In late February/early March, when everything was juuust starting to fall apart, I read a lovely book that enveloped me in a comfy fantasy world, much like the warm honey that is one of its motifs. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern’s sophomore novel, tells the story of… well, it tells a good number of stories. The throughline is Zachary, graduate student and son of a fortune teller, who is pulled inexorably towards The Starless Sea, a mysterious land full of stories, every story, all the stories.
Each of the book’s sections alternates chapters between Zachary and another text, often a storybook he has found. While it first seems like these are exposition dumps or thematically-appropriate asides, in the end it all weaves together to be a meditation on love, narrative, and the nature of stories. At its core, it is also a romance. Here is one example of an interleaved text, which should give you a good idea of whether you want to read the other pages; click through to see the end:
?
(from The Starless Sea by @erinmorgenstern) pic.twitter.com/xxfmuit7ue
— ꧁Tynan꧂ (@TynanPants) February 22, 2020
Looking at reviews to jog my memory, now, I’m seeing that some readers found it weird, pretentious, and too intertextual. But I won’t let that stop me! Besides, I have a feeling there are more than a few weird, pretentious lit-crit types here. I can see where the reviewers are coming from, though. And it does take a little work, as with any non-linear narrative. So if you find such things off-putting… you have been warned. I’ll file this one under “it’s not for everyone, but it is for me.”
Consider this a recommendation thread for all your book, TV, movie, etc. needs! I’ve been watching Bosch, which one of you yokels recommended, and it’s pretty good. Going to start Homeland and Upload soon. What about you?
J. Squid
The Starless Sea is even better than you say. If you like that sort of thing. I love that sort of thing and the extraordinary writing only enhances the sort of thing that this is that I love.
schrodingers_cat
Homeland goes downhill after season 1, becomes more and more improbable as the seasons go on.
Miss Bianca
So, speaking of “some readers found it weird, pretentious, and too intertextual”, I have started Neal Stephenson’s Anathem again, and this time I *swear* I’ll make it the several hundred pages till the actual plot kicks in!
Actually, I am only doing it as a labor of love – my pal D insists that this book was written for me, and I’m running out of excuses (and other books).
ETA: All snark aside, I really do appreciate Stephenson’s writing – I just have found this one hard going for some reason.
Dorothy A. Winsor
We’re watching Bosch too.
I listened to The Night Circus back when I was driving a lot. It’s a good book. I know Morgenstern distantly, ie someone I know is good friends with her and we once belonged to the same writer board
Glidwrith
My apologies for an OT at the top of a thread, but I’m almost never around when a fresh one opens.
Yesterday, I think, one of our Australian Jackals said the Australian schools had done their homework on how to safely re-open (e.g. spacing, air flow patterns, etc) and succeeded but did not link to anything published. My Google-fu failed and Mr. Glidwrith is intimately involved in planning for student safety, so this is a topic of great interest.
Can the hive mind help find these Australian studies?
Thanks!
Frankensteinbeck
This looks like a good thread to brag. An industry magazine spilled the beans: My friend Dana will probably have a movie made of her comic Phoebe And Her Unicorn. Watching her get more and more famous has been a treat. I mean, I’m jealous as Hell, but it’s a kind of jealousy where it doesn’t interfere with me being thrilled for her.
joel hanes
John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting is amazing, but will require you to dive down fifty google ratholes to understand everything he’s doing. Starting, perhaps, with the history of one of the royal families of Byzantium. Also Mithraism. Thence English and Welsh histories, and on and on.
Highest recommendation, but only for a certain kind of reader.
Ford’s work went out of print, but is being re-published this year. He used to be a regular and glorious commenter at the Nielsen-Hayden’s blog, Making Light.
frosty
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches. Quanah was the last chief, son ofa Comanche and a kidnapped white girl*. A fierce tribe and the best light cavalry on the continent. Finally defeated when the buffalo were slaughtered. Parker lived into the 1900s.
* Essentially the plot of The Searchers.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: anathem is actually my favorite of his! But the first 50-75 pages are a horrible slog. Took me a year to force my way through them. A week to finish.
p.a.
Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes
by John Costello
cope
I watched the first episode of Padma Lakshmi’s solo show on HULU this afternoon. Called “Taste The Nation”, each episode is only 30 minutes long. In each episode she goes to a different region of the US to sample cuisine brought to this country from foreign lands. Seeing as how Food Network has become the Guy Fieri (whom I now cannot stomach) Network, this is a welcome alternative.
frosty
I now have a list of over a dozen shows to binge, haven’t started any of them yet… well, except for Jay Leno’s Garage. Last one I saw he was driving a TR-3 like one I used to own. I sold it in ‘79 for $800. His was cherried out, $39,600. Mine wasn’t, LOL.
PJ
If you are searching for a long 19th century novel about the bubonic plague in 17th century Milan, which is more interested in the details of brigandry, religious life, bread riots, government and public réponse to the plague, and interesting minor characters who move the story along rather than the titular star-crossed lovers (who aren’t terribly interesting), then I recommend Manzoni’s The Betrothed.
TheOtherHank
I love Neal Stephenson, but some of his books are difficult. I put down Seveneves because his extra long macguffin at the beginning was too depressing. And Fall feels too much like he’s crawled up his own navel. Though, it has given me a theory about Enoch. Anathem is more fun as an audiobook.
Bruuuuce
@joel hanes: : I have not read that one, but I’d read anything by John M. Ford, even if the copy was a blurred handwritten fifth-generation transcription on wet toilet paper in Hebrew characters but using the English pronunciation
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
If you’re reading Anathem for the plot, you’re missing the point. It’s really about the setting at least as much as the plot, and large parts of the plot exist only to show off the world building. I can totally understand why somebody might find reading that a chore.
joel hanes
@Miss Bianca:
about page 128, IIRC.
Hold on to your hat.
Not my favorite of his books, but better than it starts.
