What are you reading in 2024?

[Nellisir]

Hellburner flows more like a conventional novel than Heavy Time did. Good read. Cherryh's strength is "real people"; I don't see her often among hard sf lists but the science is absolutely real as it can be, the focus is just on "hard" psychology. And ramifications; I think all of her books have wide ramifications. A small conflict is the lynchpin to a much bigger issue that's seen only in pieces.

Moving on to Downbelow Station shortly. Outside Sol System.

 

[Richards]

I'm trying something a little different after a whole string of 500+ page Lisa Jackson thrillers: A Mortal Bane, by Roberta Gellis. It's a murder mystery...set in London...in the year 1139...involving the murder of a foreign traveler whose body is found at the doors of a church which adjoins a whorehouse. And a loyal knight gets assigned to solve the mystery and bring the murderer in for justice, or else the church is going to hang their lead suspect, the madam in charge of the whorehouse. So not my usual fare, but it was pretty riveting from the get-go and I'm enjoying it.

And best of all, when I'm ready to go read a chapter or two, I can tell my wife, "I'm off to spend some time with the whores!" (Good thing she knows what I'm really talking about....)

Johnathan

 

[overgeeked]

And done. Mushoku Tensei Vol 26 finished. Damn. What a ride. It's a really good fantasy novel series. Things wrapped up about how I wanted them to, in the end. But getting there took all kinds of twists and turns. Which I'm thankful for. It's no fun reading a book for the first time when you can see the ending from a mile away. The author definitely stuck the landing with a good ending.

Though it was odd. He somehow managed to have more finales than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. There are five major "final battles" and a dozen or more reoccurring characters who needed wrapping up...and the author managed to miss a few of them in the prose and answered a few lingering questions in the form of encyclopedia entries and in-fiction historical research about the characters.

As I said before, I can see why people would be turned off by the main character's perversions. It was definitely a shock and not something I was expecting. Setting that aside, the series is directed at a specific audience of young male shut-ins. It speaks directly to that audience. And after the first 5-6 volumes starts to subtly shift into exactly the kind of story the wider society would want exactly that audience to listen to...wrapped in action-adventure, power fantasy, humor, drama, and, at times, slice of life.

It's filled to overflowing with constant messages of get out, try, don't quit, make friends, friends make you better, on and on and on. I'd go so far as to say it's an overt attempt to socialize anti-social otaku. We see about half the life of the main character, from birth to death. And it's nothing if not a repeated glorification of how friends and family make people better.

The highest is ~81,000 the lowest is ~49,000 and the average is ~65,000. All told the series is slightly longer than the five published books of Game of Thrones. Both series sit around 1.7 million words.

For comparison, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings combined has ~550,000 words. So both Game of Thrones and Mushoku Tensei are more than three times as long as Lord of the Rings.

 

[Clint_L]

Grief, there's six of the things already and they're apparently only on floor eight of eighteen in the mega-dungeon. This is going to get milked for a good long while to come. They may great, but I'm getting Castle Perilous and Myth Adventures flashbacks just thinking about buying in to this.

Yeah, I don't see myself going past book 1. When I say that it's like a novelization of Diablo, I mean that there are literally many pages just focused on inventory management, not to mention endless achievement notifications, health bars, and so on. And the protagonist is singularly uninterested in the wider implications of discovering that Earth is just one node of an intergalactic civilization, or shows any emotional response to 99.9% of humanity being wiped out in the first few pages while the few survivors are forced into a televised death match.

So there are basically zero emotional stakes or interesting ideas. But it's well enough written for what it is: the novel equivalent of a decent B movie. The humour, which comes mostly from the various achievement notifications, is around 9th grade level.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

So there are basically zero emotional stakes or interesting ideas. But it's well enough written for what it is: the novel equivalent of a decent B movie. The humour, which comes mostly from the various achievement notifications, is around 9th grade level.

Out of curiosity (and being too lazy to look) do the publishers categorize it as YA fiction? That would explain the last part, anyway.

 

[Clint_L]

Out of curiosity (and being too lazy to look) do the publishers categorize it as YA fiction? That would explain the last part, anyway.

