Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine So what are you READING?

Glad you liked the "Superman" book, lance.

I really, really did, so thanks for the recommendation!

One of the funniest parts was when I read about the woman who played Lois on the radio show. She was fired, then put on a wig, and went to the auditions to fill her job, and she got the part! (Again!) I was laughing out loud!

Was that Joan Alexander?

P. G. Woodhouse by Frances Donaldson

The comic writer, P.G. Woodhouse, was severely criticized during World War II for broadcasting a series of talks from Germany about his internment in a civilian prison camp. Wodehouse had been living in France when the Nazis moved in; he was sent to the camp. It was early in the war; the detainees had shelter, simple although limited food, received some packages and mail and were not required to do heavy labour. It could have been far worse, but it was still a prison camp.

Woodhouse consented to do five broadcasts from Germany about his experiences. He was a comedian with no interest in politics - and, according to Donaldson, quite naive - so his talks were funny. The British were enraged; he was denounced in Parliament as spreading Nazi propoganda. It might be like Oprah broadcasting for Al Queda today - an iconic figure yukking it up with the enemy.

I'd read about this incident and found it baffling, but this is the first time I read the details. Of course, Donaldson is very pro-Wodehouse, and she has her own interpretation - but she interviewed a wide range of people and read the editorials of the day as well and presents the full spectrum of opinion about Wodehouse's actions.

Of particular interest in this book are the transcripts of the actual broadcasts. They're pure Wodehouse. They have his comic style, making fun of the dreary prison routine, the food, the other prisoners and the Nazi guards and officers. Some of the harshness and fear are there as well, but I can see why people got so upset about the talks. He was eventually "rehabilitated" and the matter was closed, but he went to live in America (despite a contentious pre-war dispute with the IRS), so I guess feelings in Britain remained rather tender.

The book is a full biography, starting with Wodehouse's childhood through to his death, but the war years were what I found particularly interesting.

Thanks to the wonders of interlibrary loan, I have been steadily working my way through the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series: the originals by Dorothy L. Sayers, and the authorized sequels by Jill Paton Walsh. I'm about halfway through A Presumption Of Death; the final volume, The Attenbury Emeralds, is already waiting for me at my local library.

After that: two recent short story collections in the 1632 series were recently released in paperback, and I picked them up a couple of weeks ago: Ring Of Fire III and Grantville Gazette VI.

After that: I've been thinking, it must be ten years since I last re-read The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings ...

While visiting my local library to return The Attenbury Emeralds, I spotted Captain Vorpatril's Alliance on the New Arrivals shelf; those 1632 books will have to wait a bit longer.

Just finished reading Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss.

The 600-page book traces the history of Obama's family--starting with his great-grandmother's suicide in Kansas in 1926 and his Kenyan family's history preceding the birth of his father in 1934. Obama himself isn't born until Chapter 7, and the book ends after his first visit to Kenya and before his arrival at Harvard Law School at age 25, so it doesn't describe his meteoric rise in politics or shed much light on his politics, if that's what you're looking for.

What it does offer is a series of revealing profiles of the family members who shaped Obama's life and a glimpse into how unlikely this person would be born at all, let alone become president of the United States. The overall theme of the book is being left and leaving, and finding and being found--Obama's quest for identity in the absence of his parents (one of whom he met only once, while the other lived on another continent during his high school and college years). Maraniss interviewed Obama's college friends, ex-girlfriends, and various relatives to get the story.

Worth reading, regardless of your politics.

Daunted by 600 pages as I am, I might pick up that book to see how it was fashioned. I like that it started two generations before he was born. What was "luck?" What were those subtle pieces that fit together?

Culture can be very subtle. I learned more about myself returning to my hometown than I think I ever would have discovered on the career path that had taken me to other places. Obviously not the same as President but in 110 years I have been until this last year the only college grad in my family and only the second to have what most would consider a "white collar" profession.

It was easy to think it was all "me" but there were so many influences (+ and -) I didn't realize as a kid that I can see as an adult who has returned to the old neighborhood and those I still no doubt see in a culturally filtered fashion.

Indeed, BB.

