Random Thoughts

“Despite this solve…”

Oh my gerd! This is awful! On a sentence by sentence basis, this is gruelling. “The kettle screamed its achievement of boiling water and Adrian jerked it off the element, wincing.” This is torture.

I got to page 30 before giving up, because the concept here sounds like it could be fun. So I checked Goodreads:

There are bad books. There are books that just aren’t for me. But this is the biggest train wreck of a book in recent memory.

Right:

Almost immediately, what we might have imagined as the main story thread on board is mostly thrust aside in favour of long, dull flashbacks filling us in on the characters on the shuttle back on Earth and their relationships to Mal. None of these characters are very interesting and it all feels like a massive distraction. Except that, as it turns out, the murder itself gets pretty much forgotten.

So… I’m ditching this. I mean, I like reading trash, but the trash has to be somewhat well written, at least.

Station Eternity (2021) by Mur Lafferty (buy new, buy used, 3.7 on Goodreads)

I’ve got a strange kind of cold this week — it doesn’t seem to get better or get worse, but just remains at a stage of me feeling slightly cruddy, so I’m picking books to read that go down easily. I’m not up for reading anything challenging.

I bought this book in 2005 and then didn’t read it. I’ve read the previous books in the series, but I guess I just decided that I’d read enough of these books? And then bought one more anyway, but never read it. But now I’ve brewed a cup of bush tea, so let’s go.

(I think I started drinking that stuff after I read the first book in this series?)

I think that people should write stories featuring whatever people they want to dream up. But it’s sometimes hard to completely disregard the paternalistic tone the white author here takes with his African characters. It’s often like… “eeeh?” (Such erudite critique.)

But this book sure goes down easy. We’re presented a number of low stakes mysteries, and most of them are solved. I tend to think that the author has a tendency to forget all the plot strands?

As is alluded to in this review of the next book in the series.

I did indeed enjoy reading this book while hacking slightly, but I don’t feel compelled to buy any further entries in this series. I see that there’s now 24 or these books? Geezes. Perhaps reading one of these books every 20 years is enough?

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (2004) by Alexander McCall Smith (buy used, 4.09 on Goodreads)

This book collects one novella and two short stories, so, er, “A Laundry Files Novel”? Well, OK, perhaps Stross considers this to be a very short novel, and not a novella… Or perhaps the publishers think “novel” sells better than “novella”, and they should know.

As usual with Stross, his style is burbling — it’s hard not to envision a guy jumping up and down in front of his laptop while typing away, laughing maniacally at the sentences he manages to conjure up. It’s very charming, but sometimes you’ve read half a paragraph and you have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, because he took a metaphorical route and followed it a bit too far, while dropping in three non sequitur jokes and nine Britishisms never committed to paper before.

It’s fun, but it’s exhausting.

He also has a tendency to explain everything about his universe in every piece, and since there’s three stories in here, we get some repetition. I mean, it’s fine — it’s all very amusing and quite exciting — but it’s a thing.

These stories are set before the current New Management books, and that’s kinda nice. I saw somebody describe the New Management books as not being totally “sound”, and I kinda get what they mean: Stross’ universe has diverged so much from ours by now (thirteen books in) that the most recent books are sometimes a bit “eh?” These stories don’t have that problem.

A Conventional Boy (2025) by Charles Stross (buy new, buy used, 4.28 on Goodreads)