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Sandwolf posted:do not start with Jailbird Joking aside this is correct. Also Welcome to the Monkey House
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Mar 5, 2020 02:22
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Bilirubin posted:Galapagos. You have my Granfalloon! Content: The Graveyard Book Verdict: Just okay, YA Gaiman, took a long time to finish because I didn’t care halfway through and then felt the need to put it behind me, finally. Not sure if I would recommend to a kid.
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Mar 5, 2020 09:01
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Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd is what it says, linking the highlights of England's history prior to the coronation of Henry VIII for those like me who have never looked too deeply into the subject before. The events it covers include, but aren't limited to, the Roman occupation, the coming of William the Conqueror, the signing of the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses. Each king gets a chapter that's long enough to distinguish his reign, interspersed with shorter chapters about more mundane aspects of the period, from a peasant's average day to the Lollard heresy to likely foundations of the Robin Hood legend. The romantic jingoism that Xander77 complained about earlier in the thread is thankfully nowhere to be seen. Ackroyd is forthright about how all of the conflicts of the era, excepting the religious strife like the Lollards, stemmed from kings attempting to gain and consolidate power. There is an early mention of how the English throne being subservient to the French one by technicality may have led to the Hundred Years War, but it isn't brought up again at the war's beginning or anytime after. It's still pretty informative and a good starting point for a bunch of more specific topics, like that murder what happened at Oxford. weed cat posted:no where should i start with vonnegut I'm going to second the earlier Hocus Pocus recommendation; it was one of the highlights of my early high school experience. I haven't explored his bibliography much beyond that the two books of his that everyone knows, though.
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Mar 6, 2020 20:34
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I finished Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson. Plenty informative, and served its purpose of giving me a general knowledge of the course of the war, but I'm not enamored with his writing style.
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Mar 6, 2020 20:40
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Solitair posted:Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd is what it says, linking the highlights of England's history prior to the coronation of Henry VIII for those like me who have never looked too deeply into the subject before. The events it covers include, but aren't limited to, the Roman occupation, the coming of William the Conqueror, the signing of the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses. Each king gets a chapter that's long enough to distinguish his reign, interspersed with shorter chapters about more mundane aspects of the period, from a peasant's average day to the Lollard heresy to likely foundations of the Robin Hood legend. i tried reading this but by 50 pages in i had already scrawled about 10 pages' worth of arguments in the margins. he was wrong about a lot of things before i even got out of the anglo-saxon period
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Mar 7, 2020 05:20
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i tried reading this but by 50 pages in i had already scrawled about 10 pages' worth of arguments in the margins. he was wrong about a lot of things before i even got out of the anglo-saxon period Did you read Cundiff's Britain Begins and if so how did it compare to you? I loved it, read it then went to the BM and saw a lot of the artifacts was very cool
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Mar 7, 2020 05:36
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Bilirubin posted:Did you read Cundiff's Britain Begins and if so how did it compare to you? I loved it, read it then went to the BM and saw a lot of the artifacts was very cool i havent but i heard it's good. its on my amazon wishlist actually
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Mar 7, 2020 05:50
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finished books 2 and 3 of the Star Trek TNG: Cold Equations series, Silent Weapons and The Body Electric. The first was solid; main antagonist was the Breen. I can't say much of it stuck with me, but it was entertaining, although I was a little confused by the end. The Breen were doing all this stuff to try to distract the Federation to smuggle some massive mining ship, but I can't remember what the mining ship was doing, or why it was important to them. The Enterprise blew up that ship even though the Breen said it had Federation people on it, calling their bluff, I think? Man, maybe it's because I had taken my sleep meds and just couldn't put it down even though I was very tired. The latter, The Body Electric, was good, but relied on some plot devices that felt kinda cheap at the end. Data has to torture Flint/Akharin to keep the evil droids from killing Rhea, his love interest and Akharin's "daughter" (she is also an android). Then, when a black hole is about to destroy the freakin galaxy  he has to choose between saving Rhea, or Akharin! And Akharin is the only one who can help resurrect Data's "daughter" (the android Lal). He chooses Akharin. Plus Wesley is one of the main characters and I never liked that dude.So that makes 4 TNG books I've read this year. Favorite was still the first, Immortal Coil. It had its flaws, but had a lot of charm, and didn't feel as formulaic or built-to-sell-copies as the Cold Equations trilogy did. It was just straight up fun. The first of the Cold Equations books, The Persistence of Memory, was pretty fun, too. As a trilogy it was kinda like The Matrix movies... first - great. Second - aight. Third - eh.
