Our reads in May 2024

Another month trying to steady the tottering TBR mountain. What are your plans for May?

Had major eye problems amongst all my myriad autoimmune woes in April,did little reading most of the month. Had tests last week and the eyes seem to be working better,not so much gunk around now,but I will need a new glasses prescription before the eyes can cope with a lot of reading.I'll post a very token TBR now,I have books to finish off from last month.Hoping to get back to full steam ahead by June.
Dusty's TBR for May
C J Cherryh - Hellburner✔
Clifford D Simak - The Werewolf Principle✔
Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword
Darcy Coates - The Hollow Dead ✔
Jorn Lier Horst - Dregs✔

Still working on Some Desperate Glory.

This month's line-up is Jack Four, The Atlas Complex, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Cahokia Jazz, and Some Desperate Glory.

I finished Children of the Sky in the final hour of April and posted a review. Here's how May is shaping up:

In Progress
The Hearing Trumpet

On Deck
Titanium Noir
The Incal: Psychoverse
Revival

Ordered/Requested
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

>5 paradoxosalpha: I had never heard of Leonora Carrington until we went to see an exhibition at the Sainsbury Arts Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 2010 about Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. I brought back the catalogue (Surreal Friends) and brought these artists onto my radar, though if you read the other review of Surreal Friends on LT, you might conclude that Carrington was at best an unreliable narrator of her own story.

I'd heard of The Hearing Trumpet in passing, but hadn't really considered it to be something I'd be likely to see. Now I must look out for a copy.

>6 RobertDay: The hearing trumpet is one of my favourite books! I'm very envious of you getting to see that exhibition.

>6 RobertDay:
My copy of The Hearing Trumpet is a Penguin Modern Classics edition that I picked up secondhand, but it still smells fresh off the press and doesn't seem like it would be hard to procure new.

For readers entertained by the 20th-century history of English Surrealism, I would recommend the novel Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin.

Yesterday, I started The Crystal World by JG Ballard. It had been sitting on my TBR shelf for a few years and I have read a couple of posts in this group that Ballard is a good writer. Well… the first chapter has impressed already. Looking forward to this read.

Not yet sure what I’ll read after that. William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy has been staring at me on my bookshelf for awhile so I might take on that next.

>7 Sakerfalcon: I've added The Hearing Trumpet to my wishlist. >8 paradoxosalpha: It looks like the book is available to purchase new on Thriftbooks.

I'm continuing with the Liaden series, now up to Trader's leap.

>11 vwinsloe: To see nearly all new and used copies on offer, give Bookfinder a try. I usually search on ISBN to help find the specific edition I'm after but there are a number of ways to filter results. Here are a couple links for The Hearing Trumpet:

• ISBN: 1681374641
  
• ISBN: 1878972197
  

BTW... I see my library offers the ebook via Overdrive/Libby so that might be another way to acquire the book.

>4 Shrike58: I hope you enjoy Cahokia Jazz! I read it in March, and I'm still thinking about it.

About to pick up Touched by Walter Mosley. Apparently a dystopian fantasy contemplating how humanity and technological innovation threaten everything else. Or something... I shall see soon enough.

>15 PocheFamily: A quick little read with the typical Mosley feel. I adore his detective novels and find his science fiction thought provoking. If you remotely enjoy 'touched' I heartily recommend Futureland

>13 ScoLgo: Cool, thanks, I didn't know about that site.

>17 vwinsloe: You're welcome!

Have you seen The Literature Map?

>18 ScoLgo:, sorry to butt in but that map is way cool! I entered 'Charles Dickens' with some skepticism and it came back with huge accuracy - a lot of predictable names, but also several surprise names that I do also like.

>18 ScoLgo: wow, no! That is also cool. Thank you.

Knocked off The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles; if you liked the first book in this series you'll have little reason not to enjoy this one. Next up: Jack Four. My understanding is that this isn't vintage Asher, but I need my fix of kinetic, cinematic mayhem, and don't feel like tackling one of the man's older novels right now.

Finished Priest's Episodes; now reading Paul McAuley's Players - another of his techno-thriller efforts, written 2007 and about MMORPGs, which he sets out to explain to the uninitiated - perhaps not in such an info-dumping way as he did in Whole Wide World for DDOS attacks, but there's still an element of clunk about it. The murder mystery isn't much of a mystery - what's not given away in the blurb becomes fairly clear about three chapters in when we're introduced to an exceptionally mad and unpleasant tech billionaire and his (just plain unpleasant) sidekick, and the only mystery looks as if it is going to be sorting out everyone's agenda.

