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Holy review unload, Batman! American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham was fairly awesome. Sometimes it over-focused on his personal and familial relationships at the expense of really getting into the political climate, but that's forgivable considering that Meacham isn't a full-fledged historian. 4/5 Cujo by Stephen King. I love how the real drama in King's early works has to do with how people (don't) relate to each other, their day-to-day failings, and their struggle to come together. A woman and her son being trapped in a broken-down car and being stalked by a rabid, possessed dog is really just the backdrop to her failed marriage, and it works wonderfully. 5/5 An Overly Pleasant Apocalypse by Chris Lewis Carter. I loved this hilarious set of horror short stories - with everything from arch-demons interviewing potential serial killers to post-apocalyptic door-to-door salesmen, what else do we really need? I got turned on to his stuff after listening to his short story "Kill Screen" on Pseudopod a few weeks ago. It's chilling. 5/5 Chasing the Wolf by Nathan Singer. An indie writer with a gripping, distinctive voice. Sometimes the characterizations are cliched, but the plot is incredibly imaginative and compelling from start to finish. Highly recommended if you want something quick and way off the beaten path. 5/5 Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007 by Gary Gorton. Fair warning: this is a pretty difficult read if you're not an economist, banker, or financial analyst, but it does an excellent job of tracing the causes of the panic of 2007 and postulating its long-term consequences. The sections on the history of banking panics are a great background and show how mild they were in comparison to our current situation. Long story short, we should be in another Depression. 5/5
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Jul 3, 2012 04:13
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The Princess Bride by William Goldman. It's a good story but it's wrapped in a narrative about Goldman adapting this from the (apocryphal) original book and that part is terrible. The author's commentary is clearly marked so you can skip it. If you've seen the movie you don't really need to read this unless you want Fezzik's backstory.
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Jul 3, 2012 04:27
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The Cat-Nappers (P.G. Wodehouse): Not as laugh out loud funny as the previous Wooster and Jeeves I read and the plot didn't wrap up as well. It's still enjoyable and the the absurdity is there in so many forms (Plank, the cat, Orlo's politics). Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf): This was a case I where I admired what Woolf was trying to do rather than the end result. There are no chapters in this book, rather it's one very long interconnected tale between multiple people about a single day in London. That's what I admired, how everything was connected by just a few names and locations, though there were some vastly different people. There is little dialogue, rather you spent a lot of time in people's heads and that's what either makes it or breaks it. You have be able to get into each person's head to make the story flow (especially as there is a lot of repetition and contradiction, as you do when you're holding a silent conversation with yourself). It's easy with Clarissa and Septimus, but there weren't many other characters I cared enough about to identify with them.
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Jul 3, 2012 06:55
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I don't typically read best-sellers while they're still best-sellers, but this week I bagged two of them: Home by Toni Morrison and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Home was standard Morrison, which is to say very good, although for me nothing has really come up to Song of Solomon. Except for one, the characters didn't grab me the way they usually do, but I would still recommend it, because it's Toni Morrison. Rhymes With Clue fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jul 3, 2012 |
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Jul 3, 2012 16:06
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Serious post, I hope this doesn't get me probated: The United States Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Amendments. Just goddamned read this. Most people haven't and it's a great historical refresher. Lord Sandwich fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jul 4, 2012 |
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Jul 4, 2012 01:08
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I just finished Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. Not sure how many other people are fans of his work, but the way he just nonchalantly illustrates the most surreal situations as if they were perfectly normal is so interesting. That guy has one hell of an imagination. One of the best books I've read in a long time.
