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I must've read a translation as a kid but anyway I just finished Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister I'd forgotten how wordy Chandler was compared to most writers of similar stories. It's still a quick read but it made me realize that I like hard-boiled prose more than I like hard-boiled characters.
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Mar 1, 2019 14:16
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Little Sister does have the "You're not human tonight, Marlowe" chapter which is some of my favorite Chandler.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:11
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Ben Nevis posted:Little Sister does have the "You're not human tonight, Marlowe" chapter which is some of my favorite Chandler. Yeah it's definitely ace story-telling but after reading Chandler and Hammett and all that as a kid I spent a decade or two mostly reading hard-boiled "kiosk dicks" which tend to be around 130 pages. And the last Chandler I read recently was novellas which of course are economic with words by necessity. I enjoyed TLS but it was just a bit of a culture shock right in the nostalgias.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:21
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Franchescanado posted:Yeah, I'd say the historical accuracy in the Bible is questionable to say the least. Ya I read an anthology version abridged with illustration. So it doesn't have every bit from the bible but the most well known/important ones. It's like 700pages. Franchescanado posted:Or women seducing soldiers so they can drive tent spikes into their skulls? There are a lot of stuff like that and tbh I just read it as a comedy book. It is funnier that way. Jacob is probably one of the best characters, he loving wrestled with god despite not knowing it was God DESPITE being his prophet. He also tricked his father into inheriting the estate instead of his older brother, basically his whole life he kept loving people over but god kept taking his side. Also has anyone watched the movie Life of Brian by Monty Python. I could NOT stop thinking about that movie while reading this.
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Mar 1, 2019 18:01
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Ulio posted:Ya I read an anthology version abridged with illustration. So it doesn't have every bit from the bible but the most well known/important ones. It's like 700pages. are you doing a bit or is there something organically wrong with your brain some kind of heavy metal poisoning, maybe?
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Mar 1, 2019 18:37
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Ulio posted:Also has anyone watched the movie Life of Brian by Monty Python. I could NOT stop thinking about that movie while reading this. When I was taking the required religion class on the Bible in (Book of St. John the Divine specifically) in college I brought that move up and the teacher immediately threw the Peoples Front of Judea scene up on the screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 He said it was the best way to understand what was going on in Judea at the time.
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Mar 2, 2019 05:55
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pseudanonymous posted:When I was taking the required religion class on the Bible in (Book of St. John the Divine specifically) in college I brought that move up and the teacher immediately threw the Peoples Front of Judea scene up on the screen: Required... religion class? Can you describe this college please. 
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Mar 2, 2019 12:52
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a religion and/or philosophy requirement is common at most americam colleges e: it's not like sunday school, it's properly studying a given religion. i took Intro to Philosophy and The Hebrew Bible to fulfill my requirements, for example chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 17:59
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tuyop posted:Required... religion class? Can you describe this college please. It is a Catholic university, but being required to take a single religion class is pretty common. (https://www.seattleu.edu/) It's not a "religion is good" class. Which frankly imo is a good thing, whether you believe or not religion is such a driver in so many human lives it's worth studying it a bit. Although I wish I'd taken one that was comparative religion or something, 10 weeks on John and I basically learned about 5 things.
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Mar 2, 2019 21:42
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Blood Meridian. Holy hell, what a read! So much went on. Lovingly detailed descriptions of stunning landscapes in counterpoint to acts of utter human depravity. Part western, part Bergmann film; a powerful bit of writing e. been listening to old interviews with Harold Bloom on it since finishing and I'm looking forward to reading a few other books he compares with it favourably. Also lol what a blast from the past his attitude toward the academy is Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Mar 3, 2019 |
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Mar 3, 2019 06:16
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Bilirubin posted:Blood Meridian. Holy hell, what a read! So much went on. Lovingly detailed descriptions of stunning landscapes in counterpoint to acts of utter human depravity. Part western, part Bergmann film; a powerful bit of writing I read this a while back and I've never understood why it gets the praise it does. Along with 2666 by Bolano, I consider it to be the most overrated book I've read because it was recommended on here.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:16
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For me its the grand themes being addressed, the gorgeousness of the language, and the interplay between the worldly, highly educated judge and illiterate kid (and the rest of the gang). The ambiguity of what, exactly, the judge is. The complete deconstruction of a moral framework in the world. And the final 70 pages where you see the man go from sincere caring for an old woman left as the sole survivor of a raid on a pilgrim's caravan, only to discover she was a mummy long dead (the futility of sincerity in this world), to shooting a boy of the same age as he at the start of the book (symbolically both killing "himself" and negating the path he was set, as well as, I think, sealing his own fate in what is to come in Ft. Griffin). The final conversation between him and the judge was amazing. Knowing he was doomed he was still defiant, even though very much the creature described by the judge. And it ends both ambiguously, making it so much more powerful after all of the detailed descriptions of carnage, and pointedly with a loving dance macabre. Its with good reason, IMO, it is compared with Moby Dick.