Done with Some Desperate Glory, really good book; now I'm on a mini-break from Hugo reading with the Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems.

Finished The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard. In my youth, I had read the Conan books that included stories by L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter, in addition to Howards. This book collects only Howard stories. It's a quality edition put out by Del Rey illustrated by Mark Schultz. Recommended for those who enjoy this kind of thing.

Yeah, those 21st-century Del Rey Conan editions are really definitive--certainly a cut above the old de Camp & Carter ones.

I finished The Hearing Trumpet and posted my review. Also, the hold fairy manifested a copy of Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon for me this week, so that's next.

now reading The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF which have many interesting takes on time travel, one of my faves is the truth about weena a sequel to Well's time Machine others include The Catch by Kage Baker ,Time Gypsy by Ellen Klages,try and change the past by Fritz leiber and Red Letter Day by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. but my fav is Molly Brown - Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm a take on the SF meme of finding yourself while time traveling. written by a comedian, its interesting and hilarious. if you are in to the subject, think youd find this collection a good read

I just completed The Crystal World. I’m not sure what to make of it. I certainly enjoyed the prose. The entire novel seemed to drift along dreamlike punctuated by unexpected action. It feels like an experience that remains unresolved.

Started a Lodestar finalist last night, The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix.

Finished The Other Wind and started The Veils of Azlaroc.

I finished Exhalation, which is a short story collection by Ted Chiang. It was OK. The stories were very imaginative and thought-provoking, but they sometimes read like essays rather than stories. The characters and the tiny slivers of plot were just meant to carry the idea. Which is a perfectly fine way to write a story sometimes, but it left me wanting more than an interesting premise. Definitely not a waste of time, though, and fans of "idea" stories would like it.

>31 drmamm: Exhalation is on my TBR, and from your description, it sounds appealing to me. Thanks.

Oh brother. Oh bother. To Your Scattered Bodies Go had great world-building, which encouraged me to go on with the quintet when at some point I should have applied the Pearl Rule. Now I've finished The Magic Labyrinth 2** (and I give it that much because at least it does "sorta-sorta" wrap things up and give some answers to what this quintet is all about), having finished it up because I tend to feel honor-bound not to use a Wikipedia plot summary and drop reading the whole clunker series.

I'm going on to Gods of Riverworld but only because the finale's Wikipedia plot summary is rather skimpy (which I can't blame any summary writer for, considering that writing a summary of these Riverworld books can relive all the tedium of eternal rebirth in that danged river valley) and I want to see if there's anything I've missed.

This is a quintet that should have been wrapped up in a trilogy at most – or best of all, one over-sized single volume. Great concept, but there's such a cumbersome jungle (jumble?) of characters and so many divergent plot threads as to make this whole thing into a self-indulgent bog.

>33 CurrerBell:

I continue to watch with interest here on the sidelines. As you say, the concept is great and I have fond but very, very vague recollection of characters and scenes but very little of the overarching plot. This makes for a tempting candidate for re-read, and I'm using your commentary as a cautionary tale. There is, after all, so much to read and re-read.

>31 drmamm:
I have Exhalation on my shelf. (I say shelf, but that is metaphorical. I have multiple bookcases, let alone shelves.) I read and enjoyed his first collection and your post tells me Exhalation is similar in that it has great ideas in the stories but he seems to find difficulty finding an ending in many of his stories. I look forward to reading this collection.

Yesterday I started All Systems Red the first novella in the Murderbot Diaries. Today I finished it. I enjoyed it and will likely be reading the sequels in the near future. It has some similarities to the Imperial Radch original trilogy and also some similar themes to the film Ex Machina.

>36 Neil_Luvs_Books:

I also see parallels between Murderbot and Imperial Radch, and while I'm not as enamoured of Leckie's characters as yet, her world-building is as layered and nuanced as Wells's. I am intrigued by Leckie's inclusion of religion, as well as singing and song in Ancillary Justice, for example.

Still need to screen Ex Machina, and that's another bump for me.

>37 elenchus: Don't forget the tea services!

I always saw the concentration on tea services in the Leckie books as being like the glory days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when officers sat around in clubs, chatting about the latest scandals, pontificating on Glory and Duty to the Emperor and admiring each others' gorgeous uniforms. Little in the way of military puissance, but gorgeous uniforms.

reading starter villian Ive seen scalzis name but for some reason never read his books. This reading is for a RL book group and am enjoying it quite a bit. (talking cats? what else can you want? )Hopefully it continues to be good

Ex Machina is terrific, but I wouldn't compare it much to Murderbot, despite some arguable overlap of subject matter. The tone I get from each is so vastly different from the other.

