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graventy posted:I thought Goblin Emperor was kind of similar. You are hilarious!
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May 13, 2018 20:01
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Megazver posted:You are hilarious! Wait, why? They were both fantasies that focused pretty heavily on political intrigue and trickery.
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May 14, 2018 02:09
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Nikita Khrushchev posted:I just finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. I was utterly glued to it. Does anyone have recs for something similar? Ask him yourself, he's a Goon and posts regularly in the SF&F book thread.
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May 14, 2018 16:08
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Goblin Emperor bored me to tears. It might have been that I was listening to the audio book. The constant repetition of court titles and circumlocuitous dialog is something you can skim in text form, but is really tedious when read aloud.
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May 14, 2018 17:21
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Jedit posted:Ask him yourself, he's a Goon and posts regularly in the SF&F book thread. Oh, nice!
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May 14, 2018 17:23
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"And Then There Were (N-One)" by Sarah Pinsker. Pinsker wrote my favorite novelette, but this is something entirely different. The idea is that an alternate-universe version of Pinsker attends a conference full of Pinskers from other universes, and then a murder happens and she has to solve it. I wasn't on board with this premise at first; the humor was mom-jokey and I didn't see the point in self-inserting yourself a bajillion times. They talk about what I expected them to talk about, which is figuring out how their lives turned out and how they could have been different. One Pinsker says her girlfriend thought the conference was an exercise in narcissism, and despite a game attempt N-One doesn't quite shake off that presupposed accusation. Another question on my mind was whether this would be a weak retread of some other multiple-universe-different-timeline story, the one on my mind being the "Rixty Minutes" episode of Rick and Morty. I'd say that if nothing else, N-One stands out enough to validate its own existence, though it only becomes apparent with the solution to the mystery. The idea of trading lives with a different version of the same person, willingly or not, is something I haven't seen before, which made me much more interesting in the story coming out than I was getting started. I didn't even mind the open-ended non-ending, since it dovetailed with themes brought up earlier. Even though the motive makes a lot of sense, I'm not sure if this is a fair play mystery. That would require rereading the story and keeping an eye out for clues to see if I could have caught them before. I think it's either one clue or considering motive and personality that makes the different. Sadly, I'm not great at that, and the story wasn't so interesting that I want to read it again right now, especially since I've got so much more to get through. Library deadlines are a pain.
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May 15, 2018 01:41
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D Day Through German Eyes Vol 1 and 2 - Holger Eckhertz quote:'D Day Through German Eyes' presents the transcripts of interviews which my grandfather carried out with German veterans in 1954, on the tenth anniversary of D Day. These were German soldiers, engineers and Luftwaffe men who had experienced the opening hours of the Normandy beach landings, and were able to recall those cataclysmic events in detail. They started out great but as becomes apparent to the reader and a bit of research will show; both books are completely fictional. There's no record of the author "Holger Eckhertz" besides these books. Likewise the person doing the interview does so from a clearly modern day perspective. The interviewer (Dieter Eckhertz) supposedly a WW1 veteran and government propaganda reporter struggles with German culture of the time and the whole interview is also very sanitized for modern day readers. The stories also tend to devolve into unnecessary war porn. Book 2 was a lot more interesting than book 1 but they are still both fictional.
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May 17, 2018 09:41
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Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I've been meaning to get around to this one for years now, since it sounds like the sort of dreamlike, high-concept oddity that I'd love, and it ended up meeting those expectations. Using a framing device of Marco Polo describing his travels to Kublai Khan, which eventually turns into a debate about the truthfulness of Polo's accounts, Calvino presents brief descriptions of fifty-five fictional cities sorted by eleven general themes. A lot of it is an idea showcase presenting out-there stuff like a city that's so spread out it's impossible to tell when you've left the outskirts, or a city with an underground replica of it where they pose their dead. I'm sure there's a greater point being made in the book about the way humans think about cities or places in general, though I was in such a hurry reading the book that I'm not sure what that point is yet. I can reread it later, since it's a short book and I found a PDF of it online. It'll probably be one of my favorite books going forward and I recommend it to everyone who's interested in the idea behind it.
