I've finished reading the first five books of the kleine Vampir (the little vampire) series. I found the fifth one to be the funniest of the bunch. Somehow it reminded me of how cool it was to read Kimagure Orenji Roudo when I was 11/12. Probably because of the adolescent romantic theme and...the funny nosebleed scene. The message to take home? Never nosebleed in a room full of vampires!

Nice that you mention these. How did you find Earth Abides? I have been thinking of reading that one sometime.

From John Wyndham, a much younger self found Kraken Wakes entertaining enough, and remembered somewhat fondly for that (also it is very British, in the same way that J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World is very British as well). On the other hand, The Day of the Triffids did not work for me.

I found it very good. My review posted somewhere else three years ago:

"Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart: 4.5/5

In the years after WW2 and Hiroshima, mutants and atomic war wiping out civilization was all the rage in the SF pulp magazines (so much that many readers complained). Stewart was not a member of the larger SF community of the pulps, though, but an academic like his British colleagues Stapledon, Huxley and Orwell.
And for his post-apocalyptic novel he chose a biological catastrophe instead, where a new germ wipes out 99.99% of all humans (and other primates IIRC).

The protagonist, Ish (named after a Native American who was the last of his tribe), is way out in the wilderness and is bitten by a rattle snake while the epidemic wipes out civilization. The snake venom may have protected against the germ. That scene seemed very familiar, and it made me wonder if I had read the book as a child, but there doesn't seem to be any Norwegian translation, so maybe the same idea was used in another story.

Anyway, the book is not as intense as for example I Am Legend, and there's little action/drama (one potentially dramatic scene is resolved "off camera"), but it's still an engaging story, and Stewart manages to discuss things like ecology, anthropology, language and and how things change with time without resorting to boring info dumps or exposition (which was typical of older and denser SF), but instead it's mostly told through the eyes and inner monologue of Ish who is a bit of a spectator to life.

The life of Ish after The Great Catastrophe, and the small community he builds, is convincingly told, and I must admit I had a lump in my throat at the end. " I read Kraken Wakes as a kid (early teens, I think), but found it rather boring. I tried to reread it, but couldn't find a good copy; there's only so much OCR errors I can tolerate. There's also quite significant differences between the UK and US editions.
I liked Triffids, though, as well as Wyndham's other novels and most of his short stories that I've read.

I'm looking forward to reading more of Ballard. Reading chronologically it looked like the New Wave of SF was about to start in 1957 and that the center of creativity was shifting towards England. The Brits even had the World SF Convention that year. But as fate would have it Ballard attended that con, but was horrified to learn that the people attending were not particularly intelligent and didn't actually discuss SF. He was so traumatized by the experience that he stopped writing for 1.5 years.

Charles Bukowski - Post Office
Dan Simmons - Hyperion

Right now I'm reading 'The Fall of Hyperion' so I think I will finish it soon and this will be the 3rd book of this year. I'm very happy that I read Hyperion (Bukowski I read before) 'cause this is just astonishing novel. Once I was in the public transport and I was reading this book (paper version) and I was so in it and in some way I can say that I was almost melancholic because of some events that happened in that story and then suddenly I realized that I missed my stop and was going to the wrong place :D Because it's really hard to not in fall love with this book.

Nice to see love for Hyperion here. A suggestion (probably your plan already): go on and read all of the Hyperion Cantos;

These two go in sequence. The second does not have the tale structure (akin to the Canterbury Tales) of the first, but it is still good.

Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion

You can finish it here and it will be fine.

However, if you want more, you can proceed with the Endymion books. They happen years after the first half. You get to know more about the universe depicted in Hyperion. Everything gets wrapped nicely again.

Endymion
The Rise of Endymion

Overall, these third and fourth books are worth it, if you liked The Fall of Hyperion. Hyperion remains the best of all, to this reader, as it is a book full of promise, with every tale an homage to a different type of science fiction.

Ouch! Poor Ballard! Did not know about that incident. I recall something to that effect mentioned in a book about Marvel: how some successful creators (I think one of the mentioned ones was Todd MacFarlane himself, and not the only one) were a bit shocked when meeting fans at conventions. Probably Asimov, Heinlein and others were gentler with their fans at conventions, though (Asimov knew well that he had been an acne-riddled brat who loved SF in his own time).

In any case, literary little worlds are 90% little world and only 10% literary, or less. Patricia Highsmith said that, as artists go, she loved mingling with painters, and never would socialize with other writers. Then, there are cases like Clifford D. Simak, whom everyone loved, and lasting friendships between some SF authors.

