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Sandwolf posted:If you enjoyed Civilwarland (which is fantastic) I would strongly recommend Tenth of December, which follows the tone and essence of Civilwarland perfectly. Pastoralia is also quite good, but less efficient than Civilwarland or Tenth Fully agreed, Tenth of December was my favorite of his works. Also seconding the recommendation of Lincoln in the Bardo, but I couldn’t get through the audiobook. I think having so many comedians reading threw me off as I thought it was supposed to be funnier, then I picked up the paperback and realized it is a drama.
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Jan 18, 2020 23:52
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TommyGun85 posted:One of my favorotes; if you liked this, read White Fang. Thanks! I've heard of both of these books but had no idea they were related. I'll put it on my list next time I'm out.
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Jan 19, 2020 00:22
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Thanks, Dover Thrift Editions, for revealing the big plot twist in "Benito Cereno" on the back cover. Really made me enjoy the story.
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Jan 19, 2020 01:37
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Jerry Cotton posted:Thanks, Dover Thrift Editions, for revealing the big plot twist in "Benito Cereno" on the back cover. Really made me enjoy the story. That happened to me with Greg Egan's Quarantine. I read the Kindle edition so I didn't know. So when I got a paperback copy to give to my cousin and saw the blurb, I made my own blurb from the Amazon description and glued it over the one on the back of the book. It's a drat good read, though. Just don't get the paperback edition.
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Jan 19, 2020 02:02
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I had to make a friend promise that he wouldn't read the back of the Time's Arrow paperback I gave him.
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Jan 19, 2020 07:04
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:That happened to me with Greg Egan's Quarantine. I read the Kindle edition so I didn't know. So when I got a paperback copy to give to my cousin and saw the blurb, I made my own blurb from the Amazon description and glued it over the one on the back of the book. It's a drat good read, though. Just don't get the paperback edition. Can I ask what plot points in particular were given out by the back cover? Quarantine had quite a number of reveals in its second half.
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Jan 19, 2020 08:12
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FPyat posted:Can I ask what plot points in particular were given out by the back cover? Quarantine had quite a number of reveals in its second half. Sure. Here's the back cover (linked in case anybody else wants to read it and doesn't want it spoiled): https://i.imgur.com/BnUqJ91.png It's been literal years since I read it so I wanted to confirm with a friend of mine who also read it that I was right and he said yes, this absolutely should not have been in the blurb. After being reminded of it though, I put it in back my queue for a re-read. It was one hell of a mind-bender.
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Jan 19, 2020 23:16
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Finally got around to reading Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh. The pacing was very slow for the first 70% of the book, but increased significantly from there and was hard to put down by the end. It felt like a book that probably could have been told from a first person perspective instead, since there are tons of inner monologues and thoughts. I thought the setting was pretty interesting with a small human colony on a big planet with a lot of sentient "aliens", and the differences in culture and language are given lots of details which was interesting. The protagonist seemed pretty unremarkable at first, but by the end I found him quite likable and all in all I enjoyed the book. Still haven't decided if I'll finish the trilogy as I have a lot of other books in the pipeline.
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Jan 20, 2020 15:05
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The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. What a cool little book, easy to read, fun stories, cool moments. The themes are surprisingly relevant to climate change, even though they were originally targeted towards Cold War-era destruction and colonization, so I didn’t find them as dated as some reviews seemed to indicate. It’s got me curious about my copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I never read any Bradbury in HS so I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451 and now Martian Chronicles quite a bit. Is SWTWC worth reading?
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Jan 22, 2020 03:35
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Sandwolf posted:The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. yeah it whips but save it for autumn
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Jan 22, 2020 06:48
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chernobyl kinsman posted:yeah it whips but save it for autumn 100% agreed. It's a book best saved for October.
