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I randomly found Noumenon at a book store the other day, just finished it, and I really liked most of it. A solid 4/5 book, maybe a little lower. The jist is that a scientist finds a star that's off and possibly alien, in more ways than one. Earth send six ships to research it, and it's a generational ship with a twist: everyone onboard is a clone whose genes were determined before launch. So if Bob and Bill are gardeners at launch, Bob raises a kid-clone of Bill who'll raise a kid-clone of Bob, etc. It's really quite clever how you can read about a character on page 20 and be following that clone line throughout the book; each chapter takes the perspective of one clone line or another. It can get a little complicated because you're juggling about a dozen different names that slip in and out of the narrative, so it sometimes required me to go back and re-read sections putting two-and-two together that this guy is a clone of that guy. Overall I love the story, but there's one chunk of the story that I wish had a character just go over what the hell happened between the last time jump from the previous chapter. Spoiler-talk: There's a section after one of the ships is destroyed, where criminals (for the lack of a better term, it gets complicated) are mining ore out of a planetoid. But they keep talking about how they are still on their journey. Are they dragging a rock with them? gently caress if I could wrap my head around it. Also, there's a deeply slow point near the end that should've been exciting as hell, but I kept stopping myself from skimming forward to get to what I thought was coming. Part of the issue I think I had with it is that (mid-plot and ending spoilers) it's one of those properties where the its-not-the-destination-its-the-journey idioms is pushed so strongly that most of the meat of the story is about the ships, their society, and the crew involved. It's certainly not bad stuff, I dug a lot of it, but the being-at-the-alien-thing part of the book comes and goes so quickly. They bring up a lot of interesting stuff, but then a few pages later and the ships are going back. This is kinda resolved with a sequel hook, but still.) MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Aug 3, 2017 |
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Aug 3, 2017 03:13
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Just finished The Second World War by Antony Beevor. Would recommend. Much preferred it to a lot of similar books I've read in the past.
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Aug 3, 2017 13:05
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jeff vandermeer's borne. it was very stupid and bad. why did this get a writeup in the new yorker? why did i read it (both the writeup and the novel)?
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Aug 4, 2017 04:41
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chernobyl kinsman posted:jeff vandermeer's borne. it was very stupid and bad. why did this get a writeup in the new yorker? why did i read it (both the writeup and the novel)? I read Annihilation recently and hated it. I honestly don't get his sudden popularity. I just finished The Dying Animal by Philip Roth. It was a gorgeous meditation on boobs and death. I couldn't relate to really any of the subjects he tackles, but his prose is indescribably beautiful.
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Aug 6, 2017 01:49
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I just finished Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero and absolutely loved it. Highly recommend. It's way more than just a Scooby Doo But They're Adults Now romp, which is how it was initially billed to me wherever I found out about it.
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Aug 6, 2017 17:37
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First stop on my exploration of Indonesian literature is Potions and Paper Cranes by Lan Fang, published in English by Dalang Publishing and translated by Elisabet Titik Murtisari. This is a tragic and violent love story between a quarrelsome Indonesian couple and a geisha set during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War. The narrative is framed as a retelling and each character gets their chance to speak their version of events. As such the tone is conversational and reflective which is an interesting stylistic choice however the language is quite simple and ponderous at times which I think is this book's main failing. There is a good story and good characters in here just needing a bit more linguistic vision to bring it out, though whether the author or the translator is to blame is impossible to say
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Aug 8, 2017 10:41
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After a disgracefully long time, I finished Paul J MacAuley's Something Coming Through. In the near future, aliens have made contact and announced that they're "here to help". They hand over a handful of planets and the ships necessary to reach them, but otherwise stay largely out of the way and remain cryptic and unknowable. Colonies form on the alien worlds and there's a vibrant black market in alien artifacts, some with strange powers, some that seem haunted and drive people crazy. On one of the colonies, a cop pursues a murder that may have be committed with an alien "ray gun" by displaced cockney gangsters. Meanwhile on Earth, a researcher comes a across a young child who insists he can talk to aliens, drawing pictures of enigmatic alien structures ... It's a good read, a refreshing low-key piece of SF that's more about the people involved than the usual Sf exercise in world-building and infodumps. Quite enjoyed it although the protracted read robbed it of something. The Earth section is probably best, as the offworld gangsters are perhaps just villains needed to push the plot along. I also liked the London and English setting a lot, reading very familiar. It reads a lot like the first volume in a series, which I'm not enthused about : not everything needs to be a trilogy and any ultimate answers are likely to be disappointing.
