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Just finished Papillion by Charrière (translated). I've seen the McQueen movie but not the recent remake. I really liked it. Understand though it's told as an autobiography very little of it is actually true (or rather, happened to Charrière). But it captures the time and place extremely well, and the story is really good as long as you accept that the he makes himself out to be quite the Mary Sue, though extremely forgivable since his writing is very charismatic. Its more Gulliver's travels or the Odyssey than a faithful account. Despite my caveats, I recommend it! It's nothing like the 1973 movie and I'd guess nothing like the more recent one either, so you're not spoiled for anything. It's fairly long but easy to read and the translation I read was excellent.
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Apr 20, 2019 02:17
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TerryCheesecake posted:I think he's said the next two books are the same story told from someone else's point of view. Oh that's rad, I like that very much. Tracker's story feels well wrapped up by the end so I'm glad to hear this is his plan. I wonder which characters? Sogolon? The Aesi? Will be interesting if he keeps the dual characters as the focus - King Sister, Moon Witch or something.
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Apr 20, 2019 02:56
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areyoucontagious posted:Wow, aggressive much? I too had problems with this book- I thought it dragged a fair bit but maybe it’s because I’m just not educated enough, huh? that post was written humorously but not particularly rudely, and i didn't insult anyone's education in it.
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Apr 20, 2019 03:46
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A human heart posted:that post was written humorously but not particularly rudely, and i didn't insult anyone's education in it. I have absolutely no horse in this race but I read your post as pretty rude and not particularly funny. You may come across online very differently than you perceive yourself.
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Apr 20, 2019 05:07
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I used to hate AHH's schtick of being an inhumanly snide dickhead, but now I love it and think it's the funniest thing ever.
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Apr 20, 2019 15:42
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I used to hate AHH's schtick of being an inhumanly snide dickhead, but now I love it and think it's the funniest thing ever. An Inhuman Heart: a Gnostic Reading of the Posting History of SA Forums Poster A Human Heart
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Apr 20, 2019 17:20
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It's the Lum avatar that really puts their posting over the top for me.
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Apr 20, 2019 17:28
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many congratulations to a human heart for winning over the posters of The Book Barn
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Apr 20, 2019 22:34
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CestMoi posted:many congratulations to a human heart for winning over the posters of The Book Barn it's been a long journey and i couldn't have done it without all my fans
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Apr 21, 2019 01:05
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A human heart posted:it's been a long journey and i couldn't have done it without all my fans
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Apr 22, 2019 03:12
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only kindness can defeat the war
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Apr 22, 2019 03:12
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my bony fealty posted:Finished Black Leopard, Red Wolf yesterday... TerryCheesecake posted:I think he's said the next two books are the same story told from someone else's point of view. imho the experience of reading the novel is 100x different when you know that future books will be from other characters' POV. Three books of Tracker would be unbearable. Really, really hoping that the next book follows Sogolon; she's super interesting, has clearly defined motives, and a lot of potential for interesting character stuff, but in Black Leopard she's largely written off as "just an old witch" by Tracker.
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Apr 22, 2019 15:50
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areyoucontagious posted:I thought it dragged a fair bit but maybe it’s because I’m just not educated enough, huh? probably yeah
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Apr 22, 2019 21:31
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After finishing (a Finnish translation of) Simenon's "Le testament Donadieu" I have to wonder if any of his non-Maigret work is even decent, let alone good? I guess it's a bit unfair seeing as my take is based on three novels out of hundreds he wrote. Still two more to go and I'm kind of dreading them. (Oh yeah it's a story about the fall of a seemingly-great house and it's hell of boring because, despite having a goodly amount of poo poo happening, everything is just so loving psychological that it makes me sick. The extremely french dialogue doesn't help. I kept getting a "what if Maugham but worse" vibe while reading.)
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Apr 22, 2019 23:02
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Peter and Wendy by J.M Barrie The last chapter is insanely depressing when read as an adult. It is a classic, nonetheless.
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Apr 28, 2019 15:52
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North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud Beautifully written collection of short stories about believable, frequently repulsive, people who come into contact with elements of horror, and what that does to their minds. Huge emotional impact in a lot of these stories, but all extremely well done and stick with you well after you finish them.
