Bought a book recently?

[pxr5]

Just started Wool by Hugh Howey - the excellent series Silo is based on these books.

[Slim]

I'm now onto another Reacher novel, Nothing to Lose. Written in the third person, which I prefer. A bit simpler than some of the Reacher novels, so far at least, but I like that. While reading The Enemy a few months ago I was tempted to start taking notes so I could keep track of all the different characters, and maybe even print out a map. This one's a lot tighter and easier to follow.

Nothing to Lose was poor. Since then I've also listened to Gone Tomorrow, 61 Hours and Worth Dying For, all of which have been pretty good, especially 61 Hours. I've just started The Affair today which is the 16th Reacher novel. It's in the first person and set during Reacher's army days, in 1997. Pretty good so far.

That was a pretty good one, I finished it in twelve days.

Since I typed this I've also read Reacher #17, A Wanted Man - not great. There are two Reacher novels that don't come up to snuff, and that's one of them.

I've now started Never Go Back which the second Cruise film was based on - pretty loosely, it seems. So far so good.

[Slim]

I only ever read (as opposed to listen to) books on holiday when there's not much better to do, and I added The Striker Portfolio to my Kindle before jetting off to Malta and Greece earlier this month.

This is the third of the series by Adam Hall (a pseudonym for the writer Elleston Trevor, although that wasn't his real name either) concerning a "shadow executive" (spy) codenamed 'Quiller'. There are 19 of them! This one was published in 1968. I only wish they were available as audiobooks. I'd only read The Tango Briefing (1973) before. That was pretty good, although I had misgivings about it.

I had misgivings about this one as well. For one thing, the plot is over-elaborate. For another there's too much detail. Like the other Quiller novels it's written in the first person and there's hours of self-indulgent narration about his expertise in the craft of spying. It's all impressive stuff though. Led me to wonder whether Hall (or Trevor) had a background in intelligence field work. He didn't. Must have had a fascination with it.

What I do like about it is there's a bit of anti-glamour in it. Stuff about Quiller's expenses being scrutinised. Comments about people he doesn't like to work with. A bit of anti-authoritarianism. He's quite different from James Bond, who's obviously the benchmark for this sort of thing. Quiller doesn't always know the complete picture, only what his handlers want him to know at any given time. And in this one, he's more or less tricked into accepting the mission by his boss. He has some idiosyncracies - he prefers to work alone, and never carries a gun. It's a bit more Le Carre than Fleming.

Hall (or Trevor) has an annoying habit of jumping forward in the plot, then only telling you how he got there later. I suppose it's supposed to keep the reader on their toes. He sometimes leaves you with a cliffhanger, then you find out that he's got out of it but you only find out how a few pages later. I just found it self-indulgent and irritating.

Still - this was a good read, based on a clever idea about Luftwaffe fighters manufactured by an British aerospace company failing unexpectedly and killing their pilots. I actually very nearly finished it in a week on holiday.

I don't think it's nearly as good as The Tango Briefing though, which perhaps suggests that they get better over time.

I wrote about The Tango Briefing here: http://www.jamesgibbon.com/tango-briefing/

[Thenop]

The Fireman - Joe Hill (Stephen King's son - well one of them anyway). Looking forward to reading it.

[R6GYY]

With some book tokens I had, I have expanded my Science Fiction / Film & TV library with this tome (not from Amazon):

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[dom]

Read a couple of excellent Irish based books. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray that follows a wealthy family in rural Ireland dealing with the financial crash and it's aftermath. The crescendo leading up to the end is quite brilliantly done. I hope the TV show that is being planned does it justice

The Bee Sting was nominated for the Booker but the other novel I read The Prophet Song by Paul Lynch won it. A dystopian novel about an authoritarian Government taking over in Ireland is pretty horrific. He keeps the book at the level of the family having to deal with the extreme regime and doesn't stray into the wider political arena, only indirectly. It does though provide clear parallels with the situation in Syria and provides real food for thought

[Thenop]

Bought The End of the World as We Know It - New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand. A collection of short stories by various authors based on Stephen King's The Stand. Some of them tangents, some of them preludes or sequal-like. King approved, he wrote the foreword.