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Aug 8, 2017 14:05
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C-Euro posted:Finished Dune for the fifth or sixth time. Still perhaps my favorite book ever, though I never noticed until now that the pacing loses a step after the first third or so. Man, you hit the murderers row of some of my favorites here. I've probably read Shogun 20 times, I had to buy another copy because the paperback that my grandfather gave me can't even be held together with duct tape anymore. Dune is similar, love reading that book. Candide is clearly a favorite of mine (Dr. Pangloss is the best) and Slaughterhouse Five is another nearly annual read. Anyway, just a  for your reading year so far!
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Aug 8, 2017 15:54
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Double post to say I also finished The Lies of Locke Lamora and then raced through Red Seas under Red Skies, the first two books in Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards trilogy. The trilogy follows a group of thieves that target the super rich with a combination of long con and cat burglary. The world is a medieval Earth like planet littered with alien structures of a race no longer present, and with technologies like alchemy that give it a nice flavor. Really love the world he created. Lies was fantastic and I pretty much loved every page of it. Red Seas was less awesome, slow at the start, slow in the middle and the resolution comes incredibly fast and not very satisfyingly. The conclusion to the trilogy The Republic of Thieves still sits in my Kindle library, but I honestly don't have much desire to read it. I'm going to hit some of the other books mentioned here, namely The Way of Kings, and probably circle back to the finale when I miss start to miss Locke and Jean. Dr. Pangloss fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 16:01
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Dr. Pangloss posted:Double post to say I also finished The Lies of Locke Lamora and then raced through Red Seas under Red Skies, the first two books in Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards trilogy. The trilogy follows a group of thieves that target the super rich with a combination of long con and cat burglary. The world is a medieval Earth like planet littered with alien structures of a race no longer present, and with technologies like alchemy that give it a nice flavor. Really love the world he created. Circle back to the third book sometime, I liked it better than the second book and thought it was more like the first. The second book is the pirate book and the fourth book is the acting troupe book and I liked them but not as much as the first or third books. Also, there's a fourth book 
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Aug 8, 2017 17:14
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Lawen posted:Circle back to the third book sometime, I liked it better than the second book and thought it was more like the first. The second book is the pirate book and the fourth book is the acting troupe book and I liked them but not as much as the first or third books. Also, there's a fourth book That's very good to hear, both that the third book is more like the first and that there is a fourth. Thanks!
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Aug 8, 2017 22:03
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Crossposted from the SHAMEFUL thread, which could really use more love, hint hint.Solitair posted:Just finished Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh. It's a smaller-scale story of working-class people getting hosed over by corporations, except it's in space and they're mining asteroids for a living. I appreciate that the book knows who to blame and that it keeps things simple, considering that it's part of a huge universe, though I think it could have been slightly less simple to capture some more nuance in the subject matter. My favorite parts involved the main character dealing with trauma and being gaslit by people who want to keep him from raising a stink about his accident; my least favorite was the climax, which was basically written in shakycam. Dunno how soon I'll give other Cherryh books a try after this one. I should also mention that this is my first Cherryh book ever.
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Aug 9, 2017 08:31
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Just finished an audiobook version 1984. I did not expect to like this story as much as I did--something about the madness of false memories and never really being sure you know what you know and the despair and loneliness that brings on really resonated with me, possibly because of my own memory problems. (Things like not remembering an entire wedding I attended, or the way I clearly did remember an old friend's mother dying--when she actually didn't.) I figured it would be more like Animal Farm, all allegory and not exactly relatable to everyday life.
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Aug 10, 2017 20:45
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The Unraveling by Emma Sky Emma is very much not a journalist or writer, so this book reads more like a diary, but it was fascinating. Over the course of the narrative and her half a decade tenure in Iraq you get to see her transform from a wholely anti-military sentiment to being the right hand woman for Generals Odierno and Patreus and a high-level liason between the Coalition and Iraqi government. Quite interesting to see her view on what went right and what went wrong and the role she played in it, earning her the sometimes complimentary and sometimes insulting nickname of "Miss Bell" from the locals and officials she interacted with.
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Aug 11, 2017 02:20
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Dr. Pangloss posted:Double post to say I also finished The Lies of Locke Lamora and then raced through Red Seas under Red Skies, the first two books in Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards trilogy. The trilogy follows a group of thieves that target the super rich with a combination of long con and cat burglary. The world is a medieval Earth like planet littered with alien structures of a race no longer present, and with technologies like alchemy that give it a nice flavor. Really love the world he created. It has been a little while since I read these books, but I thought the third book was really bad. From what I remember it was very poorly paced, and just everything with Locke's relationship with Sabetha was terrible to read.