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Mar 3, 2019 20:20
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"overrated" is a meaningless criticism. if you think it's bad, explain why
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Mar 3, 2019 20:21
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chernobyl kinsman posted:"overrated" is a meaningless criticism. if you think it's bad, explain why TommyGun85 posted:I tried reading 2666 and couldn't get past the first 2nd section. Can someone explain the appeal of this novel? Am I the only one who thinks its incredibly over rated. I get the themes and the sense of dread its going for, but it kinda just....sucks. Ras Het posted:Are you sure you "get the themes" of a thousand page novel of which you read the first 200 pages TommyGun85 posted:yes im sure, thank you for asking.
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Mar 3, 2019 20:54
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I saw a copy of 2666 in the publisher's bookstore and I think the main theme is wow that's a thick book it won't fit in my bag I'll buy something else instead.
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Mar 3, 2019 22:07
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chernobyl kinsman posted:"overrated" is a meaningless criticism. if you think it's bad, explain why This is some amazing loving hypocrisy coming from you.
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Mar 3, 2019 22:22
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Jerry Cotton posted:I saw a copy of 2666 in the publisher's bookstore and I think the main theme is wow that's a thick book it won't fit in my bag I'll buy something else instead. There's a detective novel aspect to it. Read it
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Mar 3, 2019 22:27
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pseudanonymous posted:This is some amazing loving hypocrisy coming from you. 
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Mar 3, 2019 22:58
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The Turn of the Screw. Then I read it's being adapted as the second season of The Haunting of Hill House tv show as "The Haunting of Bly Manor" and now I'm depressed. A very effective spooky story that relies on restraint and a potentially unreliable or mentally unwell narrator. Read The Aspern Papers right before and liked it a bit more, the escalating tension and weird stagnation of the house and repressed Mrs Tina were great. Narrator was a real weirdo.
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Mar 4, 2019 00:26
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The Warded Man / The Painted Man I really dug it at the start, and was fully onboard til about halfway through, when it devolves into self-insert wish fulfillment and has some extremely out-of-nowhere violent misogynism that is handled in the most embarrassingly crappy way. Really disappointed because the world and concept is super cool but oh my god do the characters become garbage v quickly
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Mar 4, 2019 00:39
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Bilirubin posted:Blood Meridian. Holy hell, what a read! So much went on. Lovingly detailed descriptions of stunning landscapes in counterpoint to acts of utter human depravity. Part western, part Bergmann film; a powerful bit of writing the av club has an old interview with harold bloom about it that you might be interested in
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Mar 4, 2019 05:20
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the av club has an old interview with harold bloom about it that you might be interested in Yeah I read that also watched the "How to Read" clip on it. The attempt to tie the book into kabbalistic gnosticism given one of the opening quotes seems a bit strained. If anything the judge would be a demiurge of oblivion, since he was erasing creation, rather than making flawed things Can't stop thinking about that book it was so good e. this essay expands on a lot of the things brought up in the AV interview Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Mar 4, 2019 |
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Mar 4, 2019 06:05
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chernobyl kinsman posted:"overrated" is a meaningless criticism. if you think it's bad, explain why sorry, to clarify, overrated doesnt mean bad. I just don't understand the acclaim it gets. Along with 2666 (which I did end up finishing), maybe the repetitive description of violence doesn't do it for me. Anyways, my intention wasnt to criticize, it was to question why it gets so much love.
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Mar 4, 2019 13:10
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TommyGun85 posted:sorry, to clarify, overrated doesnt mean bad. I just don't understand the acclaim it gets. Along with 2666 (which I did end up finishing), maybe the repetitive description of violence doesn't do it for me. Anyways, my intention wasnt to criticize, it was to question why it gets so much love. Because its really really good. The violence is a major point of the book too, so if that puts you off, you are in good company. Harold Bloom took three tries to finally get through the book for the same reason. Have you read it all the way through?