OTOH, I’m someone who slogged through the entire Baroque cycle, and found most of it enjoyable …
PJ
@Frankensteinbeck: “Probably” – don’t count on the check until the first day of shooting.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
Has anything happened on optioning the Please Don’t Tell My Parents… series? It seems like it really needs to get made into some kind of TV series.
dmsilev
@Miss Bianca: I read that once. It was a slog, but worth it in the end. Seveneves, by contrast, I found to be bloated and self-indulgent. Finished it, but barely.
TaMara (HFG)
I used my 7 day free trial of HBOMax to watch an episode of Perry Mason. I will probably find a way to watch them all after they have all dropped. I really liked it. Hope the future episodes hold up.
I’d considered getting HBOMax for a few months (dropping Netflix for a while) but they don’t have a ROKU app and their HULU interface is unwatchable. And I refuse to pay $15 a month to watch on my computer.
Besides, I’ll be giving up Netflix for a while to get Disney+ so I can watch Hamilton on the day it drops.
Major Major Major Major
@dmsilev: I liked the first 2/3 of Seveneves well enough. Clunky characters but a ripping good yarn. Shame about the last part, which I’ve basically blocked out of my memory.
Major Major Major Major
Oh, I finally got the galleys for the anthology I will have five stories in. Hopefully it’s out soon!
frosty
If you’re a fan of the blues, Up Jumped the Devil: the Real Life of Robert Johnson. Two guys spent 50 years researching his life and interviewing everyone they could find. including his sister. Finally wrote it up. Everything you think you know about him is wrong.
dmsilev
Not something that we can watch anytime soon, but Apple is filming Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and they just released a teaser. Due out sometime next year. Hope it’s good; the books are a seminal SF work.
zhena gogolia
@PJ: Sounds great. I own it in Italian because it was a beautiful old edition in Whitlock’s, but my Italian isn’t good enough. Is there a translation you recommend?
I’ve been binge-reading (re-reading, of course) Jane Austen. She was such an incredible genius. In between we watch adaptations. The very best is Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds, although I also love the Colin Firth P&P.
dmsilev
@Major Major Major Major: I wasn’t a huge fan of the first part either, once I realized that it was an inevitable and literal death march converging on the book title.
Edit: Also on Stephenson, Reamde was enjoyable, but again dear lord somebody get that guy an editor who can pare things down a bit.
spudgun
So, let me get this out of the way now, I’m weird – I love cookbooks, despite not being able to cook worth a damn. I especially like them with a bit of narrative, you know, stories. So apart from rereading some Pratchett and Gaiman, I am reading My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichl, My Paris Kitchen by David Lebovitz, Slices of Life by Leah Eskin and Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger.
Re: Neal Stephenson, I’m a bit of a newbie to SF/F, so I’m a little scared of his writing – I have Cryptonomicon and the first couple of books from the Baroque cycle (they were on sale!) but I haven’t cracked them open yet because I’m afraid they might be way over my head.
joel hanes
@dmsilev:
Seveneves is the only Stephenson I started and did not finish
Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash favorites.
zhena gogolia
I was hoping to find Steeplejack. Episode 2 of Grantchester last night was much better than Episode 1. Maybe they’ll get their mojo back.
spudgun
@zhena gogolia: Oh, I LOVE the Persuasion with Ciaran Hinds! I have it on dvd. I also just watched the Keira Knightley P&P on dvd last night – nothing tops the Firth/Ehle version, but that one comes pretty close.
Austen is an evergreen favorite!
Elizabelle
This seems so pedestrian, but I am enjoying John LeCarre’s Agent Running in the Field. He takes mucho thwacks at Trump and Brexit, for one thing.
Haven’t read his earlier work, maybe one novel way too long ago to remember much … but might have to read in sequence now.
Erin in Flagstaff
If you are looking for short reads, I recommend Martha Wells “Murderbot Diaries” novellas. I just finished the second one and enjoyed the heck out of it. I can’t help but like Murderbot and its desire to stay away from people and binge-watch all kinds of soap-opera-ish media. He/she/it is relatable.
Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major: Oh, good, because I’m between pp 50-75 right now, lol!
Roger Moore
@spudgun:
Stephenson’s work can be a bit challenging for a number of reasons. I don’t think “going over your head” is the main one I’d be worried about. He spends a lot of time explaining stuff, to the point that the story getting bogged down with exposition is more of a problem. And his books tend to start slowly without a big clue of where things are going, so the early chapters can be a bit of a slog. If you want to get a feeling for him, you might want to try one of his shorter books like Snowcrash or Diamond Age. I might even recommend The Big U, which is earlier and less well known, but definitely less of a slog than some of his later works.
TMinSJ
The Murberbot Diaries (currently 5 in the series) by Martha Wells
I have never loved books so much, and I love books. Speaks so clearly to those of us that can self-isolate long term with no issues (aka hard-core introverts).
Major Major Major Major
@dmsilev: REAMDE would have been a very solid first novel from an up and coming genre writer, I’ll give it that.
cope
@frosty: I watched that a couple of weeks ago when binging music documentaries on Netflix. That and “20 Feet From Stardom” were my two favorite offerings.
sempronia
I thought The Starless Sea was a mess. I enjoyed The Night Circus enough to buy the physical book, but Starless was very unsatisfying. Lots of cool stories I wanted to know the ending of, never got any of them.
I have recently enjoyeda debut novel called The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix Harrow. It’s also about doors leading to other worlds, and coincidentally I was reading it at the same time as Starless. Gonna keep my eyes open for more by Harrow.
Miss Bianca
@TheOtherHank: I wanted to find it as an audio book! I used to love listening to audio books as I was driving all over the place. Much more stay-at-home now.
@joel hanes: In fact, the other problem with Stephenson on audio book is abridgement! Listened to vol. 1 of The Baroque Cycle as an audio book and LOVED it – but then I’d get to these patches where the narrator would say something like, “here follows a long conversation between Hook, Newton and Pepys on x topics” and I’d be laughing my ass off thinking that Stephenson had actually written that summary and stuck it in, but no – it was the audiobook people faithfully recording what they’d cut out! Then I went from being amused to SO MAD!
