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A while ago I finished Worlds of Hurt by Brian Hodge and reread Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, basically at the same time. I wasn't planning on reading two books with similar themes—the latter was for my book club and the former is something I'd left half-finished for too long—but they take very different approaches to touching on the nature of belief. Hogfather is a Discworld book, which means putting things like the holiday season in Pratchett's fantasy world and making absurd jokes about them. It also posits that human beings have an inherent need to believe in things that can be disproven, from the existence of Santa Claus to the idea that there's justice in the world. But Worlds of Hurt, which is basically cosmic horror mixed with Gnosticism, one permutation of that belief ultimately leads to misery. Ironically, the characters are left with nothing but a leap of faith to go on, in an ending that weirdly reminds me of The Lorax of all things. I'm lucky I got Worlds of Hurt off Kindle before it got taken down; hopefully there are other ways to get the shorter stories collected with the big one. I read those several months beforehand, so they were more of a pleasant surprise. VideoTapir posted:I just finished Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds. That's pretty much what I thought, too.
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Dec 25, 2017 02:58
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I've finished Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name a couple days ago, after having watched the film last week. It's kind of an advantage and a drawback to have the film adaptation so fresh in my mind while reading the book. 'Cuz on the one hand, the book can honestly be very nebulous and...free-flowing?...in its depiction of events, which isn't a critique, but just an observation of this genre that I'm not all that used to (the gently caress do you mean Percy Jackson doesn't count as high literature); either way, I think I would've had a much harder time contextualizing many of the events and settings here if I hadn't just seen them portrayed by live-action people in a live-action setting. Again, not a critique, I'm just out of practice when it comes to reading big words.  The drawback of comparing the book with the film, of course, being that I couldn't stop bloody comparing the book with the film while reading, to the point that I've settled on the opinion that they are actually two very, very different stories. This despite the fact that almost everything in the film is a very faithful and respectful likeness of events from the book. All the same, there are several reasons why I think the book CMBYN and film CMBYN are imparting two significantly different narratives, and the foremost among them is the ending. Or, to be clear, the endings. This is gonna turn from short review to longwinded nonsense, bear with. There's a scene near the end of the film CMBYN that basically serves as its sort-of-climax and definite thesis statement, where our protagonist Elio has just separated from his secret lover Oliver, and Elio's father gives him a very moving speech basically saying that he did actually know about Elio's relationship with Oliver, but also that he knew it was a very precious, loving relationship that he was glad of his son for having. He then very delicately advises Elio to not let his current sadness erase the joy and love that he experienced with Oliver, however fleeting it was, and to let this heartbreak elevate him instead of diminishing him in the years to come. This was, if I may hyperbolize, one of the best scenes I've seen from any story of this kind and may have actually saved this film for me. It's certainly not that I thought the two hours beforehand were bad or anything, but it's really hard for stories like this to stick the landing and really easy for them to leave me at least feeling ambivalent if not annoyed. So much of the end of this narrative is punctuated with Elio and Oliver's separation, Elio and Oliver's loss of one another, that it could have really easily overwhelmed the rest of our experience. 'Cuz that's the story, right? They are separated by circumstance and will probably never get together again. So it was great for the film to then take this penultimate second to say, "Yes, but don't let this loss be the only takeaway here. Remember that there was also happiness, and keep that with you as we end this story and move on to the next thing in our lives." Now...this scene is in the book. The scene is in fact one of those faithful and respectful reproductions of the source that I'd mentioned above, almost word-for-word and equally as effective in the book's context. The problem though? The book doesn't actually finish there. The movie ends one scene later, sure, with Elio still sad about Oliver (now engaged to a woman), but also with a bittersweet sort of affirmation that this sadness will pass and Elio will ultimately be fine, having had his life improved by this relationship. The book, though? There's a whole other section to go through, and that section is...okay, I wouldn't say that it necessarily lessens the lovely sentiment that we'd been left with. But it's kinda like...a shattering of the illusion? A harsh awakening from the dream? 'Cuz what basically happens is that Elio is...not really fine.  