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Jan 22, 2020 13:37
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In audio, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. Widely considered the greatest work of post-colonial Indian literature, Midnight’s Children follows the origins and life of Saleem Sinai, a child born on the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of the Indian sub-continent’s independence. Saleem, as well as other children born on or close to the birth of the new nation, are blessed with various magical powers, and their lives are linked allegorically to the fate of the nations birthed by the former colonies' independence. At 210,000 words it’s not a short book, and I think it speaks to the vitality, humor, and wonder of the writing that, whenever someone happened to overhear it, they were immediately engaged, interested in the dialog or description and asking me for context. While it’s true that, regarding the larger narrative, I could sometimes become confused, because the story is both interwoven with Indian history and isn’t entirely linear, now that I’ve finished the novel and am viewing it in retrospect, the grand sweep of novel has left a heavy impression. It reminds me of the best works of Charles Dickens: in its large cast of memorable characters, its powerful themes delivered with delightful prose, and in creating a vivid world I’m already eager to re-visit. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 21:15
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Sandwolf posted:The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Someone made this into a TV series in the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfypTnKYN5s
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Jan 23, 2020 07:00
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Exhalations: Stories by Ted Chiang Another collection of short stories from the same author of the short story which inspired the film Arrival. The highlight to me was the titular "Exhalation", which also happens to be one of the shortest stories in the book, is a beautifully written piece about androids dealing with the end of their existence. To me the worst was "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". It was so much longer than every other story and I just don't find the relationship between pet animal AI and their owners interesting. "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" probably has the most potential to be another feature film. There is definitely a world to explore there.
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Jan 23, 2020 15:26
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The Outsider by Stephen King. Interesting premise of a horrible murder taking place with overwhelming evidence pointing towards a suspect, but the guy has an airtight alibi placing him far away at the time the crime occurred. This doesn't have a good payoff and somehow meanders over 500 pages and winds up as an excuse for King to bring back dull characters from his detective trilogy. This could easily have been cut down to less than 200 pages, there is a heckuva lot more compelling content in King's own short stories such as Dolan's Cadillac or the Mist. Long segments have people driving to buy chicken or eating breakfast. The monster is a poor knockoff of It and is boring as hell. It can shapeshift and feeds off misery but has no plan and is happy to give up and wait in a cave for the heroes to show up and kill it, despite having the ability to drive a car and leave town. The cast of stock characters have little to do and take few risks with plot developments coming a mile away. King has a poor grasp on the modern world and characters repeatedly express wonder at their iPads and Google Maps, before making the final confrontation take place somewhere without cell coverage.
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Jan 24, 2020 17:09
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Quelle surprise.
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Jan 24, 2020 17:33
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Quelle surprise. I was gonna say, “so, a typical King novel then?” I like King, but the man is at his best when he writes short stories.
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Jan 24, 2020 19:06
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:I was gonna say, “so, a typical King novel then?” Yeah, the last King novel that deserved it's length was Revival. That ending was fantastic. But after that we got the dull Mr. Mercedes trilogy that plods along and doesn't play to King's strengths in horror or world building. He seems to have picked up a late career fascination with detective stories but the way he writes investigations is too slow and formulaic. It's similar to Harry Turtledove, whose recent longform output is skippable and ridiculously padded, even for him. But his recent short fiction is excellent and well worth your time, especially Cayos in the Stream and Vilcabamba.
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Jan 24, 2020 19:38
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Yeah, the last King novel that deserved it's length was Revival. That ending was fantastic. But after that we got the dull Mr. Mercedes trilogy that plods along and doesn't play to King's strengths in horror or world building. He seems to have picked up a late career fascination with detective stories but the way he writes investigations is too slow and formulaic. The ending to Revival is great, but you could probably read the first 60 pages, then the last 30 and feel completely satisfied.
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Jan 24, 2020 20:21
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Yeah, I'll defend King's short-form work, but his novels are wildly uneven and tend to be padded even at the best of times. (The short-story collections are also uneven, but the weaker stories are over with quickly and the content:filler ratio is generally much better.)