Gonna tackle the whole Baroque Cycle sometime after Anathem – goodbye, summer!
Percysowner
I’m a fantasy lover so my recs are from that genre. For a TV series The Magicians. It deals with trauma and growing up and, of course, magic. The first 4 seasons are on Netflix and season 5 will get there eventually. It’s well worth it.
For a book Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novack. I’m having a hard time describing it, but I loved it. It’s a very feminist book that also deals with Antisemitism.
oatler.
All I can do is recommend the complete works of Gene Wolfe and John Crowley.
Miss Bianca
@frosty: Oh, musician biographies! my ex was a huge music biography fan, so I got the habit from him. I’ve heard of this one, will put it on my list!
spudgun
@Roger Moore: Yes, it was suggested to me before that I should start with Snowcrash…I will have to check it out.
I did read a sample chapter from Quicksilver before I bought it, so I’m hoping I can get into it more. But I bought Cryptonomicon without checking first, so that’s on me if it doesn’t work out.
Kristine
@Elizabelle: I’m a huge fan of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, but his first couple Smiley books are shorter, almost novella. A Murder of Quality is pretty much straight whodunnit, but Call for the Dead contains more of the espionage background. Quick reads, but the seeds are there.
Ruviana
@spudgun: If you like cookbooks with stories in them you’d probably like all of Ruth Reichl’s books. I also like memoir/cookbooks and there are lots. I can recommend Stirred by a woman who had a brain anurysm and cooked her way slowly back to health and I have before me The Comfort Food Diaries for something similar. I usually find cool recipes in them too!
Kristine
@Percysowner: Loved The Magicians. One of my favorite series finales.
Miss Bianca
@spudgun: If you can find it – copies are rare and expensive, but it might be online – try The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Those of us “of a certain age” know it, if we know it at all, because of its infamous “pot brownie” recipe (actually in there, sort of, but known as “The White Cookie of Marrakesh”, thank you very much). It is, however, far more a chronicle of her fabulous French dinner parties with Gertrude Stein and their fabulous Jazz Age guests, French and otherwise, with segues into “oh, and I cooked *this*”, and then the recipes. A fun and fascinating read.
And one of these days I’ll try to make the White Cookies of Marrakesh.
p.a.
@spudgun: MFK Fisher With Bold Knife and Fork. I’m not alone in considering it a book of essays rather than a cookbook.
Kristine
@TMinSJ: Read the first one, loved it, and have the rest in my tbr pile. I first met Martha at Texas conventions in the mid-90s and I am so happy for her.
Roger Moore
On the TV front, I would strongly recommend anyone who has Netflix watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yes, it’s an animated series aimed solidly at teens, but it’s a remarkable show.
Delk
Anathem took me forever and multiple starts to read. Majorx4 praised it so many times I finally gave it my all.
Suspects on AcornTV is pretty good. It’s an improvised cop procedural. The actors spent several weeks learning how to be cops. The get a basic outline of the story and go for it.
Yesterday was the second anniversary of the passing of my sweet Gav. He was an outgoing and good boy.
Kristine
A shout-out for Gideon the Ninth, debut novel by NZ writer Tamsyn Muir, which has been blowing doors off–it’s been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula. Fascinating, complex world introduced without a lot of explanation, so you may feel a little at sea at times. But stick with it. The magic system is way cool, and I loved the main character.
Phylllis
@spudgun: Not really a cookbook per se, but Jacque Pepin’s memoir The Apprentice might be up your alley. Pepin’s delightful personality and love of good food and cooking shine through on every page.
Miss Bianca
@Roger Moore:
@spudgun:
Zodiac is one hell of a fun, fast read, and I can’t *believe* no one’s turned it into a movie yet! Ecoterrorist comedy thriller, what’s not to love? *Way* more fun than, for example, The Monkey Wrench Gang, maybe because it doesn’t take itself quite so seriously.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Just watched the new Spike Lee flick Da 5 Bloods on Netflix. Highly recommend. There was too much violence for my wife’s taste, but I have a higher tolerance for violence as an integral part of the story-telling. It’s one I’m going to think about for a while because I feel like there were many more layers there than the surface one, a group of Vietnam vets going back to Vietnam to take care of some unfinished business. But I feel like I’m not smart enough to sort all those layers out.
One of those layers is that the character of Paul, played by Delroy Lindo, is a MAGAt. I read that he hated that aspect of his character and begged Lee to change it, but Lee was adamant. It’s important to the story but I don’t get why.
Another is that all of the characters, who in 2020 are all of course about 70 years old, play themselves in the 1971 flashbacks. No de-aging. They’re wearing their 2020 faces. I feel like this is important but again don’t know why.
Also I caught a couple of homages to other films, like Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (I think) Apocalypse Now, but I’m sure I missed many others. Does Spike Lee usually do homages?
spudgun
@Ruviana: Oh my yes, I also have Garlic and Sapphires and her latest, Save Me the Plums! I just love her writing. The rest of her memoirs are on my wishlist.
RSA
My library book club chose The Starless Sea way back before the quarantine, and I totally enjoyed it starting out. Unfortunately, my schedule was (and is) pretty busy, so I had to break up my reading, with several days between revisits, and that made it difficult. Some of the clever scenes where people aren’t identified but you should recognized them by their description? What with the time-shifting, I lost track of who was doing what, where, and when. So it was a little disappointing. The book was well-written enough that I put that down to me, though, not the author
ETA: On a different topic, I was visiting a former Gawker site for a discussion of Ursula K. Leguin, and I mentioned having liked her earlier novels, The Beginning Place and Rocannon’s World. Another commenter recommended checking out the sequels to the latter, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, and so now I’m reading through an omnibus of the three novels.
spudgun
@Miss Bianca: Thanks for the rec! I will take a look at ABE books for that title—
Miss Bianca
@Delk: Aw, sweet Gav. I remember you telling us about him. Has it really been two years already? : (
Red Cedar
The Starless Sea!!! I read it in January and loved it so much I started over at the beginning as soon as I finished it. Gorgeous, amazing, wonderful book!!!