He and Oliver keep getting more and more estranged over the years, and then bitterness sets in, and Elio doesn't really get over Oliver even after all this time, and then when they meet up again after a decade or so it's tinged with temptations of having affairs and plaintive reflections over the life they could have had but didn't, and it's all just...it's the exact sort of thing I absolutely did not want to have happen in this story, to these characters. The book does end with Elio and Oliver on friendly, visiting terms again (twenty years later) but it's still tinged with the idea that Elio remains unfulfilled without Oliver's love and we don't know if he's ever really going to be fulfilled.I'm sure there's a sort of heartbreaking candor to be found in that sort of denouement, but I just can't help but have a very visceral exasperation with it. If the film had ended this way, I probably would've been irritated enough that I wouldn't have even picked up this book. The only thing I can compare it to is the Scouring of the Shire from LotR where it's like, hey, ya thought you'd made it through the sadness and everything will be fine now, but nope things are actually super ruined and no amount of lovely sentiments from understanding parents will fix how ruined things are. Again...I'm sure there's value to be found in the unflinchingly tragic honesty here. But that's why I think this film and this book, which are almost completely the same stories, end up saying almost completely different things. One accentuates its ending with the idea that a beautiful relationship might end, but it's still a good and precious thing to experience and is not any less beautiful for ending. The other says -- and I'm sure I'm exaggerating, but still -- boy it's sure loving sad if you can't stay with your soulmate 'cuz all you have to look forward to is a lifetime of wishing that you could! (I'm being hard on the book for effect, but in fairness there's many aspects about it that I enjoyed more than the film as well. One example being that it's so much easier to engage with our protagonist about his loneliness and anxieties because we're able to hear his thoughts in intricate expressive detail, which is of course pretty par for the course when it comes to book-vs-film adaptations)
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Dec 26, 2017 10:09
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Mne nravitsya posted:Sorry, I'm just not a fan of superhero type elements in my fantasy books. drat finally somebody speaking my language
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Dec 26, 2017 19:32
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Finished Ahsoka by E.K. Johnston. I enjoyed it more than The Last Jedi--there was a definite character arc, action scenes made sense, and something was definitely accomplished by the story's end. The novel fills in what happened to Ahsoka after Order 66 and her evolution into her next phase of her career. A solid Star Wars novel.
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Dec 27, 2017 20:09
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Dark Matter - Blake Crouch Fun, fast-paced, exciting, gory, twisty multi-dimensional love story. I loved it. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel Another book I totally loved. One of the sadder, more lovely post-apocalyptic novels. There's a little bit of "everything's connected/everyone's bumping into one another" that I kind of hate normally, but it worked really well for this novel because it felt like it was done right for once.
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Dec 28, 2017 20:40
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Station Eleven is fantastic. An actually well written science fiction novel! On the other hand, I just finished Artemis by the guy that wrote The Martian. I enjoyed The Martian for the science aspects. The ending was a bit stupid, but the characterization was ok, if necessarily limited by the protagonist being alone. Artemis is a steaming pile of crap. Avoid at all costs. The plot is ridiculous from beginning to end, the characters are one dimensional, and the politics of the whole thing are appalling. The author has screwed his reputation and should go back to writing software. Beffer fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 21:30
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Beffer posted:Artemis is a steaming pile of crap. Avoid at all costs. The plot is ridiculous from beginning to end, the characters are one dimensional, and the politics of the whole thing are appalling. The author has screwed his reputation and should go back to writing software. That has been the critical consensus. Read reviews before buying, reviews are useful.
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Dec 30, 2017 21:38
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do please tell me what the space guy's politics are im not being facetious, i really want to know
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Dec 30, 2017 22:15
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Just finished Ready Player One and loved it. I probably should have listened to the countless recommendations from others. Is Cline's other book Armada any good? I feel like there's a real one-hit-wonder vibe with RPO.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:32
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I just read The Art of War twice, second time with added commentary. I liked it a lot, it was neat to get some perspective on this very influential work and the added context and explanations from the commentary let me get a lot more out of it the second time through. However I did not enjoy it as much as Homestuck
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Dec 31, 2017 20:13
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Just finished The Romance of the Forest by Anne Radcliffe Was quite good as far as "classic" novels go. Good story telling all around and the language is very vivid at times and easy to read - fun to read through the very end with only a few drawn out bits. This is the second gothic-type novel I've read in the past few months and I've found they're fairly enjoyable. Next in queue, Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" - I imagine I'm in for something quite different.
