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marblize posted:this is 2015 i don't know how libraries work are you off your rocker? You get on their website and get free kindle books/downloadable audiobooks without leaving your stupid apartment. It's great.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:38
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Finished Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. It took awhile to win me over, but it had its filthy claws in me by the end.
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Sep 13, 2015 00:31
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I've been trying to finish 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle' by Murakami for about two months now and while it does hold my attention for spells, I found it to became stodgy and felt a little pretentious at times. In between putting it down and picking it up I have read the following: 'Homicide: A year on the killing streets' and 'The Corner' by David Simon. If you're a fan of The Wire, then read these immediately. They're hefty books, nearly 650 pages each, of the year that David Simon spent with the Baltimore Homicide Dept and a year he spent tracking the lives of the people that lived in West Baltimore amongst the drug trade. The lifestyle, the humour, the tricks used to coax confessions out of the "yo's", even the cops themselves that you see in The Wire all originated from Simon's experiences here. It covers some of the most heinous crimes in modern Baltimore history which occurred or came to light during the year and pulls no punches with it's depiction of the detectives and the murderers, stick up men, drug dealers and fiends that Simon met on a daily basis. There were 274 murders on the streets of Baltimore in 1988-89, and Simon opened up the can of worms that a few of the Baltimore establishment didn't like; namely that that in a country which contains some of the worst ghettos in the western world, West Baltimore stood out on its own in terms of poverty, desperation and violence. I have also just finished 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks. This may well be a masterpiece; written at a time when the First World War was not talked about very much, Faulks' vivid descriptions of trench life, the mining operations undertook by the combatants and the continued suggestion that this conflict was forgotten due to the horrors of WWII, is a stark reminder of the sheer loss of life experienced by all sides in this war. It was a tragedy and despite the general tone of the book, Faulks is able to conjure a feeling of hope by the end. I've just picked up Wind Up Bird Chronicle again, read a chapter and put it down.
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Sep 13, 2015 20:08
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My mom had many, many books and at least half of them were the books we read as kids. It's been a lot of fun going through those boxes! I'm pleased at the number of them that I still consider "good books" after all the years. The Pushcart War, The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Twenty-One Balloons are my most recent nostalgia-reads and are all excellent. William Pène du Bois is really fantastic; this particular book was my introduction to Krakatoa and then an abiding interest in extreme acts of nature. All of his books are amazing, actually. Next: The Zelpha Keatley Snyder books, as collected by myself and my sister. (We got autographs!) edit: *sigh* xcheopis fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 21:21
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I've only made it all the way through Norwegian Wood, I couldn't stand it. Marukami is horrendous. Those Wire influenced books you mention are loving brilliant though.
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Sep 13, 2015 21:53
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Francois_Dillinger posted:In between putting it down and picking it up I have read the following: 'Homicide: A year on the killing streets' and 'The Corner' by David Simon. If you're a fan of The Wire, then read these immediately. It's worth underlining that the two books are almost a matched pair in that they portray the cops side and the street side of the drug war, respectively. My big takeaway from "The Corner" was how hard it was for people to escape poverty and addiction and how easy it was for them to backslide.
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Sep 13, 2015 23:54
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Robot Wendigo posted:As for Simmons, I thought The Terror to be absolutely superb. Summer of Night is also very enjoyable. It's a grand, unapologetic, Eighties style horror potboiler. I'd avoid the sequel-of-sorts, A Winter Haunting, which I saw as Simmons clearing his throat and apologizing for the previous book. I didn't think A Winter Haunting was bad, but it wasn't that good either. That said if someone is looking for a good book that seems heavily influence IT, you couldn't ask for a better book in Summer of Night. I never knew this, but it seems that several characters from Summer of Night appear in some of his other novels and short stories.