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Jul 4, 2012 13:34
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Have just finished reading Scott Mariani's - Uprising A change from his usual "Ben Hope" ex-army office conspiracy genre. Not a challenging read but one for "I want to read for 30 minutes to forget about the day before I fall asleep, book falling of edge of bed"
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Jul 4, 2012 13:35
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I just finished Room by Emma Donaghue, and I thought it was brilliant. But wow it was bleak and I kind of slumped around all day afterwards because I couldn't stop thinking about it and feeling sad. I guess that's the sign of a good book, if it can make you do that. It's told from the viewpoint of 5 year old Jack, who has lived in a small room with his mum for his whole life. Jack doesn't know that there is a world outside the room, as far as he's concerned everything on TV and in his picture books is imaginary. His mum gets him to play games such as seeing how loudly they can scream, flicking the lights on and off at night, and typing different numbers into the combination lock. Some nights 'Old Nick' comes to visit. Jack is made to sleep in the wardrobe during these visits, and he lays awake in the dark and listens to the bed creaking. It's very loosely based on the Fritzl case, and they do manage to escape, but even then it is really harrowing as they both struggle to assimilate into normal life, the worst bit is that Jack wants to go back to the room because it's the only place he feels safe, and he doesn't understand why his mum doesn't want to go back. 
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Jul 5, 2012 17:57
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Venerable Monk posted:I just finished Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. How could you bear the pretentious borderline pedo obvious author stand-in protagonist? It was probably the worst "good" book that I've ever read.
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Jul 6, 2012 00:17
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I've read multiple books this week, but the best one I read was 'The Junker Girl and Her Droid.' I really love post apocalyptic fiction, and this was really well written. I'm surprised at how good the characterization was given that it was a relatively short read. If you like Sci Fi at all you should get it on Amazon. I think its only like $3.
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Jul 6, 2012 01:14
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz I don't really get why this book won the Pulitzer. It's really just a novel about getting laid and how a family's curse is that getting laid keeps screwing them over somehow. When you combine this theme with the fact that the narrative is full of: idiosyncratic Spanish that had me going to google translate constantly and still not getting the meaning of large passages, obscure regional slang (what is getting "bopped" in New Jersey, exactly?), obscure comic book and sci-fi references, and shifting perspective without shifting tone in a very confusing manner, I just didn't enjoy it. The first third of the novel was incredibly slow-going for me, then it picked up after the identity of the narrator was determined. I really enjoyed the 1940s section before "The Fall". Looking for either a good zombie book (I've read WWZ) or maybe The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, since it sounds really good and I want some classic sci fi now.
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Jul 6, 2012 23:31
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blaarghh posted:I just finished Room by Emma Donaghue, and... Room was brilliant. It's one of those premises that seems really gimmicky and could have been terrible, but wasn't. I just finished Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and found it to be pretty disappointing. The sociopathic masters were far more interesting characters than the apprentices that took the center stage of the story, and practically nothing happened for the middle two-thirds of the book. The narrative style was interesting, but without an actual decent story to back it up, it just felt sort of pretentious. Friend suggested the Keys to the Kingdom series, which I might pick up soon.
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Jul 7, 2012 07:14
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tuyop posted:The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz I'm glad I read this review because I had never encountered one like it before. I thought Oscar Wao was incredible. I love Junot Diaz's prose. I love the way he describes regular behaviors. Of course, I can speak a little Spanish and had no trouble with that aspect of it, but it's one of the best books I've ever read. I recently finished a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway; it's my first foray into his work and so far I'm nonplussed. His voice strikes me in tone but disappoints me in where it takes me; the stories are just okay. I clearly need to read more.
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Jul 7, 2012 07:15
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Finished The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. The characters, the tech and the environment were very well done, I really liked following Nell's story and see how she discovers the world. The end felt a bit rushed and confusing, I think you could say it's on a Snowcrash level.
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Jul 7, 2012 21:24
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Finished Procopius' The Secret History last night. It's a small, really vicious book. He really doesn't hold it back in portraying Justinian as a greedy, self-centered and indifferent despot and Theodora comes off as bloodthirsty and vicious, putting people to death on the smallest pretext. I don't have a ton of experience with this period of history, so I found it somewhat confusing - I'm not sure as to why an otherwise dutiful chronicler wrote this, let alone how accurate it is - but it's a fascinating look at the Byzantine Empire and especially at the royal couple.
