Fun summer reading

I love these threads.

A couple recommendations:

The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike #2) by Robert Galbraith (Pseudonym), J.K. Rowling
A great mystery with likable characters and an interesting twist at the end. The audiobook is especially good.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Car
I read this for the first time just recently and enjoyed it immensely. Not a great deal of action but fantastic characterization and a really interesting look at 70’s England.

The Ciaphas Cain series by Sandy Mitchell
I am a little embarrassed to put these here as they are total fluff and the cover art is frankly embarrassing. That said they are a fun combination of military scifi with the George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. Check it out if that sounds at all appealing.

Enjoyed the new Laundry novel by Stross, and also liked Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch much more than I expected to – the hater reviews had put me off it.

(And, exciting to *me* because I was dropped on my head as a child, T.G. Otte’s July Crisis, a back-to-the-sources study of the diplomatic clusterfuck that was July 1914.)

“Enjoyed the new Laundry novel by Stross”

You know I really enjoy Mr. Stross’s blog and the idea of the Laundry novels (basically fighting eldritch horrors while working for a bureaucratic government agency) sounds amazing. However they always leave me a little cold and I am not sure why…

/Not at all criticizing your suggestion or saying you are wrong to like the books.

“However they always leave me a little cold and I am not sure why…”

Always interesting to me how & why A likes a book and B doesn’t. I infer from the word “eldritch” that you have some Lovecraft under the belt, which always strikes me as one of the hurdles Stross imposes on his readers. But I’m curious what leaves you cold about them – do you just not like Bob the narrator much? or find the plots or characterization weak?

(The last book has an evil cliffhanger ending, so anything that convinces me to care less about the Laundry series is not undesirable right now!)

Glad to hear that about Americanah, Maria, since I have two copies … (better give one away).

(My big fiction commitments recently have been Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. The first extraordinarily rich but very long, the second concentrated brilliance.)

7: I recall that in the back of The Atrocity Archive, Stross mentions there *is* another author who did something quite similar … don’t have it to hand, though.

8: loved The Leopard as well, esp. since it was clear the author loved him some Stendhal. If you haven’t read any Stendhal, maybe the 19th-c . Frenchman’s obvious debt to the 20th-c. Italian will appeal to you!

“Not to get all spoilerific, but there was a plot reason for his distaste for James Bond-like party clothes.”

It seemed to me more of a personality trait I think.
(Admit that I read that one over a year ago so the details are murky.)

Stross mentions there *is* another author who did something quite similar

Tim Powers’ Declare, which takes some of the same basic Ideas and goes in a very different direction.

It seemed to me more of a personality trait I think.

The villain, for nefarious reasons, is trying to transform Bob Howard into James Bond; Howard is resisting (unsuccessfully, until he figures out to do the one thing Bond would never do . . .)

“The villain, for nefarious reasons, is trying to transform Bob Howard into James Bond; Howard is resisting”

Yeah but I don’t think he knows that when he is complaining about what he has to wear to the party.

Tim Powers. Thank you for the name

Best known for the novel that got bought by Disney, but even On Stranger Tides was pretty good before the movies spoiled it.

And Bob Howard doesn’t know everything yet by that point in Jennifer Morgue but he’s beginning to figure it out.

“And Bob Howard doesn’t know everything yet by that point in Jennifer Morgue but he’s beginning to figure it out.”

I will bow to your knowledge here. Frankly my dislike of Bob is probably purely irrational.

I have Americanah lined up for sometime soon (but Im a lazy lazy reader) also Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi had a pretty interesting and funny interview with Zadie Smith here:

http://new.livestream.com/schomburgcenter/events/2831224/videos/45613924

Best book(s) I’ve read recently are probably(definitely) George Saunders short stories(bear in mind I generally only read short stories, on account of said laziness)

Huh! Maybe Stross has decided he doesn’t like Bob that much, either.