>16 skid0612: Thanks for the recommendation.

But first I need to figure out what I just read ... am mostly left wondering "what just happened?" after reading Touched. There's a lot to unpack. I'm probably just being dense (and not just distracted by the zombies). Maybe there are several, not just one metaphor ... or maybe it's just a story.

>38 RobertDay:

The tea service is great, too. So colonial, with that being a constant across disparate cultures. I just finished the short story "Night's Slow Poison", featuring a civilization attacked by the Radch, yet they also unabashedly resort to the comfort of tea.

Knocked off Jack Four last night, no thanks to being woken up by a tornado warning. Anyway, it was good Neal Asher but not great Neal Asher; I really have to get back to his "Polity Agent" books sometime.

Finally reread Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand many years after reading it when it was new. I liked it less than the first time, but am glad I did it. The worldbuilding is great. He's brilliant with language & philosophy, and with his treatment of gender and sexuality. He's just brilliant generally. But the plotting is somehow minimal and confusing at the same time; and I found the characters wooden, despite many colorful quirks. As before, I could say that my favorite thing is the title.

>40 paradoxosalpha: true, the tone between Ex Machina and Murderbot is different. But I was thinking of the similarity between the two AIs in each both desiring freedom and self-determination.

>42 elenchus: I have one more episode of Shōgun to watch and you reminded me of the similarity between the serving of tea in Japanese and Imperial Radch cultures. I wonder if Leckie was thinking of Japan when she wrote the tea service into the Ancilliary novels?

I am half way through The Skylark of Space. It’s a fun read but the implicit racism is disconcerting when it appears on the page.

>45 Neil_Luvs_Books:
We have a really good idea what Murderbot desires, because it tells us all the time.
To me, the gripping core of Ex Machina is not knowing what Ava "desires."

>47 paradoxosalpha: Hmmmm… I always had the sense in Ex Machina that she wanted to leave. I wonder if I am not remembering correctly. Weren’t there lots of clues indicating what she wanted even though she didn’t voice them? I’ll have to watch it again. It’s a good film worth watching again.

Just finished The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov - I'm working my way through his Robot/Foundation sequence. Asimov enjoyed exploring the implications of robots to human societies. I take it for granted that his work is pretty dated at this point, but still found it an enjoyable read.

I'm reading some of Frederik Pohls short stories. His Midas World robots remind me of Asimovs.

Starting my next Best Graphic Story finalist, Shubeik Lubeik, also known as Your Wish Is My Command.

I am currently reading The House Of Styx which I bought some time ago and have only just got around to it. Quite different in feel to his earlier Quantum Evolution series.

>50 bnielsen: One of my favourite books is The Best of Frederik Pohl. The short story in there, Tunnel Under the World, is my fav short story of all time. I remember reading it to my daughter on Halloween when she was a child. Goosebumps!

>49 ChrisG1: This is also a future reading project of mine: to reread Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation series, this time in chronological order rather than publication order just for a different reading experience compared to the first time I read them.

>53 Neil_Luvs_Books: I'm getting rid of some Danish translations of old science fiction stories, so I take the opportunity to read both the original and the Danish translation. Some of the translations of Pohl's short fiction are okay (but I'm still getting rid of them :-)

Finished His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik. The Napoleonic Wars....with dragons. Yep, this could have been done campy, but the author handled it more straightforwardly & wove an enjoyable, entertaining story.

I finished and reviewed Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Titanium Noir is next.

Very little reading done,but enjoyed a reread of C J Cherryh's Hellburner .Very complicated setting,but each reread I understand a little more! lol.I just love Cherryh's immersive style,always enjoy falling back into her worlds.
Clifford D Simak's The Werewolf Principle wasnt among the very best work of Simak,but even lower level Simak has interesting themes,sympathetic characters,some philosophy and of course lovely descriptions of nature,so I enjoyed it a lot. Ending was a bit rushed and perhaps not credible,but still a nice read. I have a mini goal of trying to fill all the gaps in my Simak novels.17 down,about 7 or 8 to go,if I can locate free pdfs online:0)
Trying again with Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword.I have never had much enthusiasm for the whole nordic sort of mythology,Beowulf and Eddas included.
(I exclude Tolkien,he has pretty much Anglesized his elves etc,apart from the names IMO) But I'll make yet another attempt at Broken Sword,see if I can get beyond about 25%!

