jorallan | Entries tagged with books

So it's been a while since I posted about my reading, so here's everything I've got at least a majority of the way through since last August:

Half Past Human (T. J. Bass): what happens when we all live in mega-cities? Bass takes the theme to its extreme, postulating trillions of people of Earth, and what needs to be done for such a population to survive. Not a bad novel by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly shows its age and the fact it's really two novella-length stories in the same world with just a very little bit of glue tying them together.
The Deep (Nick Cutter): isolation horror, and honestly not particularly good isolation horror. Teases and tempts with hints of an answer to the world's problems at the bottom of the sea, and kept me reading for long enough to find out what was going on... but then dies a horrible death at the end with nothing really being resolved at all.
Thud! (Pterry): it's Pratchett. It's got Vimes. It's got dwarves. It's got trolls. It's fun.
The Ouroboros Wave (Jyouji Hayashi): a black hole is detected in Earth's vicinity and tamed to provide effectively unlimited energy. How does this effect the communities in the solar system? A series of (very) lightly linked short stories. As usual with any collection, a couple of them were a bit of a slog but enjoyable all the same.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle): mini-Christmas present from the lovely wife. While I'd never read this collection before, I've read enough Holmes to know how things were going to play out: a grand exposition from Holmes at the end of the story and everyone saying "aren't you clever?" I'm not sure if the reader is ever supposed to be able to make the same deductions as Holmes makes - often there just isn't enough detail in the writing - but that meant I did enjoy The Adventure of the Dancing Men and decrypting its cipher.
Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine (Hannah Fry): you've read the popular press. AI and algorithms are everywhere and going to save the world/take over the world/something else. A really good introduction to the topic but for those of us that care about and work with this kind of stuff, not particularly insightful. But then it's not really aimed at me, and it was only 99p on Amazon.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis (J. D. Vance): perhaps slightly surprising to see me reading right-wing American political stuff, but I do find it occasionally interesting to read stuff from "the other side". Vance takes us on a journey from his broken home upbringing to that of a hot-shot lawyer, looking at the people around him along the way. I do understand some of Vance's frustrations at seeing good money thrown after bad, but still can't agree with his conclusions.
HDL with Digital Design: VHDL and Verilog (Nazeih Botros): with the wave of FPGA-based retrocomputer implementations (hello, ZX-UNO team), I thought it would be interesting to understand a bit more about how this stuff is written (and you never know, maybe even write a patch or two. I do know a little bit about the Z80). This probably isn't the book to do it from though - while it goes into great detail of the syntax and mechanics of both VHDL and Verilog, it completely misses the higher level stuff: when should I use behavioural vs structural typing? etc. Didn't really feel I gained much from this which I couldn't have gained from reading a couple of specifications.
False Gods (Graham McNeill): second in the Horus Heresy series. Everything I wrote about Horus Rising in 2017 applies to this one as well, but it filled in some travelling time.
The Shore of Women (Pamela Sargent): after a somewhat unspecified nuclear war, the women have expelled the men from the cities, and they now live as nomadic hunter-gatherer bands. The underlying theme here seems to be that if you treat a group (whether that be men, historians or anything else) with disdain, they'll begin to act as you expect. While I think the ending is supposed to provide some hope, I didn't really get that feeling in that the only way to beat the system was to join it. Reminded me most of Huxley's Brave New World, which I may have to read again at some point, having only read it at school.

Didn't get through as much as I'd expect while on holiday for a week in the North York Moors because I got distracted by some coding. Aside: coding without Stack Overflow is hard :-( Anyway, in August I read:

