Whats everyone reading?

[Colin YNWA]

Oh Vader Down which I was now looking forward to was a bit of a disappointment. Had some fun moments but took the whole Vader is a bad ass thing a little too far!

[broodblik]

Bouncer from Humanoids is this any good  since Comixology has a sale on the complete series ?

[Colin YNWA]

Bouncer from Humanoids is this any good  since Comixology has a sale on the complete series ?

I've got a lovely big hardcover collection of this (was on sale at some point or other a few years back). Here's what I said a couple of years back

Just finished Bouncer by Jodorowsky and Francois Boucq and its 400 plus pages of hardcovered western delight. Okay so maybe the last two volumes included here (it collects the first 7 volumes of this French series) get a little over excited in developing different and interesting characters but even then is sustains it ability to entertain.

Its the tale of a one armed gunfighter, starting off as the bouncer (hence the terrible title) in a saloon in a deadend, backwater town. The town seems to only be there to support the rail road that goes through it, but in 'reality' seems to have enough going on around it to attract every greedy landowner and bandit in the state to its doors to hassle and molest the locals. And Bouncer is often all that stands in their way.

He's a great character too, like all good western heros riddled with guilt, flaws, a constantly broken heart and whiskey... he feels so much more vulernable than similar characters and really is a delight to read his tale. A tale awash with tension and high adventure and family striff that would have Shakespeare jotting down notes for ideas. Indeed the pull and tension of family are a common and well used theme throughout this volume.

Its hard bitten and dusty and not for the faint hearted, but by george its great. The art is just sublime and Moebius on Blueberryesque, just hot and hard and with storytelling and character just supremely delievered. Often the pages are left with little or no text as the art just pulls you along with the story and its inhabitants.

Basically if you like western comics and don't own this you are missing something vital from your collection.

[broodblik]

Thanks for that Colin.

The whole Jodorowsky works are on sale @ Comixology:
https://www.comixology.com/comics-sale?list_id=35630&lang=1

[judgefloyd]

Roight now, oim reading:

- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu - has probably been mentioned elsewhere here. It's a really interesting, ambitious hard-science sci fi book. The writing has dorky moments, but is overall good and it's always genuinely thought-provoking.  Here's a (somewhat spoilerish) review https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n03/nick-richardson/even-what-doesn-t-happen-is-epic

- The Listerdale Mystery, a book of Agatha Christie short stories from 1934.  Two stories in, one twee and predictable, one dead good and scary. 

[RocketMother]

I picked up The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S Thompson at a thrift store and I'm about halfway through.

It's a bunch of collected articles from his Rolling Stone days (and others I think) so it's easily digestible. Kind of depressing to see nothing has really changed in the world of politics over the last 50 years... but it's an enjoyable read.

Anne McCaffery's The City Who Fought is sitting next to my bed waiting to be read next. And Good Omens underneath that. There really does need to be more time in the day...

[TordelBack]

Never shy about my love for the inexplicably underrated  C.J. Cherryh, but I just finished Cyteen, her mammoth follow-up to Downbelow Station and the sublime 40,000 in Gehanna.  This one won the Hugo, Locus and sundry other awards on its release in 1988, and it's not hard to see why. It's a deep, slow exploration of the issues of human cloning, slavery, castes, nature versus nurture, inheritance, manipulation and the totalitarian control of corporatism on space colonisation.

The thing I love about Cherryh's writing in general is her refusal to offer outside perspectives or explanations - we see her worlds and plots from the characters' points of view, and if they never fully understand what's going on, often nor does the reader. Here, a majority of the characters are clones of different types, vat-grown and psychologically programmed to be slaves with specific roles, treated as sub-human and sometimes shockingly disposable, at best valued concubines, pets or critically, experimental replacements for key human personnel. 

Subversives and terrorists lurk in the background, but in actuality these are mainly abolitionist groups of various stripes. Looking through the eyes of both cloners and brainwashed clones, we never see them as anything but deluded threats to the social and economic order, and Cherryh certainly doesn't point the alternative view out. It's a pretty remarkable thing to experience, and experience it you do.

The hard SF core is dated a bit by an emphasis on computer tech that clearly harks back to the 70s-style overstretched mainframes established in Downbelow Station, there are about 3 brief action sequences in 300K words (and only if you include a girl falling off a horse),  and as a novel it very much just stops rather than ends, but if you ever wanted to experience life in an immoral corporate state in a hermetic bubble on an alien world, this is your chance.