I DNF’d The Broken Sword ages ago. I’ve this vague idea I should give it another chance, but it’ll probably never happen - too much else to read.

Finished The Veils of Azlaroc, started The Black Sun (lot of false hits on that title).

Poul Anderson was never one of my faves, at least to the degree that I felt the need to be the completist. To put it another way, by the time I arrived at the golden age of science fiction (13), I already appreciated that his politics were not mine.

Speaking of agendas, I just wrapped up The Atlas Complex. I regard the trilogy as a qualified success; your enthusiasm for the book will depend on how much patience you have with a pack of characters with delusions of grandeur, and for whom the getting of wisdom is a rough road. I do find it amusing that there are people over at Goodreads who love Ms. Blake's characters rather more than she does, and took it really personal when bad things happened to them!

I'm about 10% of the way through Swan Song. Very dark and disturbing so far.

I finished The Skylark of Space. I don’t think it has aged very well. Verne, Wells, & Burroughs have aged better I think. It was interesting to read something that was unabashedly sexist and racist without meaning to. I think it really reflects the culture that Doc Smith was writing in.

Just finished Murderbot 2, Artificial Condition. I'm liking Murderbot. Almost too self deprecating, but not quite.

>61 Shrike58:

I've liked much else by Anderson, but in general I think I've appreciated his sf better than his fantasy.

I'm reading another Hugo Best Graphic Story finalist, Saga, Volume Eleven, then onto Ai Jiang's novelette I Am AI.

Any Jeopardy fans here catch the question this week about the name of the capital city in Hyperion? I was surprised to see Hyperion come up.

>68 Karlstar: yes! then I was mad at myself because I couldn't think of it quickly enough.

>64 Neil_Luvs_Books: A couple of years ago, I re-read Galactic Patrol, out of some sort of curiosity. I was surprised by some of the things I found, things I could never have noticed when Smith was my go-to writer for thrilling space opera. But I felt no urge to carry on and re-read any more.

And then I read Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers. Much to my surprise, this stacked up badly against the Doc Smith.

Reviews for both books were posted.

>70 RobertDay: interesting about Simak! I have his City and Way Station on my bookshelf waiting to be read. I have only heard good things about those two books.

>71 Neil_Luvs_Books:, >70 RobertDay: Simak was one of those spotty writers, sometimes very good, sometimes so-so. Maybe not surprising considering how prolific he was.

>70 RobertDay: Thanks for the review of C.E. "a fairly preachy piece" describes a lot of the Simak I've read :-)

>7 Sakerfalcon:! Way Station was always a favourite of mine. I'm a bit afraid to re-read it, in case disappointment lurks within.

I read Way Station a few years ago and really enjoyed it. City also has some great moments. I am particularly fond of Why Call Them Back from Heaven?, which goes a bit weird at the end but is an effective piece of satire.

I've coincidentally just started reading Simak's Shakespeare's planet, which I picked up because I seemed to remember liking the wild imagination of whatever short stories of his I encountered in anthologies. I'll be reading it with more interest now!

>61 Shrike58:

I've only read one Poul Anderson novel (Orbit unlimited), which basically was a retelling of American myth-making and its right-wing self-aggrandizement has put me off reading more novels by him. Though I will likely make the little effort required to read some of his short stories (I have fond memories of A little knowledge when I was around the Golden Age).

I'm reading Lake of Souls. I'm about 110 pages in. I'm super picky about my short stories but I am really enjoying this one.

>76 Petroglyph: I have an old flip-book edition of Anderson's There Will Be Time and The Dancer from Atlantis. I read the former many times as a kid and loved it; I could never make it past the first couple chapters of the latter! I did read The High Crusade a couple years ago and found it a total blast, just sheer fun in novel form.

>77 Watry: I haven't picked this up yet but Leckie is in my top five of current working sf authors, so I imagine I will soon.

I have started Ken MacLeod's Beyond the Light Horizon, the third book in the Lightspeed Trilogy.

As with Book 2, he has included a summary of what has gone before to save people the trouble of having to reread the first two books before getting stuck into the final instalment.

>79 pgmcc:

Beyond the Hallowed Sky is nowhere in my public library consortium. I'll have to put in a request, since I'll be glad to tackle another MacLeod trilogy at some point.

>80 paradoxosalpha:
I always fond MacLeod's book rewarding.

I zoomed through Murderbot #2 and am reading Rogue Protocol now.

Started on Chris Priest's The Evidence, another visit to the Dream Archipelago which so far reads like a cross between Kafka and Discovering Scarfolk.