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May 20, 2018 15:48
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Finished Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch, also known by it's far better title of Rivers of London. I should have read this far sooner than I did, since I loved Aaronovitch's Battlefield back during the McCoy era of Doctor Who--even though it was made with a budget of about three bucks, his melding of the show's mythology with Arthurian lore was...well, it was courageous. His The Also People was also one of the best Who novels in the Virgin line. So it was no surprise that I enjoyed this book very much. It's the story of a police constable joining the magic section of the London Metropolitan Police, and his first case on the job. There's magic, London folklore, and a witty lead character, so it pretty much hit all my buttons.
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May 21, 2018 00:50
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New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is my first exposure to KSR, and at times I felt overwhelmed and underwhelmed by what I read. It's a story about the future, where global warming has made the sea level rise, most of New York City is flooded, people have adapted, and now the capitalists are circling like vultures. I love the sentiment behind it, that eventually there'll come a breaking point where enough people can find the way and the will to change the world for the better, and the setting descriptions of what it's like to live in the new canals of NYC are vivid enough that I can easily imagine myself there. However, even as I finished reading it, I already started to forget details of what happened earlier in the book. The ultimate means by which the people wrest some control back from capitalism feels disconnected from the skulduggery circling the edges of the Met Life co-op at the beginning of the story, and the former makes the latter small potatoes, easy to sweep aside in context. There's also the matter of the characters through which we see these events, none of whom are fundamentally flawed in their conception and execution, but whose lives feel small in the wake of the anti-capitalist thesis the entire book is built around. This is at least partially by design; even though most of these people played a key role in starting a political movement, it's mentioned that their efforts are mirrored in many other flooded, coastal cities and the Great Man theory of history is placed on equal footing with the masses of anonymous people that make further progress possible. The character that sticks out most is Franklin, a colossal tool whose character arc involves realizing that there's more to life than day trading and the bullshit abstraction of liquid finance. Given the hyperfocused passion he has for the kind of finances that have helped gently caress the planet and the poor multiple times by now, it seems odd to me that he goes along with his neighbors' plans to wound capitalism at its core. He isn't intolerable, though, and I enjoyed shaking my head at his lack of social graces. I also liked the segments about treasure-hunting with a pair of enterprising orphans and relocating an endangered species over the world with a cloud celebrity, which gives variety to the story despite their tangential relevance to everything else. Lastly, there are segments labeled as the POV of an anonymous citizen that are really just KSR directly lecturing the audience about the way the world is. I fundamentally agree with pretty much everything in these segments, but they're still overly numerous and in your face. I understand and sympathize with why he felt the need to be this direct on this subject, but if you remove half of these chapters it's still very easy to determine the thesis behind New York 2140. I wouldn't be opposed to reading KSR again; I'm not expecting him to write anything centered on characters or anything except macro trends like climate change, terraforming or interstellar colonization, but I do hope that the other shortcomings of this book aren't habits he's developed over his whole career.
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May 22, 2018 14:57
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That book is a very weak representation in my opinion. I actually stopped reading it because I just couldn’t care about those people. Most of his work is very character-focused. Of what I’ve read, I’d rank them like this: 1. The Years of Rice and Salt: alternate history with a reincarnation framing device where the plague kills 99% of Europe’s population instead of whatever it did kill. 2. Aurora: generation ship takes colonists to a new world where the ship itself is one of the main characters. 3. The Mars Trilogy: this is a distant third. It’s an epic story about terraforming and political philosophy on mars. It’s alright but I think there have been much better books with the same themes. 3. 2312: ugh, I can’t stand these characters or their stupid bougie space struggles. 4. New York 2140
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May 22, 2018 15:28
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Solitair posted:Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. it's one city - venice
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May 22, 2018 15:30
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Kim Stanley Robinson struggles to make his prose do basic things.
