Weekend Reading Roundup (02 October 2017)

[nanila]

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

Comments

[bonnefois]

Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong
I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't) Making The Journey From "What Will People THink" To "I Am Enough" by Brene Brown, PHD LMSW (audiobook)
The Things You Can Only See When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim (audiobook)

[nanila]

I finished The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross, which was good fun and if anything made more sense than the current state of British politics without the intervention from horrors beyond the stars.

I started, and am about halfway through, Maria Alyokhina's Riot Days which is a terrible and wonderful account of her dissident action and subsequent prison sentence.

[fred_mouse]

Not quite the weekend, but last night I finished a book! 'Twas 'Rosemary and Rue' (October Daye, book 1) by Seanan Maguire, and I've been reading it over the last two months. I have book two, but I'm struggling with the motivation to read it, because Maguire appears to have subscribed to the plot design school that ramps up the suspense by hitting the protagonist harder each time, and there is only so much of that that worked in this book, so another one might be too much.

I also finished another one late in the last week, which had been on the bedside table even longer. It was a teen supernatural romance called 'Die for Me' which I kind of enjoyed (and am glad I persevered to find out what the supernatural details were, because I was So Wrong) but won't be keeping. I cannot suspend disbelief sufficiently to believe that a pair of teenagers have found their forever partners, no matter how in character that (potentially erroneous) thought process might actually be.

Returned to Mars

[ed_rex]

On a whim, I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars from my shelves the other day, dusted it off, and suddenly found myself about two thirds of the way through it. Probably for the tenth(ish) time.

One of these days I'm going to do a major write-up of the entire trilogy, but for now I'll just say that Robinson managed at least two really neat tricks. He beautifully subverted the Heroic (almost always) Man trope at the heart of way too much science fiction (I'm not giving away too much in noting that the book's most charismatic character is killed in the book's prologue), while building an admirably complex society that no one is in control of, or even has a handle on. And he makes the long hard slog of politics interesting. How many other epic trilogies include not just one, but two, constitutional conventions?

[heliopausa]

The weekend... it was a blur. But just now I've read several friends-list entries here and on LJ. :)

[singloom]

Read "Dramalama" by E. Lockhart about two friends who enrol in a Summer Drama camp and all the friendship, rivalry and drama that unfolds. There's also themes of discovering yourself when even your dreams might be somewhat different in reality.