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Jan 25, 2020 00:12
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I just finished The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 by Marc Ambinder. The book's loosely based around Able Archer 83, the nuclear war scare that doesn't get nearly enough attention--understandably, since it's been highly classified up until recently. The short of it is that in November 1983, NATO carried out a war-gaming exercise with significantly more realism than its predecessors, and some Soviets took it as a possible opener to World War III. How close we actually came to World War III is still up for debate. Some say it's the closest we've gotten since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I say loosely because it wasn't the exercise alone that brought us to the brink of crisis, something which Ambinder factors into the book. Able Archer 83 came in the midst of brinkmanship-style rhetoric, the Soviets' conviction that the US was planning an imminent nuclear strike, US psychological operations (e.g. near-penetrations of Soviet airspace and waters), a massive combined naval exercise in spring 1983, the Soviet shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, massive US weapons buildups including the deployment of Pershing II missiles and the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars), and a false alarm in the Soviets' early warning system in September 1983. There was a lot of other poo poo going on that put the Soviets on edge. Suddenly "we begin bombing in five minutes" isn't quite as funny anymore. Anyway, Ambinder shows us the exercise in its larger context, and rightfully so. The miscalculation factor in a potential nuclear war deserves far more attention than it gets, at least in public discourse. That's valuable. Unfortunately, I have beefs with how Ambinder tells this story. First, he spends an awful lot of ink on individual actors' stories and lower-level issues. Oleg Gordievsky's family troubles come to mind. I wouldn't mind this, per se, if the book were stronger on the analysis. It isn't. So that's the second beef. Third, this book was either not proofread at all or had a lovely proofreader. It's spattered with grammatical, punctuation, and usage errors, on top of some plain bad writing. Reviews from more milhist-minded people elsewhere say it's also plagued with factual errors about missiles, dates, etc. I'd add that his interpretation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is highly questionable, but hey. This book isn't about that. All in all, pretty disappointing. Karenina fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 17:37
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I've been reading a lot lately. I replaced my smartphone with a flip phone and I'm being more productive in other facets of life, too, but also reading a lot:
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Jan 27, 2020 12:28
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The Odyssey, as translated by Robert Fagles, made a much better first impression than Mitchell's Iliad. Part of that is probably due to Fagles' translation, but the book also has much more varied and interesting imagery and doesn't feel as repetitive. I'm definitely going to revisit this one, possibly with a different translation. Maybe then I'll think of more incisive things to say about it than "that was neat."
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Jan 27, 2020 21:28
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On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-discovery of the Obvious by Douglas Harding Originally read about this meditation trick in Sam Harris' Waking Up and wanted to explore it further. It feels like a shortcut into the 'non-duality of consciousness', which is just a fancy way of saying that there is no "you" separate from your experience. There are a ton of blog posts about this particular meditation method, and you're probably better off reading any of those, or watching a few YouTube tutorials, than reading this first hand account. It definitely spirals into rambling spirituality rather quickly and never really pulls itself out.
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Jan 27, 2020 22:17
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garbage owl posted:I've been reading a lot lately. I replaced my smartphone with a flip phone and I'm being more productive in other facets of life, too, but also reading a lot: "Loose Balls" (The ABA one by Terry Pluto, not the Jayson Williams one) is excellent, especially if you liked the vibe of "The Breaks of the Game". Its more about the craziness and personalities of the ABA, but also shows a lot about why the NBA looks like it does today.
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Jan 28, 2020 19:05
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Lockback posted:"Loose Balls" (The ABA one by Terry Pluto, not the Jayson Williams one) is excellent, especially if you liked the vibe of "The Breaks of the Game". Its more about the craziness and personalities of the ABA, but also shows a lot about why the NBA looks like it does today. Came to post in this thread that I just finished that last night! Great stories, interesting format: Pluto organized interview transcripts with only small interjections. Such chaos. Paraphrased from memory, "Well the goal was to make money off merging the ABA with the NBA, but as far as a plan? no, we didn't have a plan" Soon I'm gonna start another basketball book that I heard about via Simmons' Book of Basketball - The Franchise by Cameron Stauth, about the '89 Detroit Pistons championship season. Had to track down a hard copy since it's not available as an eBook and my county library didn't have it.
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Jan 29, 2020 08:33
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weed cat posted:Came to post in this thread that I just finished that last night! Great stories, interesting format: Pluto organized interview transcripts with only small interjections. Such chaos. Paraphrased from memory, "Well the goal was to make money off merging the ABA with the NBA, but as far as a plan? no, we didn't have a plan" Simmons book is ok but its far too long and he put forth his subjective (and questionable) ideas as stone cold facts just because Isiah Thomas told him about things at a pool in Vegas. The first part about the history is pretty good and the sections about players you may not know is kinda cool, but there's a lot that can be skipped. Breaks of the Game is probably a better book and a good followup from Loose Balls if you haven't read it yet. I liked Jordan Rules too.
