Month 71: Catching Up

Month 71 of 260 (27.31 percent)
Size of list: 92,762 pages (19.27 percent above start)
Pages read: 31,297 (33.74 percent)
H-list: 8,396/24,144 (34.77 percent)
N-list: 11,580/37,308 (31.04 percent)
O-list: 11,321/31,310 (36.16 percent)
Reading: Inverting the Pyramid
Finished: From a Certain Point of View, The Warrior's Apprentice, Winter's Heart

I didn't read all these books this month, I've just been remiss in updating this blog. So here I am catching up.

From a Certain Point of View is a Star Wars anthology, giving stories to the many minor, often nameless characters that populated the original film. It's uneven, unsurprising given that it has 40 stories by 40 authors. It can't be considered canon, given that some of the stories contradict each other, but who cares? It's fun to see the backstory of the creature in the trash compactor, or to read the indignant report filed by the officer Force-choked by Vader. The overall story drags on Tatooine -- there are a lot of characters in the cantina -- but it was a fun-enough read.

The Warrior's Apprentice is the third (in chronological order) of the Vorkosigan Saga, a series of sci-fi adventure novels. The first two focused on Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan; this is the first volume to focus on their son, Miles, who I understand is the protagonist of the series in general. This book is delightful fun, punctuated by moments of seriousness. The characters take everything seriously, but the way events snowball, as Miles accidentally builds an interstellar mercenary company, strikes me as hijinks. Two volumes in this series are Hugo winners, but I expect I'll read the whole series, because it's well-written and enjoyable.

Winter's Heart is the ninth book in the Wheel of Time. It concerns itself less with grand events than with the characters themselves, to its benefit. No borders shift, nobody invades anybody else, but characters are captured, declare their intent to marry, and plot to escape. Meanwhile, the Seanchan threat takes on a new form -- it's not just a military force, but civilians, thousands of people seeking to set up new lives. For 90 percent, it's my favorite book of the series so far. It's spoiled by the climactic chapter, which comes out of nowhere, with no buildup or foreshadowing, just a need to have a big climax at the end of the book. It also ignored the cliffhanger at the end of book 8, but I find I didn't really mind that so much. I just expect to find it in book 10.

Month 67: Hey look, I read a book

Month 67 of 260 (25.77 percent)
Size of list: 92,362 pages (18.75 percent above start)
Pages read: 29,794 (32.26 percent)
H-list: 8,396/24,144 (33.05 percent)
N-list: 10,716/37,308 (28.72 percent)
O-list: 10,682/30,910 (34.56 percent)
Reading: From a Certain Point of View
Finished: All the Birds in the Sky

I read All the Birds in the Sky, start to finish, this month. I read it all on my phone, in bed; that's my preferred method and place for reading right now. It's a marvelous book about a witch and an engineer who become friends in middle school, then meet again as adults in a near-future San Francisco. It does a great job making magic, technology and friendship all feel magical. 

I'm determined to finish From a Certain Point of View this month; if I don't, it'll be because The Warrior's Apprentice came from the library and I would have just three weeks to read it. And that one will be on my phone.

Month 65/Year 4: The worst year

Month 65 of 260 (25 percent)
Size of list: 92,362 pages (18.75 percent above start)
Pages read: 29,058 (31.46 percent)
H-list: 8,396/24,144 (33.05 percent)
N-list: 10,716/37,308 (28.72 percent)
O-list: 10,362/30,910 (33.52 percent)
Reading: From a Certain Point of View
Finished: Foundation's Edge

I am ahead of the curve, at least. I'm a quarter of the way through this thing, and I have read more than a quarter of each list. That's something. But this pace can't continue, and I don't want it to continue. 

Foundation's Edge is good, but not as good as Foundation, surprise surprise. I expected to think that it won the Hugo on the strength of its series more than on its own merits, and I still think that's a possibility. I haven't read the books it beat, though, so you never know; maybe it was truly just the strongest book that year. It gets into some woo-woo at the end, in a way that doesn't fit the relatively hard science bent of the original (not that the previous books didn't bend that either with their telepathy). 

Month 61: Surfacing from the Pandemic

 Month 61 of 260 (23.46 percent)

Size of list: 92,362 pages (18.75 percent above start)
Pages read: 28,977 (31.37 percent)
H-list: 7,899/24,144 (32.72 percent)
N-list: 10,716/37,308 (28.72 percent)
O-list: 10,362/30,910 (33.52 percent)
Reading: Foundation's Edge, From a Certain Point of View
Finished: The Stone Sky, The Path of Daggers

I haven't updated this in seven months, but I haven't been reading much in that time either. We're still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working from home really cut into my desire to read at the end of the day or on the weekend. I've been slowly recovering my focus, enough to finish a book even, but it's still a problem. 

Before we went into lockdown I finished The Stone Sky. It was good but not groundbreaking like the first volume. I suppose that's how it goes with trilogies sometimes. (Then I had to hold on to the book for five months waiting for the library to accept its books back.)

I picked up From A Certain Point of View, which is a book of short stories about incidental characters from Star Wars, so it lends itself to noncommital consumption. That helped me get back on the horse. I still have plenty of it to read, but I think I'm about two-thirds of the way through. There were a lot of stories about people in the cantina, and I'm on the Death Star now.

