then really comes together in Seven Surrenders. Stopping before book 2 would leave things hanging in a big way as the tetralogy is a single continuous tale told over four volumes. Once I finished the series, Terra Ignota ended up being my top read of 2023 - but I also recognize that it's not going to work for everyone. Reviews seem to bear that out as reactions appear to be fairly polarized. Palmer likely considers that a win... ;-)

>23 ScoLgo:

My favorite Palahniuk book was Rant. I understand Haunted is definitely not to everyone's taste, and I have a copy somewhere that I haven't gotten around to reading.

>25 paradoxosalpha: Rant is my favorite Palahniuk as well. I didn't realize I was readingtime travel SF until the very end - and I loved that aspect of the story.

>24 ScoLgo: The second book is, in theory, on my 2024 TBR list; we'll see how it goes.

Just started on Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie. Revenge, here we come!

Happy New Year all!

I finished the last 2 in the Genesis Fleet series by Jack Campbell, Ascendant and Triumphant. I'm currently reading Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.

Finished reading Dune: House Corrino. It ended up being better than the other five Dune prequels I have read. The first third of the book was rather stilted like the the other two House prequels and the Legends of Dune trilogy. But the last two thirds of House Corrino moved the plot along at a fast pace pulling a number of threads together in an interesting manner. It surprised me. Taking a break from Dune for a bit to read The First Formic War trilogy by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. I have read the entire Ender and Ender’s Shadow series and greatly enjoyed them years ago. We will see how this prequel measures up.

>24 ScoLgo: The Terra Ignota series seems like quite an investment of time to find out whether one likes it or not. I've got Too Like Lightning on the TBR pile, but you've made me think twice!

Wrapped up Season of Skulls, which I had a lot of fun with. The Art of Destiny will be next.

I thought Terra Ignota was awesome all the way through. I knew I was really down for it by the middle of the first book, but it's true that it's all one story, with mostly setup in the first two volumes and payoff in the third and fourth. That said, I think book two Seven Surrenders was my favorite.

If you like complex world-building informed by actual history, sustained mysteries, and unreliable narrators, Terra Ignota is boss. Of course, some people are frustrated by some of those same things.

>33 paradoxosalpha: Thanks. Perhaps I should acquire Seven Surrenders, read them both, and then see.

>33 paradoxosalpha: Yup, the Terra Ignota series is in my TBR list. I have just heard so many good things about this series. Not sure when I am going to get to it! So many books… so little time…

I just finished the third Terra Ignota book (The Will to Battle) yesterday and intend to finish Perhaps the Stars next. I think they're amazing, though I certainly understand why people don't like them. I just found out that the author and Jo Walton have a collaborative essay collection on SFF coming out in October and I'm very excited.

Not sure if I'll pick up anything else sci-fi this month, depends if I give in to the need to read one of these 600+ page weapons on my TBR.

>36 Watry: Thanks for mentioning the Palmer/Walton collab; will certainly be keeping an eye out for that!

I finished Second Stage Lensman and moved on to Children of the Lens today.

>30 Neil_Luvs_Books: I actually enjoyed the Formic War prequel books. There's quite a few characters so they do get a little long.

>38 elorin: Glad you are enjoying those, you're making me want to read them again.

While there is little cause to mention non-fiction in this group, I did just finished Stalking the Atomic City, which is basically one man's real-life reenactment of Roadside Picnic.

>7 dustydigger: I grew up reading these books and, although I haven't gone back to reread most of them, they started me on a lifetime of reading sf. I too also thought Podkayne of Mars was one of the juveniles. It remains one of my favourites.

It might be sf, it might not, I'm not sure yet: I'm reading Charlie Kaufman's Antkind.

I finished The Book That Wouldn't Burn which was quite the book. Complex and intriguing, with great world-building. Lots to say about conflict and enemies and prejudices and assumptions.

>42 Stevil2001:

I didn't know about that book, and now I am attentive.

I'm currently enjoying The Culture; the drawings. If you're going to do world-building, start early.

>45 RobertDay:

That one went on to my wishlist in November!

>44 paradoxosalpha: It was one of my SantaThing gifts here on LT. I had not heard of it either! Very digressive, often funny, with a very neurotic narrator prone to overthinking things. So far a lot of weird stuff has taken place and who knows how it all goes together... but it does seem like something sfnal may be at the root of it all.

>39 Karlstar: I am about 100 pages into Earth Unaware and am greatly enjoying. It’s good so far.

