Poul Anderson would have been better without the tacked on boy-meets-girl of too many of his stories.

Yes, I love The Broken Sword! One of the best fantasy novels ever written. I still need to read some of his other Viking stories. I've heard Hrolf Kraki's Saga is pretty good.

My biggest criticism of these particular stories would be that they are a bit lovey-dovey in parts. I don't normally mind, but it's kind of jarring to see hardened fighting men melt so fast at the sight of a beautiful lady :)

Hey it's a known male weakness amongst even the toughest ... unless they are Gay of course. LOL

Nice to hear! =)

The Sirens of Titan (1959) by Kurt Vonnegut: 4.5/5

Some books are best to read when you are young and/or inexperienced like Raymond Feist's Riftwar Saga or Salvatore's Drizzt books, while others you will get more out of once you've matured a bit. I have some vague memories of this book from when I was a kid and read, or most likely tried to read a translated copy. The title suggested exciting adventures on Titan, but not being a simple action story the book was too advanced for the young me.

Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was a competent but unremarkable dystopian novel.
Sirens is much more original and well written IMO, and is like a mix of William Tenn (who was not able to write book length stories), Alfred Bester (but Vonnegut's writing is not so transparantly cute and clever) and Douglas Adams (who must have been inspired by this book but whose humour was lighter).

Malachi Constant is the luckiest man alive and the richest person in the US, but he spends his fortune wallowing in booze and floozies, until he is summoned before Winston Niles Rumfoord. Rumfoord is the grandest man in existence and is the only one who can make Constant feel inferior. While cruising in his little space ship near Mars, he and his dog fell into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and now he and his dog exist in wave form between the Sun and Betelgeuse, only materializing on Earth every hundred days or so.
Being now virtually a demigod Rumfoord has the power to foresee and to look into the past, and uses Constant for his own purposes, a purpose that sends Constant on an odyssey through the solar system, ending up on Titan where the three most beautiful women ever resides.

The plot is quite novel, the writing is very sharp and often humorous with many bizarre situations, and the purpose of all the small things that may seem unimportant at first is revealed in the end. I must day I preferred this book to the more famous, but also more obviously preachy Slaughterhouse 5. Like S 5 it's not hard SF, and the description of Titan is not very convincing.

Ultimately the book is about The Meaning of Life, and the meaning of the existence and civilization of Homo sapiens as a species is quite ingenious and a great reveal at the end (Isaac Asimov already used a similar idea for a short story, though).

But on a more personal level
"a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved"

Some quotes:

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”

“Thank you for using me,” she said to Constant, “even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.”

That's an interesting idea to say the least, considering Constant "used" her by raping her and she was still a virgin.

"Is there anything I can do?’is most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.”

This is the oldest book I can remember seeing the word "piss" being printed.
But "fuck" was still taboo in 1959, so we get "f-kup" instead.

Joyland - Stephen King

Not a horror story, more like a thriller, with a serial killer on the loose. But finally, the serial killer story is maybe second to the coming-of-age of the main character. And everything wrapped-up in the world of amusement park, or "carny" (short for Carnivals, I guess) as he says.

Interesting story, as usual King's style doesn't let you let down the book if the start of the story hooks you. I liked it a lot, but foiund that the story was finally pretty minor comparing to the description of the personnality of the main character. Which is not bad at all, just not what I entirely expected from a King novel.

So far in 2020: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2020/post9

Thief

Maybe the book itself isn’t quite as unimaginative as its title, but it’s not far either. It’s easy to read and I could “see” what was going on, but that’s likely less thanks to the writing and more because it’s such a typical setting. The world and action are what you’d expect, the heroes are suitably heroic, with perhaps a bit of an exception for the lead character, the villains are suitably villainous, without being over the top but also without anything to make any element interesting. It’s like a writer of perhaps passable skill but with pretty much no experience set her mind on checking the basic boxes for a fantasy series, or for the first book of one, in this particular case, without daring to even try to get to the more advanced parts of the list.
As a plain, basic, typical early effort, it can’t really be said that it failed at anything. However, if it was to be published at all, it should have first gone through a massive editing process. And I’m not referring to typos, missing or misplaced words or punctuation problems, though there are some of those as well, but to how amateurish it all is. The writing is rather messy and the main problems are the structure, flow and story and character development. It’s all rough, rushed, pretty much as plain and typical as you can get, without any actual tension, twists, surprises, bits of wisdom, touching moments or anything else that’d make it interesting, provoke an emotional response or otherwise make it memorable. I have read worse, and at least it’s free, but it’s the sort of early attempt that more accomplished authors either try to bury or, if it was rejected and they didn’t self-publish back in the day, may only, and probably with some amount of embarrassment, get persuaded to release after they’re sufficiently famous for the publishers to know that their fans will grab just about anything with their name on it.

Rating: 2/5

Le Saint des Seins - Guillaume Nicloux

Another volume of the "Le Poulpe" series, with a play-on-words title I won't bother to translate ; just know it's talking about breasts. :p

Written this time by a quite well-known (in France) film director, the writing is good. It's going back to what the Le Poulpe series is: a dive into the dark side of society, this time about the gay world in Paris.

The writing is good but, unless I missed some pages, the conclusion of the story doesn't really make sense, there's not foreclosure feeling on the story itself, so it's quite disappointing...