One of the fascinating parallels in the book is that, after his great-grandmother's suicide, Obama's grandfather (age eight at the time) and his great-uncle (age 10) were raised by their grandparents, just as Obama was raised by his own grandparents forty years later.

Obama's grandfather, Stan Dunham, was a very interesting character. He had a gift for gab and was a teller of tales (he claimed to have found his mother's body, but other sources dispute this). After marrying and becoming a father to his only child, Ann, he moved the family from Kansas to Texas, to Kansas again, to Washington, and then finally to Hawaii. After bouncing around from career to career (he wanted to be screenwriter at one point), Stan found his calling as a furniture salesman, but eventually gave that up to sell insurance--a job he hated but which paid better.

Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, arrived in Hawaii just after she graduated from high school and, during her first semester in college, met Barack Obama Sr., one of a generation of young Africans sent to college in the United States as part of a literacy effort.

Their entire relationship lasted less than a year--Barack II was born on August 4, 1961, and later that same month, Ann Dunham Obama took her newborn infant and fled back to Washington (the details on why are not clear, though considering how Barack Sr. treated his other wives, one can hazard a reasonable guess). Although Ann didn't file for divorce until their son was three, she apparently had nothing further to do with her husband. (He went on to Harvard and then back to Kenya).

The only time Barack Sr. met his son was during the winter of 1971-72, when he returned to Hawaii for a month-long visit.

One of the great things about the book is that it encourages the reader to think about his or her own family and the choices they made. I've been privileged to do a lot of family research over the last several years and have also discovered some interesting facts. Like you, BB, I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college, let alone grad school; however, my family did include one doctor and a Revolutionary War soldier.

I'm about a few chapters into The Great Gatsby--figured I should read it first before the movie comes out (which made it sound a lot more engaging than I would have given it credit for at first).

It's interesting so far, but I seem to have noticed a pattern: first person narrator, who has just enough personality/free-will to be uncomfortable about things but not much else, watches a lot of horrible rich people do horrible things while, for some reason, pretty girls keep revealing secrets about the other rich people that makes them even more horrible.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson.

Wilson wrote the Air series, last year's Mystic mini-series and Cairo, a graphic novel.

Alif the Unseen is her first novel and is a superb showcase of her talents and interests. Alif is a young computer hacker in a Middle Eastern city. He sets up secure systems for anyone who is at odds with the severely repressive government: Islamists, Communists, Feminists and people who just want their privacy. His government counterpart, known only as The Hand, is continually trying to break his systems - and one day succeeds. Alif is on the run with the full force of the government after him.

But this is G. Willow Wilson, so there are also Jinns and all sorts of mystical beings which coexsist with man in an unseen world. Alif escapes into this unseen world, dragging with him the girl next door, an American female convert to Islam, the head of the city's prestigious mosque and a very ancient book of magical tales. Unfortunately, The Hand also has allies in this unseen world, and they're not very nice creatures.

It's a book that's hard to put down, seamlessly blending medieval Arabic myths with computer programming, revolution and a good old-fashioned love story. If you've enjoyed her other works, you'll love this novel.

The Power Club by our very own Greg Gildersleeve aka He Who Wanders, Available as a Kindle book.

You have a unique super power. So do a few others. Your family has had to move to a special district for people with powers, even though the rest of your family are "ordinary" people. They don't say so, but you feel your family resents this. There are all sorts of unwritten rules and stifling restrictions in the district and your own mother says a lot of things the district does don't make sense.

You have enemies, some you know and some surprise you. You'd like to work with others to master your power, but nobody wants to work with you. To top it off, you're 12 years old.

This is Damon's story. Damon produces a dark field. While he's trying to develop this ability, he's also trying to develop his own identity, make friends and be a hero. Tall order for a 12 year old. "Being a hero isn't always about getting what you want", one of his friends tells him, and we watch Damon stumble and struggle through all sorts of mishaps, from school yard bullies to government coercion, and emerge a stronger and more mature person.

It's a captivating story. It's a long time since I've seen 12, but I cringed along with Damon at all the everyday difficulties facing a young adolescent and cheered when he succeeded.