I'm reading a novel by Christopher Priest that I'd never heard of until I saw it on the library sale shelf - The quiet woman. It's really good so far.

>49 Sakerfalcon: I read that a few years ago and was impressed. I recollect the case of the murder of Hilda Murrell, which I suspect was Priest's inspiration in part for the book.

Finished The Culture: the drawings and I'm very impressed. Now reading McAuley's White Devils and very impressed with that too. Although written in 2004, it hasn't dated badly, unlike my previous McAuley read, Whole Wide World, a near-future police procedural which was written around 2002, was set in 2015 or thereabouts, and had aged really badly.

I'm at the midpoint of A Deepness in the Sky and I think I am enjoying it better than A Fire Upon the Deep (which I liked). I've also just read through all three volumes of the comics adaptation of Norse Mythology, posting reviews for Norse Mythology Volume 1, Norse Mythology Volume 2, and Norse Mythology Volume 3.

I somehow managed to start the year with two not very common SF books: a short story published on its own: Stand-In Companion by Kazufumi Shiraishi and a collection of 60s and 70s stories by Primo Levi The Sixth Day and Other Tales. Both are readable - reviews in the works if someone is interested. Not sure what I am reading next SF-wise - my planning never works. :)

Finished Silk and posted a short review.

Also finished Silver Nitrate, but haven't reviewed it yet. I really liked it but sort of wish I hadn't been reading at the same time as the Kiernan because of thematic overlaps that may fade together in my memory over time, (who am I kidding? In three years I probably won't remember much about either book ;).

My Overdrive hold for System Collapse came through yesterday but I'm having some trouble getting into it. That good ol' Murderbot snarkiness may be wearing a bit thin for me. We'll see...

Also reading Murder of Angels, which picks up 10 years after the events in Silk. We are off to a good start in the first 3 chapters of this one.

I'm reading A Desolation Called Peace right on the heels of A Memory Called Empire.

>55 vwinsloe: I will be interested to hear how they work back to back - there are a lot of series where authors know that you usually won't read back to back so they build later volumes with that in mind (and it can be a bit repetitive and annoying if you do read them back to back :)

>45 RobertDay:, thank you for your detailed review of that work!

Finished The Deep Sky, starting Tea with the Black Dragon.

>50 RobertDay: I finished The quiet woman and thought it was excellent. There's a real sense of creeping menace pursuing the seemingly unremarkable Alice, and I enjoyed (not quite the right word!) the ways in which her Britain differed from our own. A really good read that I shall return to in future.

>56 AnnieMod: A Desolation Called Peace is going really quickly so far. The author jogs your memory about who the characters are, but doesn't do much more exposition than that. I'm glad that I read them back to back so that I retained my Teixcalaanli vocabulary. ;)

>56 AnnieMod: >60 vwinsloe: I read them back-to-back too and found few irritants - other than the people calling themselves Teixcalaanli. I kept stumbling over that word the entire time! Despite that, the duology was one of my top reads of last year.

Just finished Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie. I tried this one, as Abercrombie is a popular author of "grimdark" fantasy & this one is a standalone, rather than a series. It's a mixed review from me. There's much to like about the author's writing style - he certainly knows how to have fun with it & make it fun for the reader - but my biggest complaint is that it's overlong for what it is. As the title suggests, it's a revenge tale - mainly revenge on the part of the main character, although other characters are also following their own revenge paths (including against the main character). There are 7 men whom the main character seeks revenge against & each section of the book is dedicated to each separate victim. I felt the middle sections were a bit predictible and dragged on. But I will say the last few sections saved the book for me - some clever and entertaining twists. Expect to read some very graphic violence & sex scenes, by the nature of the genre. If that's an issue for you, then grimdark fantasy is not for you.

In the end, I give it 3 & 1/2 stars (out of 5).

Reading Atom Bomb Baby for Early Reviewers.

Finished The Art of Destiny, which going in I expected to be a little bit draggy, and such was the case. Chu does end strongly though, so I have positive expectations for the next book.

Next up: Chaos Terminal.

Finished Tales From Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. I made short work of this, at least partly due to being homebound from our local freeze event. The book contains 5 shorter works about Earthsea, ranging from a few hundred years before the life of Ged, to shortly after. As always with Le Guin, wonderful prose & storytelling. 4 & 1/2 stars.

I'm still working on Walkaway, unfortunately the author has done very little to back up his ideas, so this is speculative fiction without substance. I'm taking a break from it for a bit, but I may not finish.

