Finished The Novice by Trudi Canavan. The second book in The Black Magician trilogy.
Found the second half to be more interesting than the first half, but that is probably just me.
Started Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman, book 2 of Dungeon Crawler Carl.
What about all of you? What have you all been reading or listening to lately?
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Still reading “Path of Daggers” by Robert Jordan. Still enjoying it mostly. I should read it more and spend less time on my phone. Also reading a lot for my studies, so sometimes I need a reading break.
Read Blindsight by Peter Watts last week. It was cool, though maybe overly bleak for me. I think I’d like to read some more like whimsical sci-fi stuff next.
I’m reading Holes to two of my kids. Had not read it before, it’s a book about a kid that got sent to a work camp to avoid prison. I got a bit caught out having to explain some of the events in the middle to the kids.
On my own time I’m reading Before the coffee gets cold, a time travel book about a cafe that can transport you back in time.
Both of these books are in progress, haven’t finished them yet.
I’m just a few hours into book 8 of He Who Fights With Monsters. Still enjoying it a lot!
A Trade of Blood just came in on Libby and I’m pumped, started it this morning. It’s the third in the Ana and Din series by Robert Jackson Bennett. I loved the first two so I’ve been waiting for this one with bated breath, as they say.
Just started and finished “The River Has Roots” by Amal El-Mohtar. Wau shorter than expected, the e-book reader decieved me with this novella. Very nice references to traditional British music, very enjoyable. Nice way to get back into reading after a very stressful 4 weeks with no reading.
Just started listening to A Wizard of Earthsea for my commute. It’ll be my first Ursula K. LeGuin book. So far I like it, the prose feels old-school (which I suppose it is), but in a way that I like.
I just finished that one back in April, it was cool. I also read Left Hand of Darkness (also really cool), and I wanna read more of her stuff but im not sure what yet.
That series is fascinating. Wizard is incredibly early in modern fantasy. The final short story came out 50 years later in 2018. The whole genre developed in between and you can see the series develop with it.
I’m feeling a bit unsatisfied and listless. I put a hold for Scholomance audio book but that’s going to be a wait.
I’m open to suggestions…
Listening to Dominion by Stephen R Bown.
It tells the story of how Canada’s railroad was built. Absolutely fantastic.
Re-reading the Foundation trilogy by Issac Asimov. Just got to the part of Foundation and Empire where the Mule shows up. It’s fun to see the new anachronisms jump out at me. Last time I read this, printed newspapers were still a thing, and reading about the massive printing press network that prints paper newspapers for the forty billion residents of the Imperial capital jumps out at me like it didn’t before. And obviously, everybody smokes.
The starkest difference for me (37 years old) so didn’t grow up with the stories, was some of the verbiage used. It’s gone out of most media nowadays though. But yeah the commonality of smoking was weird, even though I grew up as it was phased out in Canada.
Queer, fag, retard (not the modern acceptable slowing something down), and I’m sure there’s more, but I read those 2 years ago, and I read a lot of old scifi, so maybe not all was Foundation, but it’s definitely a thing of the times.
I don’t think I’ve seen any reference, derogatory or otherwise, to queerness in Foundation so far. Everybody is midcentury straight and there’s no question about it. There’s definitely a lot of midcentury slang though. Asimov does regional dialects, or at least makes reference to them, and it’s hard to work out which parts are Asimov trying to sound provincial and which parts are just a product of Asimov’s time.
Queer would be used as happy/weird back than. Wasn’t derogatory yet.
I guess the point is, the words are before the times it was used against people, so it was common vernacular at the time.
Fag is a cigarette.
Edit, maybe it was the Galactic Empire series
“Cleon II was Lord of the Universe. Cleon II also suffered from a painful and undiagnosed ailment. By the queer twists of human affairs, the two statements are not mutually exclusive…”
“queer” is usually properly defined as strange or unusual, “gay” as happy or merry, and both had become slang for homosexual by the mid-20th century (OED’s first reference to that slang usage of “queer” in the US is from 1914, well before Asimov’s writing). Slang usages overlap with non-slang usage, so if Asimov used the word “queer” he could have been using either definition.
Slang words for culturally taboo topics like sexuality generally rely on that ambiguity because it allows people to circumvent the taboo, and so that discussion of sexuality could be plausibly denied if challenged. You see a similar thing happening today in socially conservative circles, discussing a family member’s “roommate”.
With all that said, “queer” was a much more socially acceptable slur for gay folks back in the 40’s, and I thought that’s what you meant. Asimov might well have used “queer” to mean strange or peculiar, I’m working with a paper copy so I can’t easily search for usages, but I think the word itself pops up a couple of times with that meaning.
I don’t think the use of “fag” as synonym of cigarette ever really caught on in the US, and I don’t think I’ve seen it in Foundation, so you may be remembering some other work.
That’s right, I was combining them, but also knew there was another common one.
I’ll check digitally later, but it was probably the Robots series, which is all part of his broader Foundations universe. There’s detectives and cigarettes galore in those ones.
The later foundation novels tie the universe together, so could be some words come back up again.
Work was busy up through the weekend so barely started the audiobook for Morning Star, the last book in the Red Rising trilogy. Or the first trilogy? I am not sure how those are seperated.
Still reading Between Two Fires as well. Going to keep trying on it, but so far has not really grabbed me. Its not bad just maybe not great?
I’m about halfway through book 3 of Star Wars The Black Fleet Crisis. Enjoying the trilogy, the story telling is back to the same as book 1 where the stories are moving together. Book 2 had the story in 3 separate parts.
After this, it’s book 8 of DCC and I’m excited to finish the ride. I was trying to get all 8 done with my alternating reading in 3 months, but damn those books are like 2-3 each themselves.
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Just finished The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah. Great read about a family who moves to a (very) small Alaskan town to start over.
Currently reading Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. This one is about a small family maintaining a seed vault on a remote island, kind of dystopian and mysterious so far. Very tight prose.
Interestingly, both of these came my way via the “Skip the Line” selection at my local library, where popular titles are available on a 7-day loan instead of the standard 21 days. Great way to discover new (to me) authors and genres.
Currently reading House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. It’s sort of a political intrigue, sort of murder mystery in a weird sci-fi setting. It’s all first-person, alternating perspective each chapter between two main characters. Every once in a while there is a chapter from their perspective as a child.
