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Happy New Year all - we're nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. Only 40 years to go until we get the Thunderbirds 馃榿

I haven't decided yet what I want to start with, I've got a year's worth of reading to pick from!

Probably I'll just finish An Empyreal Retinue first since its already started while I decide what comes next.

My first read of the year was A New Clan . I had about 100 pages to go when my DH called up that he was going to rewatch Independence Day for NYE. I couldn't resist. That is just one of my favorite movies. I don't typically reread book or rewatch movies, but this is one of my handful of favorites. So! I finished my book this afternoon.

Scout's Training by Henry Vogel

Independence Day is a guilty pleasure movie for me as well - I know all the things that are wrong with the plot, but it's just fun 馃槀 However, unlike you, Georgann, I do rewatch favourite movies, and reread favourite books.

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

In this space opera, humanity colonizes distant planets and becomes a complex society that engages in all kinds of political maneuvering, exploration, domestic dramas, exploitation, violence, etc....but with amazing advanced technology and abilities.

Good story. 4 stars

My review: /review/show...

I started last year with a classic (Pride and Prejudice) so I decided to do that again, only this time its a fantasy - Lost Horizon by James Hilton - which has the added benefit of already working on my BINGO challenge

I reread Alliance of Equals to remind myself of the storyline before the newest book in the Liaden Universe series, Ribbon Dance . As I said, I rarely reread books, but man!! I'm so glad I did! I love this whole series so so much!!

Sadly, neither of my first two books work into the bingo challenge!

I'm about halfway through The Book of Lost Tales, Part One and I have started reading The Atlantis Gene, which will certainly go towards my Bingo. As it's the first book in a trilogy, it may fill more than one slot.

My dad introduced me to 'Lost Horizon,' both the book and the b/w movie version with it's art Deco aesthetic that looked so otherworldly to a kid from a Birmingham council estate. Even though I suppose it might be considered problematic with its cultural appropriation and colonialist attitudes these days. However, it is of its time and really has to be accepted for what is and given a little license. :-) Both the book and film are excellent and remain somewhat special to me.

I still have my dad's now very fragile and yellowing Pan paperback copy published in 1947. 馃槉

I watched the movie last year but it was fun because my parents had both seen it in the past and enjoyed rewatching it too. So when a Readers Digest copy appeared in a book exchange box I nabbed it.

Somehow Lost Horizon always connects in my mind with Somerset Maugham's 'The Razors Edge' possibly because it was another of my dad's favourites. He had a nice hard back copy of it which sadly got lost馃様. I do have a paperback copy of my own though. Rightly or wrongly, I sort of feel that they approach similar themes from very different angles. Drastically different books but with a lot In common at a spiritual level. Aaagh that sounds horribly pretentious... I'd better do a Christmas cracker joke to balance it out... What do you get if you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite. 馃槉鉀勷煢�

Why did Santa stock up on vitamins?
It was good for his elf.

What's James Bond's favourite Christmas gadget?
His missile toe

Yay! Love your jokes!

Robin, have you ever read Mad's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions? You might like it :)

Sadly Michelle I haven't read that and it looks like it's out of print馃様

I have a couple more jokes for you Georgann, I have to use them up before twelfth night or they go off...

How does good King Wenceslas like his pizza? 馃崟

Deep pan, crisp and even

Where does Santa's cat go for the Christmas holidays?

Lapland

What did Santa say to Mrs Claus when he looked out of the window?

Looks like reindeer

Good, I used all those up before their expiration date. I hate waste.馃榿

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A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber

Robin!! I am cackling!

I started reading Miss Amelia's List , the newest of Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series. I am bored silly. And disappointed b/c I've enjoyed each of the previous ones. So I started reading Vox and I am totally freaking out, like my stomach actually hurts, it is so horrifying. So I guess I will alternate the two and even myself out!!

Memo to me: don't read VOX!