A Woman of the Iron People (Eleanor Arneson): space explorers find a planet of iron-age people and send down a few people to investigate. Now, I do get this book is to some extent a commentary/investigation on our modern day anthropology, but to me it wasn't either a good story (too many "with one bound, Jack was free" type moments) or actually a particularly deep or insightful commentary on anthropology.
Gridlinked (Neal Asher): I got on pretty well with Asher's Transformation series (see last June for the end) so grabbed this when I saw it in a charity shop. And... it's not as good as his later stuff. I've never particularly liked military fiction and while the Transformation series did go into that kind of stuff, the rest of it was interesting as well. Here, the military bits are still there, but the plot and the rest of the writing aren't there to support it.
Extracted (R. R. Haywood): invent a time travel machine, "extract" three people from different times for... something. The "something" is revealed pretty early on, but the book then just drags on... and on.... and on.... through a fairly interminable slog with one of the characters. Chop that out, reduce the book to a third of its size and this would have been a much better novel. (Oh, and the physicist in me insists any time travel novel at least has to try and deal with the paradox issues. Hand-waving it away along the lines of "nah, let's not try that" really doesn't work).

July started off very slow as a reading month, but picked up at the end while I was away in Pembrokeshire for a week. Anyway, I read:

The Night Clave (Monte Cook and Shanna Germain): a Numenera novel so while set in an RPG universe, probably never going to be a straight up dungeon crawl - and it certainly isn't, being essentially a voyage of self-discovery as to what really matters for one of the characters. Enjoyable enough, but felt a bit too padded to me - maybe would have been better in a novella type format. As an aside, I dare anyone to watch Strand and not want to play in the Numenera universe afterwards...
The Abyss Beyond Dreams (Peter F. Hamilton): back in Hamilton's Commonwealth universe, which is never a bad start and again sees people (well, in this case, mostly Nigel Sheldon) battling the Void, although this time from the inside. A lot of this book felt like a rehash of the Void trilogy itself - following the rise of individual through a Void-influenced society, much as Edeard did. Not quite sure where Hamilton's going with this one, but I'm sure I'll read Night without Stars, the second half of the series sometime.
The Long Mars (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter): while I was really taken with The Long Earth, I wasn't so grabbed by The Long War in which not much really happened. Fortunately, The Long Mars rectifies that with two major plotlines, both of which grab the attention and show how the Long Earth (or as it's not a spoiler given the title of the book, the Long Mars) really starts to shape societies. Still obviously setting some things up for later books, but I'll be back to read them pretty soon.

In June, I read:

Orbital Decay (Allen Steele): mostly interesting take on the social dynamics aboard the first commercial (as opposed to ISS-style scientific) space station. While trying to avoid spoilers, there's one bit in the story which feels very grafted on as you go through - and then suddenly becomes a crucial plot device in the ending which let it down a bit. I've previously read Steele's Coyote, and enjoyed that many years ago so will probably read some more of his stuff at some point. I may be being a bit harsh here on what was Steele's first novel.
Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson): really hard to describe what this is about without some massive spoilers. Let's just say that despite what's on the jacket, it's not at all the same as the Mars trilogy. That said, I can see how the first half of the book is a good set up for the second, but felt a bit let down by very end when the character I was identifying with became less important. Sorry if that's a bit obtuse...
Parable of the Talents (Octavia E. Butler): the follow-up / second half to Parable of the Sower (coincidentally see last year's June Reading post). Didn't enjoy it as much as Sower in that it felt there was a lot more filler in this one - I felt the first half of the book could have been cut back significantly without really affecting the story much, but the second half was pretty good. Talents still nicely filled in the travel bits of a work trip to Denmark.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman): it's not big[1], it's not particularly clever, it's full of ridiculous "with one bound Jack was free" moments, but it's what kicked off my D&D (and RPG in general) habit and it's still quite fun.

[1] OK, the Dragonlance universe is ridiculously big, but almost all of the non-Weis/Hickman novels are pretty poor. And so are the Weis/Hickman novels after the first six.