>42 Stevil2001: love your review of Walkaway, I just read it.

Finished Earth Unaware and greatly enjoyed it. Trying to track down my copy of the sequel Earth Afire. I know I purchased it a few weeks ago from my local used book shop so it’s gotta be around here somewhere…

>67 Neil_Luvs_Books: Glad you enjoyed it. For no particular reason, I jumped to the Second Formic war trilogy after reading Earth Unaware, I need to go back and read the 2nd and 3rd book in the first trilogy.

>66 Karlstar: Thanks! Yes, I wish I had given up on it. I kept on hanging on, thinking it would reverse itself and interest me, but this never happened.

>69 Stevil2001: I very, very rarely DNF books, but I'm considering it. I'm about halfway.

Finished White Devils in fairly short order, despite it being a 520-page book. Gripped by the setting - 2040s Africa, in the aftermath of a pandemic and with widespread bioengineering changing life (and death). It can't be classed as 'Afrofuturism', having been written by a white English author in 2004, but the sense of place worked for me, even if it does risk lapsing into stereotypes. And despite being twenty years old, very little came up jarringly (though I'm fairly certain there was a fax machine in there somewhere). Certainly it worked better for me than the last McAuley I read, Whole Wide World.

>70 Karlstar: Yes, I very, very rarely DNF either. My suspicion is that it's not going to turn around for you at this point.

>62 ChrisG1: I really liked Best Served Cold (and Abercrombie in general). Supposedly it is being developed as a movie/TV/streaming project with Rebecca Ferguson in the lead role.

Finished a reread of Unconquerable Sun, will start the sequel Furious heaven very soon.

On kindle I'm reading Expect me tomorrow by Christopher Priest. The reviews on here are generally poor but I'm enjoying it so far at 40% in.

Finished Antkind at last. That was weird but enjoyable enough to be worth it. That it has one five-star review and one one-star review here on LT seems about right.

>74 Sakerfalcon: I really hope you end up enjoying the Priest one more than I did!

Finished Tea with the Black Dragon, started To Shape a Dragon's Breath.

>56 AnnieMod: I finished A Desolation Called Peace and it was different from but really was as good as A Memory Called Empire, if not better. I couldn't help but think of the current war in the middle east.

Finished Chaos terminal by Mur Lafferty, the second Midolar Murders book. Still on the Eternity Space Station, with the various types of aliens encountered in the first book (humans, rock based, insect hivemind, and another I'm not sure how to describe). A new batch of humans arrive on a shuttle, and eventually a murder occurs. We learn more about the insect-seeming aliens, in part because one of the new humans is an entomologist. At least as good as the first book; recommended if you like getting a mystery mixed in with your science fiction.

>79 karenb:
That sounds fun, wishlisted.

>80 elenchus:

Yep it was a fun read. I don't think it is an important or deep book, but it definitely was fun. I think it is probably better to have read the first book in the series Station Eternity first, although I think that maybe Chaos Terminal is the better of the two.

Finished Unconquerable Sun and launched straight into Furious Heaven. There's no summary or anything to catch you up on events so I'm glad I did the reread.

>76 anglemark: I'm enjoying the Priest a lot so far, especially all the glaciology/volcanology/climatology. Not sure where it is going at the moment. though.

I just finished Children of Time. I really liked it. The worldbuilding really carried the story. Tchaikovsky has an incredibly rich imagination. I couldn't quite get it to five stars, as the characters and prose were just ok - not bad by any means, but not memorable either.

Just finished Braking Day by a new to me (and I think generally new) author Adam Oyebanji. It's about three generation ships that are nearing their target after 132 years in space. There is a faction on the ship that doesn't want to settle on the target planet out of concern for the current inhabitants. A trainee engineer, Ravinder Macleod, is experiencing unsettling hallucinations and dreams. At least he hopes they are hallucinations/dreams because otherwise someone outside the ship is accessing his brain. When he confides in his cousin Boz she tries to help him decode what these dreams are trying to tell him. In time, they accept that another ship left Earth the same time as theirs but has been totally wiped out of the history taught to them. This new ship could be a threat to the three and it is up to Ravi and Boz to try to prevent that.

I thought it was quite well done although I think the book should have been accompanied by some drawings of the ships because I never quite followed how they were put together.

>68 Karlstar: I found my copy of Earth Afire. Two chapters in and I’m interested.

