Books & Stuff (NS, No 24) - Reading in Jan 2022

 

Finished Reading

Mike Resnick, Will the Last Person the Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?

An interesting collection of short sci-fi stories.  There are a couple of very good pieces in here, but too many are written for a sense of humour I don't share.

Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire

This wasn't my kind of thing at all - an Alternative America where the state religion is a formulised paganism and with a very big focus of womens' spirituality. (Think of the tv show 'Fort Salem' but taken up a couple of notches and without the witches).

But I always like to give books in Gollancz's SF or Fantasy Masterworks series a go in the hope that I'll find something new and interesting.  Certainly new and interesting, just not for me...

Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

I read The Thursday Murder Club last month, and here's it's sequel.  Just as good.  It is very definely in the cozy-English-country-murder genre, so don't go for it if you want gritty realisim.  A fun read.

Currently Reading

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

J R R Tolkien, The Children of Hurin

Like a lot of fans of Lord of the Rings, I read The Silmarillion too young, found it too difficult and was put off the wider Tolkien Legendarium.  Back then in the 1980s that, and The Book of Lost Tales, were the only readily available ways of taking the Tolkien itch further (Christopher Tolkien was churning out his History of Middle Earth, but those were out of the spending reach of a teenager).

But when Christopher published an edited version of The Children of Hurin that was a single, readble narrative (unlike his other collections of his father's works) in 2007, I went out and bought it.  Thirteen years later (and having upgraded my copy to a second-hand hardback), I'm getting around to reading it!

And it reads very well.  With all due respect to the Professors Tolkien, I do find a simple prose telling much easier and more pleasurable than alliterative verse or a collection of textual variants.