For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week. Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazines.
Kel Claims Cat’s Cradle
The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list. If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.
Once again, this is not a book review column. It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.
Recently Completed:
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Audio of the radio drama. Enjoyable.
The Venetian’s Wife by Nick Bantock. More text than his best-selling “Griffin and Sabine” trilogy, but still heavily and creatively illustrated.
Sunchaser’s Quest: Unicorns of Balinor, Book Two by Mary Stanton. Middle grade “missing princess” story featuring many-colored unicorns.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Definitely related to Alan and my discussion of SF andreligion.
In Progress:
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Audiobook. Many cite this as the first detective novel in English.
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork. Only a few chapters in, but I already really like Marcelo. The “real world,” not so much!
Knight of Shadows. Audiobook. Eighteen episodes of The Shadow radio drama. I’m now over the half-way point. They don’t benefit from too many at once since, like many radio dramas of the time, they rely on set pieces and a lot of repetition. Still, they made a great amusement amid cold and fever.
Also:
If there’s one good thing about recovering from a cold or flu or whatever it is I’ve had, it’s that I don’t feel like I’m slacking if I curl up and read. It’s medicinal!
Jane Lindskold: Wednesday Wanderings 
March 17, 2017 at 10:16 am |
Completed this week:
“The Skill of Our Hands” by Steven Brust and Skyler White
Second book in the Incrementalists series about a group of body-jumping people who’ve been trying to make the world better, just a little bit at a time, for 40,000 years. This one involves Arizona’s laws and violence regarding people who entered the USA illegally and one Incrementalist’s dealings with John Brown just before the US Civil War.
Although not strictly necessary, it’s helpful to read the first book and the two short stories (on Tor.com) that occur between the books before reading this one.
About to begin:
“Cemetery Tours” by Jacqueline Smith
March 18, 2017 at 3:00 pm |
Since I haven’t commented much in the last few months, here’s several titles I’d endorse:
–All That Glitters by Loren K. Jones. Kind of a sword and sorcery, but good characters and dialogue.
–Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nuevell. Near future sci-fi, Constructed as a series of interviews, news reports, etc. Very open ended, so many places it could go in the sequel.
–A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and its sequel A Closed and Common Orbit. Very cool examination of what a multi-species community might look like. The second one narrows its focus down to the individual level, and has some cool structural parallelisms that really make the book work.
–The Sculpted Ship by K. M. O’Brien. Cool little space opera, but it looks like it might only be available as an ebook
March 21, 2017 at 7:00 am |
I’m always a little worried about books with “angry” in the title. Is the one above an “angry” book? The multi-species part definitely appeals to me.
March 21, 2017 at 3:37 pm
The “Angry” in “Small, Angry, Planet” mostly refers to the extreme volcanism of the planet in question. It most definitely is not an angry book. I think you’d enjoy it. And I think you would definitely appreciate the craft involved in the sequel.