(For those who don't know, Scarfolk started out as a joke website promoting macabre and surreal public health posters, and then went downhill from there.)

Starting a fantasy novel that's a Lodestar finalist, Unraveller. I basically know nothing about it, but I've never not found a Frances Hardinge novel fascinating, so I have high hopes.

>74 RobertDay: I'm in the disappointed camp for Way Station after a recent re-read. I respect what he was trying to do with a story focused largely on introspection, but there just wasn't much there IMO. I was hoping to be impressed, as I was with Brackett's The Long Tomorrow but that was not the case.

I'm on book 3 of the original set of Foundation books, 2nd Foundation. It's been many years since I read them, and watching the series on Apple TV triggered me on a re-read. The books hold up very well (if you can ignore some of the stuff that makes it clear Isaac wrote this in the 50's). I must say, I like the series on TV, but they have gone way off the plot of the books. I'm not sure you can even call the TV series "Foundation" but I still like the show. I will probably take a break from Foundation after I finish this book, then pick up the other books in the series some other time.

I finished Titanium Noir and posted my review. In the process, I discovered that there's a new Harkaway: Karla's Choice, written as a sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I think I'll have to read that within the next year or so.

Next on the sf agenda: The Incal: Psychoverse (a graphic novel).

#87 I just watched the documentary on Jodorowsky's Dune. It was because of this never made film that
he met Moebius and when he couldn't raise the money for the film he used much of the storyboard for the film in the Incal and Metabaron series. He's quite insane and and an amazing genius.

Yes, I knew that Dune-based backstory for Incal. I tend to think of Jodo as an occultist first, and then as a writer and filmmaker.

I was disappointed in The Metabarons: Othon & Honorata, because I felt it was too Dune-derivative. (Padded with an R2-D2 & C-3PO frame story!)

>88 justifiedsinner: Your comments, just reminded me of how bad the original Dune movie really was. Check out this scene they cut on Youtube. Fair warning, you can't unsee it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuBSvNtlAq8

as a teaser, the first comment describes it well. "Captain Picard, the lost member of Toto."
I also love how the other actors look stunned. And Kyle's hair! It should be in a museum somewhere.

>90 Authjgab:

N.B. Lynch's Dune (which you refer to as "the original") was not Jodo's earlier Dune, which never made it to production, but had a lot of curious creative progeny, including the documentary to which >88 justifiedsinner: refers.

I thought Lynch's film had some admirable bits, and was perhaps greater in its original conception, before being whittled down to a more conventional feature length. It certainly looks crude compared to Villeneuve's work, though.

Finished The Black Sun, taking an SF break with Appleby's End.

I finally finished The Saints of Salvation, which wrapped up a bit better than I expected. On to Starter Villain.

I just finished Gods of Riverworld (Philip Jose Farmer), and I'll give it 3½*** – better than the third and fourth books of the quintet. Now maybe I'm a little biased in favor of the final book only because it's final and I escape for good and for all from that danged river valley and the tower, but the conclusion of this final volume is a decent wrap-up, although there's a lot of tedious and self-indulgent philosophizing by Farmer through the midparts of Gods. I think there may be some related short stories of Riverworld available, but I won't be reading them; and the only reason I didn't apply the Pearl Rule in books three and four is that I'd gotten so far in the quintet that I did want to finish it.

>91 paradoxosalpha: I'm one of the few who actually liked Lynch's Dune: 1984 film. Because the CGI technology wasn't developed yet, Lynch had to concentrate on the characters. I thought that the casting was excellent (yes, even crazed Sting.)

I saw the first 2021 version of Dune and it was slick, but of course the focus was on the special effects and not so much the characters. For me, it was like what we used to say about pop music - overproduced. I haven't seen the second one and may never get around to it now that it is off the big screen.

At the time I really didn't have may issues with Lynch's take on Herbert, and I really couldn't bestir myself to get out to see Villeneuve's interpretation (I'm so out of the movie-going habit). What I really want to see is if Villeneuve gets to take a swing of making something out of Dune Messiah; that could be something.

>96 Shrike58: Villeneuve has publicly committed to making a Dune Messiah film.

>96 Shrike58: Yes, THAT would be something to see.

>95 vwinsloe:
There are many of us who liked Lynch’s Dune. I also like the new one, but it is a different animal. Lynch’s version is great fun for all its quirkiness. I agree that the casting was excellent.