Also, many writers disappoint when met face to face, since they put the best of themselves in their books, and people are more than their best part. It could be said the same about any artist, too

FOUNDATION AND EARTH by ISAAC ASIMOV was another great book in the series, and a good tie-in with his Robot stories.

Another break again from the series, before I return and start reading PRELUDE TO FOUNDATION, which will eventually be followed by the 7th and last book in the series, FORWARD THE FOUNDATION. I am reading them in published order.

I should also read some of the other connected novels, that I have mentioned previously ... but I imagine that won't happen until next year now ... always so much to read and so little time.

Way too many things I am hanging out to read, including the latest (5th) Cormoran Strike thriller by ROBERT GALBRAITH (J.K. Rowling). I am also reading the odd Cozy Mystery that both my wife and mother read, so trying to keep up with them. I also need to get back into reading some of the other authors I have been reading this last year or so, and keep them flowing ... some have been more regular than others ... loving everything J. ROBERT KENNEDY writes, and still need to read a few off-shoots of his before getting back to his main series, and then read them all in published order (I'd skipped ahead with the main series). Back soon to reading TERRY BROOKS' Shannara series and the final DISC WORLD novel of TERRY PRATCHETT. Still haven't really squeezed any Swashbuckling Historical Romance book(s) in yet ... just the one ebook novella by RAFAEL SABATINI.

We won't mention all those others I have sitting there waiting in the wings to be read.

My reading list for 2020

Psycho (1959) by Author of Psycho aka Robert Bloch 3.5/5

One of the few Bloch books that doesn't have "by the author of Psycho" on the cover, at least for the English versions. I owned several of his translated collections when I was a kid,but don't remember seeing this book, nor Psycho being mentioned on covers. I don't remember seeing the movie on the telly either, so obviously the Hitchcock movie is not the same phenomenon here in Norway as it is in the US.

Like Bloch's first novel The Scarf it's a psychological thriller, and as with The Scarf the highlights are when we get a peek inside the psycho's head. Bloch used to work in advertising before turning pro as a writer, but if he should have chosen a different honest job I think psychologist would have been his vocation. And I think he would be an interesting case himself, with so many of his stories being about men having unhealthy relationships with their mommies. And before that he wrote about mummies; I wonder what a good shrink would make out of that?

The book has several POVs, but apart from the fat mama's boy and 40 year old virgin Norman Bates' chapters the rest reads as a regular crime novel. The writing is very smooth, but I missed Bloch's word puns (except maybe the name Norman Bates; rhymes with "normal" and "masturbates") and the grim humour of The Scarf.

The short story Enoch (rhymes with Bloch) from 1946 has many similarities, but Psycho lacks the supernatural element (I was surprised to find the book in the Fantasy&SF section of the library).

Overall an enjoyable read, but slightly disappointing, as it doesn't really improve on The Scarf IMO.

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, by Seabury Quinn. This is the first of five volumes reprinting Quinn's entire Jules de Grandin series. De Grandin is a sort of supernatural Sherlock Holmes, or maybe Poirot, who mostly operates in a fictitious New York suburb called Harrisonville, New Jersey. He's a small, blonde-haired French physician/detective, with a pointy mustache. He has tiny, effeminate hands and feet but he's deceptively strong and athletic, and he likes to make a lot of strange curses ("Name of a little blue man!"). He's very smart and very full of himself, but his arrogance is justified in that he's always right when it comes to figuring out that a case involves something weird. He's very much an ancestor of Fox Mulder in that way. His Dr. Watson is Dr. Trowbridge, a grumpy skeptic who, just like Scully, of course is always wrong and comes across as almost willfully obtuse in how often he doubts de Grandin's theories.

Quinn was actually the most popular writer for Weird Tales magazine, moreso than Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, or Clark Ashton Smith, among others. It's not hard to see why. His style is more approachable than theirs, and he writes in a more conventional manner that would go down easier with a casual reader, although the trade-off is that his work doesn't have the eccentricity or uniqueness or sense of depth that those others have. Of course, like most writers of his era, he has odd, now-outdated prejudices - he seems to have a particular beef against Hindus for some reason.

