It begins! Coriander's Quest To Read Every Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel starts now!

And with that, The Demolished Man is done!

Link to my storygraph review (which I sure hope is visible to everyone): https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/a5b52a63-0d78-4711-bbd1-7de8123e1a08

Today I finished They'd Rather Be Right AKA The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley!

Don't fucking read this book! It sucks ass!

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/6bbc3274-f58f-4a10-b453-e4d5785a875a

Q: This review is just an old Vine

A: Yeah fuck this book

Storygraph lets you do ratings by the quarter so I could have rated this a 0.25 but I had a lot of fun laughing at the expense of the book and its stupid ideas so I gave it some points for that

I've got the next THREE Hugo winners in-hand thanks to this wonderful tome and my local library

Double Star was begin and finished in One Day! That's how good it was, ESPECIALLY compared to The Forever Machine!

Tho I was let down by the closing monologue, I've already come to look forward to the narrator ending the book by telling you what the Themes were

Review here:
https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/76446921-7452-4893-8b20-abc83579d05b

The Big Time! This was a weird one. I liked a lot of this book a lot except for the part where the plot happened, which made it very tricky to sort out my thoughts.

Review: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/e8f1c69d-e0d3-4830-a9cb-fd9347fe2b3b

Finished A Case of Conscience! I didn't like this one very much at all! It started relatively interesting and then it get extremely bad.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/e8104cd8-8bbf-4758-9616-b56bf9fcf01e

So far all of the books have been pretty short, I think the longest has been about 250 pages, so something I'm interested to see is when the Doorstopper came into vogue

Dune won in '66 but it kinda looks like it was an outlier for the time

I'm expecting the late 70s or the early 80s to be when the books start getting Real Long

For anyone curious, the first definitive war crime in Starship Troopers happens on page 13

I specify "definitive" because it opens with a military raid on what I believe is a civilian sector which I think is already a war crime on its own but it gets messy trying to figure out where exactly something like that "happens" so I figured the part where he kills a civilian non-combatant was just easier all around to count

Starship Troopers is definitely very fashy but one of the weaknesses of the writing is that I genuinely can't tell how much of the fascism I'm meant to agree with

As I go on I see that the fascism in this book is simply different from what I expected; based on the movie, I expected the book to be nothing but OO-RAH jarhead nonsense but it is actually much subtler and much smarter than that; this is a learned fascism, a fascism that has read, understood, and discarded a great many philosophical arguments on how a society should or should not be organized. It doesn't just assume that military service is good on its own, it formulates very strong arguments for that position and presents them well. It's honestly a very fascinating book, even if I disagree with every word of it.

And, god dammit, but Heinlein really did know how to write

Starship Troopers is complete! I had a lot of thoughts about this one

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/e364cba3-5e96-42b3-ae1f-d420a943dbed

Happy February! Here are my reading stats for January. That was 8 books over the month averaging 3 days to complete.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is complete! A new high-water mark for the Hugo awards has been set.

Holy fuck this book is beautiful.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/8a3a0c8d-90e5-49b9-988b-fdf942590e1b

Moving swiftly along to Stranger In A Strange Land

I'm really looking forward to this one; I've enjoyed Heinlein so far and this one has a Reputation