Finished The Evidence. In places, this is almost a comedy. In others, it seems to be a genre writer writing about being a genre writer - in this case, the p.o.v. character is a writer of crime thrillers. But the story is set in Priest's Dream Archipelago, so things don't always follow logically as one of the islands where the action takes place has high levels of 'mutability', which can make weird stuff happen. And said island has some Kafkaesque procedures to try to mitigate that mutability, but they cannot be misused, or weirder stuff happens. Add not one, but two unreliable witnesses and a cold police case, and the result is a book I found highly readable and engaging.

Themes and ideas from the other Dream Archipelago books (and indeed, from other Priest novels such as The Prestige) appear here. This novel also adds to my view that Priest's earlier novel, An American Story is also a Dream Archipelago story, despite being set in a version of our world. For one thing, mutability occurs there, too.

I find it interesting to see how the Dream Archipelago stories evolved. When the first two appeared in book form, in his 1972 collection An Infinite Summer, Priest commented in his introduction that these two stories shared a setting but were not otherwise linked. But over the time that he wrote about the world of the Archipelago, he first found that he couldn't resist slipping Easter Eggs into the stories; and then continued with his world-building until this book benefits from the reader having a lot of understanding the working of the world he has built (although it can be read as a stand-alone novel).

>100 RobertDay:
I am tempted. Nice write-up.

>100 RobertDay: I really enjoyed The evidence. Your review makes me want to reread it.

>99 pgmcc: Good to know I'm not alone!

I finished reading The Incal: Psychoverse and posted my review. In the front matter of that 2022 book, it mentioned that Jodorowsky has assigned the movie rights for The Incal to Taika Waititi. That should be pretty great, but so far IMDB shows only rudimentary pre-production data, without even a hint at casting.

>99 pgmcc: I also liked Lynch’s 1980s Dune. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good. But I very much liked Villeneuve’s recent interpretation. I thought it got a little closer to the essence of Herbert’s vision. I still have yet to view Part 2. Waiting for it to become cheaper on the streaming services.

Despite Red Mars looming on the bedside table for a month or more, I was engrossed in lighter fare. I read the Murderbot Diaries 2-6 this month and 7 is on deck. Then I am back to my reread of Discworld.

I'm another Lynch Dune hater. He got so many things wrong. Certainly Sting, while ornamental, wasn't right for Feyd-Rautha (unlike the new one who is very good). For some reason, what I remember most clearly was the Lynch Baron Harkonnen. Clearly misunderstanding the creepy aspect of the Baron needing gravity suspensors to support his huge obesity, Lynch has him bobbing around at the ceiling laughing -- for all the world like Mary Poppins' uncle.

>107 rshart3: I believe that yours is the most common opinion, at least it is the one that I have heard most often. Of course, it depends on how you personally envisioned the characters in your mind when you read the book. To me, Sting was perfectly insane. Baron Harkonnen was absolutely evil and grotesque. (Lynch had perfected insane and grotesque in his previous films.) These characters were exactly as I had depicted them in my mind's eye.

Although I appreciate the individual actors and their performances in the Lynch film, I think the casting in Villeneuve's was in every case far closer to how I had imagined the characters when I read the book. (With the willful exception of Liet-Kynes, I suppose.)

I am now 50 pages in to Stephen King's Revival. So far there's nothing notably sfnal about it, although it seems to be laying suitable groundwork. Some LT users have tagged it as sf at any rate.

>108 vwinsloe: I always considered the Lynch Dune to be a trailer for the film we ought to have had. I felt it failed to make the Fremen sufficiently ethnic, and all that "weirding module" stuff was superfluous. But I liked the look and feel, and many of the supporting cast were solid performers - Brad Dourif's Pieter de Vries, José Ferrar's Emperor (even if his role in the final battle was to play a video game), Linda Hunt's Shadout Mapes, Freddie Jones' Thufir Hawat, Sian Phillips' Reverend Mother, Jürgen Prochnow's Duke Leto and Pat Stewart's Gurney Halleck (even if a big chunk of his performance ended up on the cutting room floor, later recycled into the disavowed tv version).

The opening scenes - the visit of the Guild Navigator to the Emperor, and the testing of young Paul - remain fairly iconic for me, even if the rest of the film has issues.

For years, I remain convinced that there was a longer version of Lynch's film, because I have a vague recollection of the scene between the Shadout Mapes and Lady Jessica in the garden, and the banquet scene, though I may have seen these on a film review programme before release and they might not have made it into the final cut.