No, it's definitely not YA. More like adult B movie. Most of the jokes come in the form of snarky achievement notifications and mob descriptions. For instance, one of the boss mobs is a "Krakaren" because it's like a fusion of a giant octopus with a "Karen" stereotype. That kind of thing.

 

[Cadence]

I just got to the half-way point of "The Big Book of the Continental Op" by Hammett. These first 21 short stories from October 1923 - March 1926 (the Sutton Years and the Cody Years) were a nice read and I recommend them for those who like investigative fiction. The police were a lot more cooperative with the Continental Detective Agency than I was expecting at first, but I guess it was kind of like the western TV show Tales of Wells Fargo in that respect and it makes sense the Pinkertons would have been treated that way too. And it still throws me once in a while when the action has the Op jump to a conclusion or take an action that seems out of nowhere, but you don't find out until a paragraph or two later after the action is resolved why he did it.

There were three of the stories I might have passed on or sent back for work if I were the editor. (They are all the later ones for this time period: #16. #17, and #21).

• The "Whosis Kid" has a painfully written part where he's resisting a woman's charms.
• A lot of authors in this time period seem to need a story about a charismatic bad guy running a sex cult, maybe with religious overtones and "The Scorched Face" is one of those (as is The Dain Curse from 1928). They aren't bad necessarily, but they always make me think at first that "people in the real world can't be this gullible"... and then I realize they/we probably are.
• The "Creeping Siamese" was just kind of quick. There was a remark near the end that was worthwhile, but as a whole it just wasn't much.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

A lot of authors in this time period seem to need a story about a charismatic bad guy running a sex cult, maybe with religious overtones and "The Scorched Face" is one of those (as is The Dain Curse from 1928). They aren't bad necessarily, but they always make me think at first that "people in the real world can't be this gullible"... and then I realize they/we probably are.

I hate to say it, but sex cults are very real, and not at all confined to a single time period. They're a really effective con game and always have been. I mean, NXIVM just happened. Guaranteed there's something even worse out there right now that hasn't had a spotlight shone on it yet.

They show up regularly in pulps set in and around Hollywood in part because the studio system tended to encourage some really nasty behavior (individually and collectively) and lurid stories about sex scandals were a pretty common sight in the news - as were cover-ups of the same. There's also the sheer number of "spicy" pulps to keep in mind, which were very much the day's semi-tolerated erotica and an obvious market for stories about secret sex cults.

People are awful, and even more people like to read about it.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Still have a few books left in my complete Thomas Mann stack, currently at the end of Doctor Faustus, good stuff. In my toilet library I'm currently rererereading Gibsons Burning Chrome as a porcelain throne warmup for yet another Necromancer pleasure trip.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I loved that book when I was a kid. I will never re-read because I don't want to revisit it through a more critical lens. I'm happy with it living on in my memories as a treasured book from my youth.

There are some books I read as a kid that really haven't aged well at all, or just don't hold up to an adult perspective. Piers Anthony's Xanth series are so bad I retroactively regret having read them.

Hachette UK has just reprinted Sterling Lanier's book Hiero's Journey as part of their SF Masterworks series (under the Gateway Imprint). It's out in ebook form at the moment, but a paperback is coming soon. I haven't read this for a few years, so I'm revisiting it. It's a gonzo post-apocalyptic novel with a moose-riding cleric as the main character. It also has one of the best depictions of a druid in fantasy. This book gets a mention in Gary Gygax's Appendix N in the 1st edition AD&D DMG. It was also a major influence on the Gamma World RPG. The author was working on a trilogy set in the same world, but sadly only completed the second volume (The Unforsaken Hiero) before his death.

Hiero's Journey is gloriously gonzo. I should do a re-read sometime. It is a bummer that the third book never happened.

Do you remember the newspaper comic strip? The local paper actually carried it back in 1978, both dailies and Sundays. Don't think it was widely syndicated, unfortunately.

We had Goulart & Kane's Star Hawks too, which was just amazing. That paper's been dead since the late 1980s but it had the best comics page I've ever seen.

Woah, in all my years I never knew that a Sword of Shannara comic strip existed. Wild.