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C-Euro posted:Finally finished Don Quixote nearly two years after starting it. The first book was really boring but the second one was much more enjoyable. Shout-out to my new job that has me commuting by train, along with my self-conscious nature compelling me to read on said train instead of just playing my 3DS.  E: Oh, apparently it is complete. 3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Oct 7, 2019 |
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Oct 7, 2019 03:58
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Recently finished reading a non-fiction book about a internet criminal kingpin that reads like a bizzare scifi/milscifi book series given the various schemes and plans the internet kingpin had going on. But it was all real apparently, and why I'm cross-posting this recap-review to a few book barn threads. == A guy who created the online infrastructure and billing system for a unlicensed U.S. pill-mill (that he also created) made so much money he started hiring mercenaries to supply/guard/stay in the dozens+ of safe-houses he had filled up with gold bars and weapons. This escalated into the guy branching out into arms smuggling and of course drug smuggling along with lowest-bidder hit squads being sent out if the sums in the monthly (encrypted) budget expenditure (Excel spreadsheet) reports he required didn't add up. Toss in a stab at a legitimate business but make it a fishery specializing in rare fish stocks that was based in Somalia. Yes, Somalia (something about the decades of war + boat pirating allowing the depleted fish stocks along the Somalian coast to rebound and a fishery there being a fish-goldmine). Did I also mention that the guy gave his mercenary teams detailed load-outs of what weapons and gear they should bring on each mission, and where he thought they should setup defensive positions like he was playing Jagged Alliance 2? Or that he was the brains and funding behind two major open-source disk encryption projects that were NSA resistant. Or that the sex addiction documented throughout the book was really a scheme for getting Anchor Babies in every non-extradition treaty nation or limited extradition treaty nation in case he had to flee and needed that extra leverage to resist getting extradited to the U.S.A.? == Well, all that stuff is true and real. Book is The mastermind : drugs, empire, murder, betrayal by Evan Ratliff. And the two open-source disk encryption projects, in case anyone cares, were E4M and TrueCrypt.
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Oct 8, 2019 17:09
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quantumfoam posted:Recently finished reading a non-fiction book about a internet criminal kingpin that reads like a bizzare scifi/milscifi book series given the various schemes and plans the internet kingpin had going on. But it was all real apparently, and why I'm cross-posting this recap-review to a few book barn threads. There’s a great Reply All episode about this too!
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Oct 8, 2019 18:04
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tuyop posted:There’s a great Reply All episode about this too! That was a good interview/overview of the book. If anything, the book is more insane and covers way much more.
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Oct 9, 2019 06:13
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23 Tales by Leo Tolstoy. Loved it. These stories I particularly enjoyed and would highly recommend to anyone: God Sees the Truth, but Waits A Prisoner in the Caucasus (probably my favorite; was adapted into the film Prisoner of the Mountains which I would like to see) Two Old Men How Much Land Does a Man Need? The Godson Esarhaddon, King of Assyria Three Questions This is the only Tolstoy I've read and I'd like to read his more substantial works, but for now I'm going to finally explore Wittgenstein's non-Tractatus/PI/On Certainty stuff cuz I've read those like 3-4 times a piece and have been procrastinating on it for years now mycophobia fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 17:16
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mycophobia posted:23 Tales by Leo Tolstoy. Loved it. These stories I particularly enjoyed and would highly recommend to anyone: I haven’t read Tolstoy but I like short stories. Stab at the dark, would I like these if I’m very into Dostoevsky?
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Oct 9, 2019 17:27
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I've never read Dostoevsky, sorry.
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Oct 9, 2019 17:33
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Rolo posted:I haven’t read Tolstoy but I like short stories. Stab at the dark, would I like these if I’m very into Dostoevsky? Yeah, a lot of the classical Russian authors have a similar "feel" for lack of a better term.
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Oct 9, 2019 18:45
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COOL CORN posted:Yeah, a lot of the classical Russian authors have a similar "feel" for lack of a better term. Neat! I’ve been looking for a good short story collection to get into and I’d love to try Tolstoy without diving into a book the size of a shoebox.