What I found particularly interesting was the background to the story, the unnamed District with its somewhat mercurial and quietly threatening rules. It's never explained in detail, which makes it all the more ominous, effectively communicating what it must be like to live there. I would have liked to know more about how Damon's mother felt (although we get a good sense of her forced acceptance of the situation) and wondered if his father was so absent because of his job or because he couldn't deal with the everyday life at home in this strange place.

There's lots of material for a sequel, and Gildersleeve ends the book on a high note, but leaves the door open to continue the tale. I hope he does.

Finally, finally finished Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs. It's been a 5 year slog, including losing the book twice and setting it aside for various different reasons. It benefited from rereading from the beginning and doing it all in a short time span this time. Burroughs continues to fascinate me and despite his tendency to be a little too repetitious at times, the book has another great romp through his mind.

A Memory of Light ... the 14th book in the Wheel of Time series!

I'm on page 300!

For my book club I am reading:

Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman

It's a gay coming of age/first love story. It is set in the Italian Riviera. THe main protagonist is the 17 year old son of a professor. Each summer the professor has a graduate student spend the summer with his family. The first 2/3 of the book is full of teenage angst. The last 1/3 is less angsty. It's not a bad book, but it doesn't do anything for me.

Once that is finished, I have 3 books on deck: David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris; SHada (the novelization of a lost Dr Who episode); and Stephen Colbert's America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't. Not sure which to read next. I'm thinking of Stephen Colbert.

Greg Egan's Distress.

A master of 'hard' sci-fi, Egan introduces a future earth society with five distinct genders, on the throes of a massive scientific / cultural evolutionary leap forward.

Fun stuff, as are several of his other books, Permutation City and Quarantine. I really need to pick up some of his other books.

Pretty much anything by Peter Hamilton is amazing space opera futurism at work, as well.

I finished this.

I'm on the seventh Destroyermen book and am beginning to feel like it's trudging. I'll probably force myself through it but I think I've lost interest in most of the characters.

This sounds great--I've read and loved all of her works mentioned and really enjoy her unique voice. I had no idea Willow wrote a novel and am thrilled you reviewed it FC! Will definitely give it a try!

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Clay Jannon sees a help wanted sign in the window of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Mr. Penumbra needs a clerk to mind the store overnight, Clay needs a job. It's not just any bookstore; there are used books for sale, but, high above these shelves, accessible only by sliding ladders, are books which are taken out and returned by mysterious clients.

This novel is about the intersection of physical books and computers. The author clearly loves both. There's a secret society of book readers who are trying to decode a centuries-old mystery on one side and the bright young brains of Google who are trying to decode everything on the other. Being a happy story, the two intersect and start working together. It's not stated, but the author is either mad crazy in love with Google, works for them or was hired by them to write this book; he makes Google sound like the most wonderful thing on Earth. When I read this, I wanted to buy the world a Coke. I wanted everyone to work for Google, which, as we all know, is not evil.

Regardless, it's a lively and happy story. The mysteries of the secret book cult gradually and satisfyingly unfold. Guy meets girl, tries to impress girl and (spoiler) eventually gets girl. We meet a lot of people who do very interesting things, but don't seem to have much in the way of character development. I'd say the book has become a best-seller more for its ideas than for its characters.

As a thought-provoking piece on books and, in a broader sense, ideas and where they're going in the computer age, Mr. Penumbra's is a worthwhile read.

It's very different from Alif the Unseen (reviewed above), which also deals with matters of book meets computer. Alif was more subtle, Mr. Penumbra's is a brassy love song to the bright and shiny tech future.

There was one section of dialogue between Clay and Kat, a Google employee, which I thought relevant to readers of futuristic stories:

“...Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?”

“Sounds like a Japanese game show.”

Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer.”

Okay: “World government ...no cancer... hoverboards.”

“Go further. What's the good future after that?”

“Spaceships. Party on Mars.”

“Further.”

“Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.”

“Further.”

I pause a moment, then realize: “I can't.”

Kat shakes her head. “It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”

I'm trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can't even come up with a half-decent scene. Will people live in buildings? Will they wear clothes. My imagination is almost physically straining. Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing.