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May 22, 2018 15:40
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VileLL posted:it's one city - venice People say this all the time like it somehow explains even a single thing about Invisible Cities
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May 22, 2018 15:56
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CestMoi posted:People say this all the time like it somehow explains even a single thing about Invisible Cities Can you imagine missing the totality of a book like that
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May 22, 2018 17:52
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I just finished Embassytown by China Mieville. I had only read October before, so wasn't sure if I would enjoy his fiction. Embassytown had a steep learning curve for the first few pages, as it kind of hurls you into the midst of things with no explanations, but I was utterly engrossed. It's a great example of sci-fi at its best, dealing with imperialism, the strangeness of the unknown, and peculiarities of our own milieu. I wish there was a sequel or expanded universe.
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May 22, 2018 18:00
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CestMoi posted:People say this all the time like it somehow explains even a single thing about Invisible Cities i came away from it pretty sure i was missing ~something~ (maybe this is intentional?), but imo it's pretty clear that the structure is Marco Polo trying to explain to Kublai Khan just what makes up Venice's character, with the different cities from his stories each embodying different aspects of Venice, reflecting on the difficulty/ impossibility of accurately describing a place's intrinsic characteristics
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May 22, 2018 23:39
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Went on a bit of a Camus kick recently. After reading a couple of his short articles from that French Resistance newspaper he was part of I tackled the Myth of Sisyphus having lost some friends and family to suicide it was a bit of a hard read, and honestly there were parts of it that went over my head but the main parts were interesting. I then read Reflections on the Guillotine its a pretty thorough demolition of arguments for the death penalty in France but can be applied more generally. Some of the arguments were stronger than others, I didn't really find the comparison of alcohol very convincing, I got what he was getting at, that societal issues often create environments for crime to occur, and perfectly legal things have more severe tolls on society than the handful of serial murderers.
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May 23, 2018 03:54
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Finished Brimstone Angels by Erin Evans. It's a Dungeons and Dragons novel so my expectations were fairly low, but Evans clearly was trying to write outside the expectations of the genre. There was a focus on characters, even if it at times it read like an earnest YA novel. Still, it wasn't bad.
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May 27, 2018 20:39
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Kraken by China Mieville. A fun fantastical romp through mystical London, sort of John Constantine meets Sherlock Holmes. Sort of. Perfect summer reading if you enjoy urban fantasy with a touch of weird/horror elements sprinkled throughout. And some humorous takes on geek culture
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May 28, 2018 00:59
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Also finished Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black by belle hooks. Took a while to get through even though written very plainly and accessibly. After Charlottesville I realized I probably needed to know more about the black perspective, especially after getting into a fight with some dumb Canadian spouting off about American race relations--like guy, grow up completely underwater in the poo poo before you start telling folks how it is. Anyway, its a really great read! She was intersectional before that was a word, so you get race, gender, AND class. It really struck me, as a working class kid, how much I identified with that part of the writing, which made understanding the other areas not as easily accessible to me as a white straight male more relatable. Highly recommended--its a slim little book, each essay is approximately 8 pages or so long but they pack a lot to ponder over. Its not a book you can really tear through. Next on this reading project is Ta-Nehisi Coates new essay collection.
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May 30, 2018 05:06
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Dantes Divine Comedy. For a comedy it wasn't very funny. It was also a bit preachy. It was okay though I kind of got lost in the story once he reaches heaven. I also like how it simultaneously describes the immense horrors that god visit on sinners but then goes into great detail about gods love and justice and light and forgiveness oh and then this guy gets eaten by burning snakes 24 hours a day for all eternity.
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May 30, 2018 19:47
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Pyromaniac Ida posted:Dantes Divine Comedy. how much of this post is a joke
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May 30, 2018 19:47
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chernobyl kinsman posted:how much of this post is a joke I'm working my way through a ton of old books with zero prior knowledge just for the spectacle and out of curiosity. Last week I did Canterbury tales which I really liked.
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May 30, 2018 20:09
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So... none of it was a joke Well, first, it's not a comedy. Uh, where to go from here...