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Oct 9, 2019 18:50
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Finished Breakfast of Champions on my ride into work this morning, my second Vonnegut after reading Slaughterhouse Five a couple years ago. I liked it, I'm sure it was edgier and more thought-provoking in the 70s before we were all terminally online but the message is still relevant. That plus the fact that it only took me three days to get through it has me feeling like I should pick up another Vonnegut sometime.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:09
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C-Euro posted:Finished Breakfast of Champions on my ride into work this morning, my second Vonnegut after reading Slaughterhouse Five a couple years ago. I liked it, I'm sure it was edgier and more thought-provoking in the 70s before we were all terminally online but the message is still relevant. That plus the fact that it only took me three days to get through it has me feeling like I should pick up another Vonnegut sometime. BoC is great, in my opinion (huge Vonnegut fan) but it’s more like a distilling of a lot of his messages across multiple books. If you want something more literary go with Cat’s Cradle. Player Piano, his first book, is also underrated and the farthest from Vonnegut’s “style,” which some people find tedious.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:28
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C-Euro posted:Finished Breakfast of Champions on my ride into work this morning, my second Vonnegut after reading Slaughterhouse Five a couple years ago. I liked it, I'm sure it was edgier and more thought-provoking in the 70s before we were all terminally online but the message is still relevant. That plus the fact that it only took me three days to get through it has me feeling like I should pick up another Vonnegut sometime. I feel like Mother Night is a bit of a must these days.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:13
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I'm in the middle of Breakfast of Champions and this reminded me I need to get back to it.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:16
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Ben Nevis posted:I feel like Mother Night is a bit of a must these days. That, and Cat's Cradle.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:22
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Really like Hocus Pocus. It's basically Slaughterhouse-Five written by a cranky old fart, whose voice I enjoy a lot more than the vaguely patronizing soft-spokenness of Slaughterhouse-Five's narration.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:15
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Through Fiery Trials by David Weber. I long since stopped buying the Safehold series, but I'll check them out from my local library. With the big war ending at the end of the previous book and this one starting with a time skip I thought hey, maybe Weber will take the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and get back to actually using the whole book to tell a story. Why do I let myself hope? This book is immense, and is about 45% how wonderful and perfect the protagonist nation (and the designated other-nation-who-is-good of the book) and everyone in it are, 45% how terrible and problematic and awful the villain nations of the book are, and about 10% actually interesting world development. Also, I'm starting to get really tired of Weber every so often bringing up homosexuality only for every character involved to say it's totally okay and not wrong but they're heterosexual like everyone else, and not a single notable character in this drat book escapes without picking up a spouse and at minimum two (and on average, about six) kids.
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Oct 11, 2019 03:21
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Ben Nevis posted:I feel like Mother Night is a bit of a must these days. Came to post this because it’s my favorite. I’m also weird because while I liked Cat’s Cradle, I liked Sirens of Titan more.
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Oct 11, 2019 03:43
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Just finished Matter by Banks and I can't say I enjoyed it as much as others. The whole steampunk...but aliens! wasn't as interesting as it could've been. It had its moments, The Hundredth Idiot was a nice touch, but the repeated "the drive for money and power is at the core of all human evils" theme got a bit tiresome. The last few chapters felt like he just wanted to finish writing or had a deadline looming and was going through the motions. I liked Holse though, and for once the Ships were largely background pieces
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Oct 12, 2019 00:39
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Just finished These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places: A History of the Stony People by Chief John Snow. This is a first nation near to where I live, and I do work just off reserve, so I wanted to learn more about them. Boy, did I. There were some discussions about prehistory and religious beliefs, but nothing in detail because he feels the oral tradition is meant to be spoken in their language. However, the history from just before they signed Treaty 7 to the early 2000s was quite a series of disappointments and betrayals they endured. Yet, it ends optimistically, surprisingly. I didn't mean for this to end on Indigenous Peoples Day but there were are.
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Oct 14, 2019 23:00
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Just finished I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński. This book is insane.  For a brief summary: a miserable French everyman gets laid off, dumped by his girlfriend, etc etc. Depressed and despising Paris, his girlfriend, and his life, he decides to poison the water supply. With bubonic plague. Cracking under the catastrophic pressure, Paris fragments into a bunch of autonomous neighborhood-republics, including a Soviet republic in Belleville, an Anglo-American Territory (centered around the American Express building), an Autonomous Chinese Communist Republic in the Latin Quarter, a dictatorship for unemployed cops on the Île de la Cité, and a restored French monarchy on the Left Bank. The White Russian émigrés also set up their own piece of home. It's some good, audacious, communist farce. Although the French weren't particularly entertained and had him deported.
