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What book are you reading and would you recommend it?

Just finished Lancaster by John Nicholl in the name of modelling research. Very well written I thought.
Now getting my teeth into Black Gold by Jeremy Paxman.
 
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Jubal said:
en.m.wikipedia.org

Hard science fiction - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

It varies but that’s an ok definition to get started.
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Readers of "hard SF" often try to find inaccuracies in stories. For example, a group at MIT concluded that the planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity would have had a sharp edge at the equator, and a Florida high school class calculated that in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld the topsoil would have slid into the seas in a few thousand years.

Takes all sorts I guess. I think I'll stick with Phil Dick and Ursula Le Guin.
 
gez said:
Anyone who enjoys Science Fiction, I thoroughly recommend Stephen Baxter. Specifically, he is considered to be a "hard" Sci-Fi writer.
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Oh Yes

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Bart said:
I don’t get on with Sci-Fi generally… but am intrigued to know what ‘hard’ means in this context; you never know it might sway me.
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Hard Sci-Fi is based on scientific fact, (so no phasers on stun or beam me up scotty etc). It allows some leeway though, for example if something is theoretcially possible according to known laws of physics but we just can't do yet. Fusion power for example.

To use film as an example, Hard Sci-Fi would be closer to the films "Gravity" or "The Day After Tommorrow" as opposed to something like Star Trek.

Stephen Baxter has written stories based on a multitude of Sciences, such as Anthropology/Early Humans, Genetics, Physics etc. The Science supports the story, it's not THE story, which is how good Sci-Fi should be (even when it's based on fantastical "Science").
 
Bart said:
Thanks, that sounds better than some of the stuff I’ve tried.
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I'd definitely sign up to that definition. Only thing I wouldn't personally agree with: I'd argue that the "golden age" of Sci-Fi authors should extend to the 50's thus including Asimov who otherwise wouldn't be included. Heinlein did some of his best work in the 50's too.

Unsurprisingly, some of my all time favorite films are on their list :)
 
paulfromcamden said:
Readers of "hard SF" often try to find inaccuracies in stories. For example, a group at MIT concluded that the planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity would have had a sharp edge at the equator, and a Florida high school class calculated that in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld the topsoil would have slid into the seas in a few thousand years.

Takes all sorts I guess. I think I'll stick with Phil Dick and Ursula Le Guin.
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Never actually read any P Dick (seen Blade Runner obviously), and have only read two of Le Guin's works: The Dispossessed and The Earthsea Trilogy.

I've never subscribed to the "let's pick the story apart" philosophy. Same with Films, I don't understand people who go to watch a film and spend the entire time trying to find that car passing in the remote distance, when the film is set in the horse and cart age for example.
 
Money, by Martin Amis. Recommended? Not really, but I enjoy reading less these days.
Also reading Death of a Salesman. It's a classic but not grabbing me.
 
Half-way through this:


and it's rather sad in a way. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson made the famous remark that "Britain has lost an empire and has yet to find a role". This book so far shows how desperately and pathetically Britain, under both Tory and Labour Governments, tried to hang on to relevance in world affairs, even though this was clearly slipping out of their grasp. You can see the self-deception that was to culminate in the Brexit disaster already on the horizon. A sobering read in the light of current events.
 
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Am trying a few SF books for a change, has anyone any comments on The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, or any others by her
 
I’m sick of stories. They can **** right off! So I recommend: Rory (the Tory) Stewart’s book, Nasal Bragg, ‘Back in the Day’ and’Travellers to Unimaginable Lands’ if anyone you love is going loopy.
 
Patrick O'Brian Aubrey- Maturin series. About 22 books, I've read them twice so far, feel another round coming on (as you get older, start forgetting...) We ruled the waves, actually.
Bosch series, Michael Connelly, gripping, well written.
 
stevec67 said:
Money, by Martin Amis. Recommended? Not really, but I enjoy reading less these days.
Also reading Death of a Salesman. It's a classic but not grabbing me.
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I'm rereading "Success" on the train home from work, and finding it hard to suppress the giggles. Along with Lolita, Money is possibly my favorite novel. But, just like Lolita, its weakness is that the narrative voice is so strong that it tends to overwhelm the plot.

Have to say I am really looking forward to Glazer's "Zone of Interest". Possibly the best of the late Amis novels - all of which have a reputation for being very difficult to get on to the screen in a successful way (the same "voice" point applying). But if anyone can do it, Glazer can, and apparently has the Academy nominations to prove it.
 
I'm currently eating my way through Mick Herron's Slough House novels (first is "Slow Horses"). Think of John Le Carré but then add more bad-taste jokes. I used to be a "deeper" reader, but tend to read mostly lighter stuff these days: crime and historical fiction, with the occasional SF - I don't care about "hard" or "soft" as long as it's not the kind where there's tons of pages explaining how the society works in irrelevant detail, followed by stilted dialogue, and where the characters do things that make no sense except to drive the plot. Of all genres, bad SF is the worst "bad" writing.

I find a lot of "literary" fiction annoying, and I think @Tim Jones just hit the nail on its head: narrative style that overwhelms everything else. I've always thought the best writing is the writing that makes you pause and think about how well something was just said; not stop and re-read to figure out what was just said. A pet hate of mine is the omission of quotation marks: it's a cheap trick, it won't make you Joyce (who in any case used dashes), so stop doing it, dammit. I guess I'm more interested in the content than the way it's presented...
 
More a dip and go book. South west last summer, heading down the east coast next month, armed with this. Essential reading too for GRU members visiting, the height of Salisbury’s spire is indeed included.

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Tim Jones said:
I'm rereading "Success" on the train home from work, and finding it hard to suppress the giggles. Along with Lolita, Money is possibly my favorite novel. But, just like Lolita, its weakness is that the narrative voice is so strong that it tends to overwhelm the plot.

Have to say I am really looking forward to Glazer's "Zone of Interest". Possibly the best of the late Amis novels - all of which have a reputation for being very difficult to get on to the screen in a successful way (the same "voice" point applying). But if anyone can do it, Glazer can, and apparently has the Academy nominations to prove it.
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+1 for Lolita, it’s a close call for me with Blood Meridian for favourite novel…currently reading The Round House by Louise Erdrich.
 
Strumpet City (which I mentioned on another thread) is a longish book 550pp about Dublin life and the lock-out in the early 1900s. Very Irish flavour in the dialogue and narrative as you might expect which made it enjoyable for me, and quite a bit of history thrown in too.

I have seen a lot of good reviews of The Wide Wide Sea about Captain Cook’s voyages, has anyone here read it?
 
Audible Audio Book by Catherine Nixey "Heresy"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/29/heresy-by-catherine-nixey-review-book-of-revelations

"As far as variant versions of the nativity story go, the one from the second-century Gospel of James is hard to beat. It starts off rather beautifully by telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off. “Woe,” says the woman. Mary’s reaction is unrecorded, perhaps because she felt that she had made her point."
 
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