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Jul 8, 2012 00:19
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I recently sat down and read All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. The premise (something of a cross between Starship Troopers and Groundhog Day) and title make it seem like it should be absolutely terrible, but that couldn't be less true. By about the one-quarter mark I was completely sucked in.
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Jul 9, 2012 02:17
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Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. Sedaris is a man who knows how to describe social anxiety with humor and goddamn precision. A friend told me that he didn't like him because he's an attention seeking bastard, but his ego was, to me, what made his writing so effective. Sedaris is very self-aware, and very others-aware as well, and he lets you know it. I would recommend his writing to anybody wanting to master the short story, or anybody who enjoys reading them. It's the first book I've read so quickly (three days) in a long while, but it is also very light reading.
Fun Times! fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Jul 9, 2012 |
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Jul 9, 2012 04:08
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Fun Times! posted:A friend told me that he didn't like [Sedaris] because he's an attention seeking bastard As much as I like his books, I think I've read them maybe once each, as the audiobooks are just so much better.
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Jul 9, 2012 16:42
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Books I have read in the last couple of weeks... Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman - horror story that takes place during the 1930's in Georgia. A new couple moves to town, and of course there is something evil out in those woods across the river. I read this in one night and I loved it. I wish it was twice as long because he could fleshed out the town more and its sins (kind of like Salem's Lot). If you want something creepy (it wasn't really scary) and fresh this might work. I only paid $3 for a great condition hardback (thanks Amazon). Seal Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy Seal Sniper by Howard E. Wasdin - as a former Marine I love hearing about military training and this books does a nice job. That said I felt like the guy was masturbating while writing about himself and his politics are a little too right wing for me. Still worth a read if you are interested in the military. Hemlock Grove: A Novel by Brian McGreevy - this book is being made into a TV series for Netflix by Eli Roth so I had to check it out. The book was sold as a true adult Twilight meets Twin Peaks. While it kind of hit that mark sometimes the writing was really inconsistent. I would read a chapter and think the book is finally starting to get good only to be let down by the next chapter. Great idea but bad execution. Still I can see this working as a TV series in the right hands. Nexus: Ascension by Robert Boyczuk - a crew returning from a 30 year space mission find their home world dead because of a plague. While the book mostly delivered on the story it lacked in character development. I feel like this was a golden opportunity missed for a 5 star book. Still easily worth reading if you like SciFi.
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Jul 9, 2012 17:38
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Just finished reading The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Wondering what other goons who've read it make of the ending. I'm pretty sure the "little stranger" haunting the house is supposed to be Dr Faraday Did anyone think anything different?
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Jul 10, 2012 19:04
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Last week I finished re-reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Excellent novel, one of Murakami's best. Today I finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Reading this book was like going on an adventure. The novel is much better than the film, but that is to be expected. Next up is Naked Lunch, the current Awful Book of the Month.
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Jul 10, 2012 22:07
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WoG posted:What an odd take on it. He writes memoirs, how else could he be? Yeah seconding this, his books are great but Sedaris is very good at reading comedy as well. He has great cadence and style. You should try one out for your next road trip or something.
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Jul 11, 2012 10:22
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I just finished Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. While it was probably the epitome of an ultra-goony wish-fulfilment novel, it was so much more enjoyable than the other recent example of such fiction I have read (the insipid The Name of the Wind by the insipid Patrick Rothfuss), so I had to rate it higher.