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Oct 15, 2019 17:46
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After many failed starts, I finally finished Gardens of the Moon, the first book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It's good... I think. It has potential. If Erikson actually does get better at writing in book 2 as I've heard, then I'm really looking forward to it. But there were a lot of weird disjointed action scenes that were hard to follow near the end, which made pushing through to the end a little tough. But all in all, I'm pretty sure I liked it. Solid 7/10, bumped up to 8/10 based on the potential if the rest is written better.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:41
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I finished up the Three Musketeers this morning before work. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected. I didn't think such an old book would still be so funny which I guess displays my own ignorance more than anything. D'Artagnan ending up in a duel with all three musketeers was great but I really got into it during his duel with Bernajoux. It was just so funny to me that a riot broke out and the musketeers were going to burn a house down until the core four wandered off to get day drunk. So the rest of the musketeers just start ripping up paving slabs and loving them through the windows lmao. For honour! The middle got a bit rambly but was still funny and interesting, especially D'Artagnan finding out that each musketeer had lost his amazing horses in one way or another. It really picked up again once Milady was in the mix and I finished it in two or three sittings after that. Really excited to read The Count and Twenty Years on in the future.
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Oct 18, 2019 17:40
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Finished Three Body Problem - I was really disappointed. The first half set up these really cosmically horrifying questions and the second half was all about really rational, grounded answers. Maybe I don’t have enough experience with hard sci-fi, but I enjoyed learning legitimately about physics. I did not enjoy the big alien race from Trisolaris were incredibly humanized, I did not find any of their actions to be “inconceivable” to a human mind. I wanted them to be greater than us, but instead they were just us. I did enjoy the little juxtaposition of Evan’s claiming he wants “Pan Animal Communism,” but really it’s just an excuse to take out his anger on the human race.... much like REAL Communism claiming to be about the equality of the worker, when really it’s just an excuse to take out anger on the human race.
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Oct 18, 2019 17:51
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EmmyOk posted:I finished up the Three Musketeers this morning before work. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected. I didn't think such an old book would still be so funny which I guess displays my own ignorance more than anything. D'Artagnan ending up in a duel with all three musketeers was great but I really got into it during his duel with Bernajoux. It was just so funny to me that a riot broke out and the musketeers were going to burn a house down until the core four wandered off to get day drunk. So the rest of the musketeers just start ripping up paving slabs and loving them through the windows lmao. For honour! I really enjoyed Black Tulip as well. It's all revolution, horticulture, and love. Not so much musketeering or anything, in fact it's more horticulture and love than swords and whatnot. Still, quite enjoyable overall.
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Oct 18, 2019 18:01
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Read that Ronan Farrow book about his Weinstein investigation. Was a super interesting read content wise and there was so much to it that went on after I had no idea about. Early on I thought he might try to be too writerly in his description of events but that wasn’t borne out like I feared. Definitely one of those books that makes you realise how hosed a large amount of the rich/ruling/media class is and you just push it to the back of your mind because how would you get out of bed otherwise lol
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Oct 24, 2019 00:10
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Exhalation by Ted Chiang (listened to audiobook). An enjoyable set of stories exploring sci-fi ideas, like a box that disproves free will, a machine that lets you talk to your parallel self, and a gate to go twenty years in the future. An enjoyable set, Chiang gives ideas time to breathe and doesn’t resort to shocking twists or violence. Doesn’t reach the same heights as Stories of Your Life but still a definite recommend.
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Oct 24, 2019 02:16
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The Picture of Dorian Gray. I had never read this novel before now, and while it's glacially slow at the start, once Dorian slips into insanity/decadence, it really starts going. Considering it keeps getting brought up as an example of a "sold his soul to the devil" story, I was honestly surprised that there was a distinct lack of devil or of selling one's soul (the closest he comes is that he wishes out loud that the portrait would age rather than himself, and he doesn't seem to suffer any effects himself that were not of his own doing), and what we're explicitly told he gets into once he becomes decadent is... very underwhelming, to say the least (tapestries and jewelry, and implied horribly sexual acts with women, but not excessive gluttony?) Overall, I can see why people would hate it if forced to read it in high school, and there is a lot of naval gazing at the start, but its not that bad once you get past the first third or so.