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Sep 14, 2015 13:50
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Those 'Wire-influenced' books are, together, one of my all time favourite reads. They're everything you could ever want from a book: heart-breaking, hilarious, educational, exciting, etc., etc. As much as I have loved Treme and Show Me A Hero I really want Simon to sit down and right another novel, though I guess hes smart to stick with the HBO gravy train as long as they'll let him. I don't know where else he'll get to make TV. Murakami is a real mood read for me: if I'm not in it I hate his stuff but if you're feeling it there is something magical to it. My favourite of his is Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it's not a popular choice but its the one with the most 'plot' and actually converges at a point, albeit an elliptical one, which Wind-Up and especially Colourless do not. Maybe try that next if you want to give him another chance. It's strange that he is, by far, the most popular Japanese author here in the west. I'm sure there must be others more suited to the role going untranslated.
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Sep 15, 2015 00:19
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The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick. It was ....okay. Quintessential Dick, had all the themes and elements his fiction is known for. Not a book I would especially recommend except to a serious fan.
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Sep 15, 2015 02:23
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Lonesome Dove I saw the miniseries as a kid and dammit, I knew Gus was going to die but I was still really upset when it happened. The book as a whole is different than I expected it to be from the miniseries. It's not really about a cattle drive, its about the end of the American Frontier. None of the inhabitants who flourished there, Indian and white man alike, have any place left to them now that civilization is moving in.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:41
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Iron Council, by China Miéville. The third in his Bas-Lag trilogy, and my favourite of the three. Packed with dense and complicated musings on politics, loyalty and different forms of dissent, it also has by far one of the most satisfying endings of any book I've read. The characters are complex, it's packed with subtle and not-so-subtle references to Miéville's influences, from Lewis Carroll to Alfred Jarry, the action scenes are intense without feeling gratuitous. I'm gushing about this semi-coherently, but in summation I really liked this book and am not going to forget it in a hurry. Les Enfants Terribles, by Jean Cocteau. It's short, but it's really quite lovely. Sheltered rich kids in 1920s Paris create a "Game" to further reinforce their bubble and shield themselves from the outside world. This is one of those books that people have written ten-thousand-word essays about, so I'm not really sure what new things I could say. It didn't grab me too much while I was reading it, but the more I think about it in hindsight the more complicated and interesting it feels.
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Sep 15, 2015 18:51
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I just finished Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe by Roger Penrose. It's probably the most difficult thing I've ever read. I have a strong math and physics background and I still couldn't follow parts of it. I'm going to blow through some silly sci-fi book or something to give my brain a rest, and then read it again. Hopefully I'll be able to make sense of most of it next time. 
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Sep 15, 2015 19:33
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The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin. I appreciated its tightness of plot and unusually-Zen message, but the characters seemed pretty flat, and it ended up reading like a dystopia sampler platter. No idea stuck around long enough to really get interesting. I don't know, maybe it just seems light and inconsequential because I've been getting into Margaret Atwood, recently. Supernatural Horror in Literature by H.P. Lovecraft. I probably enjoyed this more than I should. I found it amusing how catty Lovecraft gets backhand-complimenting other authors. Also, I now have more books to read!
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Sep 16, 2015 01:14
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Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle. I'm a fan of The Mountain Goats and think that Darnielle is one of the best songwriters out there. That said, I was weary about his book, as I am with any "celebrity" authored books, but thought I'd give him a chance. It's a gloomy book about loneliness, regret, isolation, creating, and escaping. Our main character was in an accident. He created a role playing game called Trace Italian. The game caused another accident. The plot proceeds in reverse, and the reader picks up the clues along the way on these events and their effects on the narrator's life. To give anything else away is to take away from the reading experience. I highly recommend it.