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Jan 5, 2018 04:17
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Colonel Taint posted:Was quite good as far as "classic" novels go. gghrk
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Jan 5, 2018 05:05
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I just now finished The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’m still in shock from the last 30 or so pages. Liked it a lot, my initial feeling is that I like Crime and Punishment more, but I like both enough that I think I owe The Brothers K a go at some point soon.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:48
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I finished Flowers for Algernon. Loved it, the ending hits you pretty quickly.
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Jan 6, 2018 20:56
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Finished Last Call by Tim Powers, definitely not what expected based on how it was described/recommended to me but really interesting. Looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.
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Jan 6, 2018 22:06
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Code of Conduct by Kristine Smith. Really interesting sci-fi thriller, one of the few books to become a page-turner for me. It focused mostly on solving a murder mystery and introducing players and hinting at something more long-term, so I'll have to pick up the sequels, but... I really enjoyed it. Good characters, good dialogue.
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Jan 7, 2018 14:55
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Just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. An intricately detailed love letter to the Golden Age of comic books that balances the need for pop culture escapism with the harsh limits of escapism's ability to actually change the world. I like the characters, the use of real history, and even the goofy addendum in my copy where one of the characters, as an old man, has a chance meeting with a precocious young Brian K. Vaughan and turns Vaughan on to comics. Highly recommended.lifts cats over head posted:Just finished Ready Player One and loved it. I probably should have listened to the countless recommendations from others. Is Cline's other book Armada any good? I feel like there's a real one-hit-wonder vibe with RPO. You feel correctly.
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Jan 7, 2018 23:11
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Nine Princes in Amber - good pulpy fun up until it turned into a lighter but no less brutal version of the Chain of Dogs from Malazan. Then it was...well-written but frustrating, not fun to read at all. Fortunately the prison sequence was real good, and I'm down for the next book.
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Jan 11, 2018 00:48
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Old Man's War, don't know how I missed this one during my readings of Forever War and Armor, but I really enjoyed this one and looking forward to the rest of the series. Starting on Revenge by Alastair Reynolds.
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Jan 11, 2018 17:40
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Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that in the West at least, we tend to look for clear culpability and victims or heroes in times of crisis and tragedy. We as a society seem uncomfortable with moral ambiguity and circumstances where every active player is guilty of horrors. We like having a good guy to root for, and a bad guy to cheer about when they're handed their just desserts. In American history classes below the college level, WW2 has been adapted into this style of narrative for decades. America good, Germany and Japan bad, occasional guest appearances by the British and French as other good guys. World-shaping powers like the Soviet Union tend to be glossed over, or excised completely. Far less players in the war whose lives and actions had little impact in America, like China. The truth about China in WW2, which began there years before panzers rolled into Poland, does not fit that sort of narrative. Coming away from this book, the only people I felt unambiguously sorry for were the Chinese peasants. Every player in China in the first half of the twentieth century had unclean hands. The Nationalist government. The CCP. The warlords. The collaborationist state. The Japanese. The British. The Americans. The Russians. All of them did good, even great and heroic things. All of them did awful things, even if their actions didn't directly produce thousands of dead people in China. All of them had reasons for what they did, in their own minds even sound and rational reasons. None of the leaders of these groups acted with wanton malice. Not Chiang Kai-Shek, not Mao Zedong, not the Guangxi Clique, not Wang Jingwei, not Prime Minister Tojo, not Winston Churchill, not Franklin Roosevelt, not Iosef Stalin. But people died by the thousands because of what these men decided all the same. In my opinion, this book does a terrific job of explaining a major part of WW2 that's largely unknown in the West. This knowledge is not comforting, and does not make me feel better about my country's actions or indeed those of anyone but the Chinese peasants and commoners who feature in this book mainly to die by the tens of thousands. If you'd like to learn about China in WW2 - which began for China in the 1930s, not the 1940s - then I can give this book a solid recommendation. If you'd like to be depressed, well, this will do it for you.