Read Reunion on Neverend by John Stith. A light read, reasonably amusing, that is oddly nonchalant about the "alien mystery" touted in the blurb and several other elements of the story. Any of those elements, alone or together, if explored a bit more deeply, would have made the book more interesting. It is basically a heist and pursuit of the perpetrators tale. I followed that up with The Lost Hero, the first of the second series about Percy Jackson (who doesn't appear, because he is the lost hero). Good fun, and it involves a lot more Greek mythology than i remember from my 1 credit Classical Mythology course from 50 years ago. Time to dig out Robert Graves' Greek Myths.

I finished Expect me tomorrow and very much enjoyed the journey, but the destination was disappointing. The past and present twins plots linked up and were tidily resolved; however, given the impact that Adolf Beck's case had on English law, I would have thought that once Chad learned his real name he'd have found references to him easily, which could have cut out a lot of his failed attempts to find answers in the past.. But a lot of the other plot material, such as the climate research (which I found fascinating) and the IMC device, seemed to fizzle out. It felt like they'd served their plot purpose so that was it. But as I said at the beginning, I did enjoy the read for most of the book.

>87 Sakerfalcon: It makes me happy to hear that you enjoyed it!

I finished A Deepness in the Sky and posted my review. Now it's on to Tales from Earthsea, where my public library loan has just auto-renewed.

>89 paradoxosalpha: Nice review.

>90 Karlstar: Thanks!

Just been away from genre for a while, though what I've been reading - Dawkins' The God Delusion - could be said to be about a recurring character in science fiction and fantasy. Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Fred Hoyle, Carl Sagan and (to my surprise) Daniel F. Galouye get namechecked, some more frequently than others.

Next up is Jeff Noon's Vurt.

So, I knocked off Chaos Terminal, and found it quite entertaining; but you have to read Station Eternity first.

Next up: The Hidden Legion.

I've started the fourth Temeraire novel, Empire of Ivory.

Partway through the Stories of Your Life and Others. Loving the intersection between emotional arcs and thought experiments, reminds me of Jorge Borges.

Just finished The Companions by Sheri S. Tepper. Not her best, but it was still readable. She was trying to handle too many threads, and most of the alien species were old stereotypes, thinly portrayed. The indigenous life on Moss, though, was well done. The dog part didn't really work that well for me, but then, I'm a cat person :-)

>95 Cecrow: That's what I liked about Stories of Your Life and Others. Exhalation to me was more often thought experiments and lacking the emotional part, though there were some excellent stories in it.

Finished Vurt. Quite some ride, a bit like PKD's A Scanner Darkly but set in Manchester with hints of The Matrix added to the mix. Now switching to some chapbooks and fan publications.

I finished Tales from Earthsea and posted a review. It was a good set of stories with a larger pattern subtly tying them together.

>98 RobertDay: I loved Vurt. I read it when it was first published and it blew me away. One of the few books that after I finished the last page, I turned right back to the first page to read it again.

I finished Earth Afire and liked it enough to start Earth Awakens. So far I think the first of this trilogy, Earth Unaware is the best because of the time it takes to live in the culture of the free miners. These last two in the trilogy are mainly war novels but includes enough of the human element to make them intriguing beyond just battle scenes. Which I have been enjoying; they are exciting. But I am only 1/5 of the way in to Earth Awakens so we’ll see if things change. Overall, worth reading so far.

I'm enjoying Furious Heaven, the sequel to Unconquerable Sun. Space opera with lots of battles and politics.

>100 vwinsloe: Vurt completely exceeded my expectations. I was expecting some angry, post-punk grunge writing with no finesse; I actually found sophisticated, energetic and inventive post-punk grunge writing of considerable quality.

>103 RobertDay:, yes, and I found it highly emotive as well.

>103 RobertDay: >104 vwinsloe: I had not heard of Vurt or Jeff Noon. Looks like a book I would enjoy. Thank you both for putting this on my radar.

Knocked off the Hidden Legion. I wasn't expecting great things from what looked like a pot-boiler adventure, but I liked it well enough to try the middle book of the trilogy. Still, how does a book go all the way through the process of publishing without anyone noticing that the author has peppers and tomatoes in Classical Rome? This is unless it turns out that in the author's version of Classical Rome there's been contact with the Western Hemisphere.

Next up: The Splinter in the Sky.

>105 ScoLgo: I loved Vurt (and the other books Jeff Noon wrote around that time) when I was a teen. I found them spectacular, original and exciting. Of course I was a teen, and I hadn't read all that much, certainly not in English; glad it still holds up!