Was meaning to read it over my holidays, nice 800 pages :-)

[pxr5]

Bought The End of the World as We Know It - New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand. A collection of short stories by various authors based on Stephen King's The Stand. Some of them tangents, some of them preludes or sequal-like. King approved, he wrote the foreword.

Was meaning to read it over my holidays, nice 800 pages :-)

Oh nice one - I knew about this but didn't realise it was out. I'll add to my 'to read' list.

[Slim]

Since I last contributed to this thread I've listened to HG Wells' The First Men In The Moon which even for its time (1901) is very far-fetched. But an incredibly imaginative work.

I got it as part of a free HG Wells collection from Audible - some notable actors narrate the various works and this one is really well done - the guy who reads it gives a proper performance, laden with emotion and drama.

Also got through the 19th Reacher novel, Personal. Not bad at all but not one of the best ones. I prefer the third person ones, this is a first person novel.

Also listened to Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip by Simon Hart. It's mostly good, but much of the earlier material is drawn from his diaries at the time when he was Secretary of State for Wales, and not that interesting. I suspect most readers would get on better with an edited version, though it would be short.

In 2023 I wrote to Simon asking him, as a constituent and a party member, to consider withdrawing the whip from Andrew Bridgen and he did so a few days later. It was a faint hope but I thought he might have mentioned correspondence with one of Bridgen's constituents, but he didn't. I like to think that I played some small part in this, but perhaps not.
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[pxr5]

I've just finished the Silo series by Hugh Howey (Wool, Shift, Dust). A great read if a little anti-climactic. I'm really interested to see how the TV show follows the books now.

[Slim]

A couple I forgot - I also listened to a collection of three Judge Dredd novellas entitled Year One, set during Dredd's first year as a full-eagle Judge. Really very good, plenty of dark humour.

And Kevin Armstong's memoir Absolute Beginner. Kevin is possibly best known as being Bowie's guitar player at Live Aid and on several of his albums, but he's had a long and distinguished career playing with Iggy Pop, Sinead O'Connor, Thomas Dolby and others. Just a beautiful book, eloquent, fascinating and funny. Sorry to say that in one of a collection of essays tacked onto the book he has a few negative words to say about Neil Peart as a drummer, but it's not personal.

I've been more bookish than I thought! Or more auiobookish.

[pxr5]

Currently reading Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Cixin Liu about the rise of intelligent life in the The Cretaceous Past. It's so well written and a delight to see how both the ants and dinosaurs interact in a developing society. Superb sci-fi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Ants_and_Dinosaurs

[pxr5]

^ I finished Of Ants and Dinosaurs last night; now on to Donate by Emma Ellis - the first in The Eyes Forward series:

For every new baby born, a life must be sacrificed.

Mae finds herself pregnant in a world where the global population has hit twenty billion, and governments decree no child may be born without a life being sacrificed in return.

As Mae grapples with this new reality, the world becomes increasingly hostile as fertile women are seen as a nuisance, and all children are deemed a burden.

With her pregnancy progressing and so harder to conceal, Mae must make a choice: convince someone to donate their life to save her unborn child, or find a way to keep her baby a secret. But in this world, secrets are difficult to keep. Spies are everywhere.

When the stakes are so high, how far would you go to save your family?

[dom]

Almost finished the audio book of Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Really good sci-fi about a one way mission to rescue Earth.

Half way through I found out it was being turned into a film due for release next year starring Ryan Reynolds. It put me off a little as I'm not a huge fan. The book cover actually changed to feature Ken in astronaut garb.

It is a great story though and I do recommend the book at least.

[pxr5]

Project Mary is another on my to-read list, along with The Martian. Thanks for the positive take.