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Jul 11, 2012 12:09
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:How could you bear the pretentious borderline pedo obvious author stand-in protagonist? It was probably the worst "good" book that I've ever read. Its more about his writing style and his imagination. I've just started A Wild Sheep Chase, and once again the protagonist is nameless and unexplored - but this approach does have its strengths. It allows readers to more seamlessly insert themselves into the protagonist's shoes, stumbling around from situation to situation in what seems like a pseudo-crazy shrooms trip concocted by the author. I've heard that he does have more "realistic" books, such as Norwegian Wood, but I'll have to reserve judgment until I can get around to reading them and exploring the more serious side of Murakami. Venerable Monk fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Aug 31, 2020 |
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Jul 11, 2012 16:22
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I re-read Generation Kill by Evan Wright and Jarhead by Anthony Swofford. Jarhead covers the first Gulf shenanigans from the POV of a Marine scout-sniper with, to be honest, gently caress-all to do. It is well written and contemplative without being too navel-gazing (although it does get that way at times). Swofford's experience seems to boil down to sand, hydration and frustrated boredom. Generation Kill is the book the HBO series was based on and covers invading Iraq during the second Gulf shenanigans. The writer was an embedded reporter with Reconnaissance Marines for, as it turned out, pretty much the whole thing. It is deliberately less contemplative than most war books, looking not to weave together some grand Why of things but to portray accurately all things experienced by those at the tip of the spear. Fans of black humour will obviously love it and, even if you have not and never will watch the HBO show, this book will make you gay for Rudy Reyes. Lie in the Dark by Dan Fesperman. This book is described on the cover as Gorky Park in Sarajevo, which is a fair description. Set in 1994/95 during the fairly constant bombardment, it follows a homicide detective trying to investigate a lone murder during war. As a fan of fatalist/cynical crime novels in snow, this hooked me. I'd quibble the end as it seemed a bit rushed and somewhat eh but the rest has some wonderfully insane/surreal parts and muted bitterness at a culture and people stripping themselves of all that was to ensure a future.
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Jul 11, 2012 18:33
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I finally got around to finishing Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I can honestly say I've never seen an author do a better job of expressing a man (Kurtz)being perceived as an idea, rather than flesh and blood. I also found it interesting how little the culture of corporate ladder-climbers has changed in the last 110+ years.
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Jul 11, 2012 19:57
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I've been reading a lot of sci-fi lately and in the last week I marathoned through: Manhattan In Reverse by Peter F. Hamilton An awesome collection of alternate history short stories that are all sort of tangentially related. They focus on people and emotion while being framed with a very well-realised and believable universe. The first book of Hamilton's I've ever read and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work. Gridlinked by Neil Asher Initially this book was a bit of a slog and I wasn't really comitted to it but something happened after the first few chapters and I got totally sucked in to the story and started to really care about the characters. It's high in suspense and very much typical sci fi (humans traveling from planet to planet, wormholes as transport, dangerous killer robots) but manages to keep the humanity of the protagonist. Involution Ocean by Bruce Sterling Stirling's first novel, written way back in 1977. It's not very long (<200 pages) and only took me a day to read but it was very compelling. The tale of a junkie who signs up to a whaling ship (on a planet that has oceans made from dust). The captain is insane, the crew are untrusting and the lookout is a beautiful alien who is allergic to humans. The book goes into a lot of detail regarding the planet, it's inhabitants and the strange and exotic fauna that the protagonist encounter but still manages to leave enough mystery to keep the reader intrigued.
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Jul 12, 2012 05:47
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A Dance with Dragons By George RR Martin. I feel physically drained after reading that series, but god drat it's good. Pretty Martin seems to be unable to pace his books though, the ending to that one was all buildup and no climax.
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Jul 12, 2012 19:47
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Chexoid posted:JUST finished Cloud Atlas, was phenomenal. Really excited for the movie. I agree. I know I don't post in this forum but I read here a lot. I picked up Cloud Atlas after reading a recommendation here a while ago. The funny thing is, the way the book is structured I thought my Kindle copy was corrupted. All of a sudden the narrative stopped and it went to a new chapter. Right in the middle of the story. But after reading further, that is the way the book is written and in the end there is nothing left out. This is one of those books that I kept reading only a little at a time because I didn't want it to end. I have now read almost every David Mitchell novel and they are all at LEAST very good. This guy is amazing.
