Seconded! this guy gets haunted! https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2002/11/porfirio-rubirosa-200211

I mean, I appreciate that the title is just a straightforward identification of genre. No one will go home misled! Deserves a spot on the shelf next to Roaring Twenties Love Triangle, Marooned Adolescent Political Allegory, and Existential Whaling Yarn.

I just finished the preview chapters of Rhythm of War, Brandon Sanderson's latest fantasy epic/doorstopper, just 5 days before the actual novel comes out. It was good timing essentially by accident.

Whenever Cassandane asks me how it's going, I feel I have to say something like "it's a good example of its genre." There's so much stuff in the fate-of-the-world-at-stake type of fantasy that writers couldn't get away with in other genres.

I've basically lost my ability to read new stuff. Yes, I feel bad about this. I can easily pick up the latest installment of a series, but I can't remember the last time I picked up a book with protagonists I wasn't already familiar with. (That's a little unfair to myself. I read The Count of Monte Cristo earlier this year.)

I should really look into the local library's e-book service. In addition to other obstacles to trying new things, our house isn't big or well-organized. A book that's taking me a while to finish, but I might still do it, sounds like the worst waste of money and space.

I am basically unable to read anything more serious than fanfic and light fantasy right now, except for the Extremely Gloomy Serious Literature that I read with my dad.

Actually not all of it is gloomy, and I am here to recommend the Clayhanger Trilogy, which is one of the best new-to-me things I've read in a while. The characterization of the main female character is, IMO, really inconsistent from book to book, so I pretend that each one is set in a different universe. But still - what a terrific portrait of the titular Edwin Clayhanger! What surprising occasional lyric passages! What fascinating insight into the life of a provincial town in the late 19th century! What a sad meditation on aging and how little it's possible to know another person!

Arnold Bennett is of course the Bennett in "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown", and in my opinion Virginia Woolf made so much of Bennett's flaws because she was so close to him in time. Quite a lot of sections of the first and last books in particular are clearly doing rather Woolfian things rather than what she sees as characteristically Bennettian.

Anyway, it's awfully good - took me right out of myself.

Other than that, I have read so many books this year that I've stopped counting but have burned through all the Barbara Pym, Dodie Smith and various light queer historicals that I can find and am currently reading Deep Space Nine fanfic. The highlight has been the PG Wodehouse pastiche, "What Ho, Garak!".

Not novels, but the last two books I read were recommended here: The making of the atomic bomb (how did I never hear of that before?) and I forgot the other one. Both good! My personal novels:internet ratio has slipped to zero, though. Maybe Xmas break will get me started again.

Yes, the atomic bomb thing has been in the news for decades.

My (new) fiction reading has dropped to basically zero during the pandemic. I'm not really sure why, since I might have expected the opposite.

It's been 500 years. I think it's time to admit the novel is a failed experiment and go back to epic poetry.

I have so many thoughts about not reading novels, all underripe.

If you were brought into a room with a stack of good novels, a comfortable sofa, and no other media or distractions (but the assurance that important communication would reach you), how far do you think you would get into one (1) book before you started to wonder what you were missing online? How long could you stay there before getting up and wandering into the other room with your laptop and phone in it?

Frowner, did you see Cat Sebastian's Turner series? Light historical gay romances. Liked 'em.

This year has been about normal for reading novels. Live 9, I'd have expected to read so many more than normal given the lack of distracting alternatives... but the world's certainly been distracting this year.

I recently finished Martha Well's Murderbot Novel, and enjoyed it--but I preferred the preceding novellas. I'm still interested in seeing where the series goes... the issue might wind up being a side effect of being the bridge between two major storylines. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine was really strong; it's sci-fi with a very Aztec/Mayan feel, but thoroughly future adapted.

If you were brought into a room with a stack of good novels, a comfortable sofa, and no other media or distractions (but the assurance that important communication would reach you), how far do you think you would get into one (1) book before you started to wonder what you were missing online?

Half a chapter.

I refreshed Twitter while reading that comment.

Are we playing ADHD poker now?

9 This app doesnt have a like button???

14: I used to not be so broken.