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Mar 7, 2020 10:02
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Just read Ben Bova's Mars, Return to Mars, and Leviathans of Jupiter. Really enjoy sci fi based on our solar system; would like to read something with space rangers or space exploration in our solar system.
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Mar 7, 2020 12:44
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Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.chernobyl kinsman posted:i tried reading this but by 50 pages in i had already scrawled about 10 pages' worth of arguments in the margins. he was wrong about a lot of things before i even got out of the anglo-saxon period Is he wrong cos of his politics or does he just not know stuff?
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Mar 7, 2020 14:08
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Just finished "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" by Peter Handke, the Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. It's a somewhat disjointed examination of a person suffering from psychosis, using the subsequent loss of communication that occurs as a broader metaphor, or so I hope, for how books only work well when the reader can somewhat understand what the writer is trying to hell him. It's pretty cumbersome and unremarkable and I really wouldn't recommend it. Btw, this is the same guy who got into a lot of trouble recently for allegedly flirting a bit too much with the Baddies during the Yugoslav Wars. Saša Stanišić, winner of the German Book Prize last year and of Bosnian origin, also got himself involved in the poo poo show and the whole thing barely dominated the German media for maybe half a day or so.
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Mar 7, 2020 23:40
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A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories by Viktor Pelevin. A collection of eight short stories from contemporary Russian author Pelevin. Each are absurd as hell. In one, a young man runs into a pack of werewolves. In another, a young student discovers everyone is asleep. My favorite was this really beautiful story, Ontology of Childhood. There's a different translation of it online here and I highly recommend it. Best left undescribed for the reader to find out.
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Mar 8, 2020 06:41
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Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories. I’ve been big on ghost stories—particularly those from the late 19th and 20th century—for the last few months and this was a great collection to feed that obsession with. The premise is that Dahl was working on a potential TV show where each episode would adapt an existing ghost story, so Dahl read hundreds and hundreds of them and found about 30 great ones for the show. When the show fell through because the pilot was offensive to Catholics, he put about half the stories chosen into this book. I thought it was great, there weren’t any obvious choices like MR James or Dickens so all the stories and most of the authors were new to me. My favorite was “Ringing the Changes” by Robert Aickman. It was the first Aickman I’ve read and I’m excited to check out more of his work—especially since Chernobyl kinsman has been singing his praises recently and I’ve come to trust his taste. I’ve still got the Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, a Penguin collection of Lafcadio Hearn’s translated Japanese ghost stories, and the collected works of MR James to go through but once I’m through with those I’ll have to grab a copy of Cold Hand in Mine.
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Mar 8, 2020 14:32
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Safety Biscuits posted:Is he wrong cos of his politics or does he just not know stuff? no it was just bad scholarship
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Mar 9, 2020 00:03
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Chuck Buried Treasure posted:It was the first Aickman I’ve read and I’m excited to check out more of his work—especially since Chernobyl kinsman has been singing his praises recently and I’ve come to trust his taste. Fair warning (which I think CK has said in the past, but may as well repeat it): "Ringing the Changes" is much more overtly supernatural and straightforward in narrative than Aickman's typical story. He's great, but most of his stuff is extremely strange and doesn't attempt to explain itself. I think this makes it a lot more interesting than most horror fiction, but readers who really want to know what the hell is going on in every story might disagree.
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Mar 9, 2020 11:06
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i dunno about most supernatural - the one about the haunted graveyard in compulsory games which i forget the name of comes to mind as being moreso - but its definitely his most straightforward. most of his stories make me feel like if i were slightly smarter i would understand what was going on. like most of the pieces are there, but not quite all. there's definitely some kind of order, but you can't quite grasp it. although there is the one where the guy sleeps with the daughter of the moss king, that one i understood pretty well
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Mar 9, 2020 18:57
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chernobyl kinsman posted:no it was just bad scholarship Peter Ackroyd kinda does this a lot
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Mar 9, 2020 19:35
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thats too bad i really like ghostbusters
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Mar 9, 2020 20:30
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The Lessons of History by Will Durant, Ariel Durant. This book gets a lot of hype for being timeless and consistently relevant, but it just wasn't for me. Probably better viewed as a reference book than something you read cover to cover. [b]If on a Winter's Night a Traveler[/b[ by Italo Calvino. A real mind bender of a novel; the protagonist of which is you, the reader. Each chapter begins with your own actions (for instance, Chapter 1 is the story, told in 2nd person, going to the book store any purchasing the book), followed by the book itself. The hook is that the book you are reading (starting with If on a Winter's Night a Traveler) is either a mis-print, has no pages after page 32, or repeats the same page over and over etc. The best way to describe the book is as a "meta" novel. If you have interest in the nature of the self, identity etc, this is one that will really make you think.