So far in 2020: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2020/post9

Seneca despre libertate (Seneca About Freedom)

Received this booklet after volunteering for something, even if there was some confusion and I arrived when the work was nearly done. It's a selection from the Moral Letters to Lucilius and I just went through it quickly, so I won't comment much. There's little point to comment on the writing of something that's some 2000 years old anyway, though I will say that I don't care for the epistolary style either, and it's quite rambling at times.
Still, it is a philosophical text, and while proper comments about philosophy require far more time and attention than I'm willing to offer this at the moment, the fact that it's an effort to turn someone into a Stoic does make me say that I find most of the main tenets of Stoicism quite infuriating. There are some good parts, definitely, and some that are mixed, but there are also contradictions and fundamental concepts that, as I already stated, I find quite infuriating and rotten, starting with the core concept that inner happiness is what matters and it should be generated and maintained regardless of what happens, that external events must be accepted as they are, not seen as good or bad and not allowed to affect that positive state of mind. That bears a striking resemblance to the crap pushed by the modern professional mental health field, which blames the victims for not grinning and bearing whatever is done to them or the less fortunate for wishing to have access to the benefits that society should be able to grant and therefore discourages or even condemns demanding improvement.

Rating: 2/5

Pure Murder by Corey Mitchell.

It's about the murders of Elizabeth Peña and Jennifer Ertman in 1993. The book describes the killers troubled background, the girls' short life, the horrible, horrible crime and what the victims' families went through after the girls went missing, the killers' capture, the trials, and, lastly, the execution of one of the killers in 2006; two others were executed after the book was printed and the final three are still in prison, two of them had their death sentences reduced to life in prison because they were 17 at the time of the murders and another (who was 14 at the time) got a 40 years sentence. The events in the book are truly awful and senseless, it had me in tears several times. If you're interested in this sort of things, this is a good book, otherwise I wouldn't recommend it, what happened to these girls may haunt you.

Allah recherche l'autan perdu - Roger Dadoun

Another Le Poulpe series. I didn't know the author beforehand, this time. An international story that will see the Poulpe go from France to Egypt and then Iran, on the track of islamists.

Not a bad story, but why did the author think it was interesting to write some very eroticv, borderline pornographic scenes in the book? I mean, I'm no prude, and pornography doesn't bother me, but when it makes sense in the flow of the book! That was not the case. And confirm me something: in Iran, you don't speak arab when you're a native, right?

So far in 2020: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2020/post9

Deathworld (1960) by Harry Harrison 3.5/5

Finally I've reached the 1960s on my chronological reading list of speculative fiction. Took me about 7.5 years to cover 1926-1959, so it's gone quicker than I would have thought.

[IMG]

Deathworld was Harrison's first novel, first published in the January to March 1960 issues of Astounding/Analog. It seems to have been slightly revised for book publication, but all digital copies I found were based on the magazine serial, so I couldn't check for any differences.

Harrison pulls all the right strings in this novel - psi and a "superman" hero to satisfy editor Campbell, and strong women to satisfy a modern audience who apparently read SF to read about strong women for some bizarre reason.

Jason dinAlt is a professional gambler who uses Psi (when it's working) to win, and quick wits to get away with his haul. He's hired by Kerk Pyrrus to win 3 Billion credits for him, starting with 14 million. Jason ends up on Kerk's home planet Pyrrus, which is very like a futuristic Sparta, where nearly everyone, including women and children older than five, are physically superior to Jason. So kind of funny that the protagonist is actually the weakest character in the book.

Pyrrus is an Earth like planet with a gravity of 2 G and has an extreme climate and the deadliest flora and fauna in the known univerese. Absolutely everything is hell bent on killing the Pyrrans. And the trigger happy Pyrrans love killing anything that attacks.
But they are fighting a long defeat, dwindling in numbers, and it takes an off-worlder to see what their real problem is.

Reading (mostly skimming) old copies of Astounding I never can finish one of Campbell's editorials before he brings up his favourite subject - Psi - , so when I saw the word Psi in this novel I was ready to find an excuse to quit reading.
Then it turns out that the pilot of the Pyrran spaceship was young and beautiful (how convenient):

I was now ready to call it quits. Usually at this stage I check the last page of the book to see of it ends with them getting married or at least kissing, but since it was a magazine serial I wasn't that easy, so I persevered, which I'm glad I did, since the romance was not nearly as annoying as in your average Poul Anderson story, and Meta turned out to be quite a funny character:

Hey, maybe this is why strong women is such a vital ingredient in modern SF.

Overall quite an enjoyable novel, with the Psi part well integrated in the story instead of tacked on, and with better prose than for example Dorsai.

The character of Jason DinAlt is said to be kind of a "trial run" for The Stainless Steel Rat. A novelette of that name was published a year earlier, but I didn't read it since it's the novel which is a classic. But I was very disappointed to learn that the Stainless Steel Rat is just the nick name of a man. Ever since I saw the book in my father's library as a kid (but I never read it) I thought it was an actual stainless steel rat; some kind of robot with AI. Oh, well, I'm looking forward to read that novel next year.

I had a period I read only one writer at a time; Poe, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen roughly in that order, and in my younger days I read nearly everything Moorcock had written. But it's easy to get over satiated that way (especially on Lovecraft), and I enjoy a more varied diet now.

If I had time I would read mysteries too, especially Christie. So much too read, so much to play, so little time. I don't understand kids when they say "I'm bored".

BTW, you sound quite well read. Surprised you can get into Feist and Pratchett. I found Feist's "Magician" too juvenile when I reread it about 5-10 years ago.

EDIT: Argh, I mixed Terry Pratchett with Terry Brooks for some reason.