What did you just read?

I read this based on a read and recommend post from Richard Morgan and so I will paste his take... it's diffficult to nail down how this book left me... hopeful but disturbed by my own reaction.

A Man Lies Dreaming – Lavie Tidhar
Okay, full disclosure – I met this guy at the Celsius232 festival in Aviles this summer, and he’s a riot. And he gave me a free hardback copy of this book. Which is without question the most bizarre novel I’ve read in the last few years, and though I liked it, I can see how a lot of people wouldn’t; A Man Lies Dreaming is basically the answer to the question “What would a pulp thriller called Hitler: PI look like?” And if that idea in itself offends you, well, then you’ll probably want to give this a miss, because it doesn’t get any more tasteful or comfortable on entry. In an alternate-reality 1939, history has jumped the tracks and a down-at-heel ex-dictator now ekes out a living as a private detective, hired most recently by a beautiful and wealthy Jewish woman to find her missing sister. Meantime, out in the London night, a killer is stalking the local whores, failed Nazi refugees slither about running sex slaves and people trafficking networks, and Oswald Mosley is positioning himself to be Britain’s next Prime Minister. Pick the bones out of that if you can. Part of the fun of the book is spotting the various historical characters and contexts, all twisted out of true by the alternate path that history has taken, but if that’s not your speed, there are also fistfights and chases and confrontations, twisted sexual encounters, childhood traumas relived and, somewhere out beyond the reality of the main narrative, a haunting tale of a Jewish pulp fiction writer’s last days in the charnel house hell of Auschwitz. You could infer from all of the above that this is a book devoid of hope, but that’s not quite true – Tidhar’s gameplan is too complex and oblique for such basic nihilism; instead, what we’re given to hold is a smashed portrait of the human damage we know all too well, gashed artfully open so we can see the faint and fitful seep of humanity in the spaces between.


My own reccomendation also from Lavie Tidhar is The Violent Century. Bits of World War 2 and the cold war with Supers but not heroic. Almost bits of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but the spy has some nifty powers.

I read these abou 18 months apar based off of two different recommendations and didn't even connect the author.. I will look into a steampunk alternate history he's written that I have gotten wind of also.

So I have just finished everything currently out by Mark lawrence, bakker, Morgan, Sanderson don't have anything coming out for a while, rothfus Will never finish,

I need a suggestion, as you might tell, other than sanderson i like gritty and violent.

I just finished Unsong, a web serial by Scott Alexander. Pretty good.

Table of Contents

Just finished The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer. I'd passed over this one a few times in the bookstore because, based on the name, I was expecting something with a stupid gimmick; but after seeing it recommended on some history forums, I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did, as this ended up being one of the more interesting history books I've read in a while. Rather than a more typical history book, which focuses on describing a particular set of events, this is more of what I guess could be called a "cultural" or "social" history, focusing on describing what society was like and how people lived in 14th-century England. I tend to find those sorts of particulars more interesting than just descriptions of events.

I know the author's done a couple other books in a similar vein for different time periods in England, but I'd love to find similar types of books dealing with more varied locations and time periods.

I finally read Witness by Whittaker Chambers.

Despite it being a fairly famous book and dealing with areas i had great interest in i never actually got around to it until this week. Chambers Likely would have been one of the great writers of the 20th century if he had not dedicated much of his life to the communist underground and the last third of it to anti-communism. He also basically launched the political careers of two presidents, most know about Nixon but Reagan claimed Witness converted him from a New Deal Democrat to a republican. He would often quote from it by memory to his colleagues.

Overall it's pretty good. Chambers saw himself as a sort of Dostoevsky like figure, he thought communism would inevitably triumph over capitalism, it's all very weighty stuff but it perhaps reveals the true danger and intent of classical soviet communism better then any book I've read since.

At Any Prince by David Drake - A mercenary company composed of heavy tanks (the Hammer's Slammers) is stationed on a rocky world colonized by Russians. They've been hired to help fight a war against the Molts, a race of horned bipedal lizards that can teleport between geodes.

Rolling Hot by David Drake - The Hammer's Slammers mercenary troop is now stationed on a world in the midst of a civil war. When the rebels launch a massive assault on the world government, a mismatched strike force of barely repaired armored cars and hover tanks are given an important mission. Led by a captain and senior sergeant - both of whom suffer from severe PTSD that got them transferred to the rear - the strike force has to blast their way through enemy lines to secure the planetary governor.

Ukerric said:

Since Amazon still does a poor job at telling me interesting stuff is coming out, I just noticed that the 2nd translation of S.T.Y.X. has landed.

STYX is a russian series that is best described as "Mad Max meets The Walking Dead meets The X-Men". There is a multiverse, but it's broken, and every now and then, a piece of Earth breaks down and falls to the dregs of the universe: The Hive. It's a stitched world with parts of earth, and every now and then, each bit "resets" as a new copy of that part falls down in place, erasing the previous one and refreshing it. The whole is pervaded with a kind of alien spore that infects quickly people. Most of them turn into cannibalistic mutants, and a handful of "immunes" resist the infection by killing the mutated freaks and using spores to make an delaying agent to combat mutation. The side effects of that being interesting as people gain surhuman abilities.

The result is a kind of insane mashup of genres that somehow works. If you like a crossover between survivor genre, light superhero, and zombie stuff (the WWZ kind, not the Romero shamblers), that's your series.

PS: Cancel The Walking Dead, and replace it with STYX, and I'll subscribe to whatever streaming platform, just for that. As long as the cat is there.

Click to expand...

Finished the two books that are out, pretty good shit. Dude needs an editor or at least a group of people willing to proof read though