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Jul 13, 2012 02:23
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Just finished The Quantum Thief, and I just couldn't put it down, it was so fantastic. To wrangle such a fascinating mystery out of such imaginative scenarios is really skillful. I mean, the author could have easily just rested back and told a simple narrative in the Oubliette society, and it'd have been a great read, because THAT premise was just so great, but on top of it he layers a great story, and great characters. Top level sci-fi, and best book I've read in a while.
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Jul 13, 2012 14:02
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Inheritance by Christopher Paolini Book was great. Series as a whole was amazing. I didn't like a couple parts and Paolini could have fleshed out a bit more of the side plots but otherwise I'm glad to have finally read this amazing piece of fantasy.
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Jul 13, 2012 14:12
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Ghost Story by Peter Straub. It was my first time reading something by him and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Very atmospheric, with a sweet build up and some genuinely spooky moments in it. It was pretty hard to put it down while I was on the last quarter of the book.
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Jul 13, 2012 20:01
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ProfessorProf posted:Room was brilliant. It's one of those premises that seems really gimmicky and could have been terrible, but wasn't. I just read that last month. I agree the masters were definitely the better characters, but I thought the narrative gave a good visualization of the world it created, even if not a whole lot was going on in it. I also just finished The Magician King by Lev Grossman. Excellent book (sequel to The Magicians ). Definitely good reads, I've most heard them referred to as "Harry Potter for adults." It's an appropriate attribution, as they both involved schools which teach magic. The language in these two books is much more mature, a lot grittier than HP.
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Jul 15, 2012 03:47
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Just finished James Ellroy's White Jazz. It's another ultraviolent neo-noir tale from Ellroy about how deliriously crooked Los Angeles was back in America's soi disant Golden Era of the 1940s. Drug dealers, crooked cops, honest but ruthless cops, whores, junkies, and sex kittens gently caress, bamboozle, and murder each other; and even though they all imagine they have rational reasons (money, power, security, love) what it comes down to is that they're all a bunch of hosed up monsters who want to keep the whole sick game going. When Ellroy is on his game, he's a dazzling prose stylist with a black sense of humor and a perverse knack for finding the seductive side of sadism and violence. Unfortunately, when he is off his game his prose is execrably bombastic and lapses easily into self-parody. In White Jazz, he is off more often than he is on. Worse yet, the least engaging character is also the narrator (and Ellroy's obvious stand-in) and the book is a dumb dull mess most of the way through. Ellroy is weird, because he is actually much better writing turgid novels with byzantine plots populated with colorful minor characters (exactly the kinds of books that normally tempt established writers into unendurable self-indulgence) than he is writing shorter and more focused books. He's far clumsier, more self-indulgent, and more likely to lay it on too thick in all the wrong places when he's writing what must sound, in the outline stage, like a much safer work. Started Ballard's Super-Cannes (which is punk as gently caress so far) and making progress in Moliere's complete essays.
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Jul 15, 2012 05:21
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Three books about the same era and location, although with much different subjects: Defeat of the Spanish Armada by Garrett Mattingly. After a short scene setter, Mattingly spends the next 300 pages describing the two years leading up to and immediately following the Armada's defeat in 1588 by England's navy. He focuses mostly on the ten or so main figures involved from all sides, which gives the book a narrative coherence that isn't always present in military histories. The author gives equal time to the Spanish, English, and French players, and notably gives a sympathetic portrayal of their motives (although it seems to me like the Dutch are underrepresented in his narrative). Definitely a good book and extremely well written. The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I by John Cooper. A kind-of biography of Elizabeth's principle secretary, who is maybe more well known today for his pre-modern spy network. Cooper is a real historian, and as such isn't really interested in biography for biography's sake. He uses Walsingham's life as a framework to discuss the primary issues affecting the Elizabethan state: the split from Roman Catholicism, the threat of a coup d'etat represented by Mary Queen of Scots, the direct threat posed to England by the mighty Spanish empire (culminating in the battle with the Armada), the disaster of their Irish colonial ambitions. A pretty good survey of the era. The Elizabethans by AN Wilson. This is truly an old fashioned history: the author defines the