RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

Raise the flag! Sound the horn!

It's Wednesday!

What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[white_aster]

:waves!: Hi, I'm new here and happy to find a book-discussing comm! I just did a big post on my journal about what I've been reading this year so far, which is honestly a good cross-section of my reading habits! I am also wandering_not_lost on Storygraph, if anyone wants to see my longer thoughts in book-review form.

Right now I just finished reading Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, as I moderately enjoyed I, Robot when I picked it up randomly. I never read Asimov until now, so coming into his ideas (and his very, very, very dated characterization and writing style) is a bit of whiplash. And in the end, Caves was a very strange book, because ostensibly it's a detective novel about a police detective and his partner, but really it is so very much not. (I mean...they do not examine the crime scene in any way until the very last chapter!) Instead it is a platform for Asimov's ideas on humanity and robots and ingenuity and rugged individualism. Which...was an interesting experience but only a 3.5/5 star one, if you know what I mean.

My one remaining book is These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs. This is far-future scifi to that point where the tech almost becomes magic again, and a humanity that has settled into a sort of divided theocracy. I'm about 25% in and only now feel like the story is actually picking up, as we spent a lot of time just learning about the characters first. I admit, the characters are drawing me in, though one of them is that sort of "charismatic, reckless, arrogant, privileged, but Just That Good so everyone puts up with them or loves them" type. Which...I can only take so much of, really, and we'll have to see how this works out. Right now that character is the lynchpin other characters seem to revolve around, and I'm already sort of wishing that everyone would break up with them like they're a bad habit. Still, the worldbuilding is interesting, and the writing keeps me pooting along, though this is a bit of a weighty book.

[quillpunk]

Hi! Welcome! *waves* We're glad to have you! :D

It certainly is annoying when I'm otherwise enjoying a book and then something just trips all over my pet peeves. I hope it doesn't get so bad that it outshines the things you like about the book. Good luck on your reading!

[white_aster]

Thanks! We'll see, I guess. I find with things like this, it really depends on how the author feels about that character. I think I first heard about this book because the author did an interview on how she wanted to write a character that was "compelling but not likeable". (Which is pretty much what she's succeeded in doing.) So, I guess it depends on whether this ends up being a book that reveres the antihero or if it's more of a tale of consequences. There's already a much more likeable main character who is the compelling character's mentee, so it's possible the theme will be breaking away from someone else's orbit and making your own way? We shall see!

[vriddy]

Happy to see you here! :D *waves*

Quite a few years ago, I tried to read many of the "classic" science-fiction authors and while the stories were interesting, I never really liked them and stopped altogether, thinking SF just wasn't for me. Very 3 or 3.5, haha. Much later I joined a bookclub that was going through recent Hugo nominations and was very happy to discover a different side to the genre, better suited to my tastes :D

Good luck with the current book, looking forward to your final thoughts!

[white_aster]

Thanks for the rec! This was exactly the sort of comm I was looking for, to complement one that I am in on Pillowfort. :D

And oh gosh, SAME. I have this issue with most "classic" books just in general. I guess I am too wedded to a modern perspective/storytelling expectations. I may find them interesting as sort of sociological relics (it's interesting to see what in Asimov makes me go, "huh, actually, that was really ahead of its time there, sir"), and as the building blocks on which other things were built (I'm kind of lightly interested in seeing what literary scholars say about how Asimov uses the Three Laws as plot devices - right now I see them as an interesting thread of the theme of human arrogance/overconfidence in technology in the Robots books). But in some ways, they're not really "good" as stories (see the aforementioned way that the detectives do very little detecting to a frankly absurd degree, or the absolutely BIZARRE story structure of something like Homer's Odyssey), and that keeps them from being as entertaining as they could be. (Also, frankly, when you're the person who has first explored a topic decades ago, by the time I, a modern reader, have read it, what you have to say is probably no longer going to be really revolutionary, which also cuts into the entertainment factor.)

Anyway, yes, my reading of classic anything (except Jack London...I remember loving Jack London as a kid) is usually pretty limited. I mostly was on a robots kick and figured I'd go back to the well, so to speak. Also, really, Asimov's stuff is fairly short, so it's not a long slog, even if I do get something I'm not enjoying.