The Reader’s Nook - The N&G Book Thread

I still keep meaning to do a download of all the books I've read since lockdown (maybe later this week), but I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and...I do not get the hype. The initial setup is great and presented pretty well, but then the book just focuses on delivering the initial premise of "what if superintelligent spiders?" Then the book proceeds to explain the development of an intelligent spider society. Those sections are a bit dry but are still interesting for the audacity of what the author is trying to pull off. Unfortunately, the human characters are incredibly thin, boring, and the evil ones are cartoonishly evil. At a certain point you realize that the culture clash the book's promising is being withheld for the closing passages, and the whole thing feels really inevitable.

It's not bad. I'd give it a C+; coulda been a B/B+ for a book 200 pages shorter. Between this and the Sanderson I've read, I think I just hate worldbuilding for its own sake. I need story or characters too.

And now I'm diving into Post Captain by Patrick O'Brien, which feels like the opposite; the book is entirely carried by its characters. O'Brien is really letting the Austen fan in himself come out, as within 10 pages of the book's opening peace is declared and our protagonists go off to the countryside and spend their days fox hunting and pitching woo with the locals.
 
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I'm going to meet my goal to read/listen to fewer books this year than in recent years... but mainly because working from home has killed my main audiobook-listening commute time.
 
Bull Shannon said:
And now I'm diving into Post Captain by Patrick O'Brien, which feels like the opposite; the book is entirely carried by its characters. O'Brien is really letting the Austen fan in himself come out, as within 10 pages of the book's opening peace is declared and our protagonists go off to the countryside and spend their days fox hunting and pitching woo with the locals.
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I’ve been reading Master and Commander with my brother in law and...yeah, the characters are a real delight.
 
Spooky Book Season began this year with Max Brooks' Devolution, which was decidedly not spooky. Then we moved on to The Tommyknockers, which truly is King's coke novel; it has its moments, but those moments are nestled between backstory digressions (we don't need to know why the town's named what it's named, Steve) and paranoid rambling (the main character spends a lot of time thinking about how he should do something about things). Next up is Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind, which I'm quite looking forward to.
 
2nd book from Literati’s book club arrived today! I subbed to Susan Orlean’s private collection club, but there are several other luminaries with individual clubs through Literati.

This is the second month and they’ve done custom slip covers for the books (wasn’t available for the first month). The bookmark and write up is nice, but the Literati app is where this club shines. Book club discussion with not only other readers but also Susan Orlean (who stays pretty active in the discussion) as well as an AMA with the author. Worth the price IMO.

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Leave the World Behind was enjoyably and infuriatingly ambiguous.

Read Wuthering Heights for the first time over the last couple weeks; it's quite good. Gothic stuff is always surprisingly vivid, even if the prose/sensibility is nothing I can relate to. The Goodreads reviews are amazing, as a lot of people were expecting romance.

Now I'm already 1/3 through Susanna Clarke's Piranesi after just a day; it's really good, a very enjoyable but smart read.
 
Bull Shannon said:
Leave the World Behind was enjoyably and infuriatingly ambiguous.

Read Wuthering Heights for the first time over the last couple weeks; it's quite good. Gothic stuff is always surprisingly vivid, even if the prose/sensibility is nothing I can relate to. The Goodreads reviews are amazing, as a lot of people were expecting romance.

Now I'm already 1/3 through Susanna Clarke's Piranesi after just a day; it's really good, a very enjoyable but smart read.
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I've had a hard copy of Piranesi for weeks. I will likely read it after I finish Jacob Goldstein's Money.

I love love loved Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
 
kvetcha said:
I've had a hard copy of Piranesi for weeks. I will likely read it after I finish Jacob Goldstein's Money.

I love love loved Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
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I was merely "keen" on Jonathan Strange, so you might be excited to know I've been pulled much further in by Piranesi; it's really great to have such a relatively short book bursting with so much imagination. I really can't think of anything like it.
 
Bull Shannon said:
I was merely "keen" on Jonathan Strange, so you might be excited to know I've been pulled much further in by Piranesi; it's really great to have such a relatively short book bursting with so much imagination. I really can't think of anything like it.
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I think a lot of Jonathan Strange, moment to moment, felt merely good, but I couldn't help but be blown away by the insane imagination of the thing taken as a whole. The footnotes!

Can't wait.
 
I started reading Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. I’ve never read any Tolstoy, so I thought it would be a short and sweet introduction to his writing. And he is an engaging writer- it’s amazing how few words he needs to draw these characters and make you feel like you’re right there on the train with them.

But, the things he has his characters say about women and Jewish people are pretty horrendous, and those things appear to be, like, the main thrust of the whole book so far. Has anyone read this? Does it go anywhere? It says a lot that this book is so short and so well-written, but I’m not sure I can read much more of it.
 
Bull Shannon said:
I was merely "keen" on Jonathan Strange, so you might be excited to know I've been pulled much further in by Piranesi; it's really great to have such a relatively short book bursting with so much imagination. I really can't think of anything like it.
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Piranesi is tapping into a deep sense of sublime mystery that I haven’t felt in a long time.
 
Bull Shannon said:
Heh heh. It's good stuff! I'm still ~40 pages out from the end and will probably finish it out tonight.
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The experience very much reminded me of how I felt as a child reading The Magician’s Nephew, so the book’s eventual overt references/allusions to that story were absolutely delightful to me.
 
Now circling back to read The Ladies of Grace Adieu before...I dunno, either Post Captain or The Secret Commonwealth.
 
Halfway through David Mitchell’s latest Utopia Avenue and really enjoying it like I have with pretty much everything he’s done.

It would be a perfect choice for a N&G book club as it revolves around a band trying to break through the rock scene in late 60’s London.
 
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