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Jan 30, 2020 21:35
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Lockback posted:Simmons book is ok but its far too long and he put forth his subjective (and questionable) ideas as stone cold facts just because Isiah Thomas told him about things at a pool in Vegas. I read Breaks not long ago and heard about Jordan Rules - also Halberstam, right? It's on my list...
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Jan 31, 2020 00:13
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I just finished Sally Rooney's Normal People. I went through quite a few reactive emotions to it, a few directly in response to the text, others in response to the craft and the shape of the text. It's definitely a book that deserves literary critique, not least because of the attention it's received, and stemming from that a critique of the current literary environment we've found ourself in. As a directly affective work, emotionally and intellectually, it'll take me a while to slot everything into place. And mostly that's a deep questioning of what people actually want from reading?
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Jan 31, 2020 04:35
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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. I loved this book, one of my favorite non-fiction reads in current memory. Nine separate essays about the moral illusion of being a millennial and living you life on the internet, with no prescription or advice on how to escape it. It's
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Jan 31, 2020 17:13
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I’m pretty ashamed to admit I hadn’t read an actual book in over a decade, but I just tore through ‘11/22/63’ by Stephen King and I’m hungry for more.
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Feb 1, 2020 00:58
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eddiewalker posted:I’m pretty ashamed to admit I hadn’t read an actual book in over a decade, but I just tore through ‘11/22/63’ by Stephen King and I’m hungry for more. Good news: there's more!
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Feb 1, 2020 01:21
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Sock The Great posted:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. I loved this book, one of my favorite non-fiction reads in current memory. Nine separate essays about the moral illusion of being a millennial and living you life on the internet, with no prescription or advice on how to escape it. It's It's a good book. And plenty of people shouting stuff like, "THIS IS VITAL!" and then completely ignoring the many hypocrisies it pointed out and disavowing any debate about what she brought up.
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Feb 1, 2020 03:56
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 Famous People of the Paranormal: Psychics, Clairvoyants and Charlatans by Chris Wangler Found this on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books. It appears to be an obscure book, but I loved it. A great collection of mini-biographies on notable people involved in paranormal over history. Written an objective way, the author calls out frauds while also leaving room for the unexplained. If you are interested in people like Rasputin, Aleister Crowley, Charles Fort, Miss Cleo, Jeanne Dixon, and James Randi, this is an excellent read.
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Feb 1, 2020 16:31
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eddiewalker posted:I’m pretty ashamed to admit I hadn’t read an actual book in over a decade, but I just tore through ‘11/22/63’ by Stephen King and I’m hungry for more. How did you manage to pick such a huge book for your first one in a decade?
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Feb 1, 2020 21:43
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The Grey posted:How did you manage to pick such a huge book for your first one in a decade? It's not raw length that's the problem, it's that people need a real page turner to get them back into groove.
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Feb 1, 2020 23:34
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The Grey posted:How did you manage to pick such a huge book for your first one in a decade? It was an ebook, so I didn’t have a real sense of how thick it would have been irl. All the short 1-2 page chapters gave me the little dopamine hits of completion. I’m still trying to find my next big thing to make this a habit. Bill Bryson’s ‘Made in America’ is kind of a slog, but I feel like I have to finish it before library due date. I keep trying to get into ‘Mistborn’ because Sanderson shows up on so many “What are you reading” threads, but I think I hate fantasy.
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Feb 2, 2020 01:12
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eddiewalker posted:It was an ebook, so I didn’t have a real sense of how thick it would have been irl. All the short 1-2 page chapters gave me the little dopamine hits of completion. No Sanderson is just loving garbage, only marginally better than Rothfuss. Check out Naomi Novik or LeGuin or Gene Wolfe. You may also like MK Jemisin or Kameron Hurley (I think her sci fi is much better than her fantasy but that’s an unpopular opinion.) I think the most page turny of the above is Naomi Novik. Spinning Silver is great and Uprooted is really good.
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Feb 2, 2020 01:22
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eddiewalker posted:It was an ebook, so I didn’t have a real sense of how thick it would have been irl. All the short 1-2 page chapters gave me the little dopamine hits of completion.
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Feb 2, 2020 01:38
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Sham bam bamina! posted:A great book with really short chapters is The Master and Margarita. I recommend the Burgin/O'Connor translation. Also Moby Dick
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Feb 2, 2020 07:27
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