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Finished off Cameron Stauth's The Franchise last night, an in-depth look at the 1989 Detroit Pistons (also the year they won an NBA title). A quick read for me, despite being over 300 pages. Not very dense at all. A bittersweet end - the team got their rings, but had to trade away one of their core members in the expansion draft. edit: guess I should add - helps if you're into basketball, since it's about basketball. Decent fast-paced descriptions of games without getting too bogged down into stats, although there is an appendix if you're into that. For me part of the draw was all the insight to group dynamics, leadership, and competition. I saw parallels to my experience in the music industry, specifically bands. weed cat fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Feb 6, 2020 |
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Feb 6, 2020 06:09
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Cythereal posted:The Billion Dollar Boy by Charles Sheffield is a novella I picked up from my local library, and I enjoyed it. It's a simple story as the length suggests, a sci-fi coming of age adventure tale, but it worked for me. What I found most compelling was the setting, the Messina dust cloud where most of the book takes place is an unusual sci-fi setting that seems to draw heavily from 18th century fishing fleets, or perhaps far-flung trading ships of a century or two previous. And yet, I'm not sure I want to read more books in this setting if they exist, as I think this story covered the Messina cloud pretty well and I'm not sure how much more you could do with it without drastically changing things - the book's ending certainly could be a hook for a fully fledged novel, I'm not sure yet if I want to look. A short, enjoyable romp I read in a day and suitable for YA audiences. I really like Sheffield although I've not read his YA fare. He was an actual astrophysicist who unfortunately died way too early into his writing career. Physics informs his work from a "here is how [thing] works, what if..." perspective that really works for me.
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Feb 6, 2020 06:16
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Eye of the World, book one of the Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan Admittedly this took me many failed starts to finish, because the anecdotal reception I'd heard of it was that it was overly wordy and boring (very LOTR-esque). I think the LOTR comparison is apt, and very blatant at times, but the story itself was really compelling. Every city, every group of people, every race felt different and unique and fully fleshed out. I felt like I knew just as much about the Traveling People, who occupied a couple chapters, as I did about the Two Rivers folk who occupied the whole book. From clothes to history to music and so on, if you like VERY fully fleshed out high fantasy, this is a great one.
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Feb 6, 2020 14:24
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The compelling story of people who... have clothes?
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Feb 6, 2020 18:18
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The compelling story of people who... have clothes? Well it's certainly part of it
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Feb 6, 2020 18:40
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sounds awesome id love to read a detailed anthropology of a people who dont exist as part of an 80,000 page epic that never ends
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Feb 6, 2020 18:50
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Inspired by the discussion in the Genres ablaze thread, I read Pan and Victoria by noted nazi collaborator Knut Hamsun. Great books. Victoria especially had these beautiful lyrical passages on love. Have to finish Hunger one of these days.
Syncopated fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Feb 6, 2020 |
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Feb 6, 2020 19:37
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Syncopated posted:Inspired by the discussion in the Genres ablaze thread, I read Pan and Victoria by noted nazi collaborator Knut Hamsun. Great books. Victoria especially had these beautiful lyrical passages on love. Have to finish Hunger one of these days. on a scale of 1-10 how nazi would you say reading them made you
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Feb 6, 2020 20:06
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Black Griffon posted:This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone This sounded like Extremely My poo poo so I picked it up and loved it. Just finished it now, thanks for this! I can't think of hardly anything to add to the description cause I'd hate to spoil any of it. I'll just heartily second the recommendation, and point out that the book is a very nice length. Short enough to binge through it in a couple days, and not get bogged down trying to over-explain the setting or scifi details... but just long enough to feel like it's not skimming over all the details, like you can have enough time to get a little bit comfortable in their world.