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Aug 11, 2017 02:50
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:It has been a little while since I read these books, but I thought the third book was really bad. From what I remember it was very poorly paced, and just everything with Locke's relationship with Sabetha was terrible to read. It's been more than a little while since I read them and I have the memory of a goldfish so maybe my suggestion to circle back was off base. But I definitely recall it feeling more like the first book than the second or fourth, and I definitely recall liking it more than the fourth. Just checked Goodreads and I rated them all as 4* and their averaged ratings have books 2 & 3 at 4.23, book 1 at 4.3, and book 4 at 4.32 so I don't loving know what to think anymore.
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Aug 11, 2017 05:17
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Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - Despite urging from folks in the Sci-Fi thread, I read the entire book and liked it a lot. There's plenty of crunchy very-near-future space travel stuff (orbital dynamics, dV calculations, etc) to scratch the itch that I developed by playing Kerbal Space Program, lots of big picture stuff, some intrigue, and existential horror things. Part Three was way off the rails (the section many people recommended against reading), but it had some cool elements to it. For the most part though, it felt like a dumping ground for ideas that Stephenson couldn't put into other books.
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Aug 11, 2017 18:55
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robotsinmyhead posted:Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - Despite urging from folks in the Sci-Fi thread, I read the entire book and liked it a lot. There's plenty of crunchy very-near-future space travel stuff (orbital dynamics, dV calculations, etc) to scratch the itch that I developed by playing Kerbal Space Program, lots of big picture stuff, some intrigue, and existential horror things. The only reason the book exists is he wanted to come up with a quasi-reasonable reason why something like the Star Trek universe has tons of alien civilizations but with creatures that not only look somewhat human, but often can even interbreed. I'm of the "two-thirds of this is a good book" camp, but I wouldn't tell people not to read the third act. Just think of it as ... sorta bad fan fiction by the ultimate goony fan, the author himself.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:42
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tetrapyloctomy posted:The only reason the book exists is he wanted to come up with a quasi-reasonable reason why something like the Star Trek universe has tons of alien civilizations but with creatures that not only look somewhat human, but often can even interbreed. I'm of the "two-thirds of this is a good book" camp, but I wouldn't tell people not to read the third act. Just think of it as ... sorta bad fan fiction by the ultimate goony fan, the author himself. I thought it started out as a response to the question "what would happen if the moon blew up".
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Aug 12, 2017 01:32
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tetrapyloctomy posted:The only reason the book exists is he wanted to come up with a quasi-reasonable reason why something like the Star Trek universe has tons of alien civilizations but with creatures that not only look somewhat human, but often can even interbreed. someone should have let him know that star tek isn't real
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Aug 12, 2017 14:53
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tetrapyloctomy posted:The only reason the book exists is he wanted to come up with a quasi-reasonable reason why something like the Star Trek universe has tons of alien civilizations but with creatures that not only look somewhat human, but often can even interbreed. I'm of the "two-thirds of this is a good book" camp, but I wouldn't tell people not to read the third act. Just think of it as ... sorta bad fan fiction by the ultimate goony fan, the author himself. im trying to imagine a worse reason to write a book and im coming up empty
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Aug 13, 2017 07:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:im trying to imagine a worse reason to write a book and im coming up empty  withak posted:I thought it started out as a response to the question "what would happen if the moon blew up". Neal Stephenson posted:The third element that made its way into the story is the concept of aliens. Science fiction writers have dreamed up many kinds of aliens, some of them fantastically imaginative, some so profoundly different from us as to be nearly incomprehensible. But the aliens that have stuck with us in popular culture have been English-speaking humanoids. In some cases, as in Star Trek, these are so similar to us that we can even breed with them! The subtext seems to be that the aliens are us; we are the aliens. Fine. Just another reason we don't have to develop faster-than-light drive.
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Aug 13, 2017 13:00
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all these guys who want to go to space and like computer science ought to pushed into a bayou
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Aug 13, 2017 13:57
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Usually don't do audio books but I just finished listening to Al Franken's Al Franken: Giant of the Senate by Al Franken- Its probably his least funny but most interesting book once it gets past the "here's my life story in case I run for president" part and into his culture shock as a new senator. Its probably the funniest memoir written by a sitting senator, low as that bar is- I found myself mostly sensibly chuckling but with the random gut-busting joke here and there, like Franken do I wouldn't recommend it unless you're either a huge Franken fan or curious about what the senate looks like to a slightly classist lefty comedian- dude tells the best jokes from the book in interviews and stuff cant cook creole bream posted:I finished Death's End today. The conclusion of the three bodies trilogy. It's really impressive what a large scale this book has. And some of the pictures this book paints are straight up unimaginable, while also being really vivid. The scope of this trilogy is incredible and the ideas it has you wrestle with are big enough that I can look past the sort of Heinleiny part where humanity's weakness during the tenure of the first Wallfacer is reflected by men becoming more feminine - wtf Liu? Also I really enjoyed Ken Liu's translation notes- why did he only work on books 1 & 3?