I rarely read fiction, but I recently read Rats, Lice and History which comes pretty close. I highly recommend it, and not just because the subject matter is so topical these days. It reads like experimental metafiction but is not only nonfiction but a bestseller that has been highly influential in the field of disease history. When I was a couple chapters in I described it at the Other Place as "like if Tristram Shandy had been a bacteriologist," and sure enough, toward the end Zinsser makes the comparison explicitly himself.

I've been on a mystery novel kick since Ajay's recommendation of John Sandford's Virgil Flowers books. There were a dozen of those, which I've now finished (slightly uneven toward the end, but super enjoyable as a whole).

Then I decided to get away from the Minnesota setting and read Mukoma Wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat which is set partly in Wisconsin (uh, that's not Minnesota) and mostly in Nairobi. It didn't hang together as much of a story or mystery, but it was all worth it from this Kiswahili word: Sema: I want to know, but I also don't care.

After that I tried a Michael McGarrity Kevin Kearney book (Tularosa), because I was nostalgic for some New Mexico stories, and he actually delivers a little too much description of the scenery. Ok bro! What are you, Joseph Conrad? Not much of a mystery, more of a thriller, but not bad overall. I could see myself reading more in the series.

Then I read a CJ Box Joe Pickett book (Open Season), which was very good. A step over the line with children in peril, but I plowed through it anyway, and I expect I'll read more of these at some point.

I have downloaded, but not begun, Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers and Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.

If I get far enough into a book, I obsessively read it until the end, like I always did, but getting to that point is much harder. At the beginning I am thinking "Who are these people? What's going on? This is too much work."

Oh hey, do you know what else I enjoyed? John Allison's comics. Many of them are available for free here but I have also purchased some. I find that the most enjoyable reading order is to start with Bad Machinery, then progress to New Bobbins, Bobbins.horse and finally and Steeple (Mordawa, Destroy History, etc, you can pick up along the way and frankly Old Bobbins is only really charming if you enjoy New Bobbins - it's very much a comic by a nineties-early-2000s dude.) Giant Days isn't free and IMO you'll appreciate it more after Bad Machinery.

So, Bad Machinery is about these kids and school and not-exactly-mysteries with monsters and science, but it's mostly about kids and school. It's comic-realistic in tone rather than sentiment-heavy or anime-ish (not to knock those things!)

Honestly, even though Allison seems to be moving away from in-depth character stuff, I think that's his best mode. Steeple and so on are a lot of fun but he really built up the characters in Bobbins and Bad Machinery very successfully.

It will take you forever to read them all. If you're like me and a lot of your non-work non-reproducing-labor time is spent in bed trying not to have the horrors, comics that take you forever are probably the Very Thing.

Oh, and the boys and I are reading Sharna Jackson's High Rise Mystery, which is just great. Note, the audiobook is authentically rendered London slang such that we sometimes didn't know what the hell was going on, so we ditched that and I'm reading it aloud, less authentically.

I really like the Claire DeWitt novels, but Sara Gran's other work (Dope, Come Closer) is even better.

Tana French's The Searcher was better than her other recent output. But I feel like the quality of my attention is so diminished that I'm not able to give any book a fair assessment, so I'm mostly reading trash. Lisa Jewell's Family Upstairs was pretty fun, and I generally dislike Ruth Ware, but One by One was a good modern take on a manor house mystery.

Also, I downloaded a bunch of Selena Montgomery novels, because why not.

how far do you think you would get into one (1) book before you started to wonder what you were missing online? How long could you stay there before getting up and wandering into the other room with your laptop and phone in it?

This depends a lot on the kind of book. With these plot-driven mysteries, I was surprised to find I could easily read for a few hours straight (typically late, after everyone else is asleep). I'm also reading Perlstein's Before the Storm and even though I think it's fantastic, my mind starts to wander after about 30-45 minutes. That might also be because it's the story of everything in our own country going to shit, which has an aversive effect.

20: Second the recommendation of John Allison.

Chris Baldwin's "Spacetrawler" (and nearly all of his other work) is available free and lots of fun. (I started with "Bruno" 'way back in the day.)

19: This is too much work

This is one of my theories: that we have totally confounded consumption and production, particularly highly educated Type A people. It goes further than needing to have a take on whatever you're consuming; it's just reflexive. We reflexively analyze, quip, dissect, contextualize, and do all sorts of active processing of books, movies, TV, music, etc. It is work! And wasting all that effort on something insignificant and unpopular seems pathetic. (This is incidentally the only goddamn way I can explain the sheer numbers of people, including myself, who read all those Harry Potter books.)

