I’m in the home stretch on this hard science-fiction novel of the peri-apocalypse and I think the biggest takeaway so far is…
I’m not the target audience for science-fiction novels of the peri-apocalypse, hard science or otherwise.
(more…)Tag: reading
The Windup Girl
I’m just finishing up a “biopunk” dystopian bit of scifi, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it for several years now under the false premise that I believed it to be something more steampunk in flavor. I keep thinking that steampunk as a subgenre really holds a lot of promise, but I must keep finding the clinkers to read, or that thinking is flawed in some way. I’ve never found a steampunk novel that has actually held up to that promise, which makes me slightly sad.
(more…)September reads and doings
Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash I’ve been devoting more time to reading books and attempting new hobbies in my effort to reduce the amount of content I consume from the internet.
Since the beginning of September, I have read six novels and abandoned one novel after a record 30 pages (I couldn’t take the convenient miracles any longer, they were that obvious and that poorly written). The month has a few days yet and I am working on two more books. There is always a chance I’ll make it through my seventh, but I wouldn’t count on it.
If you are curious as to what I’ve been reading, check out this “living” page that gets updated as I consume, including planned and current reads.
Six books is not huge, but it is a positive effort away from social media and news that, let’s just say, feels like a low-quality circus right about now.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts — 16sep25
Have you ever started reading a book and find the descriptions of the backdrop to be too rich in the details? While in which the characters seem far too paper-thin and inauthentic?
(more…)Half-penny thoughts — 10sep25
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust last night as part of my recent determination to create some air between my brain and various digital and social medias (streaming services including YouTube, mass-social media, news sites, video games, & etc.). I am annoyed with myself now that it has taken so long to read his writing aside from Freedom and Necessity.
I hope that no one is offended when I say Jhereg is just the kind of pulp fiction I was looking for. It is not high literature, nor does it pretend to be. The novel is a fantasy tale of an assassin and mobster, Vlad Taltos, who happens to be a second-class citizen (because he is human) in a fantasy city full of thievery, deception and double-crossings. Plus, he has magic and a reptilian familiar.
And, so far, it works — as a bit of a hard-boiled noir and fantasy crossover. A movie with similar DNA (except set in a futuristic Earth instead of a medieval fantasy world) might be Blade Runner.
Like The Witcher books I’ve been re-reading, it has an easy flow to the storytelling that I think might be missing from a lot of the more recent writing out there. Even some of books I’ve enjoyed that have been written in the past 25 years seem to be trying real hard to be “good literature” when they are, at their base, pulp novels. Or, maybe, I’m just more tuned into penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and weird tales and would prefer to read that birdcage liner stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if we put too much emphasis on structure, formulae and erudition, and not enough on merely telling a “ripping yarn”. I certainly don’t know. But I’m sure there are tons of opinions about the matter.