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Jan 12, 2018 22:48
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Voices from Chernobyl I shouldn't have read this all in one shot.
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Jan 13, 2018 00:53
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StrixNebulosa posted:Voices from Chernobyl I love her style but that is an extremely rough book. There are a few scenes that literally gave me nightmares.
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Jan 13, 2018 22:57
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Nick of Time posted:I love her style but that is an extremely rough book. There are a few scenes that literally gave me nightmares. There was one statement - paraphrased it went like this: "I went to the Zone. When I got back I burned all of my clothes except for my cap. My boy begged for it and he wore it everywhere. Two years later he had a tumor in the brain. I don't want to talk anymore." and I just
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Jan 13, 2018 23:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:Voices from Chernobyl I've been reading Boys in Zinc for three months now and I'm only halfway through. I can manage one story at a time then need a couple of days break.
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Jan 13, 2018 23:51
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peanut- posted:I've been reading Boys in Zinc for three months now and I'm only halfway through. I can manage one story at a time then need a couple of days break.  She wrote more!? How? How do you stare into the face of horror and keep recording it? For not just one but two separate disasters? Is she...okay? I feel like I want to find and hug this author. edit: I went and looked up her wikipedia article and - "If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialog of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet–Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions – Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man." What an incredible woman. StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jan 14, 2018 |
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Jan 14, 2018 00:05
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Bluebeard by Vonnegut. It was wonderful.
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Jan 16, 2018 01:52
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The Road - Cormac McCarthy You guys have talked about this one before. I can't tread new ground in terms of insight. It's so, so, so, so good and sad and brutal and powerful. Ancillary Sword - Ann Leckie The second in the Imperial Radch trilogy that was all the hot-hype-game-changer from a couple years ago. I was taken with the first novel for the most part. Something pretty original with a good hook or two, but it failed to really, really grab me. The second book is unreadable trash. Repetitive in a frustrating way (unlike The Road, which uses repetition to its advantage) and completely inert. Boring characters in a boring setting giving boring exposition. I won't be finishing the series.
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Jan 16, 2018 17:12
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A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole What a loving book. I can't say anything about it that hasn't been said before. Re-reading the foreword and learning about Toole's life and the road to this book's publication makes it so much more meaningful to me. I think of how much more literature was robbed from the world on his death, thanks to some opinionated editors and a bit of mental illness. If he hadn't died I could easily see Toole mentioned alongside Faulkner and Pynchon when listing the great American novelists. What a loving book.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:05
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole I just started this book for the first time after having finished reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time ever.
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Jan 17, 2018 00:29
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I just finished The Way of Kings after being badgered by various friends to give Brandon Sanderson a shot for literal years. I liked it quite a bit! The various viewpoint characters were compelling and likable in their own ways, and the author has a knack for knowing just when to cut from a certain scene or character just when you are desperate to see more, and then cut again to a different scene once you are fully invested in the new one. In this way it reminds me of Homestuck It did an excellent job of keeping me engaged and I ripped through it in just 2 days. I am quite excited to read more, though hearing big talks of a 10 part series makes me worried and hearing that said 10 part series is part of an even larger story and world makes me 
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Jan 17, 2018 07:30
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Sanderson is fun - I'm reading Oathbringer now and it's good so far. FYI there is an interconnected universe thing but it's by no means essential to enjoying any of the individual books/series (so far). He's talked about doing some interconnected books, but so far you're fine not even thinking about it unless you make the connections yourself. Obviously some things (thinking of something at the end of the second Stormlight book) that will probably make a much bigger impact if you've read the other books, but it's not like it doesn't work on its own.
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Jan 17, 2018 09:21
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I'm aware of the broad outlines of the Cosmere stuff. I'll probably just follow this series for now and branch out if I get the itch.
