03 October 2020

Book list - Jul-Sep 2020

Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times -- memoir, by Jennifer Worth
The Bartered Brides -- historical fantasy, by Mercedes Lackey
Women of Valor: The Rochambelles on the WWII Front -- WW II, by Ellen Hampton
The Wizard of London -- historical fantasy, by Mercedes Lackey
The Case of the Spellbound Child -- historical fantasy, by Mercedes Lackey
Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence -- US history, by Joseph J Ellis
Stars Uncharted -- SF, by S K Dunstall
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 -- US history, by Joseph J Ellis
Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence -- US history, by Carol Berkin
Stars Beyond -- SF, by S K Dunstall
1636: The Atlantic Encounter -- AH, by Eric Flint and Walter H Hunt
Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields --  WW II, by Wendy Lower
The Legacy of Heorot -- SF, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes *
Beowulf's Children -- SF, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes
Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840-1870 -- history, by Liza Picard
Starborn and Godsons -- SF, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August -- SF, by Claire North
Peace Talks -- urban fantasy (Dresden #16), by Jim Butcher
The Pursuit of the Pankera -- SF, by Robert A Heinlein


Got sidetracked a few times, so there were just 19 books this time round, only one of them a reread (marked by an asterisk).  Seven SF and AH books, six history (seven, I guess, counting North's memoir as history), and three fantasy (Misty Lackey's Holmes-meets-magic tales, to go with the two I read last quarter).

I'm calling Harry August the best book I read this quarter, followed by Stars Uncharted.

Starborn and Godsons suffers from a problem common to sequels written well after (over twenty years, in this case) the preceding book: Discrepancies caused by the author's not remembering what he/she/they had written before.  The first thing I noticed was that two characters' names had been changed, but the really annoying thing was problems with directions -- locations that were south of the colony in the first two books are now described as being to the north, even though the original map from the first book was included in this one.

Pankera is a "new" book by Heinlein; after all these years someone finally noticed that if the story fragments included in Heinlein's papers were assembled in the correct order, they made a complete book.  It was written in parallel with The Number of the Beast (1980), and in fact the first 150-odd pages of the two books are nearly identical.  Then the stories diverge -- and I personally think the wrong one was published, and the wrong one set aside.  Pankera includes more Barsoom, a lot more Galactic Patrol, and almost zero Lazarus Long.



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