My difficulty reading novels is idiosyncratic though: there's a not-reading/not-writing multiplier effect that is by now deeply pathological and sad, AIHMHB.

I've read the Harry Potter books many times. I'm probably not very type A.

I have totally lost the ability to get swept up in fiction reading since the pandemic, and I really miss it. I can't do escapist genre fiction or literary fiction. I find myself just impatiently thinking that everything is unrealistic and people aren't coping with REAL problems. I think next year, when all of the novelists' pandemic novels come out and hopefully we aren't living under the threat of an erratic would-be autocrat, will be helpful in that regard.

I have, however, been reading aloud to the nieces and nephews via video or phone. I did this before the pandemic too, but it's picked up since then because Aunt [Witt] is backup childcare. The nine-year-old is liking the Hardy Boys (not without a handful of editorial interjections about sexism, racism, and the like). The six-year-old asked for "a romance" so we've been plowing our way through 1950s teen romance (not without a number of editorial interjections).

So far the most engrossing one has been one written in the '50s but set in 1918. It opens with Armistice Day and a major plot point is an aunt convalescing from the flu and (yes, that flu). The kids of course instantly got all of the pandemic/isolation/fear/illness/recovery plot points instantly, in a way that I don't think any of us would have been able to a year ago.

Theoretically, how can you disprove my theory that true mental health requires reading Murder Must Advertise at least annually?

I can still read loads, but only if it is relatively light fiction. Have had better luck listening to more serious things, though. I listened to Mexican Gothic and really enjoyed it! I do agree that I would have enjoyed a book about her time in Mexico City even more.

Frowner, did you see Cat Sebastian's Turner series? Light historical gay romances. Liked 'em.

KJ Charles is excellent as well.

Tana French's The Searcher was better than her other recent output.

Tell me more. I've read all of her stuff and was going to skip it because I wasn't a huge fan of the plot summary, and on top of that a friend I normally overlap with gave it a pretty bad review....I only mildly liked The Witch Elm, so thought I might hold off...

I feel like Tana French doesn't know how to wrap up her own books. They start well, though.

Rowling had that problem too.

I was super excited to have reached the stage where we read a chapter of a book aloud before bed. Read a few different books with mixed success. Then tried the Wizard of Oz and my kid was electrified. LOVED IT. Well, I happen to have the fourteen volume series on my shelf and am now starting volume 14. I had never thought I'd revisit those as an adult, much less with the amount of attention required to read aloud. Cannot wait to be done with them, unless any of you want to have an extensive discussion of the themes and symbolism in Oz. (Fourteen novels of children's lit and not a single mother figure. Why not, Frank Baum?) I'm ready. My memory of the entire Oz canon is fresh.

29. I've liked all of Tana French's novels pretty well, except for The Secret Place (the high school setting didn't feel believable) and The Witch Elm (boring, unbearably chatty narrator). The Searcher avoided the problems of those books, and had some typical TF strengths (strong writing, compelling characters). But it also has the very typical TF weakness of a plot that depends upon the main characters making decisions that don't make any sense, so if you're tired of that aspect of TF, you can skip it.

I ordered Susanna Clarke's Piranesi and Marilynne Robinson's Jack from from my local bookstore right around the time that the store was featured in an LA Times article about how small bookshops are suffering in the pandemic. It's been more than five weeks, and my order still isn't ready. Apparently the store was inundated with orders after that article came out, and now they're way behind. Which is a good problem to have, but I also just want my books. I guess I'll go in person for my next order. And soon, because LA County is probably headed for another shutdown.

I read Moby-Dick early in the pandemic. I really appreciated Melville's commitment to the short chapter. I don't think I'd ever read it before--it was assigned in high school but I don't think I finished it then and hadn't tried since. Most of what I remember of it from high school was the field trip they took us on to the (wonderful) New Bedford Whaling Museum. A friend and I took acid that morning before getting on the bus.

I also read A Month in the Country in late August when visiting Maine. Again, not exactly an obscure book, but man . . . I had no idea how great it was.