Highly recommended, but very loooong. 

[von Boom]

I can't agree more about Cherryh. Her work is wonderful and very absorbing. Her aliens are some of the best written and always feel, well, alien. I have been itching to reread her entire Alliance-Union series.

[Apestrife]

Tom O'Neill's Chaos, a book about the ins and outs of the Manson murders. Makes a valid point that the police work wasnt the best, and brings about some weird and possible connections between the Manson family and fbi, a doctor who killed a dr who killed an elephant with lsd among other fascinating finds. And he does this while still keeping to the point that the investigation of the Manson family wasnt the best.

Tom also makes interesting observations of his 20 years looking into stuff, interviewing people. The mistakes he makes, and how much of it ultimately is a search for information without end rather than getting answers. Reminded me a bit of Robert Graysmith's work on the Zodiac killer, or James Ellroys My dark places.

A very interesting read.

[pictsy]

I finished Asimov's Galactic Empire series last week.

This series is probably the weakest stuff of his I have read and certainly don't work as a series.  As individual books they are OK.  The Currents of Space is easily my favourite of the three.  It has excitement and heavy themes that are of shocking relevance today.

I have started on the final (and longest) leg of this Asimov journey.  I have read the Foundation series before, but I did it in publication order.  I'm looking forward to Foundation and Earth where the things loop round to the beginning.  Curious to see how it reads in a different context.

[TordelBack]

Making another run at Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem. I didn't enjoy it at all last time, and didn't actually finish it. In the intervening years everyone I know has raved about it, and in the lockdown era it's one of the few books in the house that I haven't finished (oh for the days of the teetering to-read pile!). So let's see.

If you're looking for a waffer-theen-meent of a book, I heartily recommend Hugo Hamilton's memoir The Speckled People, about an outsider childhood in 1950s Dún Laoghaire, and also life as an ordinary person in rural Germany under the Nazis. Read it in one insomniac sitting, but re-running sequences in my head ever since - as perfect an evocation of family and of Ireland as you'll ever read. And you'll never look at a barmbrack the same way again.

William Boyd's Blue Afternoon isn't his best, but it has a fun plot, great characters and his signature sense of time and place (thus time, 1900s Manila, and to a lesser extent 1930s California). Learnt more about the US invasion of the Philippines than I ever knew, and more about 1900s surgery than I ever wanted to know.

[TordelBack]

I finished Asimov's Galactic Empire series last week. This series is probably the weakest stuff of his I have read and certainly don't work as a series. 

Agreed, it's a grab-bag of lesser works, and I think the grouping into a series has the whiff of a post-hoc marketing strategy ("hey kids,  if you liked the Foundation series...! "). As you say,  Currents is the (only) stand-out.

Wishing you good luck with re-reading Foundation, you may need it if starting with the bloated prequels!

[Apestrife]

Read Ted Lewis' Jack's return home (Get Carter). Read it mostly out of curiousity since I like the film, and it was quite good. A black hearted gangster Jack Carter returns home to see his brother buried, and then starts to badmouth and strong arm his way through his hometown. Hoping to punish someone for what he believes is a murder. It's basically the film that followed, but in book form. Very brutal and nasty. Especially how casual some of the stuff is. Very shocking at times.

[pictsy]

Wishing you good luck with re-reading Foundation, you may need it if starting with the bloated prequels!

Not having any trouble with them so far.  Prelude is already a more engaging read than Pebble.  I also only read a chapter a day so I can fit some comic reading and miniature painting.  I have found if I read at least a chapter a day I can get through more books.  This year has been my most prolific for reading thanks to this.

[von Boom]

Making another run at Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem. I didn't enjoy it at all last time, and didn't actually finish it. In the intervening years everyone I know has raved about it, and in the lockdown era it's one of the few books in the house that I haven't finished (oh for the days of the teetering to-read pile!). So let's see.

I've read the trilogy and in all honesty, it's not worth the trouble. The first book is pretty good, but by halfway through the second the story was meandering and by the end of the third I was irritated. The ending is weak and left me feeling I'd spent a lot of time on nothing.

I know the first book won the Hugo a few years ago, but that just shows you how reliable the Hugos are now.