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Apr 28, 2019 17:28
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Golden State by Ben Winters A noir detective story with a genre twist: it's set in a dystopian vision of the future, and while the protagonist is certainly hardboiled he's an officer of a government agency charged with upholding the objective truth at all costs. Definitely a book with a message, and that message is to ask yourself what the truth is. Actually a pretty enjoyable detective story, I feel the book's climax is the weakest part of the book where Winters drops the hardboiled detective story to engage fully with the sci-fi dystopia plot. Generally not a good sign for me when a detective mystery has a very predictable ending. If, Then by Kate Day This book is part of what you might call suburban fantasy: a quiet, pleasant suburban town filled with quiet, pleasant people living quiet, pleasant lives suddenly starts to encounter supernatural phenomena that reveal to the protagonists how their lives weren't as quiet and pleasant as they thought. I want to like this book, it strikes a good atmosphere early on and the mystery is intriguing: people start seeing visions of alternate versions of reality - both of themselves and others. The book clearly wants to be about the importance of our choices in life, but most of the characters are shallow and I found the ending unsatisfying. This is the author's first book, and I certainly see promise in her writing if she continues and improves. The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead A mediocre techno-thriller filled with one-dimensional characters and a poorly explained central plot device you've seen done better.
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Apr 28, 2019 22:39
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Bilirubin posted:North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud Thanks for posting about this, I’d never heard of it before but this caught my interest and the free part I could download to Kindle really grabbed me so I think this will be my next read. I just burned through Joe Hill’s Horns in more or less one sitting today so I guess that’s the kind of thing I’m in the mood for lately.
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Apr 29, 2019 02:15
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TFTO To have and have not by Hemingway. Originally two novellas expanded with a third part to make a novel it changes tack pretty markedly at one point but instead of veering from the central theme of eat the rich the third part just expounds on it. Pretty powerful stuff; I wish I'd read this first instead of Farewell to Arms. Of course the main character is an American macho bastard but I don't know if Hemingway knew how to write any other way? The first two parts work(ed) really well as separate stories, too.
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Apr 29, 2019 03:28
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Read LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking. It was pretty good, David Bowie appeared on page 41, and somethingawful's Brown Moses appeared on page 72.
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Apr 29, 2019 23:46
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Bilirubin posted:North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud Great recommendation. Read the first story and it was so upsetting I put it down for the rest of the night. Definitely a slow burn. I'm not sure what was more upsetting; that she abandoned her kid at a rest stop or that she let's her 3 year old drink Coca Cola. Perhaps it's for the best Sock The Great fucked around with this message at 13:10 on May 3, 2019 |
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May 3, 2019 12:45
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Sock The Great posted:Great recommendation. Read the first story and it was so upsetting I put it down for the rest of the night. Definitely a slow burn. Yeah, that one stuck with me for days afterward. I just finished “The Monsters of Heaven” before bed last night and I think that one will too, although it was more unsettling than viscerally upsetting. So far this is a really great book that I wouldn’t have heard of without this thread.
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May 3, 2019 16:16
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Chuck Buried Treasure posted:Yeah, that one stuck with me for days afterward. I just finished “The Monsters of Heaven” before bed last night and I think that one will too, although it was more unsettling than viscerally upsetting. So far this is a really great book that I wouldn’t have heard of without this thread. I'm delighted that so many folks are now enjoying this book!
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May 3, 2019 21:31
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Bilirubin posted:I'm delighted that so many folks are now enjoying this book! I got it too, I’m very excited but I’m reading the latest Charlie Jane Anders first.
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May 3, 2019 21:43
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ballingrud Good
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May 4, 2019 00:33
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Just finished Pontypool Changes Everything. Pretty good movie; awful book. The afterword of the edition I read (issued about 10 years after the original) included an apology from the author for ever publishing it, so that was pretty funny.
UnbearablyBlight fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 4, 2019 |
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May 4, 2019 00:42
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Last month's BOTM, The Doorbell Rang. It was my first Nero Wolfe, and won't be my last. Wolfe is such an enjoyable prick.
