Dying of the Light, George R. R. Martin (365 Books, Day 138)

Via Papersky-- I'd read many of Martin's short stories, and also The Armageddon Rag, but hadn't even known of the existence of this one. (No, I have not read A Song of Ice and Fire. Asking me when I'm going to read it won't help anything. I have now bounced off the first one very hard twice, so it only gets one more shot, and I'm saving it for a time that feels propitious.)

There are some writers I love, and race through, and sit down with and look up six hours later and have no idea where the time has gone. There are other writers I love who take a bit longer, because they are denser, and I have to work to get everything they're saying into my head.

There are still other writers, and Martin is one of them, whom I respect and admire and enjoy terribly in the abstract and after I've read them, and then when I am trying to read the actual book it requires a physical act of will and effort to get my eyes to remain focused on the paper. I have no idea why, unless it is that they think so incredibly differently from the way that I think that I am having to translate as I go, to find some way of construing and contextualizing each and every sentence because it goes so against the usual way I see things that it barely makes any sense. (The principal other writer I have this issue with is C.J. Cherryh. I have come to the conclusion that she literally thinks perpendicularly to the way I do and that even when I do understand what she is trying to say, I probably do not get anything out of her remotely resembling what she intended me to. For instance, people keep telling me her novel Rusalka is depressing, whereas it is one of my comfort books.) This is why I bounced off A Game of Thrones: it's very long and I was getting a nasty headache from having to think about it so hard and I haven't the endurance and so I found that I was making excuses to go clean the bathroom instead. B. says I should try the audiobook. Maybe so.

At any rate, I consider this kind of reading good for me; it expands the inside of my head. When I finally did click with Cherryh's Foreigner series, it changed the way I think about some things involving logic; the way I think about logic now would not have been comprehensible to me before reading those. So when I heard that there was a Martin novel I didn't know about, and which is short, it went on my list. Yesterday I read four hundred and ten pages of Mette Ivie Harrison (who is, granted, easy) in an hour and a half. Today I read two hundred and fifty-four pages of Martin in just under seven hours. That will tell you.

( As to how the book is? The book is great. )

Dying of the Light, George R. R. Martin (365 Books, Day 138)

Via papersky-- I'd read many of Martin's short stories, and also The Armageddon Rag, but hadn't even known of the existence of this one. (No, I have not read A Song of Ice and Fire. Asking me when I'm going to read it won't help anything. I have now bounced off the first one very hard twice, so it only gets one more shot, and I'm saving it for a time that feels propitious.)

There are some writers I love, and race through, and sit down with and look up six hours later and have no idea where the time has gone. There are other writers I love who take a bit longer, because they are denser, and I have to work to get everything they're saying into my head.

There are still other writers, and Martin is one of them, whom I respect and admire and enjoy terribly in the abstract and after I've read them, and then when I am trying to read the actual book it requires a physical act of will and effort to get my eyes to remain focused on the paper. I have no idea why, unless it is that they think so incredibly differently from the way that I think that I am having to translate as I go, to find some way of construing and contextualizing each and every sentence because it goes so against the usual way I see things that it barely makes any sense. (The principal other writer I have this issue with is C.J. Cherryh. I have come to the conclusion that she literally thinks perpendicularly to the way I do and that even when I do understand what she is trying to say, I probably do not get anything out of her remotely resembling what she intended me to. For instance, people keep telling me her novel Rusalka is depressing, whereas it is one of my comfort books.) This is why I bounced off A Game of Thrones: it's very long and I was getting a nasty headache from having to think about it so hard and I haven't the endurance and so I found that I was making excuses to go clean the bathroom instead. B. says I should try the audiobook. Maybe so.

At any rate, I consider this kind of reading good for me; it expands the inside of my head. When I finally did click with Cherryh's Foreigner series, it changed the way I think about some things involving logic; the way I think about logic now would not have been comprehensible to me before reading those. So when I heard that there was a Martin novel I didn't know about, and which is short, it went on my list. Yesterday I read four hundred and ten pages of Mette Ivie Harrison (who is, granted, easy) in an hour and a half. Today I read two hundred and fifty-four pages of Martin in just under seven hours. That will tell you.