I'm going to add a shout-out to the SyFy Channel's Dune miniseries, if only because of that show's Gurney Halleck, a British actor called P.H. Moriarty. His first big supporting role was as the sidekick 'Razors' to Bob Hoskins' Harry Shand in The Long Good Friday, as well as a similar role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He has an interesting history, having started out with a shady past in London's East End underworld - which is the setting for TLGF - and some currency in London's semi-professional boxing community. He plays Halleck as a gangster's enforcer, and in the DVD extras, when interviewed about his approach to playing the role, simply says of Duke Leto, "He's my Boss!".

>111 RobertDay: Linda Hunt, Jürgen Prochnow, Freddie Jones- YES. More than solid.

>111 RobertDay: To this day, whenever I see Linda Hunt in anything, my brain immediately says, "Shadout Mapes!"

Finished up Cahokia Jazz; there's some clever world building here but I'm not sure that I found the climax convincing. Worth a try though.

>113 ScoLgo: So true!!

Started Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer, a near-future novel about a libertarian seastead.

I flew through Starter Villain last week, it was a light, fun read. Lots of cats.

Finished Appleby's End, back to SF with The Cosmic Puppets.

Finally getting into The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz, which has been on the mental TBR since before it came out. What could terraforming of planets look like in the far future, in a galaxy far, far away? At least, as run by a for-profit corporation. Good so far.

Dipping in and out of The Stolen Hours, a collection of stories by Manjula Padmanabhan.

So, finally knocked off Some Desperate Glory. I liked it better than I thought I might, and I can see why it made the Hugo short list, but I still wouldn't have swapped out any of the choices I did make to make space for it: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, The Saint of Bright Doors, Infinity Gate, Translation State, He Who Drowned the World.

Tim Lebbon, The Last Storm 3½***. Fairly decent story, but I couldn't figure out just how Ash and her father (and his mother, for three generations) had some kind of power to create rain storms out of home-made electronics plugging them into their veins. For sci-fi, this isn't a very good case of world building, but the story itself was fairly decent.

I'm reading The surviving sky which posits an interesting future scenario but has too much married couple drama.

>123 Sakerfalcon: I'm thinking that before I read any further SF/Fantasy by Indian authors I probably need to read some of the Indian classic epics, just to get a better sense of what memes they're cribbing from those works!

Read a Hugo finalist, Mammoths at the Gates, yesterday. It was fine; the somewhat unfocused nature of Nghi Vo's Singing Hills novellas isn't very much to my taste.

Now I am reading A Traveller in Time, a collection of sf criticism by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller.

>124 Shrike58:

Good point! I'm currently reading Doniger O'Flaherty's Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities, which is full of fascinating translations and glosses.

I have given up on Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword
80 pages in and I hated it. Little fondness for nordic myth anyway,except when filtered and romanticised like Tolkien :0)
So cold,brutal - and brutish- disliked even the so called hero . I have decided not to finish it,something I rarely do,barely even once a year,but I feel the need to take a shower to wash away the nastiness . About 10 pages at a time is my limit. As you may guess,I am so not a fan of grimdark,and even regular so called epic fantasy leaves me cold. I have been filling gaps in my Anderson shelf,so thought I should read this,its supposed to be a classic,but nope. Back to SF for me!
Very little time for reading ,since Mr Dusty,on top of the speech difficulties from his stroke,plus the onset of dementia,and now having chemo for a blood disorder need care and attention a lot,and between the two of us there are endless docs appointments and nurses turning up to take blood etc.Quality time for reading is at a premium.
I may read some famous short stories next month,a couple of award winners,and then just comfort reading of old beloved books that wont need razor focus to understand them! :0)We'll see......

>126 paradoxosalpha: A couple months ago I ran across an interview with Kritika Rao where she held forth on some of her favorite characters from the Indian classics; though there's the tricky matter that those favorite characters may coincide with the deities that one chooses to worship.

>128 Shrike58:

Not sure how that's tricky. It seems sensible to me that one's religious adherence would be congruent with one's taste in literary character.

>124 Shrike58: The great Indian epic (in my opinion) is Mahabharata, which I much prefer over Ramayana. Now in fairness and much to my regret, I don't know Sanskrit, so I've got to use translations/adaptations. I read R. K. Narayan's translation/adaptation or whatever you want to call it of The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic and positively detested what Narayan did with it – much too much abridgment, and it really seemed that he was trying to cater to Western (British, primarily) audiences. I also read Krishna Dharma's Ramayana: India's Immortal Tale of Adventure, Love, and Wisdom (another abridgment), which I enjoyed for its color illustrations but which seemed a little too juvenile for my taste.

