What non-Go book are you reading right now?

General Chat
865

While I cannot speak for the specific book, there are cases where some book/work gains traction, fame and praise from the critics and masses, when, in fact, it is “lame and mediocre” for people who are already fans of such things.

I think the most famous case is “The Game of Thrones”, which is widely regarded as (I quote from the google search) “a masterful, character-driven epic fantasy that kicks off the A Song of Ice and Fire series. It is highly praised for its complex politics, morally grey characters, and shocking twists, offering a gritty, low-magic world where betrayal and power struggles dominate”.

As far as I could tell after reading it though, it could easily be argued that it is “a childish fantasy driven by the stupidity of the vapid characters who, given the intelligence they exhibit in the book, are creating a marvel to the reader on how they managed to stay alive by then. The shocking twists are mostly generating shock at how illogical and unlikely they are, while the depth of the politics involved are akin to a puddle of water in the summer sun.”

3 Likes
866

I’ve commented on Yasunari Kawabata’s writing elsewhere in this thread. One novel I hadn’t read until now is Snow Country, generally considered his best. I don’t necessarily share that view ( the book is still settling in my brain) but I can say that this is vintage Kawabata, thoughtfully conceived and executed, consistent with the themes that preoccupied him in his career.

A wealthy Tokyo dilettante makes a series of visits to a remote tourist community in pursuit of a nineteen year old geisha he met on his first visit. He seeks a relationship with her, and she seems to respond generously, but they misunderstand or choose to ignore each other’s intent. They are simply on different wavelengths, and this is presented in what might be called a series of vignettes. No particular event can necessarily be seen as a crisis point. They will part company mainly because time has run out.

For reasons not fully explored, Mr. Shimamura has trained himself to view the world through an aesthetic lens. It’s not that he’s delusional; he has simply acquired a knack for gently pushing aside anything that doesn’t mesh with his predilection for all things ephemeral. He sees Komako in this light. He’s enchanted with her outward presentation, the attention to dress, the thick white makeup, the faint blush in her cheeks, her exquisite playing of the samisen. But small town geishas are a different breed from their city counterparts. Komako does meet the standard in some respects, but she also smokes a lot, doesn’t seem to hold liquor well, and is subject to emotional outbursts, something a more polished geisha would never allow. Shimamura ignores these shortcomings, but his infatuation can become extravagant, which Komako then interprets as a form of mockery. And so it goes. She is aiming for a more domestic life, but he’s incapable of viewing her as a fully developed human being with all the messiness that it involves.

There’s much to admire in this novel, but you should be prepared for detailed descriptions of the following: mountain peaks, autumn foliage, the subtle interplay of snow and mist, mass movements of butterflies and dragonflies, harvesting, the Milky Way galaxy, the curvature of Komako’s body postures, the intricacies of textile weaving and dyeing by local artisans, the ghostly illusions produced by windows and subdued lighting, etcetera. It’s been said that Kawabata’s writing is in the spirit of haiku poetry. Sound is countered with silence, stillness with motion, fragility with immensity. The book would lend itself greatly to illustration, as do his other works.

I’ve had some difficulty finding Kawabata’s books in English translations, though they are certainly out there. This one was in Spanish. I often felt that I was consulting a dictionary as much as reading the novel, but it’s a rewarding process all the same, and hopefully the Spanish I learned hasn’t evaporated altogether.

2 Likes
867

Well I have put it aside. Don’t have the rest in me to read such a long book now. But its substitution is great: Simon Morrison’s A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow.

TBH: I am reading the Dutch translation.

Scherm­afbeelding 2026-04-11 om 18.54.18
Scherm­afbeelding 2026-04-11 om 18.54.18674×1008 143 KB

2 Likes
868

Ι finished the “Stainless Steel Rat” and “The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge”, but I had to draw a line at the “Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World”… :sweat_smile:

The books are “ok” for what they are I guess, but whatever happens in them is just so unlikely that I just cannot keep reading. I’ll just mention a mostly “spoiler free” example:

The first book begins with setting the premise of the main character who is a con-artist who is supposedly smart and charismatic who uses his mind and doesn’t kill people and has never run an “action type” theft or violently robbed a bank or whatever.