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Feb 6, 2020 20:21
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I read a bunch more McDowell recently and thought it might mean I like horror fiction in general so I read A Head Full of Ghosts and then I realized that no I just like McDowell
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Feb 6, 2020 20:28
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chernobyl kinsman posted:on a scale of 1-10 how nazi would you say reading them made you I've already sent my Nobel medal to Goebbels
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Feb 6, 2020 20:29
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I read a bunch more McDowell recently and thought it might mean I like horror fiction in general so I read A Head Full of Ghosts and then I realized that no I just like McDowell read aickman bitch
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Feb 6, 2020 20:33
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chernobyl kinsman posted:read aickman bitch Rec me bitch
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Feb 6, 2020 20:36
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Rec me bitch dark entries, cold hand in mine, or compulsory games actually just pick up whatever I don't think it matters
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Feb 6, 2020 20:52
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the only really good Tremblay is the one novella where he all but explicitly says that he's a noncommittal atheist whose interest in horror is rooted in panicked fear of his own mortality and the vision the genre offers of a universe not wholly constrained by materialism
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Feb 6, 2020 21:02
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the only really good Tremblay is the one novella where he all but explicitly says that he's a noncommittal atheist whose interest in horror is rooted in panicked fear of his own mortality and the vision the genre offers of a universe not wholly constrained by materialism Eh, I like The Little Sleep. It's a fun, weird, disturbing detective novel.
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Feb 6, 2020 21:04
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Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. I'm on the young side (b. 1985) to appreciate Steve Martin's stand up career. To me he was the Dad in Father of the Bride and I vaguely remember my Dad showing me The Jerk when I was way too young to really "get it". So I never really knew that he was one of the biggest acts of the 1970's. Could any stand up sell out a 22,000 seat amphitheater in 2020? You could really feel how uncomfortable he was once he broke out as a stage act. He dedicates the first 100 pages to working at Disney Land and Knotts Berry Farm, the next 50 to transitioning from magic act to stand up, the next 30 to being an opening act and having success on the talk show circuit, and then about 10 pages to being a massive headliner.
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Feb 6, 2020 22:11
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Sock The Great posted:Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. I'm on the young side (b. 1985) to appreciate Steve Martin's stand up career. To me he was the Dad in Father of the Bride and I vaguely remember my Dad showing me The Jerk when I was way too young to really "get it". So I never really knew that he was one of the biggest acts of the 1970's. Could any stand up sell out a 22,000 seat amphitheater in 2020? You could really feel how uncomfortable he was once he broke out as a stage act. He dedicates the first 100 pages to working at Disney Land and Knotts Berry Farm, the next 50 to transitioning from magic act to stand up, the next 30 to being an opening act and having success on the talk show circuit, and then about 10 pages to being a massive headliner. I read his novel about the guy with OCD in Santa Monica and really enjoyed it. He's a very funny and smart guy might have to check this out
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Feb 7, 2020 05:42
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Finished The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood on my train ride home today. Honestly I thought it was kind of boring until the last 25%, where it got kind of weird but at least engaging. Willing to chalk it up to not being the target audience as a guy, or that only reading it on my way to and from work (when I'm most tired) is not the way to go about it 
C-Euro fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Feb 7, 2020 |
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Feb 7, 2020 06:19
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The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Stunning, prescient, completely bleak and cynical story about a British journalist living in Vietnam in the early 1950s. The titular American arrives and starts a love triangle that sets off the larger metaphors of colonialism, capitalism, and the "third force." I think I will read more Greene once I get back on track with Le Carre. Smiley's People by John Le Carre. Smiley's People more than makes up for the deficiencies of The Honorable Schoolboy. A fitting and wistful end to the trilogy. I bought a guide to Smiley's world from 1986 that has pictures of the locations from the trilogy and an index of characters, jargon, and constructed timelines, which is nice to have on hand.
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Feb 7, 2020 08:02
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chernobyl kinsman posted:read aickman bitch I bought a few collections based on the last time you brought him up and yeah, it's some good stuff.
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Feb 7, 2020 15:54
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Finished Dune, the original book for the first time last night. Good book. I came into it expecting something a bit like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it was a much more serious story than Hitchhiker's; much more akin to Star Wars. Even having read the whole thing, and enjoyed it, there are parts where I feel sure that I'm not getting deeper symbolism that Herbert must have been intending. An example is Paul's relationship to prophecy and foreseeing jihad being done in his name in the far future, as well as his future plans for Arrakis. I'm not sure whether other books in the anthology expand on that or not (I've heard that some of the other books are hit-or-miss). One subtlety I did get was Jessica beginning the story being embarrassed that she was "merely" the duke's concubine. But at the end of the story, she told Chani that Irulan would be a wife to Paul but never experience the love or historical attention that she and Chani would enjoy. The ending of the book is interesting. In some ways, it's rushed (the final battle for Arrakis mostly happens "off screen"), but I also enjoyed how Herbert drew out the fight between Feyd-Rautha and Paul. There was a very satisfying sense of things being "set right" and the villains of the story "getting theirs". I'd be interested in continuing the story with the next books in the anthology.