Robin wrote: "My dad introduced me to 'Lost Horizon,' both the book and the b/w movie version with it's art Deco aesthetic that looked so otherworldly to a kid from a Birmingham council estate. Even though I suppose it might be considered problematic with its cultural appropriation and colonialist attitudes these days."

This raises the point of how much leeway should be given to authors of the early 20th century (or before) with regard to modern societal values? I grew up reading (and loving) the Biggles books - and still enjoy the occasional reread. I now recognise the quite blatant racism and sexism present in the books, which I certainly didn't as a kid. Was Johns being deliberately racist and sexist, or was he writing according to the accepted social values of England at the time? The same can be asked on many authors considered giants of the SF/F genre - Lovecraft chief among them.

Kamala Harris "The truths we hold" and The Exorcist

Johns I think is just a mirror to his era. Lovecraft is a horse of another colour (out of space). Absolutely a phenomenal writer which no one can take away from him but... A very strange man with what I think we would now consider to be undiagnosed mental health issues. As for his racism, well, he was a bit out there even for his time. He even took the time to compose race hate poetry...

In fact Tony you chose a good name to bring up in Lovecraft. If you "cancel" Lovecraft what do you do about his legacy? His Cthulhu mythos has influenced so many writers and so many filmmakers. Cancel him and you would be cancelling huge swathes of modern literature and countless movies and TV shows. And yet unquestionably he was not a nice human being by anyone's definition. It is a big thorny subject for sure...

Anyway, enough from me, I should probably stick to the jokes? 馃ぃ

Actually, I don't consider Lovecraft a great writer, but I do think he had an astonishing imagination, and the Cthulhu Mythos is one of the great literary creations of the 20th century. Perhaps I should say that I don't find Lovecraft's style to my taste - there's too much "indescribable horror" 馃槤 But, as you say Robin, Lovecraft has been hugely influential, however, his racism was certainly of a more intense level than Johns' racism, which was just the accepted societal norm for the time.

Another example would be Sax Rohmer, who wrote the Fu Manchu novels. Those novels were certainly racist, and contained a lot of what would be considered inappropriate cultural appropriation these days - and was certainly considered so by the Chinese government, who issued formal complaints (although that may have been for the Christopher Lee films more than the novels). Yet, Fu Manchu has also had a big influence on 20th century culture.

The racism isn't too blatant in Lost Horizon. Of course even Conway sometimes thinks things like how the people living in the valley are cleaner than most Chinese, implying they are a dirty people, and one character used the work "chink" but I think we're supposed to take the other 3 characters as unenlightened and frown a bit on how they are responding to their time in Shangri-La. After all Lost Horizons also holds up Asian cultures as a more ideal one, mitigating most of Conway's flubs.

Lovecraft is a whole other can of worms, he very clearly thinks his own "race" is the best one (note that his "race" isn't "white people", he really despised the poor in New England too, there were a lot of "degenerate dutch" in his stories, he basically covered all the "ists" and probably invented a few new ones).

He does get some brownie points from me by portraying cats in a positive light. They aren't witch familiars but rather Dreamland creatures that will come to your rescue, or protect you from the rats in your walls (of course they might be called N***man...*cough*). Guess everyone has a redeeming feature if you dig deep enough.

If you go in understanding both the time when the author lived (apparently that cat name was pretty standard for a black cat, it wasn't just Lovecraft), and the author himself, I don't think all these works need to be tossed. As you pointed out, a work can still be influential while at the same time cringe worthy.

It is easy, with 20/20 hindsight to wag a finger at the past of course. In most cases the famous L P Hartley quote applies "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

With your comment Andrea on the cat name, whenever they screen the old WW2 movie, 'The Dam Busters,' they either awkwardly dub in an alternative name for Guy Gibson's dog or post a warning for "outdated language" before the screening. Being a black dog, he was named, well... the 'N' word, which was very commonly used for black dogs then.

Such casual racism of course wasn't done with any Ill intent. It is hard for people to appreciate now of course, but such instances were generally just innocent lack of awareness. People literally just didn't know any better. This must seem very odd or even impossible to people who have always had the Internet at their disposal to give you an overview of anything in the world you might want to know in seconds.