And in other news: our Golden Retriever Tamar, who ate a bowlful of grapes on Thursday, spent 48 hours at the emergency vet but is now home and fine and all is well. I’d posted about it Thurs night, and thanks so much to all who sent good wishes and said kind things. It was a very stressful couple of days and we’re so glad she’s ok.
sphouch
For books, I usually recommend something from a friend of mine from the Air Force – he has written a fantasy style series called the Zarryiostrom. Steve Plagman is a good fantasy writer and Nene is an outstanding fantasy artist.
For something a little more rustic, a friend of mine from law school is the author of The Ghosts of Varner Creek, which is a good story about facing the past.
Finally, because I like historical fiction, I confess to being keen on David L. Robbins books, including War of the Rats, the Last Citadel, and (not war) Scorched Earth.
Mathguy
@Miss Bianca: It takes awhile to really see things in Anathem starting to coalesce.
spudgun
@p.a.: I haven’t read it yet, but I have The Art of Eating in my book queue, as well as a book of essays by Elizabeth David.
So many books, so little time!
Mathguy
@Kristine: It should have won the Nebula. Hope it wins the Hugo. Most interesting thing I’ve read in years (except, perhaps, The Fifth Season).
FelonyGovt
I really like Neal Stephenson but I’m not a big fan of plowing through archaic language patterns. So I’ve never tackled the Baroque Series, but I do love Cryptonomicon and Reamde.
Want a really dopey, fun movie? Check out Puerto Ricans in Paris on Netflix.
ETA I LOVED (books) The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich and The Other Americans by Laila Lalami. These are probably “chick” books, at least according to Mr. FelonyGovt.
spudgun
@Phylllis: I have it! ? It’s in the queue…
Frosty Fred
@p.a.: Anything by MFK Fisher. Anything by Ruth Reichl, up to and including their grocery shopping lists.
Kristine
@Red Cedar: So glad to hear the good news about Tamar.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
In terms of books, I have a huge collection of stuff I bought in used bookstores over the years (I can’t pass one without going in, and I can’t go in and come out empty handed). For some reason I don’t always read the stuff I buy. I’ve promised myself to remedy that while on lockdown.
One of those was The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction [Magazine], Vol 2. Another was a collection of stories by N. K. Jemison, who I learned in her bio had the unprecedented feat of winning the Hugo for best novel 3 years in a row. Both of those made me realize that I’m kind of out of touch with the current generation of talent in the Fantasy & SF categories and have a lot of catching up to do.
Despite the backlog, new books are also coming in. I signed up for a mystery book-a-month thing with an independent bookstore we love in a beach town we love, just to throw them some support. From them I’m reading Joseph Schneider’s, One Day You’ll Burn, which I believe is a first novel.
Mathguy
@Roger Moore: Seconded. I’m through the first two seasons. It’s fun and has quite a bit unexpected darkness, especially with Ba Sing Se.
debbie
@Phylllis:
Also Julia Child’s My Year in France.
piratedan
A few shoutouts… film an indy titled Cosmos…. re first contact story…
For your reading plasure… Becky Chambers has an engaging series of stories set in a unique fture universe…
For music… from the archives of the power pop neverweres.. i would offer the Dum Dum Girls, they sound like a cross between The Records and Mazzy Star
Mike in NC
We really enjoyed the HBO reboot of Perry Mason, with Matthew Rhys as the famous trial lawyer. Here he’s a seedy private eye barely making ends meet in 1931 L.A.
Miss Bianca
@Percysowner: Have you read NN’s Uprooted? Honestly, one of the best recent fantasy books I’ve read in *years*. I liked the Temeraire books that I’d read, but that one just seemed like such a step up in her game. I still think the opening paragraph is one of the best I’ve ever read in terms of totally sucking me in.
Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.
That last sentence was a LOL for me.
Let’s see, so I’ve got Spinning Silver, Up Jumped the Devil, and something else to add to Mt To-Be-Read…gotta go back up the thread…
schrodingers_cat
@Mike in NC: Matthew Rhys was the best part of the The Americans.
spudgun
@debbie: Yup, got that too…related: I only bought the dvd of “Julie and Julia” so I could fast-forward through all the Julie bits and watch only the Julia story!
Wyatt Salamanca
Major,
As a lifelong bibliophile, i hope this kind of thread could possibly become a semi-regular feature of this blog.
I have to start with my favorite novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
My favorite books of recommended reading are 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich https://www.1000bookstoread.com and Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels by David Pringle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Fiction:_The_100_Best_Novels
For science fiction short stories, I recommend Asimov’s Mysteries and Blue Champagne by John Varley.
frosty
@Erin in Flagstaff: I agree. The Murderbot Diaries were a fun read.
frosty
@cope: It’s a show? I was talking about the Robert Johnson bio. Also, 20 Feet is one of my faves. Have you seen The Wrecking Crew, Muscle Shoals or Laurel Canyon? Also good behind the scenes music documentaries.
Redshift
I also ripped through The Murderbot Diaries. Sooo good!
frosty
@Miss Bianca: I’ve read Keef’s autobiography Life. What else do you recommend?
Redshift
@oatler.:
I love John Crowley. Little, Big is my absolute favorite book.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: Must read all. Then read all again. Then become obsessive. Just do it.
spudgun
@frosty: I believe cope is talking about the Netflix film Devil at the Crossroads…
I loved 20 Feet From Stardom! As a singer in my previous life (different genre, but still), I could really relate to the struggles those backup singers went through.
And I finally saw The Wrecking Crew a couple of weeks ago on Hulu – I had NO IDEA that Glen Campbell was a member! And no idea they were so involved with Pet Sounds. That doc was a real eye-opener.