Bob as suffering IT guy working for a classified bureaucracy of magic worked best in the first book or two. He’s since leveled up enormously in terms of magical powers and climbing the bureaucratic hierarchy. His attitude toward work seems to be lagging behind his experiences and new responsibilities. But as Stross has repeatedly stated, Bob is not a reliable narrator.

I like the occasional fantasy that takes the viewpoint of someone fairly ordinary who isn’t personally trying to save the world or overcome the forces of darkness. Over time it seems like most of those ordinary characters gain power until they’re fighting toe-to-toe with lesser gods and the Big Bad of the series, if there is a Big Bad around. Most World War II stories are not about people who plan to personally assassinate Hitler. I’m not sure why conflicts in fantasy settings gravitate toward that POV.

Henry, I’m glad you dug ‘Poor Man’s Fight’ as I really enjoyed the book myself; in fact I borrowed a kindle just to read it. Marko Kloos’s _Terms of Enlistment_ is an e-book that is pretty good albeit a tier below — Alexis Sanchez vs Luis Suarez, if you’ll allow me.

I recently read _Lawrence in Arabia_ with a lot of enjoyment, enough to get me to read _A Prince of Our Disorder_ next.

I also, owing indirectly to Doctor Science’s satisfying evisceration of Vox Day’s Hugo nomination over at Obsidian Wings, just started reading the Brother Cadfael novels. So far I am pleased there are so many of them.

Two thirds of the way through the Ben H Winters series: The Last Policeman, Countdown City and World of Trouble. An end of days police procedural where the mystery thread sometimes gets lost, but still a fun fast read.

Dave I have been meaning to read those. Glad to hear they are enjoyable.

A good noir I read was Manchette’s Fatale, tho it’s overpriced by NYRB. Another reason to regret not knowing French. Short enough that it would make a good film. (I think noir novels are all meant to be films, if they’re good; the genre seems inseparable from film.)

Thank you, Henry, for pointing out the typos in my hastily written comment. There isn’t a book or an article published that doesn’t contain a few, despite all the eyes that review them.

At least that would be better than chiding John Quiggin. I never liked that Quiggen guy.

I actually had to Google the definition for “solecism.” I can’t remember the last time that happened. That’s why I come here…even when you’re flaming each other I learn something :)

First book I could think of to recommend for summer reading would be Joon Ha Lee’s Conservation of Shadows.

For something a little more fun and shallow, Michael J Martinez’ Daedalus Crisis.

Karl Schroeder’s Lockstep was alright, and I guess Gaie Sebold’s two Babylon novels are alright, too. I read a lot of junk.

I have found that Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty by Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey to be very useful in doing a little backfilling history when I read today’s current events. The Indonesian election was made substantially more clear because I read the essay about the Philippine struggle between Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her rivals, and the general nature of Philippine politics.

Summer reading (simultaneous, desultory, overlapping): Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue, like all Chabon wonderfully rich, this one centering on a record store in Berkeley a generation ago; David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, BH being defined as everything from the Big Bang (or before?) to the present; Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, by a former sportswriter who also wrote an excellent biography of Mickey Mantle and a pretty funny baseball novel, Squeeze Play. All recommended on an “as is” basis, since I haven’t finished any of them. Am also planning to read at least some of a book that I do not anticipate recommending, Inferno by Dan Brown (of Da Vinci Code infamy), because I understand much of it is set in Manila, a city I know somewhat.

Ah, a fun thread, recommending many writers unknown to me. Thanks!

I’m currently reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize last year. There are two narrators, a teen-ager in Japan, whose diary is found by a writer on an island off the west coast of Canada, who is the second narrator and is Ruth Ozeki herself. Oddly, Ruth the narrator does not come across as likeable, at least to me. I often find with alternating narrators that one is much more compelling than the other, and here the Japanese teen-ager, Nao, reigns. How did her diary come to be in the ocean? Did it arrive with the drift from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami? What happened to Nao?