It's been too long. Haven't read that much in the past six months, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad. But here's some of the things I did read:

The Medusa Chronicles (Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds): fairly typical Baxter or Reynolds hard sci-fi. Enjoyable enough, but with a GREAT BIG SIGNPOST to the ending a third of the way through the book which left a bit of slogging through waiting to get to that bit.
Can & Can’tankerous (Harlan Ellison): I don't remember very much about this. Sorry.
Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman): pretty dark, pretty twisted, generally quite weird. Or in other words, just what you'd expect from Gaiman. Enjoyable.
Binary Storm (Christopher Hinz): entertaining action romp through a dysfunctional near-future Earth. Written as a prequel, and either the ending is very forced, or was hamstrung by the need to remain consistent with the later books. I suspect the latter.
Nemesis (Alex Lamb): starts off as a fairly standard "conspiracy in space" - but has enough twists along the way to keep the interest levels up. Probably worth reading Roboteer (the first in the trilogy) before this though as while there's just about enough exposition so that things make sense, I felt I was missing a few bits along the way.
The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu): Hard sci-fi, but with an Eastern spin this time. Hard going in places and jumped a bit quickly from the "investigative phase" to the "everything happens at once phase" for my liking, but I wouldn't be averse to reading the rest of the trilogy at some point.
The Book of Heroes (Miyabe Miyuki. Apologies if I've got that name in the wrong order): young girl enters a story to save the world. A bit too young adult for me really, but probably enjoyable if you like that sort of thing.
My Night in Freeport (Anthony Pryor): Freeport is one of my favourite D&D settings, so a new story set in the City of Adventure? Grabbed me straight away - but it's really, really, really short. Not worth the asking price.
First Person Peculiar (Mike Resnick): a short story collection. Had some good bits and not so good bits in it. Probably.
Poseidon's Wake (Alastair Reynolds): yes, more Reynolds so more hard sci-fi. Didn't realise it was the third one in the trilogy when I got it from the library and definitely suffered from that.
Miniatures (John Scalzi): another short story collection that I don't remember very much about. There's a theme here, isn't there?
The Nightmare Stacks (Charles Stross): back in the Laundryverse. More programmer/maths geek dark horror fun. Good, but not up to the level of The Atrocity Archives from my point of view.
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti (Genevieve Valentine): take a traditional circus. Add some fairly dark Iain M. Banks-style body horror and you have Mechanique. Not going to be a book that makes you smile, but still worth a read.
Echoes of Earth (Sean Williams and Shane Dix): an off-shoot colony of humanity receives an apparently great boon from another species... but it comes with a price. A lot of set up for what was obviously always intended to be a multi-part story, and doesn't really get going itself.
Blackcollar (Timothy Zahn): a bunch of freedom fighters strike out against the evil Galactic Empire using non-conventional weaponry. Sound familiar? Actually written before Zahn wrote what is apparently some of the best stuff in the Star Wars EU (sorry, "Legends"), but all the same... military fiction is never really my thing, but this is okay as it goes.

Also known as "Phil starts reading too many books at once month".

The only things I actually finished this month:

Word Puppets (Mary Robinette Kowal): too long since I finished this, struggling to remember very much about this short story collection other than that I enjoyed most of it.
Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game (Spidermind Games): I kickstarted this after they got copyright bullied earlier in the year. Haven't got round to running a game yet, but hopefully will do in the New Year.

Still reading Gridlinked (zero progress made) and The Three-Body Problem (some progress made) from October, but also now reading Echoes of Earth (good progress being made on the train during various work trips to Manchester) and New Views on an Old Planet which was the recommended reading for my 1A Geology course but I never read at the time. However, inspired by the Blue Planet II episode on "The Deep" (van Andel was the first person to see mid-ocean ridges forming new crust in person) and as it's available for about £3 on eBay, it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Coding-wise, I rewrote the "automatic loading" feature of Fuse to be more friendly if you've got additional hardware available (techie details here) and made some games load quicker.

Photography-wise, I got tagged in the "seven days, seven black and white photos of your daily life" meme on Facebook. You can see what I came up with on Flickr.

December will be spent trying to finish more books than I start, but I may not actually get too much done due to the fantastic Advent of Code being back again.