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May 4, 2019 02:14
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Robot Wendigo posted:Last month's BOTM, The Doorbell Rang. It was my first Nero Wolfe, and won't be my last. Wolfe is such an enjoyable prick. They're the perfect blend of the eccentric genius detective fiction and A.A.Fair style boiled detective fiction genres.
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May 4, 2019 09:18
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Cross posting this to the Scifi/fantasy thread + recently read thread. Finished reading L.F. Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. And it was very intense, dark, hosed up, funny, and readable in controlled dosages. JttEotN is the thinly fictionalized misadventures of a misfit in a World War 1 to pre World War 2 world, with plenty of colonialism, PTSD, and antiwar sentiment bundled into it. JttEotN manages to be bleaker than Glen Cook's Black Company books while predating Jack Vance's multitudes of baseline human veniality.
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May 4, 2019 13:41
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Just finished a "Signet Double Mystery" of Wife or Death and The Golden Goose and it and they are completely forgettable in and of themselves but it's weird how important a name is/was in crime fiction. Neither of the novels were written by Ellery Queen (a NÄM DE PLYM anyway), nor do they feature Ellery Queen, but were billed as his works. The style of the two novels - originally published one year apart - is so different that I doubt anyone would have thought they were written by the same person(s). It's like when Evan Hunter (an assumed name) published crime novels under a pseudonym, and then they were later published under another pseudonym - Ed McBain - because that was much better-known than Hunter.
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May 4, 2019 16:35
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I finished Magic: The Gathering- Planeshift on Thursday. I've been working on collecting the novels and had a lucky score at a charity book sale last week, so I got the bulk of the novels I was missing. Is there not a thread around that series?
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May 5, 2019 15:11
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there thankfully is not
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May 5, 2019 15:25
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Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. While I really enjoyed this book, the ending gave me some extremely mixed feelings - mostly because of how abstracted it was by the end. The author took the long view and explained things, and I didn't get the inner, emotional view that I needed for closure. But drat if the spiders weren't magnificent the whole way through.
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May 5, 2019 16:29
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I just finished Sefira and Other Betrayals by John Langan. Much like other literary horror, this book was filled with beautiful prose and generally good foundations for the stories. Some stories were better than others, of course. I won't spoil them, but my favorites were the titular story Sefira; a story called In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos which was very reminiscent of some of Laird Barron's fiction; a story called Bloom, where the ending squicked me out really bad (in a good way); and a story called At Home in the House of the Devil which was a fantastic take on the mythos of the Christian Devil. All in all a solid set of fiction, although I think it missed the heights of dread and awe that The Fisherman inspired in me.
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May 6, 2019 04:44
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what makes john langan 'literary'
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May 6, 2019 05:32
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Edit: that’s just my opinion. Agree or don’t I don’t give a gently caress sephiRoth IRA fucked around with this message at 06:52 on May 6, 2019 |
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May 6, 2019 06:47
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chernobyl kinsman posted:what makes john langan 'literary' Writes books. That's pretty dang literary, literally.
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May 6, 2019 07:33
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areyoucontagious posted:Edit: that’s just my opinion. Agree or don’t I don’t give a gently caress oh come on don't be like that
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May 6, 2019 15:26
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Oh we're in this thread, so Babel-17/Empire Star by Samuel Delany Two well-written scifi stories bound together (Empire Star gets a mention in Babel-17). Babel-17 is about a strange language that is detected before acts of terrorism, and is thought to be related to a war with the mysterious "Invaders". A poet (and all around perfect human being, which was a turn off for me) who just happens to be brilliant and, oh, a licensed starship captain (all around perfect) is drafted to figure it out. Lots of discussion of how language can shape perception in this work, and Delany creates an interesting world. Just wish the protagonist was a little less perfect. Empire Star is a short coming of age story that explores complexity of thought in a progressive revealed, intertwining plot that involves...but that would be telling. A much more enjoyable romp for me.
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May 6, 2019 15:31
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 I just looked up what "literary" means in this context and I'm loving glad I live in a civilized culture where we don't have an equivalent word or concept.e: Not that I actually found any reasonable definition for it apart from "books I think are really good".
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May 6, 2019 15:32
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