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Aug 13, 2017 14:18
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Lawen posted:It's been more than a little while since I read them and I have the memory of a goldfish so maybe my suggestion to circle back was off base. But I definitely recall it feeling more like the first book than the second or fourth, and I definitely recall liking it more than the fourth. Just checked Goodreads and I rated them all as 4* and their averaged ratings have books 2 & 3 at 4.23, book 1 at 4.3, and book 4 at 4.32 so I don't loving know what to think anymore. Um, how have you already read book 4? it doesn't come out until next year...
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Aug 13, 2017 21:55
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Um...apparently I'm going insane and/or senile? I swear to god I've read it and they form an acting troupe to con someone out of something? But you're right, it's not out yet and I can't find an ARC copy lying around my house. Maybe I'm thinking of a different series? I don't know what to think anymore. Probably best to just ignore me. 
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Aug 14, 2017 00:57
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Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian. What a lousy, lousy book. It almost set me off of the whole series and it'll be a while before I'm willing to touch the next one, this one was so bad. It was well-written as usual, but the quality of writing had trouble holding me when the content was so boring and dreary. Too much time spent on land, too much time with the ladies, too much time being miserable... may we never meet Diana again. May Jack and Stephen never get so stupid as to want to duel again. May we spend more time on a ship having fun instead. Sophie's okay, though. I liked her better in the last half of the book instead of the first.
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Aug 14, 2017 11:45
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That's ok, read the next one.
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Aug 14, 2017 16:50
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tetrapyloctomy posted:
Just make a loving duology for Christ's sake! 
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Aug 15, 2017 00:06
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Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin Kiernan Kiernan creates some great characters in a story that is heavily inspired by Lovecraft, which I guess you could say about most of her work. It reads like an X-Files episode where they had no intention of making another one.
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Aug 15, 2017 00:49
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StrixNebulosa posted:Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian. What a lousy, lousy book. It almost set me off of the whole series and it'll be a while before I'm willing to touch the next one, this one was so bad. This was my exact experience and I still haven't gotten to the rest of the books.
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Aug 15, 2017 13:33
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StrixNebulosa posted:Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian. What a lousy, lousy book. It almost set me off of the whole series and it'll be a while before I'm willing to touch the next one, this one was so bad. So it wasn't just me then.
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Aug 15, 2017 13:43
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Anyone read Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson? I support BlackLivesMatter maybe not how the movement has been lead but the message, in general, seems very reasonable. The book is just random anecdotes of racism he has faced and he tries to generalize it as a common thing. I am not American nor live there so I can't be sure how much racism is still there. I am sure it is very active especially in some states, the recent Charlottesville Riots/Incident was enough proof of that. But his books makes it seem that the divide in America has made 0 progress which sounds untrue. I know last couple of years have been rough with shootings, riots and such. Can anyone tell me if I am completely wrong on this or is America really still as racist as it was in the 50s-60s? I am almost done with the book but just had some conflicting opinions about it. Ulio fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 20:49
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it's really bad yeah e: the racism not the book
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Aug 15, 2017 21:35
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Ulio posted:Can anyone tell me if I am completely wrong on this or is America really still as racist as it was in the 50s-60s? yes read this next https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1595586431/
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Aug 15, 2017 22:38
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Ulio posted:Can anyone tell me if I am completely wrong on this or is America really still as racist as it was in the 50s-60s? Sorry to disagree with the others, but it's a ridiculous statement to say that racism is as prevalent or institutionalized as it was in the 50s and 60s when governors and state troopers blocked African-American students from attending schools, whites- and blacks- only water fountains and restrooms, etc. Racism exists both in the hearts of people and in the lingering residue of the previous hundreds of years of institutionalized and enforced segregation and oppression, and frankly is probably impossible to entirely eradicate either in America or anywhere else in the world, but there have been vast improvements in the past 50-60 years.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:01
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Radio Spiricom posted:yes Oh ya I actually started this a while back never got to finishing it. Thanks for the answers. Very interesting for someone outside the States.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:47
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:Um, how have you already read book 4? it doesn't come out until next year... Is he possibly thinking of The Bastards and The Knives? It's a compilation volume of two novellas about the Gentleman Bastards.
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Aug 18, 2017 15:12
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Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier: Guardian I'm looking forward to finishing up the last two in the series.
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Aug 18, 2017 15:59
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Abyss posted:Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier: Guardian pretty cool that book titles are generated automatically by marketing software nowadays
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Aug 19, 2017 02:18
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