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Oct 24, 2019 13:47
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Perdido Street Station - China Miéville This was a pretty decent book. A new and interesting world. One inhabited by birdmen, cactus men, humans, insectoid people, little frogthings, and more. A large sprawling city with its own cliques and underground. The story told was interesting and the characters likable enough to keep my attention. I feel like this was longer than it should have been, but I am hard-pressed to think about what could have been removed. It wasn't too overly wordy, and I think the backgrounds of the characters and the build-up were all necessary. Enjoyable.
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Oct 24, 2019 19:25
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Lost Gods by Brom A fairly pulpy dark fantasy about a perennial gently caress-up's journey through purgatory to help save his wife and newborn from the schemes of his grandmother, who is actually Lilith. Pretty standard as fantasy goes, but since Brom is an artist he gives really evocative descriptions of purgatory and its denizens, whether it's long-forgotten gods or Lucifer's scheming underlings. The dialog is often goofy and somewhat repetitive, but I liked it anyway. Brom's art speaks directly to my 13-year-old self who loved The Cell.   
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Nov 1, 2019 16:48
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Last weekend I went down to my local library and took a stroll down the sci-fi/fantasy shelves. Came away with: The Magic Engineer by L. E. Modesitt Jr. Back of the blurb promises a story about a Leonardo da Vinci born into a world of magic and the revolution he brings with him. This book is not that, and is instead about the rather boring adventures of a wunderchild and his friends, and the protagonist is easily the least interesting person in the book (aside from maybe the villains). I found it to be a quick read, and most of the characters basically likable but shallow and the plot very basic. Not a bad read, I enjoyed it okay, but it was a crushing disappointment from what the book advertised itself to be. Indigo Springs by A. M. Dellamonica So as it turns out you don't need to be straight to write a book full of offensive LGBT stereotypes! There's a fairly interesting, and even vaguely original, system of magic here, but the characters are so shallow and such terrible people (even when they're meant to be heroes) that getting through this book was a chore. Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill I can name the exact moment I stopped liking this book, and that moment was the Big Twist. Big Twists, in my experience, come in two flavors: the ones that make you suddenly rethink everything you've read until that point and make perfect sense while throwing everything beforehand into a whole new light, and the ones that come out of left field and just leave you confused while making the preceding drama and events feel cheap. This book has one of the latter type. Funnily for a book about robots, I thought the book's great strength was the humanity of its characters, I was invested in seeing what would happen to everyone until the author decided the stakes weren't big enough. Pity.
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Nov 2, 2019 21:58
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Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, by May Sarton. It's about an old bisexual lady who's a novelist and a poet (much like May Sarton) who gets interviewed about her life and work by two journalists. The first third of the book, before the interviewers show up, is an engaging look at Mrs. Stevens and her young gay friend Mar, and it really got my hopes up. Then the interview actually happens and is a load of horseshit. It's all hot air about "the Muse" (a significant other) and pseudo-Jungian gender archetypes, repeatedly interrupted by diegetic flashbacks where the woman lapses into catatonic reveries as she relives her improbable encounters with each of her Muses for the reader's enlightenment – certainly not for the benefit of her interviewers, who at first are magically unaware of any break in the conversation but eventually lose their patience and tell her to "say it aloud" (how it's divined that her plunges into blank silence are an "it" to say aloud is anyone's guess). It might be the single stupidest literary device I've ever seen, and the scenes it's used to deliver are held together only through sheer force of authorial fiat. The book wraps up with a return to Mrs. Stevens and Mar alone for some closure, but it still manages to end on a sour note with a fantastically ham-handed bit of symbolism that I will not dignify by recounting. Not recommended! Edit: I decided to give it a full review. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 2, 2019 23:02
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All Systems Red - The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells This book was alright. It is a very quick read, and I couldn't help but think that this short channeled Roy Batty, Marvin The Paranoid Android, and Molly Millions into one character for a short security detail. It wasn't anything beyond what a decent Warhammer 40k book provides, but it was entertaining regardless. I'll move on to book 2 and see where we end up.