If that does seem impossible to anyone reading this, let me just point out how many millions of people per day fall for fake news stories and hold beliefs that are demonstrably wrong, despite having the Internet to use to fact check anything they see, even having dedicated sites like Snopes to consult.

What chance did people in the past have when researching anything meant a bus ride to the public library to consult books that were often years out of date.馃槉

Robin wrote: "Johns I think is just a mirror to his era. Lovecraft is a horse of another colour (out of space). Absolutely a phenomenal writer which no one can take away from him but... A very strange man with w..."

I do love Lovecraft's writing, personally, but yeah he was very much racist/xenophobic and classist even beyond the norms of his time. Everyone is going to wrestle with this differently, but my own approach is that if the author is dead and no one of the same views is benefiting financially then I will continue reading them if their work is something I enjoy...and of course if it's easy to read them without being bombarded with their bigotry. With Lovecraft, there are still quite a lot of his stories that can be read without encountering any or much of his racism while others are more blatant.

If an author is alive that's a different ballgame for me, anyway.

That seems like a good approach NekroRider.

I might perhaps add though, in regards to the still living, that there might be exceptions. Say a writer is now in their eighties and wrote something in their youth that would now be questionable, if they have grown in the meantime as almost all of us do and no longer hold such views, are even apologetic about their early work, then that is hopefully forgivable? The world would have looked very different to them then.

What a lot of people don't get is that if you are looking down from a hilltop you can see the extent of a Forest, if you are in the forest all you see are trees. When you live in an era things look pretty normal to you that often look pretty bizarre from the viewpoint of 2025.

I'm 67 and in my youth and formative years, Black Face Minstrelsy and beauty contests with swimsuit parades were prime time TV watched by millions. Daily newspapers regularly featured topless women on page three. Kids comics commonly depicted racial stereotypes as in, someone's pen pal from China would visit and they would be in pyjamas, wearing a pointy straw hat and have slanty eyes and big teeth (yes they really did). That's just scratching the surface.

I'm not ancient (though I frequently feel as if I am) but even in my lifetime things have changed so much. I grew and changed with the times as did most people I know but it was a very different world back then. 馃槉

"Such casual racism of course wasn't done with any Ill intent. It is hard for people to appreciate now of course, but such instances were generally just innocent lack of awareness. People literally just didn't know any better." Agree or not, these attitudes certainly have led to the continued racial issues we have today, the institutional racism we deal with, and excuses we hear daily. But now we know better, so we do better.

I finished Miss Amelia's List but it was sadly not the book for me. If a person liked Regency stories... oh well. It did fill the Female Author slot for my first entry on my bingo card.

'Now we know better. so we do better' indeed Georgann, I really hope so, I really do... 馃槉

Just a thought on the "isms" from past writers. If we don't read them, or worse, ban them, we don't know how things were. On reflection, much of what I read in my youth would be unacceptable, even shocking, now, if I revisited it but as has been said, some of it I simply disagreed with and some of it I learned better. In my teens, I read 'Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott. In it he describes Ivanhoe's reaction to Rebecca's Jewishness, citing it as a symptom of the time when the book is set and saying it's different now (1819). Well, antisemitism still isn't dead in the twenty-first century, as we all know, but without the history, will anything change?

It would be very easy to slide into all kinds of intolerance simply because we don't understand the context. And not just context. Sometimes, there is a valid argument for what we see simply as a prejudice. It doesn't justify (say) racism at all but understanding the background can help us see the beams in our own eyes and we all have them, no matter how "woke" we imagine we are.

I've been reading the Catteni series by Anne McCaffrey. I read it a long time ago, so it's faded a lot from my memory but I was surprised by my feeling towards it. There are some signs of when it was written in her depiction of women and some of her own prejudices creep in. Inevitable, I suppose. I still admire it for its scope and optimism but there are bits that make me slightly uneasy.

Another famous quote for you... "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" (George Santyana)

The current trend for cancelling/burying things we do not like is not a good one. No one learns from that.

