Books - What are you reading?

99p on Kindle at the moment so I'll give it a try.

Picked up another of his books The Deep cheap on kindle.

Enjoy The Troop

I just read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and hated it.

People say "oh if you liked The Dispossessed you should read Iain Banks' Culture series!!!!"

I've had people recommend the Culture series to me independently of The Dispossessed and I thought it looked pretty great, but I've now seen it being recommended so many times to readers of Le Guin that its got me paranoid that it is actually like The Dispossessed and that I'll hate the whole Culture series.

People who have read both: how similar are they, really? Is there anything else the Culture series reminds you of that maybe I don't hate?

The reasons I hated the Le Guin are: 1. very boring; 2. very philosophy; 3. already read Conquest of Bread reh teh teh, and it's all well and good but what I really want is a novel, not a hectoring pamphlet :-(

Ah I should have made clear, it’s the last of any of his sci-fi books that I hadn’t read. End of an era.

sad times. Just start reading them all again. My favourite is Use of Weapons, I bought it on Kindle because my trade paperback copy was falling apart.

My favourite is Use of Weapons

Excession for me. Just a straight up 10/10 sci fi banger.

Banks is heavy on the plot, the conceptual stuff sits more in the background. I wouldn’t think to compare it to The Dispossessed tbh.

That said, I enjoyed The Dispossessed so you can probably discount my opinion.

Not very similar at all I wouldn't say. I really like The Dispossessed (and I'm not too bothered about the Culture series) but it's very heavy handed with the political messages. The Culture deals with it a fair bit more subtly and it's not the driving point of the narrative as it is in The Dispossessed.

On a related note, I've been re-reading the Earthsea series by Le Guin for the first time since I was a kid and I'm really enjoying it. Quite a lot darker than I remembered.

re-reading the Earthsea

First two parts are great, I just can't get past the opening of the 3rd for some reason. Must try again!

Also read. Rotherweird recently, which I thought was quite good. Something a bit different.

I've just started on the 3rd, only a few pages in so far though.

@Eejit @ltc tyvm, both your opinions very helpful! Heavier on the plot and more subtle treatment of the politics makes it sounds like I might well enjoy Banks then, I'll put him back on my TBR rotation.

I started a binge read through of all of the Iain M Banks books - just started on Look to Windward most recently.

I was worried that, once he died, there would be a huge gap in the sort of SciFi that he wrote, and spent years trying to fill that with other authors.

I've realised, though, that (for me at least) there's enough work of his for there to be plenty of novelty during re-reads. Plenty that I've forgotten, and plenty that I've missed the times that I've read them before.

I even managed to get through Feersum Endjinn without having to read another book at the same time.

I found his non-scifi far more hit and miss, with probably more hit that miss. Rather than reread all of them, I usually stick to the same 3 or 4.

Banks non scifi:

Superb

Wasp Factory
The Bridge
Complicity
Crow Road
Espedair Street

Good

Steep approach to garbadale
Canal dreams
Walking on Glass

Flawed, unsuccessful or otherwise not for me:

all the rest

I felt the same way. Just "read" it on Audible because my 10 year-old got it as a birthday gift and I wanted to know what was in it.

The late fourth addition to that series is embarrassingly bad. I think she wrote it in response to the (justified) accusations of internalised misogyny in the original three books ("weak as woman's magic, wicked as woman's magic") but that's not enough to make a good book. The original trilogy was great children's fiction and I prefer not to remember reading the fourth.

I’m currently about half way through ‘Killing Thatcher’ by Rory Carroll.

It’s a gripping read.

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Nearing the end of The Woman Who Fooled The World: Belle Gibson's cancer con, and the darkness at the heart of the wellness industry.
Hardly belongs in the book thread as it reads more like a very long magazine article, but I'd recommend it nonetheless. Beyond the core story of the charity con you may have read already, it goes into plenty of detail about all the support and encouragement she had from people around her. Penguin publishers and Apple come out looking complete asshats.

I think I might read that!

Mantel short story on actually doing the deed...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/19/hilary-mantel-short-story-assassination-margaret-thatcher

I think I might read that!

Happy to lend it to you if you fancy. It's very good.

I've been on a bit of a Paul Auster binge of late. He's one of those writers that everyone always told me I'd love but I've never got around to reading. Just finished Invisible which was excellent and now moving on to the New York Trilogy.

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I recently read The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose by Le Guin. I highly recommend it if you're a fan and haven't read it. It's basically a collection of short stories she's picked from across her career.

It's really interesting to see the ideas for characters from the Hainish cycle and Earthsea books in their early forms.

I've just finished Square Haunting by Francesca Wade.

It's about five women (H.D., Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf) who all lived in Mecklenburgh Square at some point in the early twentieth century, and what it represented for them and how it linked to their lives and works.

It's a really interesting take on social history and the concept doesn't feel forced at all. I got a book by Sayer from the library on the strength of what I learned about her here.

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The Stranding is Gripping.
jumping between a woman's life and relationships surviving in London, with her life and relationships in a post apocalyptic New Zealand.

Compelling that juxtaposition

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I’m enjoying Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.

First Paul Auster I read was The Brooklyn Follies, which I quite enjoyed. Then I read In the Country of Last Things, and I really enjoyed that. This led me to believe that I liked Paul Auster, and that Paul Auster was good. So I then read the New York Trilogy and Man in the Dark. This led me to believe that maybe fuck Paul Auster.

Someone bought me 4 3 2 1 for a birthday present. It's massive. On past experience I have a 50/50 chance of liking it, but I don't like those odds going into a near 1000 page novel.