I tend to go through phases with reading, getting sucked in completely and blissfully ignoring everything for a while but then coming out, unable to turn a page and refreshing Twitter constantly. I also have a hard time with plots, they're just one damn thing after another. It's partly why I prefer looking at things, but that's even harder to enjoy than reading these days. I can't imagine feeling comfortable during a museum visit--well, maybe at Worcester. No one visits Worcester.

I actually think the one thing Rowling knows how to do is end her books.

My daughter really wanted me to watch "My Hero Academia". It is genuinely the most sincere, wholesome thing I've ever seen in my entire life. This is probably how she's rebelling.

You could tell Voldemort was supposed to win and them an editor made her switch.

33. Thanks! That's helpful - I'll probably continue to skip for now.

On the subject of books set in Ireland and the current state of my reading, I'm listening to Actress by Anne Enright, and it is delightful. I have a lot of data processing in my job and audio books are the best companion. I'm also listening to Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden for when I need something with a slower narrator (I know you can change the narration speed but I don't really like messing with that).

I've started Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art but I have had a pretty horrible track record with non-fiction this year....that being said, I think I'll manage to stick with it, as I find the subject fascinating and it's beautifully written.

Also reading The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow, as she hits my sweet spot for slightly twee-alternate history-books with magic. And romance novels galore (I have three going right now, which is unusual for me but also fitting with the whole I need to check my phone every five seconds thing.)

32: reading chapter books with the Giblets is one of my all-time dearest pleasures. It's my favorite thing.

Jack and Annie are so boring.

I've been disappointed by Tana French's recent work. I loved her first three or four books, and I thought she had a winning formula (Nordic noir + American hard-boiled, set in Dublin and with an Irish twist...). But lately she seems to have abandoned that formula. I found The Witch Elm unreadable (or at least, I was not willing to finish reading it).

I do like it and will like it better when I like the books better. I really didn't think I'd be in for 3,000 pages of Oz. Baum was really interested in clothing, really describes what every character is wearing. Pretty good about having little girls as protagonists. Intensely look-ist; beauty is virtue every time. Want more reflections on Oz? I can do more.

Adding John Sandford's Virgil Flowers series to my list of 'books I might actually read during a pandemic.' Thanks, ogged! (thanks, ajay!).

And speaking of mysteries, I recently read Ruth Ware's The Turn of the Key, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Ware has a talent for creating a creeping sense of dread, and her play on James's Turn of the Screw is truly clever, and just a lot of fun.

The Flowers books are extremely "guy," but Virgil is very likable.

40: That's lovely to hear.

41: I know. I love genre fiction and for some reason even I find them intolerable. Thankfully the older kids got in to them on their own, and the younger kids don't really read them.

The younger ones *are* pretty obsessed with the Boxcar Children, but those are all available via audio stream from the library, so they don't need me. I remember loving the first book as a child but losing interest immediately, as soon as adults appeared on the scene in the form of their rich grandfather.

Yes, the 180 additional books where they no longer live in the boxcar don't need to exist. It was the original shipping container home, though. Who in this day and age does not long to inhabit an abandoned boxcar?

Original 1924 text is free:

About seven o'clock one hot summer evening a strange family moved into the little village of Middlesex. Nobody knew where they came from, or who they were. But the neighbors soon made up their minds what they thought of the strangers, for the father was very drunk. He could hardly walk up the rickety front steps of the old tumble-down house, and his thirteen-year-old son had to help him. Toward eight o'clock a pretty, capable-looking girl of twelve came out of the house and bought a loaf of bread at the baker's. And that was all the villagers learned about the newcomers that night.

"There are four children," said the bakeshop woman to her husband the next day, "and their mother is dead. They must have some money, for the girl paid for the bread with a dollar bill."

"Make them pay for everything they get," growled the baker, who was a hard man. "The father is nearly dead with drink now, and soon they will be only beggars."

This happened sooner than he thought. The next day the oldest boy and girl came to ask the bakeshop woman to come over. Their father was dead.

That opening is rather different now.

35: Hey yes, A Month in the Country is great!

I just read The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, a pretty masterful study in disorienting, creepy atmosphere over an intentionally gappy plot, highly recommended if you go for that kind of thing.