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Feb 7, 2020 16:13
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So does this Aickman fella have a novel or is it all short stories
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Feb 7, 2020 16:19
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Hi MelF_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Finished Dune, the original book for the first time last night. Dune whips rear end and the book that follows this one (Dune Messiah) leans harder into this angle in a way that I generally enjoyed. Rule of thumb with Dune is that anything written by Frank Herbert is worth your time, and anything not written by him can be safely ignored.
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Feb 7, 2020 16:23
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C-Euro posted:Hi Mel Cool; thanks! I'll check it out. I think I read somewhere that some of the sequel books feature Paul more prominently than others. Dune is one of the most unique books I've ever read. I don't know of many other books that have a sense of plopping you down in the middle of a story thread in a sprawling universe.
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Feb 7, 2020 17:10
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Finished Dune, the original book for the first time last night.
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Feb 7, 2020 17:15
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Sham bam bamina! posted:How did that happen? Not knowing much about Dune in advance except vague things about "desert planet with huge worms". For some reason, that translated in my mind to Hitchhiker's-like farce.
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Feb 7, 2020 17:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:So does this Aickman fella have a novel or is it all short stories he has one novel, the late breakfasters, that i have not read because i am saving it
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Feb 7, 2020 18:09
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PsychedelicWarlord posted:Smiley's People by John Le Carre. Smiley's People more than makes up for the deficiencies of The Honorable Schoolboy. A fitting and wistful end to the trilogy. I bought a guide to Smiley's world from 1986 that has pictures of the locations from the trilogy and an index of characters, jargon, and constructed timelines, which is nice to have on hand. I'm on Smiley's people now, though I quite liked Honourable Schoolboy. I feel like if they just changed Smiley to someone else in THS a lot of the complaints would go away, though I appreciate that it shows that George was not at all immune to the trappings of the role.
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Feb 7, 2020 22:01
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Lockback posted:I'm on Smiley's people now, though I quite liked Honourable Schoolboy. I feel like if they just changed Smiley to someone else in THS a lot of the complaints would go away, though I appreciate that it shows that George was not at all immune to the trappings of the role. One of my favorite surprises reading Smiley novels was finding out just how complicit he was in the various schemes of the Circus.
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Feb 7, 2020 22:28
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Sarern posted:One of my favorite surprises reading Smiley novels was finding out just how complicit he was in the various schemes of the Circus. He's even standing there at the end of the Spy Who Came in from the Cold! Also not clear whether he ordered Fawn to kill Jerry
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Feb 7, 2020 23:25
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Thanks a Lot, Mr. Kibblewhite by Roger Daltrey. Normally I don't go for autobiographies or biographies in general but this was a great read and pretty well written although Daltrey plays a little loose with the timeline of events but I don't think it is a detriment to the story. And of course when you're in a band like The Who things are going to be absolutely loving nuts and it doesn't seem to me like he's shying away from discussing any of the bad poo poo either he or anyone else did. If nothing else the book is purely Roger Daltrey's recollections, opinions, and some justification of why things happened the way they did. Quite entertaining A++ would read again etc. etc. Also it feels good to buy a book and immediately get into it rather than to put it off for later as I have a bad habit of doing. I have a stack of books as a monument to "I'll read this later" and some of them have been around so long that I am no longer interested in reading them.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:02
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Agency by William Gibson. I was beyond excited for a sequel to The Peripheral but I have to sadly report that Agency is a pretty weak effort. It has likeable characters (Wilf and UNIS are both great) and good dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with it per se, but the whole novel felt like almost nothing at all happened and there were no stakes. I listened to the audiobook (amazing narrator) and when the book ended, I was like "wait what, it's over? There was no climax!" There isn't really even an antagonist. Pretty let down. 