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Mar 4, 2019 19:25
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chernobyl kinsman posted:are you doing a bit or is there something organically wrong with your brain Well I just posted my opinion on the version I read which I found funny because it was impossible to read it seriously. Instead of using personal attacks maybe you can say what made you so angry to use personal attacks on someone on an internet board, like perhaps what was so wrong with that post. I am not going to stoop to your level and levy personal attacks on you but maybe in the future say what is wrong with the post so we can have a discussion.
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Mar 4, 2019 20:40
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Not the Messiah posted:The Warded Man / The Painted Man It has some big timeskips in it where the character totally changes into a different kind of person in the interim, and each time he's a more anime version.
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Mar 5, 2019 01:18
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Bilirubin posted:Yeah I read that also watched the "How to Read" clip on it. The attempt to tie the book into kabbalistic gnosticism given one of the opening quotes seems a bit strained. If anything the judge would be a demiurge of oblivion, since he was erasing creation, rather than making flawed things ...although I suppose he could be a demiurge wandering the creation of a higher order demiurge 
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Mar 5, 2019 05:25
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i think a solid gnostic reading would be that he's an archon, not the demiurge itself
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Mar 5, 2019 06:02
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i think a solid gnostic reading would be that he's an archon, not the demiurge itself I recall vaguely there being higher and lower orders of creation each with demiurges but checking online you would be correct. Think that I'm going to put The Origin of Satan next on my reading list after V., which is also very good so far.
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Mar 5, 2019 06:15
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i think a solid gnostic reading would be that he's an archon, not the demiurge itself Dude, I just found your link to the essay on gnosticism in Blood Meridian on jstor. Heading in 
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Mar 7, 2019 19:09
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ScottyJSno posted:Just finished book 2 - Lines of Departure And Book 3 is finished. Angles of Attack by Marko Kloos I`m out. It was ok, but I can`t take 3 more of these. He did answer the questions I had about the first book. If you love Military Fiction these book are just good enough. Bad Tom Clancy level for sure.
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Mar 8, 2019 06:34
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I just finished Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. I found it very enjoyable, well written, and even if I knew roughly how Theranos and Elisabeth Holmes fared, I still stayed up far too late to finish it. Are there any books written in a similar way that anyone can recommend?
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Mar 11, 2019 15:52
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The Island of the Day Before, a very Umberto Eco book, perhaps the most Eco of Eco books. Intertextuality hits you over the head more than in any of his others I've read, it's suspect if the frame narrative is valid at all. The unnamed "translator" (presumably but not surely Eco himself) could very well have made it all up. Packed with all the musings and digressions you could ever want about 17th century cosmology and magic medicine. The plot is a straightforward castaway story; how it unfolds is not. Learn all about the longitude problem and sympathetic medicine! The ostensible hero Roberto is a naive young man who is shaped by exposure to science, thought, and violence prior to the immediate plot - he's an Eco protagonist through and through. I enjoyed Roberto and his imagination; the best parts of the novel come near the end when he really lets it loose. Constantly wavered between sympathy for the poor fellow and thinking he is head-shakingly dumb, or at least prone to poor decisions. The book succeeds in communicating the mystery and wonder of the period's science and has excellent portrayals of the characters involved and for that I give it high marks. A great read if you're an Eco fan, not at all a good first one of his to try if you're not. Bonus for the cute reference to The Name of the Rose slipped in.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:46
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Sjonkel posted:I just finished Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. I found it very enjoyable, well written, and even if I knew roughly how Theranos and Elisabeth Holmes fared, I still stayed up far too late to finish it. Anything by Matt Tabbi, Michael Lewis, Jon Krakauer, Erik Larson. All of those guys right books in the vein of Bad Blood. Non fiction, edge of your seating reading. Can't recommend these guys enough.
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Mar 13, 2019 02:23
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e: Posted to recs thread.
The DPRK fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 17:35
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Finished a translation of Jeffrey Archer's First Among Equals last night and it was poo poo. It's incredibly dry, more like an over-grown synopsis than a novel. Long story short the posh Conservative is a mega-cuck and ends up ousted from his dad's old bank and decides to settle on being speaker, the born-into-the-wrong-party Labour dude can't control his dick but still does pretty OK and ends up deciding he wants to be with his wife even though she's ugly, and the less-posh-because-his-dad-was-only-a-loving-lawyer Conservative has a happy marriage and kids and king Charles III makes him prime minister wow. There's some other stuff too but basically that's the entire plot and story of the book. I don't know how this ended up a best seller - I guess it's an interesting peek into the inner workings of British politics but it's fairly superficial at that. For a novel about politics it has far too little intrigue.