TaMara (HFG)
@Phylllis: Oh, I am now putting that on my list. I love him.
Major Major Major Major
@Wyatt Salamanca: we’ve had a number of threads like this, mine are under this handy category https://balloon-juice.com/category/books/recommended-reading/
PJ
@zhena gogolia: I read the mid-20th century Archibald Colquhoun translation, available in hardback from Everyman for under $30, because, when I bought it in April, the newer Penguin translation by Bruce Penman was completely sold out everywhere, and going for over $45 as a used paperback. I haven’t seen the Penman, so I can’t compare them, but I thought the Colquhoun was serviceable. Manzoni is required reading in high school in Italy in part because of the fineness of his language, but there were no beautiful sentences in Colquhoun’s translation.
dnfree
The book that has stuck with me this summer is “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers. It’s stunning and relevant now even though it was published in I think 1940. The main character is a deaf-mute, but his interactions with various other people (who think he uniquely understands them) is the heart of the book. The book has imperfect characters concerned about civil rights for blacks, the plight of the working class, and even the lack of options for young women, especially poor young women. There are seeming throwaway lines that are just piercing, and the theme really is inability to communicate. We had seen the movie, which is also good but largely leaves out the social issues.
cope
@spudgun: Yes, thank you for clarifying that, apparently two different productions about Robert Johnson.
I am familiar with “The Wrecking Crew” and “Laurel Canyon” but have yet to see them. I must fix that as well as look up the “Muscle Shoals” title.
James E Powell
@frosty:
Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band.
Barbara
@Elizabelle: @Omnes Omnibus:
Read in sequence. Then read your faves. Then read in sequence again. Watch film versions. Grow impatient. Go back to books and read again. The Perfect Spy imho is the best, but Tinker Tailor is the one that hooked me.
chopper
@Frankensteinbeck:
oh man i love that series. my kids are nuts over it. they’ll plotz when i tell them a movie is coming out
Mary G
@Miss Bianca:
@Major Major Major Major: Another lover of Anathem here.
I am watching Belgravia on Prime, Julian Fellowes’ latest soap opera about rich British people. I can’t focus on anything complex right now.
Wyatt Salamanca
@cope:
@frosty:
Have either of you seen Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band or Joni Mitchell- Both Sides Now: Live at the Isle of Wight Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpLO96_9Qwc?
Robbie Robertson is as impressive a storyteller as he is a songwriter and Joni’s performance at the Isle of Wight is outstanding.
Boussinesque
I just recently picked up Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds, third book in a stand-alone trilogy (the first two are Revenger and Shadow Captain, and I’m enjoying getting back into that. Before that, I had just finished Elysium Fire, and had finally gotten through Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. As far as Reynolds goes, I’ve always appreciated his (somewhat gothic, but always very thorough) world building style, and I’d recommend him to anyone that likes SF on the harder/noir-ish side (although some of the settings have nanotech, so not too hard).
On the nonfiction side, I’ve been reading David Neiwert’s Alt-America, which is good, but I can only handle it in small doses on account of the subject matter being depressing.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Major Major Major Major:
OK, cool thanks for that link and for tonight’s post.
Barbara
@cope: Muscle Shoals is great, although I thought additions by Bono detracted from it. He couldn’t bring himself to openly acknowledge the Black southern experience as the genesis of this amazing musical culture. He kept talking about the power of the earth. The producer who founded the label was white, with a life story out of Faulkner, but the music was not. The highlights for me were scenes with Duane Allman, and Aretha Franklin making the white musicians earn her respect.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara: I should re-read A Perfect Spy. Tinker, Tailor drew me in, but I think Smiley’s People has the strongest hold on me because of that ending.
I’m listening to A Spy Among Friends, Ben McIntyre’s book about Kim Philby, and I keep going to the parallels to Smiley’s world in my mind. I think the biggest difference is that Le Carre’s characters seem to drink a lot less than their real-life inspirations.
Wyatt Salamanca
@dnfree:
Never read this novel, but it’s on my list.
Have you seen the 1968 film adaptation starring Alan Arkin?
His performance won a best actor award from the NY Film Critics Circle.
PJ
@Miss Bianca: two of my favorite musician memoirs: 1) This Little Ziggy, by Martin Newell, about his time in the glam band Plod, which is hilarious and more like the everyday life of most musicians, which is to say, failure; and Here Comes Everybody, by James Fearnley, about his time in the Pogues, which is erudite and funny and sad, tracing the parabolic arc of the band and Shane MacGowan’s talent.
Also on the funny and horrific end of things, Songs They Never Play on the Radio, by James Young, about touring with Nico in her latter years, will cure you of ever wanting to be in a band with an icon with a major drug habit.
Of rock bios, Trouble Boys by Bob Mehr, about the Replacements is fantastic, about four self-destructive kids from Minneapolis without a high school diploma or driver’s license between them, but one genius songwriter, who somehow managed to get out of the basement and make some of the best music of the ’80’s before imploding. Shakey, by Jimmy McDonough, about Neil Young, is also great , and a little too revealing for Neil’s taste; after giving him dozens of hours of interviews, Neil sued to stop the book from being published.
And I also highly recommend Respect Yourself, by Robert Gordon, putting the incredible history of Memphis’ Stax Records in the context of the civil rights and black power movements of the ’60’s and ’70’s.
Steeplejack
@TaMara (HFG), @Mike in NC:
I watched Perry Mason last night, and for me the jury’s still out. I went in adamantly refusing to see it as a “reboot,” and it’s not. They lifted some character names and pre-war Los Angeles as a starting point, and that’s about it. Actually, what it feels like is a reboot of J.J. Gittes, the seedy P.I. from Chinatown.
The first episode was interesting—enough to go on with, anyway—but it was heavy on “atmosphere,” which raises fears about HBO True Detective syndrome. We’ll see how it goes.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I read all of the McIntyre books, and what is striking is the parallel, and rather damning story he is telling about the Btitish class system. I read an interview with LeCarre where he was asked about the class system, and he said that as bad as Americans might think it is, it’s 10 times worse. Just scathing.
