What books are you reading right now?

The Indira Gandhi flub was pure laziness on my part, I didn't check for the correct spelling.

Do you mean The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick? It's an AltHist novel which I've also read, and need to reread.

 

I loved The Man in the High Castle: I always felt A Canticle for Liebowitz was a little disappointing, but that may just be a question of tastes.

I have to give a shout-out: I think some of the absolute best AltHistory fiction is by a guy named Harry Turtledove, who is a history prof at Cal State Long Beach, and despite that seems to be able to turn out novels on more or less a weekly basis. Some of his stuff is mediocre-- definite "guilty pleasure" material-- but some is quite good, and some is excellent.

He wrote a series based on his stand-alone novel How Few Remain, that hypothesizes a Civil War won by the South, with a Confederate States and United States existing side by side: besides How Few Remain, there were two sequel trilogies and a tetralogy, which took events in that timeline into the mid-20th century. A terrific series.

Turtledove's stand-alone novel Ruled Britannia hypothesizes an Elizabethan England that lost to the Spanish Armada, and lives under Spanish rule after a successful invasion: the main characters of the book are William Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, and honestly, the book is worth reading just for all the in-joke references to Shakespeare and de Vega plays.

As for the "guilty pleasures," his Worldwar tetralogy follows the course of events when aliens invade earth in 1942, at the height of WWII. If you're looking for great hard science fiction, this is definitely not it-- the first time I read it, I could virtually hear Carl Sagan's spirit howling in protest. But it's a very entertaining story, and hard to put down.

Those are just my favorites, of course. Dude's written probably fifty books, easy.

 

I liked Guns of the South but I really think he gave the leader of the Confederacy a bit more credit than they probably deserved in the end.

 

Yesterday I bought U.S.S.A., yet another AltHist novel.

 

The Meaning of Relativity - Albert Einstein

 

I'm currently about half way through RAJ, a novel by Gita Mehta. This novel set in India is unique, compared to the others that I've read, in that it's told from the perspective of a woman who is a princess in a royal Indian family. Mehta is very critical of the actions of the British, and sympathetic towards the traditional royal families. IMO her views of pre-British India and Indian royalty are seen through "rose colored glasses." To be fair I need finish the novel before rating it. I'll give her writing style a thumbs-up even though she uses many words and terms without definitions or explanations, i.e. some knowledge of the Indian language(s), customs, & social and political structure would be useful to the reader.

 

Love this series, especially the first one.

 

That reminds me, as a major league Marvel Comics fan, one of the best limited series ever, available in graphic novel format, is Marvel 1602, which is an alt-history of a sort imagining some of the great Marvel heroes living in the Elizabethen age. It was written by Neil Gaiman, and is nerdgasmically awesome.

 

RAJ was an interesting read, but not a book I'd reccomend. According to the jacket bio Mehta comes from a wealthy family in India, so her viewpoint makes sense.

---------------------------------------------------------

For some lighter reading I'm about 30 pages into Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane, who probably best known for his two novels that were made into movies, Mystic River and Shutter Island. I've read & enjoyed quite a few of his novels. So far GBG hasn't disaapointed.

 

Reacher books by Lee Child, downloaded from the library to my Samsung Tab 4.....I LOVE it
(the latest ones are not as good as the early ... I given up on authors who no longer write their own books, but "co author"
basically they are selling their name...James Patterson....

 

Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane was a good read, as I expected from DL. He's not known for his "everybody lived happily ever after" endings, but the ending of GBG disturbed me.....which I'm sure was his intent. Now I'm interested in seeing the movie, wondering how much the novel was "Hollywoodized."

--------------------------------------------------------

At the halfway mark I'm disappointed with U.S.S.A. by David Madsen. Perhaps in 1989, when the book was published, a murder mystery set in the USSR under the control of the USA was a novel idea (intentional pun). I recall many people being curious about Russia and what would happen after the collapse of communism. Maybe the author will pull it together in the last half.

 

I ran across SS-GB in my thrift/resale store searching, but decided to pass on it because my stack of will-read-someday books has grown quite large. I have to force myself to limit the number of books I buy; just because I find them cheap doesn't mean I need to buy them.

Paperbacks are usually a no go because they usually don't age well and my eyesight even with corrective lenses doesn't like small print. Unless it's a book I seriously want to read (The Book Thief being a recent example), or a book that's difficult to find (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?).

Hardbacks I try to buy as 1st editions with the dust jackets, but again it depends on how much I want the books and/or how "rare" they are (my copy of The Man In The High Castle is a Book Club edition). Since most rare & valuable 1st edtions are truly rare, I don't have many. But I have managed to put together decent small collections of 1st editions by certain authors. Most aren't worth much, and probably won't increase in value much, but they're worth more than the $1.00-$2.00 that I usually pay.