I’m enjoying it quite a bit despite so-so writing, because of the setting and because of the richness of the title, which I won’t spoil here. I’ll never hear that phrase, “for the time being”, the same again.

Before Ozeki I zipped through two of Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn mysteries. They are set in Saskatchewan and are not very mysterious—I guessed the culprit early on in both novels—but I love visiting Joanne Kilbourn in her world, with her kids and her job and her routine, and these crimes that keep cropping up but even when they do dinner must be made and homework overseen.

Last recommendation. One of the best novels I’ve ever read was Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittredge. Just a wonderful novel, the more of a triumph because it was woven from short stories written over a span of many years. She takes terrific risks with her main character, who is seriously flawed, but somehow brings the novel home in a really satisfying way.

Oh! And one more, Three Junes by Julia Glass. This was her first novel and was much better than her second, which was so bad I haven’t yet tried the third and fourth. But in Three Junes she takes tremendous risks, changing narrators twice so the three parts of the book are only loosely connected, but again the ending is very satisfying. Ahhhhh. Wish I could read it for the first time again.

In a previous thread I digressed by mentioning Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, which is largely about the treatment of Aboriginal and mixed-race Australians early last century. (I’m not Australian, so learned from it).

Currently part way through Little, Big by John Crowley. It’s still too early to commit to an opinion.

Reading two-thirds of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy—Annihilation and Authority—has left me highly anticipatory for the closer due in September. Lovecraftian atmospherics abound within both, though their framework, expeditionary spelunking of the infected zone and clique-riven bureaucratic containment of the eldritch abscess respectively, present two differing, but complimentary, means of portraying such. Both are eerie and unsettling in the best of ways, in that the author consistently opts for subtlety and less-is-more in the knowledge that such a methodology helps to fire the imagination and ratchet up the tension. Very, very good…

“The Laughing Policeman”, the best, or at least the best-known, of the Martin Beck stories. A perfect book, as genre novels can sometimes be. Perfect in the sense that any change would make it less good. If there was even one more character it would become too difficult to follow without turning back every ten pages to remind yourself who Per MÃ¥nsson is; if there were one less it would be possible to work out who the murderer is by a process of elimination. If there were one twist more it would be a Swedish Agatha Christie, one less merely a good procedural.
Also perfect – “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”.

I’ll second The Laughing Policeman. Some of the others in the series were fairly weak, but it was excellent.

I re-read The Friends of Eddie Coyle every year or so and it is still perfect. (The movie version with Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle is worth watching, too.) I also highly recommend The Digger’s Game and Cogan’s Trade (the latter was recently filmed not-horribly in disguise as “Killing Them Softly,” with Brad Pitt).

Another Tim Powers novel this audience might like is The Stress of Her Regard. Shelley, Keats, and Byron versus something not exactly a vampire. Also the true answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.

Just finished Paul Park’s All Those Vanished Engines. It’s a mashup of literary meta-fiction, steampunk, and sf, but that’s not what the plot is about. Took a while to figure out what he was doing but in the end I liked it a lot. He’s sort of in the same territory as Gene Wolfe, which is how I found him years ago.

What, no comics?

I liked “Locke and Key”.

Unfortunately, Rankin has said (no link – he said it when I saw him on his last tour) that he’ll be taking some time off. He wants to stop and smell the roses while he can – especially because he was deeply saddened by I(M)B’s death.

Anybody know whether there was any truth to the rumor that there was a last D & P book in the pipeline when Reginald Hill died?

@62mrearl
If you like Pascoe & Dalziel, try Jim Kelly…he has a couple of different lead characters Dryden a newsman and Shaw a DCI, but his character interactions and the clever mix of irony and subtle humour on top of clever plotlines make a very strong read. I’ll definitely try Michael Dibdin, I’ve seen them but never picked them up. Rankin and Robinson are good too, but I’ve only tried a sampling of them – I’ve read everything Hill and Kelly.

Cheers