As to Mahabharata, though, there is an absolutely magnificent English-language blank-verse adaptation by Carole Satyamurti, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling. Don't be misled by Satyamurti's surname: she was English, and Satyamurti was her South Asian husband's surname. She didn't know Sanskrit, so she took various translations (I assume they were older, public domain) and abridged them into her own prose version, cut-and-paste style I assume. Then she converted this abridged prose to blank verse. As I said, it's absolutely magnificent, though some Hindus, I believe, may dislike it for what's left out or perhaps for some doctrinal reasons. Realistically, though, abridgment is essential for a work that's several multiples lengthier than the Bible or than the Iliad and Odyssey combined. (ETA: Satyamurti's Mahabharata, though a substantial abridgment, still does run 900 some pages.)

There's a lot more I could write here, but this is a sci-fi group, not a group on Hinduism, and I don't want to overdo this discussion. But if you're interested, Satyamurti's work is available in Norton (a regular Norton edition, not a Norton Critical) in both hardcover and softcover. The Narayan Ramayana is available in Penguin, and Krishna Dharma's version is available through some kind of specialty press.

>129 paradoxosalpha: It's tricky for the outsider looking in.

I'm taking my cues from these essays: https://reactormag.com/a-short-history-of-south-asian-speculative-fiction-part-i...

And: https://reactormag.com/a-short-history-of-south-asian-speculative-fiction-part-i...

>127 dustydigger: Sorry to hear about all the health concerns that you are dealing with. It is so hard to find good reading when your attention is divided. I hope that you find a few comfort reads that will do the trick.

new month!

I have just finished Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the Light Horizon, book 3 of his Lightspeed Trilogy. As with Ken’s other trilogies the third book creates a great whole with its two companion novels and generates meaning and awareness of various aspects of life, the universe and geo-political manoeuvring. I love SF that uses the medium to explore themes that are relevant to the here and now and explore the possibilities available to avoid many of the blunders countries have fallen into repeatedly.

>127 dustydigger: I won a children's book from LT; The Further Adventures of Miss Petitfour and I found it was a fun book to read after some "heavy" books. Maybe some light themed books would be good for you. Take care and sending hugs for both of you.

>135 mnleona:
>132 vwinsloe:
thanks for your best wishes. I am starting a reread of Neverwherethe first Gaiman bok I ever read. i think this is read #4.i am also thinking of rereading the Heinlein juveniles. read Podkayne of Mars recently,fancy Farmer in the Sky

>136 dustydigger: I love Neverwhere. I haven't really read much of Gaiman's adult fiction – I just couldn't get at all interested in American Gods and didn't bother reading anything else other than Neverwhere. My preference with Gaiman is definitely for his juvenile works, The Graveyard Book being an all-time favorite and I very much like Coraline as well.

I also was not so fond of American Gods,but loved Coraline.
Black Button eyes.....EEK!!

>130 CurrerBell: Princeton has published a one volume edition of Robert Goldman's complete translation of the Ramayana. Haven't started it yet. I will start once I finish Ramesh Menon's "modern retelling", which has kept my interest. As for the Mahabharata, I too found Satyamurti's verse retelling wonderful. Penguin has a translation and abridgement by John D Smith, where he summarizes the abridged parts between translated segments so you can get more or less the whole story.

>139 wbf2nd: Thank you! As to Mahabharata, I've got Smith's Penguin version around somewhere, just have never gotten to it. (I've also got the 10-volume Bibek Debroy prose but definitely haven't gotten to that.) As to Ramayana, I've also got the 3-volume Debroy translation and that really should be my first priority, considering my poor success with Ramayana elsewhere.

Incidentally, I'm planning on giving most of my Rich Riordans away to a fifth-grade teacher in my congregation. I'll be keeping the first two because my favorite Percy Jackson character is Clarisse LaRue, but the one "Rich Riordan Presents" that I'm going to keep for the entire series is Roshani Chokshi's "Pandava Quintet" (and I've still got to get around to the fifth and final installment).

>140 CurrerBell: I hadn't heard of Chokshi's Pandava Quartet, I will have to keep my eye out for it. I admire Riordan's enthusiastic support of other writers' using their heritage as the background for Percy Jacksonesque tales.

Curious to hear what you think of the Debroy translation of the Ramayana. I have his Mahabharata, and have started it. So far it is quite readable, but being so long I tend to drift over to other books, so it will take a while to get through.

Starting my next Hugo read, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.

>142 Stevil2001: I read that last month, it was fun.