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Feb 10, 2020 07:22
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precision posted:Agency by William Gibson. Just came here to post this. It's not awful ... but it is very weak. The antagonists are outclassed by our heroes, there's a strange obsession with packaging and stowage (how cases are put in a car, which way they are facing, what the case is made of) and minor characters flutter around the plot with nothing to do. Just how many times did someone say "tell them hello [from me]"? I didn't take after Wilf myself. He's a classic Gibson protagonist in that he doesn't know what he's doing or why, more powerful characters direct him around to do-a-thing (which is mostly "go talk to X") and then having the plot explained to him. The whole plot against Lowbeer is a strange case of this - most of the way through the book, Wilf is told of it, he tells Lowbeer, who knows of it already and asks him to go back and have another proforma conversation and then the conspiracy goes away.
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Feb 10, 2020 14:17
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I think he came up with the "visiting an alternate past where Trump lost" idea, but then the book doesn't actually do anything with that plot point except that several times someone says "Wait, he won in your timeline? How?"
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Feb 10, 2020 14:58
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precision posted:I think he came up with the "visiting an alternate past where Trump lost" idea, but then the book doesn't actually do anything with that plot point except that several times someone says "Wait, he won in your timeline? How?" And a few characters stop to make admiring comments about Hilary. The whole no-Trump / no-Brexit angle is irrelevant, I agree. It could be excised from the book without making any difference. And maybe I'm forgetting it already, but does he imply that Trump only won because of interference from the future, making our world a stub? And I keep comparing Eunice to Wintermute and wishing the AI had been really alien, not a witty chatbot.
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Feb 10, 2020 17:10
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Yeah, that was heavily implied, I believe Lowbeer talks about it. Since he loves trilogies, presumably there will be another, and besides hoping it's better, I hope it also at least tries to explain how the stub thing works or who created it. Both books go out of their way to repeatedly say that nobody knows how it works or who discovered it, which is a pretty big indicator Actually now I wonder if Agency is so bland because he had to set up Eunice in order to resolve the stub mystery somehow precision fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 17:30
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Moonseed by Stephen Baxter is an odd novel, half disaster story, half Big Dumb Object. The premise of the book is: taking the hypothesis that the Moon was created in the primordial solar system by a massive object striking the still-molten earth and carving off a chunk into orbit... what if that object wasn't just a newborn planet or big asteroid? What if it was something... else? And what if the Apollo missions unwittingly brought a tiny piece of it to Earth, thinking it just an ordinary Moon rock that promptly got filed away never to be examined? I do not like disaster stories as a general rule for one of the same reasons I do not like horror stories in general: they often indulge in misery porn, delighting in showcasing death and destruction and suffering. But Moonseed worked for me, because the disaster story in the book goes hand-in-hand with the sci-fi story of trying to figure out what the Moonseed is and what's really going on. The characters of Moonseed are standard fare for both genres, but I enjoyed the book on the whole. If there is a weakness to the Big Dumb Object part of the story, I'd say it's that Baxter clearly didn't know how he wanted to end the story, leaping straight from a relatively grounded Tomorrow AD story to more fantastical science fiction in the last dozen pages or so.
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Feb 10, 2020 18:26
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nonathlon posted:And maybe I'm forgetting it already, but does he imply that Trump only won because of interference from the future, making our world a stub? I thought it was interesting in the abstract to show that an un-Trumped world wasn’t immediately any better, and in the short term was demonstrably worse on account of almost ending In nuclear fire, but Gibson never really seemed to have anywhere to take the idea.
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Feb 12, 2020 22:05
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Solo by William Boyd. To my knowledge this is the latest author to write James Bond books and of the ones I have read the closest in tone to Fleming himself. The beginning of this book is rather rough with Bond being creepier than usual paranoidly stalking a girl and breaking and entering her flat for no real reason but once Bond is assigned to deal with a civil war over oil rights in a African country it's business as usual with ridiculous pulpy situations, character names, surviving grevious injuries, deformed henchmen, and allies dying. Also the book very sensibly takes place in 1969 rather than dragging Bond kicking and screaming into the modern era as other authors have done. Plus this is obviously a start to a new series of Bond books as classic characters are cycled out for younger versions, the Bentley is written off for a new car again, and a few plot threads are left open to presumably show up in later books. But it's not all new as there are small references to events in Fleming Bond sprinkled in. Overall it was a fun read and I'd maybe get more from the library, but I am not particularly compelled to reread it as I sometimes am with Ian Fleming and I suspect it's because there is no one that can exactly duplicate Fleming's unique voice and ability to rocket you past the silly bits.
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Feb 13, 2020 03:34
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