I really enjoyed The Witch Elm. I thought it was the best of TF's recent books, even if it doesn't quite match the first three. But a big part of the appeal of The Witch Elm for me was the protagonist, since he was so familiar. "Lucky, self-satisfied, not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is young man for whom things come easy is the victim of a violent and traumatizing assault" is pretty much describes me 20 years ago. So that made entering the world of the book satisfyingly unsettling in that Tana French way.

Right now we're reading the Melendy Quartet by Elizabeth Enright, and I can't say enough good things about the first book. We just started the second.

I've completely lost the ability to concentrate on reading novels since the pandemic. What really sucks for me is the same is true of movies, especially ones I've not yet seen.

Maybe you've seen all the good ones?

I'm curious: what do you think is the cause, Barry? Loneliness, stress, disrupted rhythms of the day... the sense that you're living through an uninterruptable, engrossing movie just enduring the times we're living through? I mean, we're in a shitty disaster flick 24/7.

I think it's stress. And the just so much shit going on, the uninterrupted 24 hours a day news cycle.

53.last maybe I should rewatch the Poseidon Adventure and the Towering Inferno both of which I haven't seen since I was a kid.

I gave up on watching movies at home almost a decade ago. If I was watching with my wife, I would fall asleep, and if I was watching alone, I would either fall asleep or get impatient and turn it off. I loved going to see movies in the theater though. Covid put an end to that, so I haven't seen a movie since I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire early in March. Good movie to go out with anyway.

I really hope that's a sequel of "Man on Fire" where Dakota Fanning goes on a rampage to save a kid she's protecting.

57:. If that will make you happy, we can pretend it is, Moby.

It would be better to lobby to have it made.

I read David Mitchell's i>Utopia Avenue recently. It takes a certain kind of confidence to decide to write a novel about a rock band set in 1960s London-- is there any more cliched and overly romanticized setting? But despite that it's pretty entertaining.

I'm rereading The Picture of Dorian Gray. I don't know what made me think to do this. I didn't remember how annoying Lord Henry Wotton is. He reminds me of Sartre's description of the anti-semite who is impossible to argue argue against, because he treats everything as a joke.

Luckily Sartre was living in Europe back when it was really easy to find all kinds of different anti-semites.

35: I read Moby-Dick early in the pandemic. I really appreciated Melville's commitment to the short chapter.

That may be my next "big" book. I've been trying to lose myself in largish tomes. A number of Eliot's worked pretty well, Dostoevsky (Demons) workingless well at the moment. I did recently read Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, the story of the story of the Nantucket whaleship Essex which seems to be the inspiration for Melville. (Was it recommended recently in a thread? Not finding it, but did find a rec for it on Unfogged in 2006. Pretty soon freshmen at college will not have known a time without Unfogged.)

Not a novel, but has anyone here read Paradise Lost? I recently heard an interview with a doctor who said that was what he was reading to get his mind off of the pandemic news.

Yes, and it's absolutely wonderful

I assume that's a doctor without any pandemic-induced marital stress.

I assume that's a doctor without any pandemic-induced marital stress.

Moatly this year I have been gobbling well-made silly books as all I can read. Lots of E Nesbit because I was reading it out loud to my mother while that was still possible; rereading Lois Bujold; rereading John Wyndham; most recently a huge binge on Diana Wynne Jones. Before my brain went I was reading lots of Auden and kicking myself for not doing so earlier. Liz Williams' magical novels.

Spent the last three days reading and annotating the 450 page report on Cardinal Theodore "Uncle Ted" McCarrick, and it really does show up every possible form of corruption inside the Church.

You did buy an old house if it has a moat.

I spent the week right after the election reading the Forsyte Saga; mild interest in the characters, really enjoyed a lot of scraps of minor material history. ( In the 1880s a stuffy old rich guy is still wearing his fingernails long, manicured and pointed, because that's what stylish men did in his youth. Right after the Boer War cousins marry and decide not to have children because of the consanguinity -- what birth control? Not specified. A social directory lists a man's coffeehouse as well as his descent, property and clubs.)

Edward the VII didn't get syphilis. They must have had decent condoms.

49: I like your synopsis, and I'm going to give The Witch Elm another try.

Argh!... 72 was me.