Fine, that’s cool, seems like the kind of fellow that might have inspired the creation of Pratchett’s “Moist von Lipwig” character. Alas, the author proceeds to abandon that premise immediately. Fast forward a few pages and the main character is robbing a bank. Which would have been fine, if the plan made any sense and if he didn’t proceed to rob a bank in the beggining of each other three books. :sweat_smile:

Page 3 the character explains that a good con-man needs to be emotionally detatched from his con and if (or to be more exact, “when”) it fails, the conman should leave the con immediately and not get into the temptation of “salvaging” or “overstaying”.

There is even a limerick:
“Turn your back and walk away -
and live to graft another day”

AMAZING! That sounds like the kind of crafty fellow I’d like to read.
Alas the main character proceeds to become totally and inexplicably obsessed with his next graft/con/mission and goes to insane lengths and risking his life for, phenomenically not good reason other than “bruised ego”.

Unfortunately these books seems to be another case of what I mentioned earlier about D&D characters and not being able to roleplay an “17/18 Intelligence, 17/18 charisma” character because the player/author has no clue how those people could be like…

If you enjoy break-neck action then the books are ok.
If you have even the faintest idea of how any of that works then you might suffer from “suspension of disbelief” every page…

For example the way the main character goes in the “main town” in the second book without a plan, manages to wing it, messes it up totally and goes in and out of that military camp, was excruciating to read for me since I have been posted as a guard in military camps and had been an army officer for a while. None of it checks out. :saluting_face:

Next, I am going for Ian M. Banks’ “Culture Series” and its first book “Consider Phlebas”… I do not remember who suggested those books or where I heard of them, but considering that “phleva” means vein in Greek, the title was always a bit funny to me, but people say that this is a solid series, so I’ll give it a shot (no pun intended :sweat_smile:).

3 Likes
869

Harry Harrison was never a first-tier writer, IMHO. He rose above hackdom with a few notable stories: “Rock Diver” (an early short story), Make Room! Make Room! (which you read IIRC), Captive Universe (an enjoyable pocket-universe story), and maybe the Deathworld trilogy (I have mixed feeling about it).

I read the first two Stainless Steel Rat stories when I read through my father’s collection of 1950s Astoundings around age 11. Didn’t like them then, for moral reasons, and I expect I would dislike the series even more today. Sadly, the SSR potboilers became Harrison’s bread and butter, just like the Retief stories did for Keith Laumer (who was a better writer, I think). This is the usual story: writers have to eat, and their hackwork detracts from the better stories they might have written, but never did. Most of the best SF, at least in the old days, was written by authors who had other jobs.

We read Consider Phlebas in my book group quite a few years ago. I liked it mildly, but it had some unnecessary gross-out scenes that seemed pitched to 10-year-olds IIRC, and it did not inspire me to read more of the “Culture Series.” I also read his famous, non-SF book, The Wasp Factory, which has many virtues but is quite unpleasant, which may be why I don’t remember much of it anymore.

1 Like
870

My most recent read was Progress & Poverty by Henry George. I have mixed feelings because it has introduced me to the most important idea that I had never heard of, yet by doing so it has revealed to me just how unable humanity is to make the correct decisions. An important economic problem, likely the primary cause of wealth inequality, has been known for 150 years, and yet the solution has never been applied.

If anyone else is familiar and wants to discuss, is unfamiliar and curious, or in particular if anyone has a counter argument, let me know, I’ll start a thread.

4 Likes
871

Me in a nutshell.

… greed … ?

2 Likes
872

Yeah, the opening scene is kind of nasty for just for the shock value, I guess, but I do not have much of a vivid imagination for such scenes, so it didn’t really affect me at all… but it really set the pace, I guess, for what the author can put in scenes… :sweat_smile:

I think I recall a discussion about this here… is it about the land tax proposal?
In any case, feel free to open a discussion about anything philosophical, there is, after all a relevant thread for them:

It is a topic that contains a lot of interesting ideas and discussions. :slight_smile:

If it is about the land tax, there are plenty.

That’s the main reason why we have economic systems in the first place. :sweat_smile:
It is a need that most people have and it needs to be adressed in a civil way (after all, if you get your hands on a fortune, you need to institutionalise a way to keep your hands on it for as long as possible :wink: ), so that there can be a “civil society”…

2 Likes
873

I just want to note that this book was the basis for the famous movie “Soylent Green” (German title: “Jahr 2022 … die überleben wollen” – “Year 2022, Those Who Want To Survive”), however the exact term “Soylent Green” does never appear in the book (soy + lentils), and the movie deviates quite much from the book (cannibalism!).