The Path of Daggers, book 8 of The Wheel of Time, was okay. It was better than book 7, at least. And for once it ended on a cliffhanger, making me a little more eager to pick up book 9.

Month 54: Letdown

Month 54 of 260 (20.77 percent)
Size of list: 92,140 pages (18.47 percent above start)
Pages read: 27,870 (30.25 percent)
H-list: 7,770/23,922 (32.48 percent)
N-list: 10,101/37,308 (27.07 percent)
O-list: 9,999/30,910 (32.35 percent)
Reading: The Path of Daggers
Finished: The Triumph of Injustice, Ancillary Mercy

I've been updating this blog late. I'm fairly confident in the numbers, because I keep my spreadsheets updated at least weekly, but I'm a little iffy on the correspondence between what I've finished and those numbers. Nonetheless, what I finished this month was all on the O-list, and the O, we recall, stands for Other: books that neither won a Hugo nor were included on the official D&D inspirational reading list. 

The Triumph of Injustice is not only nonfiction, it's not really a story -- it's a policy book about taxation. The authors, Saez and Zucman, work with Piketty but are based at Berkeley, which is a huge plus. Nonetheless, this book lacked the pizzaz of Piketty translated by Goldhammer. It's a weird thing to say about an economic treatise, but there it is. It's hard to judge how convincing it is, since I'm inclined to agree with them already, at least on the problem.

Ancillary Mercy was a profound disappointment as the third installment of the trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice. The first volume set up this massive galactic showdown between Anaander Miaanai and herself, and the last volume with a very localized resolution. What's going to happen to the Empire? On the Imperial Scale? Who wins? How? This book is good on its own merits, but it doesn't exist on that basis. I wanted resolution of what was set up in volume one, and volume three isn't it, and there's no volume four. Sigh.

Month 53: of dogs and gods

Month 53 of 260 (20.38 percent)

Size of list: 91,770 pages (17.99 percent above start)
Pages read: 27,271 (28.84 percent)
H-list: 7,770/23,922 (32.48 percent)
N-list: 10,101/37,308 (27.07 percent)
O-list: 9,400/30,540 (30.78 percent)
Reading: The Path of Daggers
Added: Blood of Elves, Prose Edda, The Triumph of Injustice
Finished: A Fire Upon the Deep, Second Foundation

A Fire Upon the Deep is the first Vinge I've ever read; it's the first of three, and the first two won the Hugo. It's generally a spacefaring adventure, the story of two kids trapped on a planet alone with aliens, and the humans trying to rescue them while all hell breaks loose in the world around them. The worlds of this novel are filled with interesting ideas, from the aliens the kids are trapped with -- dogs, basically, but whose basic unit of personhood is a pack, not an individual -- to the idea that certain zones are the galaxy simply allow more complex thought than others, and that sometimes those zones shift. And then there are the plant-aliens, the bee-aliens, and the great intelligences that might as well be gods. The book felt too long to me, probably could have been cut down a quarter, but kept me wanting to find out what happens next and interested in how all the elements relate. The main characters are mostly human, but there are some POV chapters for the Tines, as the dog-packs are called, and those are fascinating, as they scheme against each other.

Second Foundation is not as good as the first Foundation, nor as good as the second Foundation. It's good at the beginning and middle but really peters out at the end. Nonetheless it's short enough to be worth reading as I head toward the only Hugo winner in the series, which I hope won on its own merits and not just because the voters wanted to give a win to the series. I'll find out!

Added this month is the first Witcher novel, which is basically because my kid loves it; Prose Edda, because it's the source of so much D&D lore, even if it didn't make the appendices; and The Triumph of Injustice, a current-events policy book that follows on Capital in the 21st Century (even though Piketty wrote his own sequel, thank you).

Month 52 / Year 4

Month 52 of 260 (20 percent)

Size of list: 91,780 pages (18 percent above start)
Pages read: 26,471 (28.84 percent)
H-list: 7,524/23,922 (31.45 percent)
N-list: 10,031/37,308 (26.89 percent)
O-list: 8,916/30,550 (29.18 percent)
Reading: A Fire Upon the Deep
Added: Blood of Elves, Prose Edda, The Triumph of Injustice
Finished: This Is How You Lose the Time War, Old Man's War

Despite some lost time this year, I'm still ahead of the curve. I hope to do better in Year 5.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a series of epistles between two rival agents in the titular time war. It was interesting in its concepts, such as the nature of the two rival groups, the Agency and the Garden, and in the creative ways the agents would hide their letters but set them up for discovery. But it had third act problems, in that the shifting into action wasn't set up well, and then wasn't compelling. 

Old Man's War felt like largely a recapitulation of Starship Troopers, and if you follow the author on Twitter as I do you'll know that he wouldn't deny that. There were a few interesting new concepts he explored — not the way that old people were given new bodies, which felt like a series of advertisements for SmartBlood and BrainPal and whatnot, but the way some bodies belonged to people whose brains hadn't come forward, and what that means. It was a fast read, and interesting enough that I won't mind returning to that universe.

I added Blood of Elves because it's the first Witcher book, and my teenager would love it if I read that; the Prose Edda because it's the Norse mythology that underlies dark elves and other elements; and The Triumph of Injustice because it's the virtual sequel to Capital in the 21st Century, which I read back in Year Zero.