Just finished The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I've been meaning to read this extremely popular fantasy novel for quite awhile & finally got to it. Not hard to see why it's popular - it's a darn good story well told. Not sure I'll continue with it soon, since volume 2 is over 1100 pages & volume 3 has been overdue for years. We'll see.

I finished Medusa's Web and posted a short review. Now starting Cryptonomicon.

Finished To Shape a Dragon's Breath, started Or What You Will.

>108 ChrisG1:, bought my copy when it was "First time in paperback" and wow is it covered in dust as I'm still waiting to see the 3rd book come out.

An interesting list, from Rich Puchalsky, of alternate Hugo winners. He brings up the interesting point why no Lem, Alasdair Gray, Pynchon etc.

>108 ChrisG1:, >111 Cecrow:

Robert Jordan, among his other sins, left me with a strong aversion to starting reading series that are not all published yet.

>112 justifiedsinner: One reason why more literary writers don't make it onto the Hugo nominees list is because the Hugo is a popularity poll amongst a specific sub-set of fans who go to World SF Conventions (and tend to be predominantly male and from North America). It is no guarantee of any sort of literary merit.

The converse holds: many authors whose work is identified as "genre" by their publishers but who feel they have aspired to a higher standard of prose in their work have criticised the publishing industry - at least in the UK - for not submitting their work to some of the more prestigious literary award panels, such as the Booker (or whatever it's called this year).

Knocked off The Splinter in the Sky; okay, but just okay. This is the rare case where I think that the novel could have been longer to achieve better world building.

>113 AndreasJ: PC Hodgell was my motivation for that rule, with a 9 year gap between the 2nd and 3rd, and a 12 year gap until the 4th. Of course there are a number of other cases, most famously George RR Martin. I *have* broken the rule occasionally, usually with those seemingly endless series where I figure I might as well start. Many of those series I end up dropping at some point anyway.

Some series-in-progress are fine, and I like reading The Laundry as it comes out, for example. I don't think there is any problem with reading the unfinished Murderbot Diaries either.

I read the Earthsea "trilogy" when it was "finished," and then it wasn't. Ditto for Foundation.

>117 paradoxosalpha:

Not read either of those, but sure, I was fine with reading say Discworld when it was “unfinished”. The aversion concerns more tightly integrated series, where the parts don’t stand on their own.

Earthsea was a tetralogy when I read it, FWIW.

I'm soon to read The Other Wind, the sixth and actually final book of Earthsea. If someone (or something) other than Le Guin writes any further Earthsea books, I doubt I'll be interested.

>118 AndreasJ:
Earthsea was a trilogy when I read it. :-)

>113 AndreasJ: I share that aversion - in my case, GRRM is the catalyst. It depends on the nature of the "series." You have the Episodic series, in which each book is a complete story, and the "One-Novel-in-Multiple-Volumes" type of series. It's the second sort I've learned to avoid.

Finished reading Earth Awakens. I liked it. Which means that The Second Formic War trilogy is now on my TBR list. Taking a short break from SciFi to read Slow Horses. I so enjoyed the ATV+ series I thought it was worth a shot. 1/4 of the way through and it is worth the read.

>120 pgmcc: Me too - but then I read it again a few years ago when all six volumes had been released. As a more mature reader, I feel I got more out of it the 2nd time around.

>117 paradoxosalpha: Stross would have been happier spinning the last three "New Management" novels off into their own sequence, but the publisher decided otherwise. The "classic" sequence is going to be, apparently, wrapped up in one novella and one novel.

GRRM got too clever for his own good, as there was going to be a long in-story time gap in the original five novels planned between the first three and the last two; then the TV series happened. Martin might be still working on it, but it's obvious that his heart isn't in it.

I kind of liked Tehanu, but I wound up finding that book inadvertently funny.

>124 Shrike58:

Well, Stross wrote the New Management books as their own sequence, even if they leveraged the Laundry Files worldbuilding. But I'd been reading the Laundry on release for about seven books prior to that.

I didn't find Tehanu funny at all! I did like it, and I thought Tales from Earthsea was even better in some ways.

I liked Tehanu rather less than the first three. In retrospect, that's at least in part because it's more adult-oriented than them, and I was a teenager at the time.

Dunno if I'll ever read the last two. I rather feel I'd have to re-read the first four first, but at the same time I'm not big on re-reading.

>121 ChrisG1:

Thanks, if that's the word, to getting burned with Jordan I never got started with A Song of Ice and Fire.