2 Likes
874

On the topic of population. I see that you like Sci-Fi. I would highly recommend two short-stories:

  1. Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut
  2. 2 B R 0 2 B, by Kurt Vonnegut

I am sure you’ll love it.

3 Likes
875

Yes, I saw the movie when it came out, and it inspired me to read the book. BTW, the movie features the last role of the great Edward G. Robinson, who, ironically, dies in one of the government’s suicide centers in the film.

2 Likes
876

Currently reading the 4th book in the Old Man's War Series by John Scalzi :

Nothing “too deep” (though certainly not shallow) but I really enjoy the humour. Have ordered the last three books already (whenever I can, I buy used books).

However, even though I enjoy them, these are mostly “fillers” for the pauses between what I really want to read.

Next up is the 4rd book in the awesome Children of Time Series by Adrian Tchaikovsky (but I didn’t enjoy the 3rd book as much as the first two):

and then probably the 2nd book in The Captive's War Series by James S.A. Corey :

And then, I guess, it might be time again for some non-SF, non fiction.

3 Likes
877

Scherm­afbeelding 2026-04-17 om 23.19.13
Scherm­afbeelding 2026-04-17 om 23.19.13490×882 67.2 KB

1 Like
878

Malthus makes a valid argument but it’s incomplete. It fails to take into account that technology has far increased the food production per capita. It’s actually (mostly) increasing land rents which causes relative stagnation of standards of living and the persistence of poverty in developed nations, and population growth is but one factor in increasing land rents.

879

I had never realised that it had to do with lentils.
I had thought that the word soylent to be like virulent or something like that.

3 Likes
880

Well, you were spot on.
Unfortunately I got the “three books, box set”… oops. It was on a sale and it costed almost as much as one book, so I thought it was a bargain. :roll_eyes:

Though, to be honest the graphic scenes were not really my issue, but the gross incompetence of the characters. My God, it makes you wonder how these people managed to stay alive through their lives to reach the timeline of the book.

At one point near the end Yalson even asks Horza the question I’ve been wondering most of the book “what did they teach you in that War Academy of yours?” or something similar. So, it is not just me, the author knows it too. :sweat_smile:

Anyway I’ll read book 2 later, I cannot stomach that now, so I switched to something that’s definitely good: Re-reading “The Blade itself” by Ambercrombie.

I had it in my re-read list and it has been years since I’ve read it, so I have forgotten what exactly happens, but it is a book worth re-reading. It contains two of the greatest fictional characters ever written (as far as I am concerned). Sand dan Glokta and Logen Nine-fingers.

That last one has two main “lines”… one is “I am still alive!” and the other is “you have to be realistic about those things”, so since the whole red/blue button choice reminded me of Logen and Glokta a lot, I thought it was time to revist the whole Ambercrombie universe.

The first law trilogy is good, but it is the characters that really make it shine. The subsequent books on that same fictional setting are even better.
Ambercrombie really knows the human nature from inside out. Highly recommended. :slight_smile:

1 Like
881

If you like a Very Good Read but also want Seriously Chewy Writing, then I have some writers for you, all SF or adjacent.

Ted Chiang - Wikipedia ’s output is extremely small - he has written just over a dozen short stories - but he has received over 30 awards including two Nebulas and a Hugo. (He apologizes for one of them because he was forced to finish it too fast, and I agree it is a bit lesser but still an very good read.)

I recommend not reading any of the descriptions. Start with “Exhalation” or “Hell Is The Absence of God” and just read it slowly in one sitting, none of his works are very long.

Gene Wolfe - Wikipedia is my personal favorite for his incredibly vivid characters and subtle and intricate plots all bearing on some aspect of the human condition. Many of his stories are told extremely elliptically by idiosyncratic narrators with limited views of what is going on, so the reader needs to piece it together, and yet at the same time, they are exciting in an almost pulpy way.

I’d start with the novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and if you don’t like the first page, there’s no hope. :smile:

His magnum opus is the Book of the New Sun, a four-volume series. He mentioned the idea to his editor who said, “Send me a treatment!” and quite a few months later, Wolfe shows up with the whole thing in first draft, all three volumes (at the time).

Editor stays up all night reading it and calls him and says, “Sold!” so Wolfe rewrites it entirely from the beginning, and I mean retypes it.

I’ve read it many times and I always find new details and revelations. There are still one or two questions I have, decades later!, but Wolfe did know the answer to those questions.

