Weekend reading roundup (13 Feb 2017)

[nanila]

How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

[nanila]

I did indeed start Chris Mullin's Hinterland. It is thus far an engaging memoir of a life in politics.

[sunflowerinrain]

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.

I'd started it a few weeks ago and put it aside twice, but this weekend took it up again and after a few pages was hooked: so hooked that I wanted to continue with the series immediately, and only just managed to restrain my credit card.

The mystery is intriguing though it's not an easy read, especially if you try to follow the weird but fortunately unexplored physics. The social engineering is quite scary, and the portrayal of memory manipulation is the stuff of nightmares.

The central character is said to be modelled on Arsène Lupin, but I kept thinking Hercule Flambeau: the names, of course, but I suspect that Flambeau was also partly based on Lupin. Le Flambeur is an appealing hero in spite of his flaws.

[nekhbet_love]

I went to archive.org and found a book written in the 1800s about a little village that was the birthplace of some of my ancestors. It is so interesting! Written in Spanish, Historia de la villa de Valls (a town in the Mediterranean area)

[fairytalewitch]

I finished reading Deadline by Mira Grant. The first book of the trilogy, Feed, psychologically traumatized me a bit so I was dragging my heels with Deadline. But my husband read Feed and was waiting for me to finish Deadline so I had to. It was every bit as amazing as Feed but not quite such an emotional shock.

[nou]

Since last report, I have read:

• Mr Campion and Others by Margery Allingham. This was a recommendation from sunflowerinrain after I asked for suggestions to get into the Albert Campion books. It’s a collection of short stories, which wasn’t exactly what I was after as reading matter, but it worked very well as an introduction. I have a couple of the novels on my to-read pile now.
• Galactic Empires edited by Neil Clarke. More short stories, but this time SF. This was... OK? The Ann Leckie and Greg Egan stories were both very much to my taste, and so of course I’d read them before. It was good to have a prompt to re-read them, though (for, I think, the third or fourth time in the case of Egan). The stories by John Barnes and Paul Berger were both new to me, and I enjoyed them though would be unlikely to re-read. The Neal Asher one was very Neal Asher, the Yoon Ha Lee one was very Yoon Ha Lee, and the Kristine Kathryn Rusch one was very Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The Robert Silverberg story was an excuse to make beautiful descriptions of alien landscapes (i.e. very Robert Silverberg). The one by Robert Charles Wilson started off so creepy (as in male-gaze creepy, not haunted-house creepy) that I didn’t read it. Steve Rasnik Tem’s was interesting enough for me to want to seek out more by the same author, though this particular story wasn’t one I’d read again. I liked the one by Naomi Novik, and Ruth Nestvold’s was interesting though I’d have liked to have had more acknowledgement that gender doesn’t have to be binary.
• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, recommended by nanila. I liked it a lot and have already bought the next few in the series.
• Volume 9 of The Comfortable Courtesan by Madame C- C-. I love this series and can’t wait for Volume 10.
• The Red Abbey Chronicles: Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff. I’m really surprised I liked this, because it’s Young Adult (YA) and I normally find YA annoyingly over-simplified. (I hadn’t actually realised it was YA when I bought it.) This was not over-simplified! It was a bit too short for my taste, though. I’ll probably give the next one in the series a go once it’s out in English.