The average person in the 30s, 40s, 50s or whenever, never imagined that their behavior would be scrutinised by future generations and found wanting. They just lived their lives.

As you pointed out Isabella, try as we might we all have blind spots. As much as they dislike the notion, the people of today will, in the future also be judged and likely found wanting.

This brings me back to forgiveness. If people learn and grow and change, can we still 'cancel' them for things they may have said when they were a different person in a different time?

It is an important question for us now in the modern world, in a way it never was before. Any stupid, misguided opinions I or anyone my age might have had when we were fifteen say, are lost to time. But now we have social media... everything anyone ever says or does is there on the Internet for all time. You can't say you didn't say it, you can't say you didn't do it (unless you are Donald Trump).

In the age of the Internet, the parameters for forgiveness are going to need to be defined...

Robin wrote: "The current trend for cancelling/burying things we do not like is not a good one. No one learns from that."

I agree!

Robin wrote: "The current trend for cancelling/burying things we do not like is not a good one. No one learns from that."

Absolutely.

I agree as well. What people, those who want to cancel anything they find offensive, don't realise is that they don't have to engage with those things. We are adults. We can make the choice of not reading books whose authors have views that we don't like. Same for movies.

Finished Lost Horizons. I was amused at some of the differences from the movie. Like how the movie put a pretty young girl on the plane, instead of a grumpy old missionary. 1 bingo slot filled, 24 to go.

I'd think I'd be someone who'd be happy to live in Shangri-La, whether or not it was a glorified prison. They have lots of books after all (though I'd never be able to fill the "Published in Current Year" bingo slot...)

Next up with Commanding by Mike Shepherd, this leaked over from last year and I want to finish off the handful of books left in the series soon as I can.

Robin, 100%! I certainly hope I find forgiveness for my thoughts, voice and choices in the past that I have changed. It's hard, tho. I've hurt people I love. Hopefully...

Georgann wrote: "Robin, 100%! I certainly hope I find forgiveness for my thoughts, voice and choices in the past that I have changed. It's hard, tho. I've hurt people I love. Hopefully..."

We all have, Georgann, one way or another. Someone once told me, we need to forgive ourselves, as well as other people.

Just so...馃槉

Very interesting discussions in this January thread about our readings, thanks for all the contributions! I fully agree with Robin's comment about not learning anything from cancelled/buried things.

Now, with some concern about my reading tastes, I have to report that Excession was yet a DNF, the third in a row. This time I persevered to 72% of the book but finally decided to stop there. It was a great disappointment for me, since I had much enjoyed previous Culture books by Banks. It was not the case with this one. Plot, characters, narration, nothing pleased me much.

I'll be starting Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, another author whose books I have enjoyed sofar.

In my opinion (and I believe facts would bear me out), people who read widely, especially those who read SF/F, tend to have a more tolerant outlook. Hmmm, actually, that's not entirely true - I'm quite intolerant of wilful ignorance. But I don't believe in cancelling people's opinions - everyone has the right to an opinion, but I don't have to respect your opinion, and I don't believe in banning books, even if I disagree with their content.

The problem lies with the self righteous, those people who mistake belief for truth, where there is no objective proof. I have acquaintances who quite sincerely believe things (political and religious) that I can鈥檛 agree with. I accept their right to express their opinions but they take that as tacit permission to let me know what they believe. That would be okay, except that I know from experience that any disagreement on my part would give offence, so I keep quiet. Maybe I鈥檓 the one being self righteous here? Or just cowardly?

Sounds like you could possibly open a discussion as to why its ok for them but not for you. Or you can keep quiet and not get into a tangle. It depends on your temperament, I think, but also on what is best for you. How bad do you feel about yourself for keeping quiet? Are you ok with it and just blow them off? Or are you seething on the inside? Is it worth making them offended to stand up for yourself? Worth the argument? Either way, I don't think you are being self-righteous or cowardly. It sounds like you see things clearly. You are just trying to be at peace with yourself and others.