JPJ @72: I'm glad! Hope you enjoy it. I think the ending is well done. I can see thinking it has jms @33's "the main character does something rhat doesn't make sense" at the core of it, but it didn't strike me that way. Though again, I partly enjoyed it because it captured an earlier part of my life in an uncanny way.
I think TF's problem is that her formula is great but is incredibly challenging to pull off. She needs a new protagonist for every novel. That limits what she can do with her protagonists, and not all of them will be as compelling. It's hard to top the first three, because the first one was so good and it set up really interesting characters for the next two. So the rest suffer a bit by comparison. It's hard to imagine PD James being nearly as good if Dalgliesh had been a minor character in one novel, the main character in a second, and then had disappeared.

The main impediment to my novel reading is having a small and active dog that keeps needing walks.
Glad that others are enjoying the Virgil Flowers novels - for lack of any new ones, I am now working through the Dortmunder novels, which are also great fun.

"In the 1880s a stuffy old rich guy is still wearing his fingernails long, manicured and pointed, because that's what stylish men did in his youth."

And did in the 1920s as well - if you want a sample of nail parings from the suspicious cousin, just suborn his manicurist, as Sayers fans will know.

28: Murder Must Advertise taught me everything I need to know about the ad biz and about cricket.

I was that whipped cream in aerosol cans existed back then so that Sayers could have used the expression "squirty cream."

Stupid phone. I wish that....

I've been reading the most recent Charlie Stross novel, "Dead Lies Dreaming". I have to admit, I'm not loving it. Bits of it are fun, though, so if you like what he does in the Laundry novels, you'll probably enjoy it.

64: I had intended to read Paradise Lost shortly after I read His Dark Materials but then I figured I should read Dante first, and that did me for epic poetry for a good long while. Still haven't read Milton.

On the other hand, I recently breezed through Maria Dahvana Headley's new translation of Beowulf and it's a hoot. She renders hwæt as "Bro!" and the poem is off and running.

80: I walked past that one in the bookstore recently and decided to wait for the paperback. I like the Laundry, but I'm not nearly as interested in the New Management as Stross seems to be.

Instead, I picked up the David Mitchell mentioned upthread, and Shadows of the Short Days, because why not read an Icelandic fantasy alt-history novel?

Meatloaf should write an autobiography called Paradise Lost by the Dashboard Light.

Milton is a much easier read than Dante, partly, of course, because he actually wrote in English. He's also full of surprises. No one tells you how keen he is on fucking.

I, too, think the Laundry series has gone downhill. I did enjoy the one about the elves, but the superhero one was cringe-making. My fluff yesterday was Carl Hiaasen's anti-Trump novel. It is even less subtle than you might expect, but great fun in a cartoonish way.

Will look up that Beowulf, yo.

84, 85: Next week's project is to clear a bunch of stuff from the basement, which my show me where my copy of Milton is. Might be time to give him a try! (Speaking of unexpected things in classic works, I was suprised at how much of Haydn's The Creation is a love story.)

I know from Stross' blog that he has been through some Stuff in the last couple of yours -- mainly the death of both parents -- in addition to the global shitshows everyone is enjoying, and that's bound to have an effect on an artist's work. On the other hand, I think (1) he's a bit bored with the series, and (2) the things he's interested in are not really the things I'm interested in. For Stross, it seems a big deal that Bob is an unreliable narrator, and hasn't actually been human for a while now. Stross also seems to think that the New Management is just fascinating. He hasn't induced me to care particularly about either of those. His boredom with a series showed most strongly towards the end of the first Merchant Princes series, and it kinda put me off picking up the new version/set.

I don't think there's a way to solve those issues apart from a total revamp of the economics of publishing, and even that might not work. I suppose the best thing to do is wait for the paperback and hope for the best at half the cost.

83: Indeed he should!

(I hasten to add that I read Dante in translation.)

I would say that every Laundry book has been roughly 75% as good as the previous one*, and this curve is reflected in the format in which they have appeared on my bookshelves: 1 and 2 in Gryphon hardback first edition; 3 in paperback; 4 in second-hand paperback; 5 on Kindle; 6 borrowed from library on multiple occasions, 7 borrowed from library once, 8-9 not read. The New Management is very dull. The superhero one was really not good. The idea of "Lovecraft plus pop culture property" worked well when it was Lovecraft plus Deighton or plus Fleming but doing Lovecraft plus Modesty Blaise falls foul of the problem that no one knows who the fuck Modesty Blaise is except, apparently, Stross.