October's reading:

Gene Mapper (Taiyo Fujii, translated by Jim Herbert): a bit of a random pick up from the library, but also part of a slightly deliberate attempt to read a bit outside my normal comfort zone of moderately hard sci-fi. Very simple plot summary is near future and dealing with the socio-economic impacts of genetically engineered crops - and I enjoyed it enough to munch through in a couple of days, which is pretty rare these days. Can't let the glaring crypto hole go uncommented though: no, you cannot reverse engineer the input given only a hash, no matter how much brute force computing power you have.
Skeen's Leap (Jo Clayton): your typical RPG thief ends up stranded on a medieval technology world and has to get back to her nice high tech environment. Along the way, she acquires a party of diverse companions and has various adventures. Unfortunately, the plot is about as generic as it sounds, and the writing isn't good enough to elevate it. It's also only half a story, ending just as it should be getting going. Meh.
Yesterday's Kin (Nancy Kress): apparently peaceful aliens have landed in New York. What do they want, and are they truly peaceful? Sounds like yet another bit of pulp fiction, but Kress spins it through the eye of one (dysfunctional!) family and how it affects them. Enjoyable enough in what is effectively a novella format, but just lacking that... something which would make it want to pick up the trilogy its become.
The Stars are Legion (Kameron Hurley): I know this one has got a bunch of adoration for its feminist themes, but... sorry, it's just not a very good story. Just too many points at which the "grand plan" could have got one or other of the protagonists killed, and then the whole thing would have fallen apart without its message meaning very much at all. A real struggle to get through.

Currently reading Gridlinked (back to hard sci-fi and back to the start of Neal Asher after doing the Dark Intelligence trilogy earlier in the year) and The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu: continuing the eastern theme), and finished off Word Puppets which I was reading through October.

September's reading:

The Atrocity Archives (Charlie Stross): as noted last time out, you'd probably expect I'd have read this already, but I never had. I really enjoyed the first half ("The Atrocity Archive" itself) as I'm always a sucker for Lovecraftian sci-fi, but wasn't so taken by "The Concrete Jungle". Overall the whole thing reads as what Pratchett might have written if he were writing stuff set in the modern day, which isn't a bad thing (and I do very much like Good Omens as well...). Will probably seek out some more of the series sometime.
Flood (Stephen Baxter): I have a funny relationship with Stephen Baxter. He's an author I always think I should like more than I do, which leads to me owning quite a lot of his work... but never actually enjoying it very much. Flood was OK - an interestingly different take on climate change, but still not one that really grabbed me at all.
Moons of the Solar System (James A. Hall III): a largely tedious gazetteer of every known moon in the Solar System (i.e. a natural satellite which orbits something other than the Sun). While some of these bodies (Enceladus, Europa, Ganymede) are definitely interesting, some have some cool orbital mechanics (Epimetheus and Janus) and it's vaguely interesting to know that some asteroids have moons, the vast majority of moons are just boring lumps of rock. Then for added confusion, some almost entirely unrelated appendices.

As of 1st October, the only thing on the reading list was Skeen's Leap, but I've actually worked my way through Gene Mapper and started on The Stars are Legion since then.

Inventors at Work (Brett Strern): a selection of 20-odd interviews with prolific inventors. Not much insight into what actually distinguishes an inventor from anybody else, other than a refusal to accept the status quo and (in the vast majority of cases) working with a team so they're not trying to do it all themselves.
The Bread we Eat in Dreams (Catherynne M. Valente): possibly best thought of as a modern set of fairy tales - but gone dark. Don't expect many happy endings here, but enjoyable enough reading all the same.
Moving Mars (Greg Bear): fairly typical Greg Bear in the sense of it being politics driven by some hard science - although the science is way out there in this case. Somewhat unsatisfying if the ending is telegraphed half-way through the book and somewhat unsatisfying when it comes in that it doesn't really seem to solve the problem it's intended to solve.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Steig Larsson): to be honest, I don't quite see what the hype is about. The first half of the book is very slow, everything happens in the third quarter, and the last quarter is just wrapping up the obvious loose ends. I can see how it could make a good movie (or two) though.

Currently only one book on the go, The Atrocity Archives. Filling in a bit more stuff you may well have expected me to have read already, but there you go.