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Sep 17, 2015 02:17
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marblize posted:this is 2015 i don't know how libraries work are you off your rocker? Librares been pissing me off lately - having books one and three of a trilogy, or just the first  Just finished.. Ian Tregillis Bitter Seeds, first 1/3 of a tale of nazis with strange powers and english warlocks. I thought it was a pertty interesting treatment of the nazis with powers, giving them flaws and making them human, instead of just perfect super-soldiers. Looking forward to the next part this ends with the germans defeated in '41, but the special ones are captured by the soviets, so i have a feeling there will be a bunch of cold-war'ish espionage? Before that.. Pines by Blake Crouch- yes the same one that was just on TV this summer. I watched the whole series before starting the read, wasnt sure if it was going to be the same or radically different. This is another 1 of 3, roughly lining up with the first 4 (or 5?) episodes up to the big reveal that they're 2000 years in the future and the good Dr is running everything. I think i'm preferring the books- I like how they handled getting Burke's family to the town instead of in the show. other than that, it is a pretty straight adaptation so far
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Sep 17, 2015 04:20
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Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. 4.25 stars, I think. KSR is a master of hard sci-fi and postulating realistically about humanity's future. This novel was written beautifully and was chock full of interesting science and futurism, but he did go a little pessimistic for my tastes in this one. The characters as a whole were alright, but the real draw for me was the brilliant concept behind the narration: the ship's AI is telling the story. It allowed big info dumps to actually have a place in the narrative, and led to some hilarious observations and gentle pokes at storytelling and human language. It took me ages to get into the plot though. Not a lot happens for the first third of the book, and even when events first started to move along (when they got to Aurora), it was still unfolding so somniferously that I was almost ready to put the book down. It seemed like that slow meandering of the story would continue indefinitely, and that the pessimistic message would swallow the book whole. But then about 45% through the book, things changed in a massive way — and the next 40% or so was tense, exhilarating, magnificent. The goal of returning to Earth returned some optimism to the story, and all of the events that followed were incredible to behold. The unrest that tore the ship's population apart, the revelations about the second voyage, the ship's decisions and actions, and the multitude of problems during the journey home, were riveting. After around 85% through, though — once they get back to Earth — the book shifted into a very extended denouement, and I found myself wishing prematurely that it would end. The very last sequence was nice, but still, most of the story after the 85% mark just felt a bit superfluous. Instead of hearing about beach-building projects, I wanted to know what had happened to those left behind at Tau Ceti. Nothing really came of the controversy surrounding the Cetians' return, either. I also really missed ship, who honestly had the most amazing character growth of the whole book. Its destruction was a real bummer for me. To sum up: masterful writing, compelling science, fascinating narration, and an exhilarating middle section; but not a perfect novel for me.
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Sep 19, 2015 09:14
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Finished Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks. It's sort of a typical "adult" fantasy with orphan becoming an Going to start his next trilogy now. Xaris fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Sep 19, 2015 |
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Sep 19, 2015 10:54
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Maria Kondo's book about cleaning. Very good. Yet to put it into action yet though
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Sep 19, 2015 12:32
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ICHIBAHN posted:Maria Kondo's book about cleaning. Very good. Yet to put it into action yet though Man, BlueStory should be getting some sort of commission for selling this book to so many goons. Personally I was deeply offended by Kondo's instruction in the free sample that you should throw out half your books and put the rest in a cupboard. That's no way to treat your library, a house without a big row of bookshelves isn't worth living in  I finished Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delany. I enjoyed the first essay, about Delany's experiences with public sex, the porno theatres of Times Square, the people he met, and the changing culture in the area. The second essay is much drier and more technical, largely about the differences between 'contact' and 'networking', interclass communication etc but covering much of the same themes as the first. It's not worth the ~20 quid its currently being sold for, but it's Delany, it's a good read.
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Sep 19, 2015 16:17
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The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers was, like most collections of short stories, pretty hit or miss. I could've used a lot more murders and ambiguous weirdness, and a lot fewer naive artists falling for the wrong women in France. When it's great it's great, but please shut up about palette knives. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood was fantastic. For a while I was worried that the protagonist was going to be a horrible sociopath, but I got to like him faster than I would have expected. I continue to enjoy Atwood's bit-by-bit exposition of just what the gently caress is going on in the horrible worlds she creates, largely through flashbacks. I actually liked the ending of this one enough that I'm on the fence about whether I should read the other two connected books.
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Sep 19, 2015 23:56
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ArmadilloConspiracy posted:Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood was fantastic. For a while I was worried that the protagonist was going to be a horrible sociopath, but I got to like him faster than I would have expected. I continue to enjoy Atwood's bit-by-bit exposition of just what the gently caress is going on in the horrible worlds she creates, largely through flashbacks. I actually liked the ending of this one enough that I'm on the fence about whether I should read the other two connected books. You should. The second one is sort of a parallel story that overlaps with Oryx & Crake, and the third brings the first two books together in fantastic fashion.