entire era by the lives of England's most eminent people. I understand the appeal of great man histories, but you can tell the author is a professional writer (as opposed to professional historian) by the weight he places on the authors: Sidney's Arcadia is mentioned or quoted on 13 different pages, and no chapter is without a Shakespeare quote. You won't find the lives of ordinary people discussed in this type of book, which kind of lessens its usefulness as a book long description of a country over a 60 year period, at least for me. Although not the subject, the sun that all these books orbit is the person of Queen Elizabeth. I have to mention this because it drove me a little crazy: All of these authors describe her with something approaching awe. They talk about her mercurial personality, her cunning, her intelligence, her thrift, all as positive traits for a ruler. But I can't help but interpret these same traits in a more negative light. For example, everyone comments on Elizabeth's indecisiveness, her knack for leaving her true feelings unknown, her unwillingness to make hard decisions, (eg to allow the court to go through with Mary's execution following her trial, to allow Drake to pre-emptively strike the Armada while still in harbour), and all interpret this tendency in a positive light, as a kind of Machiavellian ploy to keep her cards hidden. But I see it completely differently: have you ever heard of another great leader who was praised for being indecisive? Isn't the usual description of great leaders that they are decisive, that when under extreme pressure they seize the opportunity to mold events to their will? I get the feeling that if the Armada's invasion had succeeded, that these same traits would not be praised. dokmo fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 16:03
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Just finished Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I just...I couldn't do it. Every page had to have at least three references to some facet of nerdery. Any book with the line "smooth move, ex-lax" in it and clumsy writing centred around the ability of nerds to have gundam fights and do a perfect game of pac man is just impossible to me. I also could never figure out who it was supposed to be written for - it was written as if for the YA market, but nobody under 30 could really fully grasp the references within. It was just a bit confused. I think you can either switch your brain off and just get immersed by it and love it, or you are bitter and picky like me and hate it. I dunno.
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Jul 16, 2012 19:12
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^^^ I feel the same way about Charles Stross' latest stuff. Glasshouse and Accelerando were pretty good, but then he started releasing a bunch of internet lingo nerd bait YA-level wankfests (one of them is named Rule 34, ugh). I picked up the first one in that series, ignorant to what kind of book it was, and I just couldn't do it. Finally finished A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick, thoroughly enjoyed it. It took me way longer to read this than it should have- probably because I was reading in on a Nintendo DS e-reader. Then I got a Kindle and all was well. stimulated emission fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 22:54
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Einherjar13 posted:I just read that last month. I agree the masters were definitely the better characters, but I thought the narrative gave a good visualization of the world it created, even if not a whole lot was going on in it. I'll definitely give it that - the book portrayed a very compelling and lively image of a world in which, unfortunately, very little was happening. Just finished Year Zero by Rob Reid. Wasn't incredible, but it was a fun read with a great premise, a lot of good gags and a surprisingly tightly-constructed plot. It was amazing how many things I dismissed as one-off gags, only to have them be critical to the climax of the story. Next, at the suggestion of the Stephen King thread, I'll be picking up EDIT: Is there seriously not a kindle edition of Pet Sematary? What the hell. Quinn2win fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 22:55
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ProfessorProf posted:Next, at the suggestion of the Stephen King thread, I'll be picking up It has been decades since I read it but I remember Night Shift was pretty excellent (I think preferred the Skelton Crew collection more). Last Rung on the Ladder was pretty awesome. Also cool stories that are connected to Salem's Lot (Jerusalem's Lot and One for the Road) and the Stand (Night Surf). I think my favorite short story by King is the Jaunt (which is in Skeleton Crew). It really messed with my young mind. Also I have Year Zero and plan to start it next when I'm finished with my current book (Niceville by Carsten Stroud).
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Jul 16, 2012 23:19
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I finished Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham the other day. I found the basic narrative interesting but some of his digressions into other topics were boring and a little too long for me. Still, I'd happily recommend it to anyone who has worked their way through his short stories and wants a novel of his to read.
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Jul 16, 2012 23:50
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