“Personally, I think the big change is going to be our brains,” Kat says, tapping just above her ear, which is pink and cute. “I think we're going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers.

... “Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.”

Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

“But I think the writers had their turn,” she says, “and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.”

I am definitely talking to a girl from Google.

Lightspeed Magazine edited by J. J. Adams

Just read my first issue of Lightspeed, which I'd heard about for a while. It was really quite impressive and well worth the money (I got a Kindle subscription, $2.99/month). You can read a lot of it on-line for free, but I like to support efforts like this.

The magazine offers a novella, a lengthy excerpt from an upcoming novel, four fantasy and four sci fi short stories, short interviews with the authors about these stories and two longer interviews which, in this case, were taken from the Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast and an article on an artist. Of the whole bunch, there was only one short story that I didn't enjoy. That's a much higher return than I get from most periodicals and anthologies.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

I just finished reading this book and all the way through I thought it's the kind of book rickshaw1 (and many other LWers) would enjoy. Its male narrator (it's told first-person throughout) is involved in the dirty work of apocalyptic war cleanup, so he's a tough guy, yet with a crazy sense of humor and a wondrous way with words. One common complaint about tough-guy books is the misogyny that's often found. You won't find that here. Beyond all that, it's a commentary on war, society, and identity.

The book reads like a ninja; I won't explain what that means, but if you read it you'll see.

I loved Harkaway's use of language. Here's the opening of Chapter One, and he's just getting warmed up:

"The lights went out in the Nameless Bar just after nine. I was bent over the pool table with one hand in the bald patch behind the D, which Flynn the Barman claimed was beer, but which was the same size and shape as Mrs. Flynn the Barman's arse: nigh on a yard in the beam and formed like the cross-section of a cooking apple. The fluorescent over the table blinked out, then came back, and the glass-fronted fridge gave a low, lurching hum. The wiring buzzed--and then it was dark. A faint sheen of static danced on the TV on its shelf, and the green exit lamp sputtered by the door.

"I dropped my weight into the imprint of Mrs. Flynn the Barman's hams and played the shot anyway. The white ball whispered across the felt, came off two cushions, and clipped the eight cleanly into a side pocket. Doff, doff, tchk...glonk. It was perfect. On the other hand, I'd been aiming for the six. I'd given the game to Jim Hepsobah, and any time now when the power came back and everything was normal in the Nameless Bar, I'd pass the cue to my hero pal Gonzo, and Jim would beat him too.

"Any time now.

"Except that the lights stayed out, and the hollow glimmer of the TV set faded away. There was a small, quiet moment, the kind you just have time to notice, which makes you feel sad for no good reason. Then Flynn went out back, swearing like a billy-o--and if your man Billy-O ever met Flynn, if ever there was a cuss-off, a high noon kinduva thing with foul landuage, I know where my money'd be."

"Flynn hooked up the generator, which God help us was pig-powered."

And so it goes.

Harkaway acknowledges P.G. Wodehouse, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alexandre Dumas as influences.

Cross-posting with the "What are you Watching" thread:

I'm currently almost finished with Clash of Kings, the second volume in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, being serialized on HBO as Game of Thrones. I'm interested in getting the HBO series on DVD but am leery of spoilers. Can anyone tell me how the first two seasons synch up with the actual book series? I saw Bleeding Cool has a preview for the third season. Any non-SPOILERy info is greatly appreciated.

"The 4-Hour Work Week" by Timothy Ferriss... wishful thinking mostly, but some interesting points...

From what I understand, season 2 = book 2, but starting with season 3, it will take two seasons to do each book. This is a very good thing because too many important and awesome things will be left out.

I read all the GoT books last year Pov and became totally hooked. My siblings all love them too. It's probably one of the only "series" of books one truly loved, and the quality only gets better and better.

The show does a great job putting great actors into the right roles, and Martin is part of the writing team, so he's able to insert a few scenes into the show that are new but make total sense.

If you're reading the third book you are in for a treat. Oh man, there is at least one major shocker of a twist for one of the narrators though I guess you can say that about all of them. Book 3 is when Jon emerged as my favorite, second only to Tyrion (with Arra a close third).