*Literary critics recognise this as "The Dune Exponential" and I am heartened to recognise its absence in some of my other favourite serial authors, such as Ben Aaronovitch, whose Folly novels are holding up very well. I suspect this is because Aaronovitch comes from a scriptwriting background and is used to writing serials.

re: 85/86

Yes, I think that's right (for both). I found this one a bit confused, the pastiche elements and the politics were heavy handed, and the characters all a bit clichéd. I didn't care about anyone in it, and in fact, actively disliked almost all of them. Also, one of the main characters, lazily and a bit creepily, hits all the same fetish-y tropes that Mhari does in the other Laundry novels. There's still some fun riffs, but, those might be better just being blog posts or bits of snarky polemic.

Also seconding 88. Actually, I _have_ read the Modesty Blaise novels. Two of them, anyway. The first one (which is quite good), and one of the later ones (with lots of sub Dennis Wheatley occult themes). Also, at some point seen the film. Oddly, the film, for a piece of 60s quasi-Austin Powers fluff was written by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey, and has some big name stars in it.

HWÆT!

*Literary critics recognise this as "The Dune Exponential"

Hah! I think I read about nine of these, and I suspect I am unusual among discerning readers for being willing to argue that the third one was quite good.

The one where the ghula (sp?) was sexually imprinted on the woman and they kept fucking all the time was weird.

Then they found Jews in Space.

Jews in Space with speech patterns right out of Fiddler on the Roof.

95: Is this a Dune sequel or Spaceballs?

I haven't read/seen either.

"Jews in Space" was from the end of "History of the World, Part 1". But the plot is from a Dune sequel.

The point was that these people were on kind of an ark and to keep the human race as we know it, there had to be Jewish people on that ark along with the future-types.

98:. Were there also giraffes and aardvarks on the ark?

Not that I recall, but there was a sandworm.

My only recollection of Dune Messiah is that there was some kind of twist in the final paragraph. Looking ahead to read that when I was about a quarter of the way through cured me of that habit. I have no recollection whatsoever of Children of Dune. I have a vague sense that God Emperor of Dune was better than the previous two. Then I stopped.

Oh, thank god, I thought I was the only one who didn't know who Stross was parodying. I did read all the Bond novels as a kid and appreciated his Fleming pastiche, though. I think I also enjoyed the vampire one very much: he had thought a lot about how that'd work. But sometimes he puts a lot of thought into stuff, builds a convincing world, and it's not really a fun place to have a narrative. I don't really remember much beyond vampires and elves, and the superheroes didn't work for me. Too many of the characters are too unlikeable after too much trauma. I think I find the New Management somewhat entertaining, but I'd probably feel differently if I better understood British politics.

The Merchant Princes stories did go downhill at the end. Has anyone read the repackaging from a few years back? Is that worth it?

100: Jews wouldn't get on well with sandworms because traditional Jewish music is very rhythmical and would get them eaten. They'd need to get into jazz.

Jews in Space with speech patterns right out of Fiddler on the Roof.

THE SPICE, THE SPICE, L'CHAIM!

It was a baby sandworm and in cage.

I saw spaceballs before I had seen any star wars films. It didn't make sense to me.

88, etc.: I too read "Dead Lies Dreaming" and found it sort of "meh." Really barely connected to the "eldritch horror" of Lovecraft or to the alleged main source/inspiration [no spoiler], not to mention the half dozen other sources he's riffing off of. You'll I'm sure be thrilled to hear that it's the first of a trilogy within the "Laundry" epic.

85: I liked the one about the elves, too.

The last thing he did that truly creeped me out was the short story about unicorns. He does some great shorts; the one about (among other things) the ekranoplan on a literal disc (not a typo) world was awesome, as was the Nazis in space (guest appearances by the Iran-Contra cast). Those were quite some time ago though.

107.last: agreed. Though I think you are conflating The Atrocity Archive (Nazis in space) with A Colder War (Iran-Contra and Lovecraft). Both are excellent; it was reading A Colder War online that got me into Stross in the first place. And obviously I have to approve of Missile Gap (Yuri Gagarin flying a nuclear-ramjet-powered ekranoplan across an Alderson disc).

The thing is that those were a long time ago. The Atrocity Archive was 1999!