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Sep 20, 2015 02:16
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Longitude by Dava Sobel. A very enjoyable read about the competition to find a foolproof way of finding longitude. In the early 18thC, the British parliament promised a £20,000 cash reward for anyone who could solve this age old problem and appointed a Board of Longitude to measure the accuracy of any solutions presented. On the one side were the clockmakers, led by self-educated genius John Harrison, and on the other were the astronomers, represented in this book mainly by the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne. Sobel presents the astronomers as representatives of the political establishment trying to scupper the dreams of the little man, which can wear thin a bit, but Maskelyne really did treat Harrison and his son very badly, and it seemed clear that there was a conflict of interest in awarding the prize money when Maskelyne was appointed the new Astronomer Royal and therefore was appointed to the Board of Longitude. Without spoiling it too much, if you like historical non-fiction you could do a lot worse than this. Sobel writes very well, and detailed explanations of clock mechanisms do not get boring in her hands; indeed, this book is presented as a race between rival scientific factions in a world that was still in the process of being mapped and as such, for me, had an 'Around the World in Eighty Days' feel about it. Worth checking out.
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Sep 20, 2015 15:59
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I finished The Terror yesterday and read Summer of Night today. Simmons is an acceptable way to pass the time, but I think his ideas and research are better than his actual execution. Next up: Broken Monsters. I loved The Shining Girls, so I hope this one goes well.
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Sep 20, 2015 22:18
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How to Win Friends and Influence People, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie. I read these as part of a training I went to for work. I could summarize them with "be nice to people, keep yourself occupied, and talk about what you know." The books are very repetitive and full of stories of Dale meeting important businessmen from the early twentieth century. They were written during that time period and haven't been updated since. Very old phrasing and sexism abound. That being said, if you work for a corporation, read them (or say that you did) because I guarantee your Directors, VPs, and CEO all have (or claim they did).
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Sep 21, 2015 02:56
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Lady Chatterley's Lover. I was thoroughly entranced all the way up to the last chapter -- I was positive that Mellors and Connie were either going to end in some horrible disaster of a marriage, or completely sever their relationship after some bitter disappointment with each other. The whole time, I was rooting for that ending, thinking this was the only way this tail [e: tale] could end. Instead, they are living separately but there's hope for their future together. Which I thought was just bogus. The book makes such a good case as to why this is impossible, too! WTF, D.H.? You pulled your punch at the last moment. E: House Louse posted:E: in typo veritas. 
Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 21, 2015 21:29
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The Philadelphia Chromosome by Jessica Wapner. This was an interesting topic (the discovery of cancer as a genetic disease, and the development of a treatment for a specific type of cancer based on that), and I learned interesting things, but the writing is definitely not strong enough to fully grab a layman like myself. I felt fortunate that I got this in audio form (though the reader had really generic inflections), so that I was doing other things and staying occupied during the dull parts. The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce A couple of these were really fantastic, but most of them were too short to really create a mood or...do much of anything. It didn't help that several with more or less exactly the same theme/problem were grouped right in a row. Ambrose Bierce's irony gave some of these a good twist, but I'd call most of these thoroughly missable. The Dead and the Gone Yes, I am an adult child who reads YA novels. This was a decent companion piece to Life as we Knew It (teenagers dealing with big moon-related disasters). I think it lost some of its impact by being in 3rd person as opposed to the 1st person narration of the first book in the series. It edged on preachy at times, largely due to the main character being pretty serious about Catholicism, but I think it had more grit and terror than the first book, which I appreciated, given the subject matter.
