March Suggestion box

[james_davis_nicoll]

Waiting for the last few books on my to-read list to come in. Open to suggestions, particularly for more recent books.

I cannot recall who asked me to read the Rational Harry Potter but it has defeated me. May I review something else?

Comments

recommendations

[(Anonymous)]

- The Library at Mount Char / Scott Hawkins

- The Rook, Daniel O' Malley

- Nexus (and sequels) / Ramez Naam

- Lonely Werewolf Girl / Martin Millar (heck, anything by Millar; not many people writing like him. Who else writes drug addict or transgender Scottish werewolves?

- Shallow Graves (Kali Wallace)

- Spellbent (Lucy Snyder) or any of Snyder's short story collections

- Imp series (Debra Dunbar)

[dsrtao]

Of these, I think The Rook was the best.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Weird: I thought The Rook was terrible. (Compulsively readable but a prose style akin to Dan Brown, and a fatuously nutty view of how secret agencies work. Caveat: (I may have a dog in this race.))

The Library at Mount Char I found harrowing but brilliant and I offered a cover blurb in hope that my name would shine in its reflected glory.

Nexus ... yeah, that'd be a good one for James.

Who else writes drug addict or transgender Scottish werewolves?

You may need to run, not walk, in the direction of Glen Duncan's work. (No transgender in his Scottish werewolves, at least in the first book, but most entertainingly done and very finely crafted and weird enough that just about anything could show up later ...)

[dsrtao]

The Library at Mount Char offered me no characters that I wanted to spend any time reading about; I have now bounced off of the first or second chapter of Nexus three times.

Different tastes. You liked The Traitor, as I recall, which I didn't, but then I enjoyed Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and you bounced.

[felila.livejournal.com]

I was completely absorbed by Naam's novels. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized that the whole #$%@#$% plot depended on the brain software possessing ONLY those backdoors that the developers had written into it. That's a coder fantasy that doesn't play out very often in real life. Hackers find bugs, buffer overflows, whatever. Is there any software that is absolutely impervious to attack?

I recall Gene Spafford opining that a computer in no way connected to the net, surrounded by barbed wire and a moat, guarded by guys with guns, was only relatively secure.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

An example being that Stuxnet was a successful attack on computers that were "in no way connected to the net, surrounded by barbed wire and a moat, guarded by guys with guns".

RE: recommendations

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Seconding anything by Millar.