ETA: that interview made it impossible for me to enjoy soaps about upper class British families.
zhena gogolia
@PJ:
I think I read some Calvino in his translation a long time ago.
dnfree
@Wyatt Salamanca: I think that’s the film I referred to. Very well done but naturally left out a lot. That’s what made me want to read the book. The social issues were largely left out of the movie or in muted form.
Edited to add that this is an end-of-depression era book, very clear on the status of African-Americans and the poor.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack:
Did you watch Grantchester? We thought it had improved. But maybe we were just in a bad mood last week. The characters were much more interesting. David Bamber was wonderful, and Dominic Mafham is always good for some smarmy sinisterness.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
Finally a thread in which I have a lot to say! Too much, really, so ….
Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun blew me away, and, in fact, if you like ancient literature (as in the Aeneid) it’s mindblowing in its fidelity to late Roman imperial & Byzantium ideas of destiny, empire, etc. I always got the feeling that he read some sword-and-sorcery books and thought to himself, “but the actual dark ages really were so more complicated than that….”
John Le Carre’s masterpiece is A Perfect Spy. For some reason this book never gets as much press as his other books, probably because it’s written after the books that made his reputation but I think it’s actually his best — and for someone who didn’t live through the cold war, incredibly illuminating to what was really going on.
In the same vein I have to say Asimov’s Foundation trilogy explained Communism to me. I never understood why communists believed in Marx when world events didn’t unfold the way Marx & Lenin said they would until volume 2 of the Foundation trilogy, when Seldon appears and doesn’t talk about the Mule and everyone is bewildered but they stick to the scripted psychohistory anyway.
And all I can contribute to the current debate is that I have spent quarantine going down the rabbithole of Chinese Xianxia. Just as Tolkien drew on pre-Christian England for his Lord of the Rings, Xianxia is rooted in a tradition of Taoist magic, Buddhist cosmology, and mythical Chinese history. So I’m now becoming an expert in bad Taoist magic, the rules of which are set much more by the needs of the plot than by any internal consistency ;-)
I’m reading the novels of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, who writes really complicated BL novels — one of which was sold to a Chinese film studio and can be viewed on Netflix: https://www.vox.com/2020/3/27/21192718/the-untamed-netflix-review-rec-mdzs-cql – and the other of which is still not available as an formal English translation, so I’m reading what seems to be the only complete translation of Heaven’s Official Blessing in someone else’s google drive files.
J R in WV
@Erin in Flagstaff:
I have all the novellas, and the most recently released long novel. After the recent novel came out, I first read all the novellas, which was a good choice.
There is a reason the first novella won a Hugo, and a Nebula. The whole series is a great story of a person becoming, well, a person. Starting from square zero, working their way up to being in love, very slowly.
Would recommend, highly, if Erin in Flagstaff hadn’t already. Really good stuff!
I love Neil Stephenson’s work in general, but Seveneves was not good, not at all. The rest of his work, well, some of it could use an editor, but by and large, wonderful stuff.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Sounds like I ought to rediscover Le Carre. I was reading his Cold War novels while the Cold War was still going full steam and I was working in the defense industry. So we’re talking 30 years now since I’ve read a Le Carre. Kind of stopped reading him, not sure why, when all that shifted drastically, and they started briefing us on espionage from “friendly” countries like France.
Falling Diphthong
@Miss Bianca:
Anathem is my favorite Stephenson novel. Even though it takes 300 pages for the plot to kick in, after 500 pages it’s moving right along at a good clip! A compliment I wouldn’t normally pay a book–I like plot, and stuff happening–but this one the slow start really does pay off down the road.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Just arrived here a few minutes ago. I had dinner with my brother at Sighthound Hall last night, got home late. His family abandoned him to go back to the beach house, so he was feeling poorly. I stayed up late to watch Perry Mason and will catch Grantchester on one of the reruns this week.
Did you see my comment the other day about Morse and his first name?
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack:
Oh, no, what was it? We just watched Deceived by Flight for the 3000th time. Bonus Nathaniel Parker! It’s a superb episode.
LeftCoastYankee
I have a couple of the recommended books in my “queue”, so I’m happy. I loved the Night Circus so am looking forward to the Starless Sea.
I read Stephenson’s Reamde earlier in the spring. Entertaining, but I think I’m very jaded on the techno-libertarian (aka middle-aged cyper-punk) world view.
The Baroque Cycle is my favorite books by him, although I read it a while ago. Cryptonomicon (sp?) as a companion piece was fun and thought provoking.
I remember Anathem as a slow-starter, but worth it.
I’m finishing up the Cartographer series by AC Cobble, and won’t be sure if I can recommend until I do. It’s sort of a fantasy version of the East India trading company, of course with magics. It seems a little too OK with colonialism so far, but that might be the price could lesson in the end? Or bad magic is bad could be the lesson. That would be disappointing, but we’ll see…..
Jean
@Mike in NC: We’ve enjoyed the first episode too. Matt Rhys is the actor from The Americans; he plays the husband. I think this new role suits him well.
I recommend William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows which takes place during the 1918 Flu. Excellent writing. Also by Maxwell–So Long, See You Tomorrow. Maxwell was the fiction editor of the New Yorker for decades.
J R in WV
Also will recommend Charlie Stross. His Laundry Files series is a wonderful SF series, magic, computer science == magic, etc. Amazing stuff.
Also John Varney, and Vernon Vinge. Won’t attempt to detail these guys — but all great!!
Steeplejack
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
“[. . .] really complicated BL novels.”
What is BL?
Amir Khalid
@frosty:
Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, titled Born To Run. Not to be confused with Dave Marsh’s famous biography of Bruce Springsteen, which is titled Born To Run.
PJ
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth was the one book Wolfe always mentioned as an influence on Book of the New Sun, which ended up being a much longer and more complex work.
