What are you reading? Options

[Decrepit]

At 2058 yesterday evening, 4 Jun 2025, I concluded an initial read of Terry Brooks' "Pre-Shannara: Word and Void, book 1, Running with the Demon". I liked it very much. Smaller in locale and timespan than his sprawling early Shannara entries, I find it far better written. It held my interest from start to finish. I'll definitely continue the trilogy.

But first, a possible change of pace. Having created a new cover for Mary Wollstonecraft's (the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley of Frankenstein fame) "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", I decided to give it a try. I'm only partway through the short, meh biographical introduction, so it's too soon to report on the book's worth or lack thereof.

[SubRosa]

A few days ago I "read' All Quiet on the Western Front, from the audiobook here.

It is good. It goes quickly, as the writing does not get bogged down like the armies did in the trenches. It is not a standard, single story with a beginning, middle, and ending. Rather it is a series of individual anecdotes that were clearly taken from the author's personal experiences in the First World War (he was a German infantryman on the Western Front). This is not a bad thing. In fact, I think this is why the book flows so quickly and seemingly effortlessly.

All together the events span a period of about 3 years, and they show different facets of an ordinary soldier's life during the war. The Nationalism that prompted him and his classmates to join direct from graduating high school, the grimy and gross facts of life such what it feels like to crush the lice that live on you, or how they ambushed the rats that ate their food (and them). Going home to find that he does not belong there anymore. And of course the artillery bombardments, and a face to face encounter with a French soldier that really brings home the horror of it all.

I was surprised at how faithful the movie adaptations have been, at least the 1930 and 1979 films. They pretty much hit every mark in the book, except the Russian prisoners of war back home.

[Decrepit]

A few days ago I "read' All Quiet on the Western Front, from the audiobook here.

It is good. It goes quickly, as the writing does not get bogged down like the armies did in the trenches. It is not a standard, single story with a beginning, middle, and ending. Rather it is a series of individual anecdotes that were clearly taken from the author's personal experiences in the First World War (he was a German infantryman on the Western Front). This is not a bad thing. In fact, I think this is why the book flows so quickly and seemingly effortlessly.

All together the events span a period of about 3 years, and they show different facets of an ordinary soldier's life during the war. The Nationalism that prompted him and his classmates to join direct from graduating high school, the grimy and gross facts of life such what it feels like to crush the lice that live on you, or how they ambushed the rats that ate their food (and them). Going home to find that he does not belong there anymore. And of course the artillery bombardments, and a face to face encounter with a French soldier that really brings home the horror of it all.

I was surprised at how faithful the movie adaptations have been, at least the 1930 and 1979 films. They pretty much hit every mark in the book, except the Russian prisoners of war back home.

I love me a good WWI in-the-trenches novel. Read AQOTWF early this year (2025), before my accused reading block kicked in. Its 1930 film adaptation is one of my all-time favorite movies. (The remake is okay but doesn't equal it IMO.) "Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914 – 1918", an early Kindle purchase read during 2021, remains my favorite such book. Its one drawback, if drawback it be, is that Barthas, a real-life person, spent the closing months of the conflict in relative safety, rendering the ending a bit anticlimactic.

[SubRosa]

I "read" an audiobook of War of the Worlds yesterday while I was at work. Here is a link to it. It was good. The best of HG Well's work that I have read so far of late (The Time Machine and Island of Dr. Moreau). It is very much an adventure story - which those are as well - but this one has a faster pace. There is more happening, and the stakes feel higher. The story does not waste much time, it quickly gets right into the first cylinder landing near the protagonist's home in Surrey. From there it is a quick succession of events as he bears witness to the invasion.

It is not an action story, in that the protagonist is not an action hero. He is not wrestling Martians or getting into gunfights. Though there is a fist fight at one point, and a hatchet does eventually get used. Instead the protagonist and later his brother are essentially point of view characters who are there to describe what happened in this big event. But they are not shaping the event itself. They are simply swept up in it.

Which in itself works as an example of what life is like for the millions of refugees displaced by war and other misfortune. That was one of the points of the story. Wells wanted to show what it is would look like if some technologically advanced culture came along and did to Britain, exactly what they had spent centuries doing to Indigenous populations around the world. It is not subtext, but actual text. He directly calls out the genocide of the people of Tasmania at the beginning of the book.

In the Sci Fi sense, it is predicts several things. First the Martian War Machines are sort of like precursors to real life tanks, in that they are machines piloted by people, armored and filled with devastating weapons. There is a clear line to mecha from here as well. Of course he has the Death Ray, in the form of the Martian's heat beam. But similar things might have been done before. What surprised me was that the Martians also used chemical weapons, with something like poison gas that they fired from tubes. They also had aircraft, which is not a giant leap, as balloons had been a thing for a century and people had just started using dirigibles with propeller engines around the time of his writing. Wells took the next step and took this emergent technology further ahead, and imagined it without the need for a big gas bag to hold it up, and instead fly of it is own accord.

He also goes back to microbes here, and the idea that the Martians either did not have bacteria and viruses on Mars, or that they had eliminated them. This was something he touched on briefly in the Time Machine, in which the future Golden Age that preceded the fall to Eloi and Morloks, humans had also wiped out harmful microbes, and with it diseases.

All in all it is a really good story. I highly recommend it. I can see why so many films and TV series have been made from it. It lends itself very easily to a visual format.

[Acadian]

Thanks for the neat reviews!