( As to how the book is? The book is great. )

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Galactic Gourmet, James White (365 Books, Day 139)

This is a very specific subgenre of fiction: the hospital novel. James White's Sector General books combine the hospital novel with hard SF; they're set at a space hospital which has to medically handle many, many different species.

I had never read any of them but this sounded like a recipe for good light reading, so I picked up the one which had additional interest for me, in that the main character is a chef whose mission, or obsession, is to improve the hospital food. For everybody, including that guy who eats high-intensity radiation.

And indeed, this was good soothing light reading, in the 'problems come up and we solve them through intelligent discussion' direction. The book was a bit oddly structured, in that the first half works through a bunch of food solutions for hospital-dwelling aliens and the second half is a first-contact story, and while there is some emotional arc to tie the two together, there isn't much, because this sort of book never has much emotional arc. So it feels kind of like a fix-up, even though I don't think it is, or as though it really wanted to be two novellas with a large page in between them reading 'Part Two'. But whatever. I enjoyed the viewpoint character, who is not human and does not really understand humans and does not want to because he is cooking here, dammit, and who is plausible as a chef not in the technical sense that the book knows much about actual food prep-- it's okay to middling on that-- but in the sense that he has no other life and is an obsessed workaholic who is convinced he is the universe's gift to food, which summarizes most chefs I've known (and I am not saying that as a bad thing; I sometimes wish I were more like that).

The prose is a bit clunky and overly polysyllabic but it is clear and readable, so I don't much care, because again, this is not the sort of book you read for style.

This is the sort of book you read if you want to read about people intelligently fixing interesting technical issues which don't have much danger to them, concerning fields you care about, with aliens. If that is what you want, this is exactly what you would like. I shall keep the rest of them in mind for the next time I want that, because sometimes I really just do. You know, like the day after turning my brain inside out over a book I found difficult and rewarding.

The Galactic Gourmet, James White (365 Books, Day 139)

This is a very specific subgenre of fiction: the hospital novel. James White's Sector General books combine the hospital novel with hard SF; they're set at a space hospital which has to medically handle many, many different species.

I had never read any of them but this sounded like a recipe for good light reading, so I picked up the one which had additional interest for me, in that the main character is a chef whose mission, or obsession, is to improve the hospital food. For everybody, including that guy who eats high-intensity radiation.

And indeed, this was good soothing light reading, in the 'problems come up and we solve them through intelligent discussion' direction. The book was a bit oddly structured, in that the first half works through a bunch of food solutions for hospital-dwelling aliens and the second half is a first-contact story, and while there is some emotional arc to tie the two together, there isn't much, because this sort of book never has much emotional arc. So it feels kind of like a fix-up, even though I don't think it is, or as though it really wanted to be two novellas with a large page in between them reading 'Part Two'. But whatever. I enjoyed the viewpoint character, who is not human and does not really understand humans and does not want to because he is cooking here, dammit, and who is plausible as a chef not in the technical sense that the book knows much about actual food prep-- it's okay to middling on that-- but in the sense that he has no other life and is an obsessed workaholic who is convinced he is the universe's gift to food, which summarizes most chefs I've known (and I am not saying that as a bad thing; I sometimes wish I were more like that).

The prose is a bit clunky and overly polysyllabic but it is clear and readable, so I don't much care, because again, this is not the sort of book you read for style.

This is the sort of book you read if you want to read about people intelligently fixing interesting technical issues which don't have much danger to them, concerning fields you care about, with aliens. If that is what you want, this is exactly what you would like. I shall keep the rest of them in mind for the next time I want that, because sometimes I really just do. You know, like the day after turning my brain inside out over a book I found difficult and rewarding.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.