What is “BL”?
zhena gogolia
@PJ:
Google says
cope
@Wyatt Salamanca: I’ll search those out as well, thank you.
cope
@Barbara: Sounds interesting. I find Bono a bit much to take but there can never be too much Duane or Aretha.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
From Friday night.
Elizabelle
Thanks all for advice re John LeCarre. Shall take it. He is cryptic, which is perfect since the spies are in a hall of mirrors, too. Can see where a second reading would be a pleasure as well.
First novel was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; on the list.
aliasofwestgate
@Mathguy: Welcome to being able to understand about 1000 new memes on the ‘nets. ATLA is a generations’ epic and then some. You now know the meaning of ‘There is no war in Ba Sing Se!” Tumblr still has a ball with that one in general, but then, that phrase has been circulating the internets since it aired during the W’s presidency.
The Joy of that show is that it remains relevant and is fucking awesome so many years later. When i first ran across it channel flipping on a weekend after work on Nick. I thought it was something special (it had literally just started the week before). Seeing it lauded 15 odd years later is amazing, to this day.
PJ
@zhena gogolia: This truly is a full service blog.
frosty
@Barbara: Yes, Aretha’s skepticism about the good ol’ boys ability to back up her soul singing was a good part.
Tom Levenson
I recently read Underland by Robert MacFarlane and found it amazing–great travel writing, profound science writing, and a kind of personal inquiry/memoir I’ve never encountered before. Going to read more of his stuff soon.
Also have really enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders stuff lately. I loved All the Birds in the Sky, and found her more recent The City In the Middle of the Night, while less immediately accessible, to be one of those science fiction/speculative works that keep popping into my thoughts.
Steeplejack
Un-recommendation: my brother, who loved the first two volumes of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, says the last one, The Mirror and the Light, is awful. I was surprised at his vehemence, and we didn’t discuss it, so that’s all I’ve got. Cheap hearsay.
Searcher
Drew Hayes, Rachel Aaron, Dakota Krout, and Charlie Holmberg are all young(-ish) people writing SF&F that isn’t just “elves and wizards and robots”.
(I’m of an age where I spent most of my life reading books written by people 1-3 generations older than me, so I’ve recently made an effort to find stuff written by people my age or younger.)
[EDIT: Christ, Heinlein is 4 generations older than me.]
James E Powell
@Miss Bianca:
I forgot to mention in my earlier comment the very excellent Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. It covers the history of the Fab Four and their families, friends, and associates from their grandparents to the very beginning of their stardom. It’s almost a thousand pages, but it’s mandatory for fans.
Waiting for the second volume of this work can be likened to the same for George R.R. Martin’s Winds of Winter or the next (allegedly final) volume of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
columbusqueen
I’ve been happily binging Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which are absolutely great, & would also recommend Hulu’s Harlots. It’s a reminder that sexual politics haven’t changed much through the centuries.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack:
Yes, love that. Whately has the greatest timing.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack:
Judging from one of the reviews I read, which quoted liberally from it, I think he’s probably right. I bought it anyway. I can’t very well read the first two novels twice and not even look at the third one. But I’m worried.
zhena gogolia
Good night, all.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Night-night. ??
CraigM
If you have HBO and want a sort of sci-fi, SVU-ish cop drama looking at tensions when “immigrants” who are ethnically identical to the current inhabitants arrive in modern day Oslo from 100, 1000, and 10000 years earlier in history, then I would recommend “Beforeigners”. So far there are only 6 subtitled episodes in Norwegian and Norse, hope they do another season. Refreshing to see a show where the cops have to unlock a special cabinet in the squad room to get guns for special circumstances. Occasional full frontal nudity and and killing of small game with rocks. Probably the only show I’ve seen in 10 years that I would recommend.
prostratedragon
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’ve concluded that everybody does; the movies are like a colloquy among the makers going back a long way. Haven’t seen Spike’s new one yet, but reviews suggest you’re right on target.
Jerry
When Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education comes out in September, buy it. A Harry Potter type of setup but turned on its head. Not sure how else to explain it, but I couldn’t put the book down.
CaseyL
@joel hanes: That’s one of the things I love about Ford: he assumed his readers were intelligent and well-read and, if not, they could jolly well go along for the ride and look stuff up later. I was very fortunate to already have a lot of the history The Dragon Waiting references – but even as a history nut, some of it was terra incognita.
No two of Ford’s book are the same. He wrote the seminal, proto-cyberpunk novel (Web of Angels); the two most unusual and celebrated Star Trek novels still legendary for having been published at all (The Final Reflection and How Much for Just the Planet?); and The Last Hot TIme, a gangster novel set in the “Borderlands” universe (where the world of the Fey and our world meet). Plus Growing Up Weightless, a YA coming-of-age novel set on the Moon, where the successful rebellion of the lunar colonies 50 (?) years ago is still reverberating on Earth and Moon.
He was unlike any other writer ever.
As for TV viewing: I have stopped watching TV altogether, but I stream a lot of videos on YouTube.
So I’ve been watching, and highly recommend, “Eons” from PBS: a free and wonderful series of 10- to 15-minute episodes explaining and illustrating the paleolithic world, from the first maybe-life forms on Earth to the age of the Hominids. There are a lot of episodes, and the information is very up to date. Very good hosts, wonderful graphics, and lots of shots of Earth’s continents moving around.
Jerry
For you Le Carre fans, have you read The Looking Glass War? That’s the one that has really stuck with me over the years. Raw, gritty, and the end was a sucker punch. I feel like I should read it again to see if it hits me the same way
prostratedragon
@Barbara:
Then you might enjoy Inspector Lewis. It’s set in Oxford, a follow-on to Inspector Morse, where we pick up around 10 years later with Morse’s DS who has now become an inspector himself. Doesn’t deal as much with the decaying landed gentry as, say, earlier Midsomer Murders, but takes a very dim view of the striving for the new upper classes that the makers see going on at Oxford U. — Lewis, recall, is a “Geordie,” from I guess Northumberland State AM&N or something, so has little patience with it.
joel hanes
@Elizabelle:
I am enjoying John LeCarre’s Agent Running in the Field
Yes, I did too.