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Jan 17, 2018 22:57
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Pump Six and Other Stories - Paolo Bacigalupi I think that Paolo Bacigalupi is the one of the most underrated sci-fi authors working today, constantly working with very real things like water shortages, GMOs, and unrest in Asian countries to create some truly compelling dystopias. He's not exactly subtle with what he's trying to say, but I like his settings, characters, plotting, and emotional hooks enough to kind of ignore that aspect of things. This early collection of his works is excellent. One of the stories - the one that isn't science fiction, and feels like a weird outlier - is the only one that isn't great, but it's also the shortest of all the stories. "The Fluted Girl", "Pasho", and "Yellow Card Man" were all strong stand outs, and I'd most definitely recommend seeking them out.
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Jan 18, 2018 13:48
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Mahlertov Cocktail posted:Sanderson is fun - I'm reading Oathbringer now and it's good so far. FYI there is an interconnected universe thing but it's by no means essential to enjoying any of the individual books/series (so far). He's talked about doing some interconnected books, but so far you're fine not even thinking about it unless you make the connections yourself. Obviously some things (thinking of something at the end of the second Stormlight book) that will probably make a much bigger impact if you've read the other books, but it's not like it doesn't work on its own. I'm about 2/3 into Oathbringer as well. Remind me what you're referring to at the end of Words of Radiance that connect to his other works (spoiler tagged, obviously). Mind you, I've only read the Mistborn Trilogy, so if it's connected to Elantris or his other ones then I wouldn't have gotten it.
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Jan 19, 2018 04:41
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Ayem posted:I'm about 2/3 into Oathbringer as well. Remind me what you're referring to at the end of Words of Radiance that connect to his other works (spoiler tagged, obviously). Mind you, I've only read the Mistborn Trilogy, so if it's connected to Elantris or his other ones then I wouldn't have gotten it. It's related to (book title) Warbreaker. Full spoiler: The sword that Szeth gets is Nightblood.
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Jan 19, 2018 08:52
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The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin poo poo was tight. Very fun read. I'll get around to the next two books eventually, I don't feel like doing the whole trilogy thing right now.
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Jan 19, 2018 12:27
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Finished Fire and Fury. It's an interesting read regardless of what political views you might have. It's irritating in parts because the author really overdoes adjectives to the point where it seems like he's just pulling random unnecessary words out of a thesaurus. He also goes on some opinion-based, inferential tangents that probably could have been cut from the book entirely. Still not a bad read overall.
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Jan 22, 2018 18:29
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Rolo posted:I just now finished The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’m still in shock from the last 30 or so pages. I just got through Notes from Underground and some other short stories that were included. The Double was really boring, and I'm a huge Dostoevsky fan so it pains me to say that. White Nights was good. Dreams of a Ridiculous Man was good. The first section of Notes from Underground is fantastic, but it loses a bit of its punch when it gets into the narrative section of the next few chapters. If you liked Crime and Punishment (my fave), then you'll like Brothers.
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Jan 22, 2018 18:34
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon Oh hell yeah this was loving good. My first Chabon was Gentlemen of the Road so I was really surprised by the contrast in writing styles; the man's definitely got a strong handle on the craft.
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Jan 23, 2018 01:43
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I just finished Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David, who's done a few novels for Star Trek and also Babylon 5. It's essentially the story of when the sidekick in a tale of heroic fantasy gets pissed off at how awesome the Chosen Hero of Destiny is, hits them on the head with a rock, and takes their place. Which turns out to have some unfortunate consequences. I did enjoy the book, even though the protagonist is an anti-hero who can be a tremendous rear end in a top hat, but I'm not sure about looking for the others in the series. There was a sample of the next book in the series: Woad to Wuin at the end, but it did kinda put me off, because there was a pretty heavy-handed LotR satire, except that the "One Ring" is actually a cock ring which he cannot remove, and he quickly discovers that it ensorcells women nearby into screwing the hero, even though the hero does not want to.  That's MORE than a little creepy, and it seems like the quest is to take it back to the Flaming Nether Regions to destroy it. That plot point looks like it'll last the whole book, and I'm not really interested in the spoilered part being repeated throughout that book.
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Jan 23, 2018 02:04
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