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Nov 6, 2019 02:58
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Philthy posted:All Systems Red - The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells Thanks for this, I read that book too and came to the same conclusion. It was good enough but shallow and not gripping in the way that I cared much about what happens next. I know a lot of people recommend the series and I was wondering if it just missed me or if there's more to it. I'm very interested in your thoughts on the next one.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:01
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Lockback posted:Thanks for this, I read that book too and came to the same conclusion. It was good enough but shallow and not gripping in the way that I cared much about what happens next. I know a lot of people recommend the series and I was wondering if it just missed me or if there's more to it. I'm very interested in your thoughts on the next one. This is exactly the niche murderbot fits into, imo. Like Becky Chambers or John Scalzi but without the horrible writing.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:08
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I just finished The Hunger Games trilogy, a series i'd been wanting to read for ages and just never got round to. Took me a while to get used to the first person perspective narrative but it works well within the context of the story. It really is just Battle Royale: America, though.
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Nov 8, 2019 11:36
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Artificial Condition - The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells Book two. I really enjoyed this one. We get a few new characters, and a new mission. Interactions between two specific characters kind of made this book a slam dunk. There is decent world building taking place, and I like where it's going. I don't want to give much away, but the android population is it's own living breathing world in addition to the living world. I'm starting to get a Neuromancer(Spawl) / Snow Crash vibe here. It's still pulpy, but that's growing on me. These would make really cool animated shorts for Love, Death & Robots. On to book three. Philthy fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Nov 10, 2019 |
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Nov 10, 2019 06:24
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I've been working my way through every John Le Carre novel. Currently in the middle of the Karla Trilogy. I think my favorite so far is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is just as gripping as everyone says. Comparing George Smiley with the image of Bond I get from the Bond thread (haven't read Fleming in full myself yet) is interesting. Smiley is a literal cuckold who is completely passive in all matters that have nothing to do with tradecraft. It's only when he's working on Circus business that he's able to articulate himself and be decisive. Le Carre essentially wrote the anti-Bond. Smiley is fat, poorly dressed, usually miserable, and not above moral calculations that even Bond would shake his head at. He's ill at ease in situations that aren't Circus-related or to do with German literature. The Karla Trilogy touches on the scandals of the time: Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five. One of my academic interests was Cold War espionage, so I paired TTSS with the files available on the Cambridge Five. You can see instances where Le Carre ripped straight from the contemporary revelations, and other things that would only come to light later. I think if I were to recommend a single Le Carre at this point, it would be either The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or The Looking Glass War. The Looking Glass War has Smiley mostly as a cameo and is fairly detached from the rest. It's about a rival group of spies who are essentially out to pasture who seize at the opportunity for a great undertaking. Coming off of the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , Le Carre wanted to showcase a failure and it's wrenching.
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Nov 10, 2019 16:08
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PsychedelicWarlord posted:I've been working my way through every John Le Carre novel. Currently in the middle of the Karla Trilogy. I think my favorite so far is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is just as gripping as everyone says. I was disappointed to find some of the novels good but not great - they've all been good, but not as great as the ones you pointed out. So far, apart from the ones you mentioned, I've really enjoyed The Little Drummer Girl and The Night Manager. Everyone else but me will probably point to A Perfect Spy as his best book.
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Nov 12, 2019 21:05
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Rogue Protocol - The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells Book three. This book reminded me of the first, but a little better. There is an overreaching arc going on taking place between missions. Not nearly as much character development or world-building as the second book. This story focused on the main arc with a secondary mission. I like where it ended, and I immediately downloaded book 4 and I'm working through that now. Ultimately, this series is pretty good. It really reminds me back to reading something like the Neuromancer Spawl series back in the day. But - I will say paying $10-17 per book is absolutely ridiculous. All four should be combined into a single $8 book at best. That is my only real complaint. It's a good read, but the cost is way way out of line for this material by a wide margin. Maybe I'm just being old fashioned and I should be willing to pay $10-17 per 120 pages in todays indie(?) market. I don't know. I do like people being compensated fairly for their works, and maybe this is helping that. I don't really know. It should be totally unrelated to the work, but when it's skewed this much you can't help but comment on it.
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Nov 13, 2019 20:26
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Sarern posted:I'm doing the same thing! But slowly, because post-Cold-War le Carré is extremely depressing. I think you mean inter-Cold-War.
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Nov 13, 2019 20:54
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