>126 AndreasJ:

Fair enough. I reread the first three to read Tehanu, a sort of project that I am warming to as I age. I am about five years younger than Le Guin was when she wrote that book, so old enough, I guess. She definitely stopped focusing on her supposed YA market in favor of exploring her fantasy world and using it to wrestle big ideas. As someone who read an awful lot of books written for adults before I even reached my teens, I have never found that boundary very valuable.

>121 ChrisG1: That's a good distinction. Are they discrete stories set in the same world, or are they serialized stories, each with cliffhanger type endings? Examples for comparison would also be Iain Banks Culture books as opposed to The Lord of the Rings or The Broken Earth.

>125 paradoxosalpha: Tehanu was my favorite of the Earth Sea books, but I haven't read Tales From Earthsea and will since you've recommended it.

>123 ScoLgo:

I was thinking that The Culture would be another good example where reading in the "unfinished" series would be without penalty (although of course it's done now). As a contrast, I was glad to be able to read some complete Ken MacLeod series at an uninterrupted gallop: both Fall Revolution and Engines of Light.

>127 paradoxosalpha: Tehanu was fascinating to me, seeing someone do a deconstruction of their own fictional world and its assumptions. It's kind of like the same person writing Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. I read the Earthsea sequence individually about a decade ago; I got The Complete Illustrated Earthsea as a gift a few years ago, so someday I'll reread them all in that volume.

Oh dear,poor reading month with regards to good stuff,though I spent a lot of time reading kindle rubbish,great fun and soothing for a distracted mind.lol.
I ruined my computer and have been demented this last week without it,only had a kindle. Hate trying to read on a phone ,especially scanned 1950s stuff on Open Library. Hence a load of kindle unlimited stuff.But birthday day me ,76 today, received my new one this afternoon,and here I am ,bad penny always turning up. :0)
Got it just in time to set up a new thread for February

>131 dustydigger: Happy birthday, Dusty! Sorry to hear about your old computer but am glad you acquired a timely replacement. I can't imagine trying to read Open Library stuff on a mobile phone!

>129 paradoxosalpha: Good point about The Culture. That is a series one can dip in & out of without worrying too much about reading order. With a couple of exceptions, the same is true of Cherryh's Alliance-Union, (Heavy Time/Hellburner and Cyteen/Regenesis being the exceptions).

After diving into the first few Ice & Fire books, I decided to wait for the series to be finished before continuing. Ten years later we all see how that has turned out. The one exception to my "Wait Until Finished" rule is another Cherryh series: Foreigner. I have read 21 of them with Defiance waiting on the TBR shelf.

>130 Stevil2001: That is a great point about Tehanu and is what really struck me when reading that book. Le Guin turned everything sideways and I was not expecting that.

I too have that illustrated edition of Earthsea. It's a beautiful book but wow is it ever huge! It is the type of volume that lends real meaning to the word volume! I may need to get myself a lectern in order to read it. ;)

>131 dustydigger:
Happy Birthday. I hope you have had a good day.

>129 paradoxosalpha:
The Corporations Wars is another good Ken MacLeod trilogy.

I have read the first two books in his Lightspeed trilogy and the third book is arriving in May, in good time for Worldcon. Ken did a great thing in the second book; he included a short summary of what went before, hence saving the reader from having to read the first book again. I presume he will do this with Book 3 as well.

>127 paradoxosalpha: I read The Earthsea Trilogy long before the fourth book came out. If I were to read the additional books I would feel the need to reread the first three first. I am not sure I am interested in doing that.

>135 pgmcc: My one disappointment with Lightspeed is that Ken's publisher seems to have disregarded the lure of the hardback edition!

Happy birthday, dusty! And happy new computer. A necessity for me too, these days.

>136 RobertDay:
I have read them on Kindle so did not notice that peculiarity. That is disappointing.

>135 pgmcc: I plan to eventually re-read the entire Earthsea Cycle in the next couple of years. I read them piecemeal as they came out (original trilogy and then each of the subsequent three sequels). So it will be interesting to read them all in close sequence.

I'm one book from finishing a straight-through re-read (1-3) and new read (4-6) of Earthsea, and though it took Le Guin many decades to write the books, I think they do benefit from reading all together.

OK, I'm persuaded to re-read Earthsea series! It's been years.

This month I finished -
The Echo Wife by Sarah Failey
Starter Villain, John Scalzi, and
Fugitive Telemetry in the Murderbot series.