July's reading:

Heretics of Dune (Frank Herbert): felt like a novel which was written mostly because anything with "Dune" in the title and "Herbert" as an author is a license to print money; the Scattering has happened, but now we need something new now that Leto has gone. Better than God Emperor (which isn't saying much), but still doesn't really hold a candle to the original book. I may read Chapterhouse Dune one day, but I'm unlikely to spend any time with the Brian Herbert books.
Conservation of Shadows (Yoon Ha Lee): for the first half of this short story collection, I was really enjoying being pushed out of my typical hard sci-fi into something a bit different: still sci-fi, but a lot of stuff on the power of words and pictures (and a lot of betrayal). My the end, I was starting to think that the power of words and pictures was perhaps a little bit overdone, and maybe it was time for a different theme. Enough there that I'll probably read the rapidly becoming famous Ninefox Gambit at some point.
The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells): incomplete, and unlikely to be finished. The thinks-he's-the-last-of-his-shapeshifter-race suddenly discovers he's not the last of his race after all. Just didn't grab me enough in the first couple of chapters to make me think it would be worth continuing.
The Salt Roads (Nalo Hopkinson): if you don't like one set of roads, try another. A strange book, just too "literarture-y" for my simple tastes as it follows the stories of three oppressed African women across three time periods - but just never really seemed to go anywhere or come to any real conclusions. Or maybe I'm just a philistine, who knows?

August's reading will include Inventors at Work, The Bread We Eat In Dreams, Moving Mars and probably a whole load more as I'm spending a week away with no Internet :-)

July's coding:

z80trace: a simple tool to visualize instruction flow on a processor. Potentially interesting, but needs some work.
DivMMC emulation for Fuse - pretty much working, but needs tidying up.
Work-wise, some data science for our driver identification patent and some embedded C coding for a client project. Scaring the rest of the team with pointers :-)

One Man and his Bike (Mike Carter): a semi-accidental read. I grabbed this off the pile of shame as emergency reading for a camping weekend away when somebody else stole the Kindle... and then left the Kindle on charge when we went out the door. A Guardian journalist gets fed up with the rat-race and goes off round Britain on his bike - the book itself didn't really grab me, mostly being a series of unconnected ancedotes, with only a couple of threads tying the whole thing together, but it did vaguely make me what to do some sort of cycle tour (although nothing like 5000 miles, I should be very clear). Of course, 90 minutes after finishing the book, I came off my bike so maybe that's not such a good idea...
The Border (Robert McCammon): started off promisingly as a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction: Earth is being used as a battleground between two all-powerful alien races, and humanity is squeezing out an existence where it can. It started OK, but went downhill in about Chapter 6, continued through a whole sequence of "with one bound Jack was free" moments, jumped the shark completely when the anti-hero suddenly saves the day and then ends on perhaps the second most ridiculous deus ex machina I've read (The Naked God still "wins" on that front). Not recommended!
Infinity Engine (Neal Asher): while I really liked Dark Intelligence, the first book in the Transformation trilogy, I wasn't nearly so taken with War Factory in which everyone seemed to be manipulated by You-Know-Who-If-You've-Read-The-Book, so wasn't sure what was going to happen here. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise in that while everyone was still being manipulated by You-Know-Who, they were now all very much aware they were being manipulated. And everything ends with a nice showdown which ends mostly as you'd expect, but certainly with a kick in the tail.
Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler): more post-apocalyptic fiction, although not a deliberate choice - a semi-random choice from the unread pile on the Kindle. In 2025, the US is falling apart as the effects of climate change hit hard. As a young girl's community falls apart, she sees a better future and prepares and plans how to make that happen. So much better on that front than The Border, where everything seemed to happen despite the actions of the protagonists, rather than because of it. There's quite a lot of words here for not that much happening, but enough to make me read the next one sometime.
Burn (James Patrick Kelly): sci-fi novella set on a deliberately planned planet where the residents accept a simple life - apart from the few that don't. Felt like a bit of a mismatch for the novella format - it would have been stronger either chopped down to a short story focusing on the one main thread, or as a full length novel where the secondary themes could have been delved into a little deeper. Entertaining enough, but just a little unsatisfying.