The first story is nothing amazing beyond the introduction of the heroes (it's kind of a weird inverted take on were-creatures), but you can tell that Quinn is really going for it in the early going. One story involves the heroes getting shipwrecked on a remote island and witnessing the natives smashing in a young woman's skull, then later in the story a madman treats them to a fancy dinner that's afterward implied to be the woman they saw killed earlier. One particular story, The House of Horrors, involves an insane surgeon transforming young women into hideously deformed, boneless creatures that he keeps locked in cages in his basement. It's a mean story, even by modern standards. I suspect it might have been too mean for the readers because shortly after the stories settle into a lighter, cozy routine. The heroes usually meet a young woman in trouble and then they take care of whatever's causing the problem, freeing her to get married to her sweetheart or whatever, de Grandin summarizes how he arrived at his conclusions, and then it closes on a gag of him wanting dinner or a drink. It's fun but it does get repetitive.

Just finished DEJA DEAD by KATHY REICHS, and it wasn't a bad story, if a bit over-descriptive at times.

Anyway, despite it being nothing like the BONES TV series, which was supposedly modeled after it, I enjoyed it. The main character Temperance (Tempe) Brennan is nothing like the TV show character, and this first book is set in Quebec (Canada) and features the police (who she struggles to get along with), with no sign of the FBI, and while Tempe sort of works with a team and for a boss, it is nothing like that of the TV show, and she is mostly on her own. She is also much older, divorced, has a daughter in college, and was an alcoholic. So any similarity with the TV show, is purely based on the examination of bones, and not really much else, so a completely different feel, people, setting and vibe.

This is the author's first novel, and perhaps it shows, though it was a best seller and won an award ... perhaps later books in the series inspired the TV show. I will be reading more of the series.

Deja Dead

Kathy Reichs

Bones

My reading list for 2020

Just out of curiosity: did you read the other books by N.S? I found Diamond Age great. Great to the level of "I want more of this". I have Cryptonomicon and the Baroque cycle in the waiting list. They are long and I am wondering if they really deliver. Some people swear by them but I wonder, if the best of Diamond Age was wild speculation, will his works set in the past hold the same appeal?

Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson (1959): 3/5

Some months before Starship Troopers was serialized in F&SF, Dorsai! ran in the May, June and July issues of Astounding, and thus being perhaps the first book length example of Military SF, even though ST was released in book format first.

It's the year 2403 and mankind has spread to the nearest stars and colonized planets, mostly by terraforming (thus Dickson avoids the problem of "Earth like" planets with life around young stars like Sirius).
Each planet is specialized and trades more in trained personnel than physical goods. Dorsai, a planet in the Fomalhaut system, provides the finest mercenaries in the known universe. Donal Graeme is the latest addition, having just turned 18 years old.
[IMG]

Donal is also "odd", and thanks to the genes from his Maran (produces psychologists) mother he has amazing powers of intuition. He has the power to foresee or to look into the past, he's the ruler of the stars...no wait, that was a different, later boy wonder.
Thanks to his superior intuition in addition to being a Dorsai, his career is meteoric and he eventually must face Prince William, another superman of superior abilities, but less martial and more like the scheming politician Palpatine.
Another important character is the girl Anea Marlivana, the Select of Kultis, who is a product of a selective breeding program and is to become Prince William's wife. The leaders of Kultis have great hopes for their offspring and his/her descendants. Sound familiar?
But then comes the unplanned mutation Donal and disrupts their plans...

So an interesting premise.
Unfortunately the writing is pretty bad and very pulpy, everything being very sketchy. The images the text conjure in my mind is like a movie using the cheapest possible sets. The characters are somewhat more distinct, though. There's no flashbacks, only one POV, and hardly any inner monologues, so all in all rather crude and very far from being "literate" SF. The story starts with an info dump in the form of Donal and his closest family discussing the current situation. Better than a regular info dump, but still rather clumsy, and it's even repeated in the third part of the serial.

So objectively hardly two stars, but despite all its faults I rather enjoyed the story, and in the end that's what really matters. And it's an easy and quite short read anyway.


[Cough] Plot armor. [Cough]

I wonder how much of this is autobiographical?

Rough draft encounter: red ink everywhere: REVISE, REVISE, grammar error, clumsily worded. :-) Glad most meetings people have don't themselves have "editors" and "publishers".

Most books and other art is not (fully) produced "live": the art we enjoy probably goes through stages of heavy editing that no one will ever see, even performance art where the refinement happens in repeated "practice", rehearsals, etc. Especially games: right now there are most certainly people at CDPR who are encountering parts of Night City which might not exist in a month: the Night City which does escape into the world will be the combined efforts of many people over a long period.

I finally finished reading Les Misérables, it took me forever to read it this time. This is the second time I read the book, the first was back in 2001 and I read it very quickly back then, nowadays I'm not as motivated to read as I used to be. It's a wonderful work, one of the best novels I've ever read. Now I just started with another Victor Hugo novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which I've never read before.