But then, I’ve enjoyed every LeCarre I’ve ever read — I used to buy them only in airport bookstores, because they’d have the new one, and it would reliably get me through a flight.
CaseyL
@Jerry: The LeCarre that hit me hardest was The Honourable Schoolboy, the Smiley book between Tinker Tailor and Smiley’s People. I was still a new LeCarre reader, and not expecting things to turn out the way they did.
joel hanes
@Miss Bianca:
I don’t do audiobooks. I’ll sound peevish and arrogant if I explain the reasons, so just take it as a given that I’m peevish and arrogant.
ETA: the digressions were the heart and soul of the Baroque cycle. I didn’t care so much about the progress of half-cocked Jack, or Elizabeth’s little ways of pleasing men, but O! the discussions of wootz steel, the Royal Society, producing phosporus, Leibniz and his monad, Newton’s alchemy, Hooke’s surgical cure for bladder stone, the Tower of London, the Sun King, the London mint, silver mining in the Hartz, etc. etc. etc.
joel hanes
@CaseyL:
I seem to be alone in really liking both The Constant Gardner, and the film made from the book. But I do.
joel hanes
@oatler.:
John Crowley
Little Big !
Aegypt !
prostratedragon
é@Elizabelle:
There was actually at least one Smiley book before The Spy, but no loss to omit it. There’s also a good movie of The Spy with Richard Burton lending his chilly talents. Between the book and movie, that started me on a LeCarré kick through A Perfect Spy which I might have to repeat soon and extend to more of the later ones.
prostratedragon
@CaseyL: That one is good! Don’t know why it isn’t mentioned more, but might be that downbeat ending which also has a kind of moral burden to it as I recall. People are often chewed up and spat out in Le Carré’s novels.
joel hanes
@RSA:
Planet of Exiles is one of my favorite LeGuins.
To see her at her angriest, seek out the novella she wrote for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies, The Word For World Is Forest.
Actually, if you’ve never read Ellison’s Dangerous Visions books, that would be outstanding pandemic reading. Mostly short stories, mostly memorable. Less shocking now than they were almost fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago! I grow old …
Wyatt Salamanca
@Jerry:
Yes, it’s a great novel.
Awhile back, CBS Sunday Morning aired nice profile of him
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kMWSHKddMw
Cowgirl in the Sandi
I loved the Night Circus – such interesting characters and ideas. I was really looking forward to the Starless Sea but I just didn’t find it as compelling. I can remember the names of the characters in NC even though I read it a long time ago, but I can’t remember any character (or actually much of anything) about Starless Sky.
I also love cookbooks, especially those that take me away somewhere else from my boring shelter in place life – like A Culinary Journey in Gascony by Kate Hill and A Kitchen in France by Mimi Thorisson. Yeah – I’m bitter – I was supposed to be on a river cruise in Bordeaux last week – damn virus.
joel hanes
@CaseyL:
[John M. Ford] was unlike any other writer ever.
When 9/11 happened, I was regularly reading the Making Light blog, and in a while he produced this poem, 110 Stories, which I think is genius.
Uncle Omar
Here’s a pair to draw to…Desert Solitaire by Ed Abbey. It drew me to the desert and keeps me here. And, Adventures with Ed, a portrait of Abbey, by Jack Loeffler. Abbey was a cantankerous old fart as a young man and the cantankerosity grew as he aged. A younger version of me enjoyed The Monkey Wrench Gang, but the older version finds it tedious–but occasionally hilarious. Also The Brave Cowboy, made into a film entitled Lonely Are the Brave, starring a much younger Kirk Douglas. Any of Abbey’s anthologies are good for the soul.
CaseyL
@joel hanes: I remember that; I hung out at ML back then, too. And for a few years longer, until their anti-Hillary screeds drove me off.
Have you read “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station”? Pure genius, casting the Arthurians by the types of trains they travel to Court in. (And the last two lines get me every time.) Ford loved trains; they figured prominently in many of his works.
suezboo
@spudgun: As a big Nora Ephron fan, I must intercede for her book, Heartburn. A memoir about her marriage to and divorce from Carl Bernstein (of Woodward-Bernstein fame), interspersed with recipes. I am an avid admirer of these witty, New York wisecrackers. (cf. Dorothy Parker)
Sally
If it hasn’t already been recommended, I enjoyed the Jackson Lamb series Slow Horses by Mick Herron. An easy, fast and furious read. The next one is due out early next year. Also too, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre. It has been mentioned here before, but I’ll also reinforce the recommendation for the Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series featuring Jack Aubrey. I love Phillip Pullman. His Dark Materials trilogy was great, and the new Dust is just as good. Chris Hill’s The Sleepwalkers is fantastic, scary and takes at least a century to read. It’s about the lead up to WW1. I’ll stop there.
joel hanes
@CaseyL:
their anti-Hillary screeds
Glad I missed that; I used to love Avedon Carol’s Sideshow until she plunged headlong into that particular pit.
Were those screeds written by the NH’s themselves, or by Abi?
joel hanes
@CaseyL:
Have you read “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station”?
I had not; now I have. Thanks.
I’ve bookmarked it and hope to remember to re-read it in December.
Kristine
@joel hanes: The DV anthologies were some of the first SF stories I ever read.
i was a little too young for those books.
frosty
@Uncle Omar: Lonely Are The Brave is a great flick. For some reason my college had a Western Hero Series on movie night and this was one of them. I don’t remember the others.
Miss Bianca
@frosty: Way late back to this thread, but I really enjoyed Grace Slick’s autobiography, Someone to Love? If you can find it – it’s kind of obscure. Miles Davis’s autobiography is great, too.
David Crisp
@frosty: A terrific book.