Currently working my way though Heretics of Dune (Frank Herbert) just because I've never read the last two of the original series and Conservation of Shadows (Yoon Ha Lee).

May's reading:

Revelation Space (Alistair Reynolds): usual Reynolds hard sci-fi, not that I think that's a bad thing. That said, probably my least favourite of the Revelation Space trilogy - it lacks the grand scale of the later books, and is a bit deus ex machina at the end.
Sunshine (Robin McKinley): while I loved the world this was set in, I couldn't really relate to the characters and the plot was just a bit too predictable. Bit of a struggle to get through, but I'd potentially read something else set in the same world.
Beyond the Aquila Rift (Alistair Reynolds, short story collection): there wasn't a deliberate plan for a Reynolds-fest; this just happened to be at the library when I was there with the kids. The usual mix of stuff you get in a short story collection - three favourites were "Weather" (what is a Conjoiner engine, anyway?), "Beyond the Aquila Rift" (ancient jumpgate technology) and "Trauma Pod" (a soldier is saved by an intelligent medic-bot. Then stuff happens...).

Bit of a quiet month. Currently working my way through Infinity Engine (Neal Asher), the last in the Transformation trilogy, and The Border (Robert McCammon).

My reading from 10 days in Majorca:

From Techie to Boss (Scott Cromar): a guide for how to transition from being a techie in the trenches to team lead / project manager / people manager. All a bit too "management from on high" (aka waterfall) for my tastes, particularly the project management bits; the words "change control board" generally want to make me run as far and as fast from a project as possible.
The Protos Mandate (Nick Kanas): part of Springer's "Scientific Novel" series, and frankly a perfect example of why you shouldn't let scientists pretend to be authors. Probably best summed up by the author themselves in the "Science behind the Fiction" section after the story itself: "the [story reflects] traditional American values [...] with good guys and bad guys and relatively formulaic plot lines." - although I'd probably change "relatively formulaic" to "incredibly predictable".
Building Great Software Engineering Teams (Joshua Tyler): a better guide to being a good software leader. Very startup focused, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn't agree with everything in here (should a founder at a ~100 person startup still be doing the initial CV screening - probably not) but the book's a good place to start if you're looking at being a software leader, either as a manager, a technical leader or a startup founder type role.
The Long War (Terry Pratchett / Stephen Baxter): the second of the Long Earth series. I very much liked The Long Earth, and this started promisingly with a couple of interesting major plot threads (along with a couple of minor ones as well). The major threads continued to develop... but then all just ended rather suddenly, followed by a very telegraphed hook for the next book. Enough interesting stuff going on for me to read the next one though.
Finding a Million-Star Hotel (Bob Mizon): a guide to getting to see the Milky Way and the rest of the stars, an increasingly difficult problem in this day and age. Generally pretty good, but a lot of filler (which I skipped), particularly the list of "dark sky places" in the UK and the US and the details of every solar eclipse until 2027. Had the best line of any book this holiday: "Most astronomers are very sane, tolerant people."
Horus Rising (Dan Abnett): the first of novels giving the backstory to Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K universe. Fairly standard military sci-fi; I suspect readers will either know the rough outline of the Horus Heresy (in which case the plot won't be too surprising) or won't be interested in it, in which case I suspect the book won't hold their attention for too long. Definitely worth the $0.20 if you consider I got five of the Horus Heresy novels for $1 in a Humble Bundle deal, and probably even worth the $1 if I don't read any of the rest of them.
Down and Out in Purgatory (Tim Powers): a quick novella about a guy who wants revenge on his love rival, even though said rival is now dead. A bit predicatable, but only an hour or so to read so not the end of world.

Other than that lot, I also read most of Alistair Reynolds's "Revelation Space" when either sitting on the beach or when Karen or James stole the Kindle. Not quite finished yet, and a bit weird as I've read the Revelation Space stories mostly in reverse order (Absolution Gap first, followed by Redemption Ark and now Revelation Space) so I have a fair idea what's going to happen...