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Mar 19, 2019 18:03
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How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Would do LSD or psilocybin if offered. Would turn down 5-meo-DMT.
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Mar 19, 2019 18:42
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The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson is a frustrating read that had me laughing at the end for all the wrong reasons. Much has been made about the wrong foot it gets off on, and its otherwise unimpressive prose, by my friend OnsetOutsider and others in the Genres Ablaze thread, but I was up for seeing a Rube Goldberg narrative with copious amounts of time travel unfold. Unfortunately, there's also the matter of the book's sense of humor; when it's trying for a laugh, it often comes off dad-jokey with a dash of "How do you do, fellow kids," especially early on. Once I got far enough into the book, I got the sense that after the huge bummer of Seveneves, he decided he wanted to emulate the fun tone of Snow Crash again but couldn't replicate it as easily this time. Thankfully, the book is an epistolary, so anyone bored of protagonist Melisande's narration can have their pick of superficially different writing styles if they press on long enough. My first real laughing fit came from the addition of a Skaldic poem depicting a gang of Vikings raiding a Walmart, at which point the weight of how stupid and cheesy the entire affair was came down on me like a ton of bricks. Then there's the ending. I've only read three Stephenson books so far, but his reputation for not sticking the landing is there for good reason. Snow Crash ends the moment the bad guy blows up, which is jarring but not a fatal flaw. Seveneves has an entire last third of the book which is a radical departure from everything that came before, too long to be a distant epilogue and too short and low-stakes to be a satisfying sequel, which I'd rather it had been than part of the same book as the rest of Seveneves. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. finds a whole new way to let us down. After every loose end aside from the main conflict that has torn up D.O.D.O. has been accounted for, the characters have a brief discussion about the ethics of going back in time to radically change the world, or to stop someone else from doing the same thing. Despite their ultimate disagreement, they decide that they'll protect the status quo they know anyway, make a plan of action... and then Melisande's narration says that they've been hard at work doing that ever since. The End. Assuming this isn't VLR-style sequel bait and Stephenson truly intends to end his story of witch-powered time travel here, I'm astounded at this man's audacity. To be fair, the discussion they have does bring up some interesting questions about this whole stupid affair, which up until that point I had little reason to take seriously. In talking over whether the current timeline where technology has made magic nearly impossible is "better," the characters bring up the long history of slavery, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, global warming, and the millions of lives saved by antibiotics. They don't bring up killing Hitler, because Stephenson's rules already establish that rapid, drastic changes like that can't work and they'd have to be more subtle and thorough to achieve the same effect, but if they did they'd probably come to the same non-conclusion. To top things off, circumstances in the last act of the book have left the protagonists in the debt of a powerful banking family whose only interest in time travel is the pursuit of money, which doesn't make me that eager to see the protagonists win. Once again, I come to the question of whether the author had a higher motive for getting in his own way. Did Stephenson intent to deny the reader their expected climax and instead throw a bunch of doubt on where our sympathies should lie, or was he just unable to find a way to resolve the big conflict he spent seven hundred pages setting up in one book and found a smart-rear end to avoid doing so at the last minute? Even if the former is true, the rest of the book is still pretty brainless on a thematic and prose level, so it's a little late to pretend otherwise at the 98% mark. What right does this book have to wait so long to get truly interesting? Again, if it turns out a sequel is in the works, feel free to disregard most of this, but right now I doubt that's the case. Ugh. Even though I would hesitate to recommend this book unironically, I have to admit that Stephenson's books have always fascinated me no matter how baffling and withholding they get. I have Quicksilver in reserve, and his bibliography is short enough that I could get through it in a reasonable amount of time. Right now, though, I'm gonna cleanse my palate with the new Becky Chambers book. Solitair fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Mar 20, 2019 |
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Mar 20, 2019 00:05
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Finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Excellent book. It's a little dense in it's reading as he doesn't do line breaks for dialogue, so it can be a bit hard to keep straight. But its very funny, smart and ended up in general a good balance of a book that easy to keep reading but still engaging and interesting. I recommend it as a great library ebook borrow.
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Mar 20, 2019 03:00
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Solitair posted:The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson Ew, Becky Chambers. But if you’re looking for some Stephenson that’s completely different, and mostly free of the flaws of his recent sci fi, check out Cryptonomicon or Reamde. The Diamond Age is also a fun, tight book though not completely different. And the whole Baroque Cycle is decent as well. I just realized that I’ve read entirely too much of this middling SF writer because I’m always fascinated by his weird flaws in structure.
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Mar 20, 2019 03:36
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