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May 30, 2018 20:26
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Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor and The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin. The first Binti was a raw nerve of tension, panic and anxiety that had me on edge most of the time I was reading it. This one is less overtly stressful, but still no picnic. The title character is getting hurt from all sides and the closest thing to a friend she has is someone who tried to kill her once and doesn't regret it. It also ends on a cliffhanger; there's a possible way for Binti to find an identity and a stable situation, but not before she has to solve another crisis. I'll probably pick up the next book soon. Then there's The Stone Sky, which continues and pays off the main threads of The Obelisk Gate before it. While I like the additional context the new thread in The Stone Sky provides, and I was mostly satisfied with this one, I still think the first book is the best. The way The Fifth Season is structured made it feel different and fresh when I first read it, whereas the sequels felt more typical of the genre. There's also a reveal at the end that implies the reason why the book is in present tense and partially second-person, but it doesn't entirely fit for me unless I'm missing something. You know the drill: if you liked the first two you'll probably like this one as well.
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May 31, 2018 02:27
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I've finished a few books lately, the most recent of which was Blood On the Moon by James Ellroy. I'm familiar with his later work; this was one of his earlier novels and the first in a trilogy about an LAPD detective called Lloyd Hopkins. This is a novel that really wants and really tries to be Red Dragon. Ellroy admits as much in the foreword but I think it's too overwrought to manage it.
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May 31, 2018 10:38
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Pyromaniac Ida posted:I also like how it simultaneously describes the immense horrors that god visit on sinners but then goes into great detail about gods love and justice and light and forgiveness oh and then this guy gets eaten by burning snakes 24 hours a day for all eternity. I don't see the contradiction.
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May 31, 2018 10:50
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I just finished Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and I'm all hosed up about it. A gorgeous work. I read a lot of Asian diasporic literature but haven't read much Korean work, if any honestly, and it floored me.
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Jun 1, 2018 13:12
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Finished Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch in audio book form. I was sort of expecting not to like it since so many people say it is the worst of the three but I actually liked the change of pace and how it was more laid back and straight forward than the second. On the past section of the story I didn't care much for the play itself but I enjoyed the plot surrounding it and the character development. On the present side I wish the stakes had been a bit higher because nobody seems to care much for the outcome of the election. The big revelation about Locke's past was amusing but it also left me thinking "ok, so what?". At least it leaves a lot of aspects open to explore in future books (if they ever come out) in addition to all the things going on in the rest of the world. Michael Page's narration is top tier as always. 4/5
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Jun 1, 2018 15:41
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Chernabog posted:Finished Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch in audio book form. Yeah, I couldn't care about the revelations about Locke. It smacks of making your awesome character even awesomer and more tragic. I just want a cocksure thief who steals from dirtbags in an original and well-detailed fantasy land, and it's always more fun if the hero is an underdog. Also, the Sabetha drama about red headed girls wasn't believable to me, despite that being based on a real thing in our world.
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Jun 1, 2018 17:07
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Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire. This is a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway, which means that no matter which book you read first, it'll spoil the other. That put a damper on my mood reading this book; instead of going with the flow, I kept asking myself if I'm getting anything out of it that I couldn't infer with Every Heart, and the answer is not really. It has decent insights on the ways children are shaped by subpar parenting, but these observations are delivered by narration that's more intrusive than I wanted from it. The book being cute about the protagonists being named Jack and Jill didn't help matters, either. Even though I have a big problem with Every Heart's ending, I still feel that I got more out of it than Sticks and Bones.
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Jun 2, 2018 20:41
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Hull Zero Three is a weird, weird book. It's Greg Bear so you know it's going to be a little strange, but this book uses some standard sci-fi twists in rather creative ways. It's a short read, I read it start to finish in an evening, but by the end I enjoyed it well enough, it's just hard to say anything about the plot because of how heavily it relies on twists and mind screws. All in all, I think it's an alright read from the library. I've read all these ideas before, and read them in better stories. But for a four-hour read picked at random from the library, not bad. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 03:20
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The Glass of Dyskornis by Vicki Ann Heydron. Second in the Gandalara series. Not as good as the first, mostly because it's the rough middle sequence, between arcs - Ricardo's solved who stole the Ra'ira, he's found a place in this new world, etc. So this is in a sense the first book in the series, kind of - here it takes all the elements of the first book and proceeds, providing a new quest (so the reader doesn't have to read about Ricardo's peaceful life) and introducing new friends and foes. Tarani's the biggest new element, and an interesting character in her own right, once Ricardo gets over himself around her. A good, fast read, and it's good adventure fiction with a hefty dose of world-building, and I enjoyed it. Onwards to the third! - And then I'll have to buy the next omnibus, after that!