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Sep 22, 2015 03:55
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Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, book one of trilogy one of that whole huge series. 4 stars. A decent start to a series that I will continue with interest. Fitz is good as a narrator — much better than Kvothe (shudder) — and the characters whose stories revolve around him are well drawn. Hobb's writing is pretty good too. She's on a level with GRRM in terms of writing skill (just to compare to another fantasy author whose main opus began around the same time in the 90s), although her worldbuilding mastery is a shadow of his. On a negative note though, the plot feels weird and directionless for a huge portion of the book. The focus keeps shifting: you think it will be about Fitz' training as an assassin, no, his training as a Skill user, no, it's really about the Red Ship raiders, no wait, we're in the last 100 pages and suddenly it's all about a royal wedding! I was hoping it would all come together at the end, but it didn't. Instead all these threads remain loose, to be tied up in the later books. I guess that's forgivable — a lot of epic fantasy trilogies tend to lean on the "it's really one long book!" thing. But I do prefer each individual volume in a series to offer some closure, even when it's setting up the hooks for the next one. Oh well, those hooks (What exactly is Forging? What's the deal with the Fool?) are buried in me now, and I'll be looking for the second volume next time I can afford to go out and splurge on books.
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Sep 22, 2015 07:11
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That's what owns about them though. You think you're going to get a bog standard fantasy book about a kid being an uber skilled assassin embroiled in a bunch of palace intrigue, like someone's lame RPG character, but instead this brain damaged idiot mostly wanders through his poo poo life high as a kite, getting more and more hosed up emotionally and physically. It's the book equivalent of that sweet bro and hella jeff stairs comic
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Sep 22, 2015 11:11
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Yeah I enjoyed AA a lot. I never felt compelled much to read the trilogies after that for some reason, but maybe some day. I think I just really did not like the whole his effective dad marries his teenage sweetheart thing that much
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Sep 22, 2015 23:13
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American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It was surprisingly brisk for a 1,100 page book with extended material.
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Sep 23, 2015 01:42
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Calm the gently caress Down by David Vienna. A parenting book about not worrying so much about raising kids. Very quick read, but not in-depth at all.
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Sep 23, 2015 14:26
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I have long commutes for work, and enjoy audiobooks to pass the time. I have some Audible credits to burn before I cancel the subscription... Can anyone recommend lengthy, enjoyable biographies or historical accounts? I've listened to and enjoyed the following: - The Guns of August (WWI), Barbara Tuchman - Hitler (  ), Ian Kershaw- Wizard (Nichola Tesla), Marc J. Seifer - The Earth Shall Weep (Native Americans), James Wilson This might not be the right thread to ask this, so forgive me.
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Sep 23, 2015 21:07
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^I haven't read it but The Power Broker keeps getting recommended to me, might fit what you're looking for.
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Sep 24, 2015 05:08
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marblize posted:^I haven't read it but The Power Broker keeps getting recommended to me, might fit what you're looking for. That looks pretty interesting, thanks, will have to check it out.
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Sep 24, 2015 05:11
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Gerbil_Pen posted:That looks pretty interesting, thanks, will have to check it out. I listened to "Into the Silence" by Wade Davis about the failed Mallory Everest expedition and - by extension - the English cultural relationship to World War I. It was absolutely excellent and I highly recommend it.
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Sep 24, 2015 06:50
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Gerbil_Pen posted:I have long commutes for work, and enjoy audiobooks to pass the time. I have some Audible credits to burn before I cancel the subscription... The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark.
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Sep 24, 2015 07:51
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I'm reading all the PKD I never got around to. Right now finishing up Ubik. Could use a little spray of it myself actually.
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Sep 24, 2015 14:09
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HerzogZwo posted:I'm reading all the PKD I never got around to. Right now finishing up Ubik. Could use a little spray of it myself actually. What's up PKDick buddy  Momentary derail: I think that's really his best novel. I'm consulting with a couple artists to get a UBIK tattoo (replete with "I am alive and you are dead" incorporated). Someone save me from myself.
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Sep 24, 2015 14:53
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Ubik stands out to me as a perfectly-paced mystery. Every single time a new twist was coming up, I figured it out just barely before the characters did, but no sooner. One of the best sci-fi books I've ever read.
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Sep 24, 2015 15:18
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Gerbil_Pen posted:I have long commutes for work, and enjoy audiobooks to pass the time. I have some Audible credits to burn before I cancel the subscription... Lord of Misrule, Christopher Lee's autobiography. Worth reading as the only book that discusses heavy metal, Tolkien and World War 2 commando raids.
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Sep 24, 2015 15:22
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