Cordwainer Smith was “an officer in the US Army, a noted scholar of East Asia, and an expert in psychological warfare. He was one of science fiction’s more influential authors despite his relatively limited output and his early death at the age of 53” and also godson of Sun-Yat Sen and many other things.” Back when you could do that and be a nice guy, too - credited with saving a lot of Japanese lives by writing pamphlets that gave them socially acceptable ways to surrender.

Every short story starting with his first, Scanners Live in Vain, is a knockout (there’s a posthumous collaboration that’s a whisper of him) and they are all in strange and beautiful and extremely modern for someone writing in the 50s and 60s only.

It leads through stories like Golden The Ship Was, Oh, Oh, Oh and The Burning of the Brain to The Ballad of Lost C’Mell which is some sort of revelation of the whole thing.

Start with Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, or Scanners Live in Vain.

Lem, Ellison, Pohl and/or Kornbluth, Sturgeon, I have a list but I’m out of time.

5 Likes
882

An idiot plot driven by inept characters often kills a book or movie for me. I want characters to be brought low by destiny or character flaws or even bad luck or irony, but not from falling over their own feet.

Ted Chiang, who I mentioned above, said something much like this about COVID:

While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.

5 Likes
883

Welcome to OGS and to this thread. I’m amazed at how similar our SF tastes are. As most everyone here knows, I am nearly 72 and have been a huge SF fan from my earliest days. In my youth, I was very active in SF fandom and got to meet many of the old-time authors and even become friends with a few, as well as most of the well-known fans of the era. Today I “keep my hand in” only with a local book group.

I have read all of Cordwainer Smith and he is high on my list of greatest authors. He was incredibly innovative, and his early death was an incalculable loss. Your recommendations are well chosen, I think. BTW, I have on my shelf a book that was owned by him, acquired by my father for 25 cents, A Parody Anthology, collected by Carolyn Wells (Scribner’s, 1904). It is hand-inscribed with his real name: “Paul M. A. Linebarger, Washington, D.C., March 27, 1934.”

I also love Lem and get frustrated by the resistance I get about him in the book group. Lem’s Eden is absolutely the scariest novel ever written; no one has come close to his terrifying descriptions of being stranded on an alien planet. I’ve read all but one of his translated books. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but I guess it would be The Futurological Congress.

Pohl and Kornbluth were great individually and together, one of the best teams in SF history. Sturgeon was probably the best stylist in the field, with classics like More than Human, “Microcosmic God,” “Maturity,” and many other short works, humorous and serious. The only name I can’t get on board with is Ellison, although I do acknowledge the excellence of certain particular works, especially his two Outer Limits screenplays. I do admire Ellison’s advocacy for emotional honesty in the workshops that he taught.

Ted Chiang I have not read, but want to. Arrival, based on his story, is one of my favorite SF movies.

Gene Wolfe, ironically, is someone I like, but I have read only a little of his early work. I have many of his books on my shelves waiting to be read. This is ironic because we were friendly acquaintances back in the day, at the start of his career. He was very active in a fanzine where I was active and we often engaged in discussions. It’s rare for pros to stay active in fandom, even if they got their start there. My impression was that he was a big-hearted guy, much beloved in fandom.

A perfect example is Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a documentary novel about the bubonic plague in London in 1665, which Defoe massively researched. Ironically, I read this in early January 2020, shortly before the COVID outbreak. The 17th-century monarchy handled it much better than today’s insane bureaucracy.

4 Likes
884

Oh, I’ve been here for about ten years, maybe more! I only just discovered these chat forums.

Go is a weakness of mine to procrastinate, so I play a lot of blitz, and even then I play too fast. :smiley:

When I lived in Canada (all of the 70s, I’m a bit younger than you) I was very active in fandom but I graduated from university and I moved to New York City and, well, so much to do.

Everything I’ve heard about Wolfe as a person was good!

I envy you not having read him. The Book of the New Sun starts:

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.

and around the third time I read it, I cracked up at the sheer audacity of that sentence, given the incredibly intricacy of what is to come.

A story from Fandom: maybe a decade ago, he was on some fan podcast, and the interviewer asked him, “Do you have any theories as to where The Book of the New Sun is set?”, and Wolfe looked surprised and said, “South America, of course,” and then proceeded to explain why this should have been completely clear from the book. No one else knew.

I’ve been thinking about these old books again now we are reunited with them here. Any Go player visiting Rouen, France should let us know, we’ll show you a good time!

3 Likes