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Jun 4, 2018 19:13
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell I am a big fan of Mitchell's work and this one was no exception. I actually liked it better than Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. The story takes place is 19th century Japan during a period where the Shogunate has closed Japan to foreigners fearing the spread of christianity. The only exception is the trading post on the island of Dejima, where the Dutch East India Company is permitted to trade mercury and copper. The story is broken into three parts all revolving around Jacob De Zoet, a Dutch clerk. Part 1 focuses on Jacob getting involved in shafldy trading practices between the dutch and japanese. He eventually falls in love with a japanese midwife who in turn is in love with a japanese samurai serving as an interpreter between the japanese and dutch. Part 2 details a samurai's rescue of a kidnapped japanese nun from a secluded monestary that uses the nuns as concubines and then sacrifices their babies as a way of attaining immortality. Part 3 details the negotiation between the japanese and a british warship that shows up in the harbour and begins bombardment of the trading post as a way of taking the Dutch's place as the japanese trading partner. I thought the whole thing was fantastic and all the stories although seemingly unrelated are tied up nicely together.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:47
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Worm, motherfuckerrrrrrrrr
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Jun 7, 2018 18:42
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Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Random sci-fi book by an author I'd never heard of that turned out to be a pretty interesting read. It's the best kind of global disaster story, one where the disaster is (very well researched and explained) window dressing to a story about people and society, and how they respond to and change in times of crisis. Mother of Storms was written in the early 90s, and has a cyberpunk-ish view of the future that may have seemed far-fetched at the time but is now horrifyingly plausible. Well, maybe not the UN being a world superpower. One of the big things this story deals with an evolution of the internet that lets you tap into peoples' brains, seeing what they see, hearing what they think, feeling what they feel in real time. Hands up if anyone would be surprised that one of the main uses for this technology is porn, bringing all the intense unrealisms of existing porn to a whole new level - and it's relevant because one of the main characters is a porn star, who dwells heavily on the idea of performance versus reality, a stage persona versus who you really are, and what that means when the performance goes on inside your own head. More salacious than it needs to be for the story? Probably, but it's an interesting thought, and the book also dwells at great length on other implications of this technology, like how riots can become communicable diseases as people around the world tap into the thoughts and emotions of people in violent protests or how, ultimately, this technology can be used for good as the most powerful instrument of empathy ever devised. The book's inside cover compares this book to The Forge of God and Lucifer's Hammer, and I agree with the comparison. Not as good as those two, I think, but an interesting read all the same.
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Jun 7, 2018 21:56
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Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. This is a science fiction mystery revolving around a setting where people can grow clones for cheap and download their minds into them, becoming immortal. On a colony ship, the crew wakes up as fresh clones, finding their previous bodies murdered, with no memory of the voyage so far. What follows is a tense series of layered character reveals that does its job very well, aside from not giving mystery buffs a chance to figure things out with clues ahead of time. In the process, the novel touches on subjects like religious objections to widespread cloning, the ethical considerations of altering a clone's DNA or mental state, the legal distinction between people who have and haven't been cloned, and how clones view their extended lives differently. Overall, it's pretty good, though I doubt I'll strongly remember it a year from now.
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Jun 8, 2018 07:47
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Solitair posted:Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. I have an ARC of this and read maybe a third of it before setting it down and forgetting about it so thoroughly that I bought a copy... which I read about a third of before deciding I didn't care. The legal/ethical aspect was neat, but not enough to keep me interested in a bunch of characters I didn't like.
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Jun 8, 2018 12:31
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funkybottoms posted:I have an ARC of this and read maybe a third of it before setting it down and forgetting about it so thoroughly that I bought a copy... which I read about a third of before deciding I didn't care. The legal/ethical aspect was neat, but not enough to keep me interested in a bunch of characters I didn't like. That's understandable. I was wondering as I read if this was going to turn into a deep space version of The Hateful Eight.
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Jun 8, 2018 17:11
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