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Mar 9, 2020 20:58
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Cool; thanks! I'll check it out. I think I read somewhere that some of the sequel books feature Paul more prominently than others. You may like the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Every book in the series unceremoniously drops you into the middle of a story, and shows no remorse as it expects you to find your way through a complex storyline. You can ~probably~ start the series from any book in the series, but Deadhouse Gates is probably the best starting point. It's not quite the same type of storytelling as Dune, but the prose, world building, and character development/philosophical liturgies are unparalleled IMO.
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Mar 10, 2020 10:29
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Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh Moshfegh created a loathsome, great character with a well-defined interior life and unique voice, but tries to slam that character into a half-baked plot that starts too late and ends too quickly. Ah well.
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Mar 12, 2020 00:26
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Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. A bit scattershot in that I felt that things came and went without being explored to their full potential. I did have fun reading the page where he tears down the optimistic hopes of his previous Mars Trilogy thanks to the discovery of Perchlorates.
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Mar 12, 2020 02:50
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FPyat posted:Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. A bit scattershot in that I felt that things came and went without being explored to their full potential. I did have fun reading the page where he tears down the optimistic hopes of his previous Mars Trilogy thanks to the discovery of Perchlorates. I like most every book KSR writes to one degree or another, but boy howdy as a big throbbing sci-fi enthusiast nerd did I find this one hard to enjoy. The primary thesis of the novel seems like one big cynical sandcastle-kick after he discovered perchlorates. "Humans are dumb and petty and will literally never change, colonizing other planets was always doomed to fail and a huge waste of time, alien microbes are always vengefully lethal and entirely insurmountable, everything breaks irreparably, it's way better to just abandon any ambition to do anything and nap on the beach!" It was still an excellent piece of work and I thought the AI was shockingly readable, all in all. I think KSR just really needed to vent his spleen after having his speculation pooped on so simply and permanently.
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Mar 12, 2020 12:14
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I always thought of it as an allegory for climate change, especially with its proximity to New York 2140 (which I couldn’t finish, ugh).
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Mar 12, 2020 15:02
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Sinatrapod posted:I like most every book KSR writes to one degree or another, but boy howdy as a big throbbing sci-fi enthusiast nerd did I find this one hard to enjoy. The primary thesis of the novel seems like one big cynical sandcastle-kick after he discovered perchlorates. "Humans are dumb and petty and will literally never change, colonizing other planets was always doomed to fail and a huge waste of time, alien microbes are always vengefully lethal and entirely insurmountable, everything breaks irreparably, it's way better to just abandon any ambition to do anything and nap on the beach!" Its a good thesis. We are barely able to solve our own climate crisis so the expectation that we woukd ever be able to terraform another planet like in his Mars trilogy is crazy. Very relevant; we cant even contain viruses and bacteria from species we've evolved next to let alone being able to live with alien microbes and bacteria. I havent read Aurora so I dont know if thats at all relevant, but Im looking forward to reading it.
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Mar 12, 2020 16:56
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TommyGun85 posted:We are barely able to solve our own climate crisis
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Mar 12, 2020 17:52
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Oh, what I would give for your optimism. sorry, the word should have been comprehend instead of solve.
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Mar 12, 2020 18:02
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the climate crisis is only a source of stress if you a) don't realize that we're currently in an ice age and so a "warming" period is really a return to approximate normality and b) believe that globalized industrial civilization is in any way sustainable or worth saving it's good that kim stanley robinson has belatedly realized that nerd fantasies of colonizing the universe, or even the solar system, have never been anything more than fantastic escapist masturbation, and that technology will never solve the problems that technology created chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 04:41
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in short, i'd like to recommend to you all a brilliant treatise by a Berkeley academic named Theodore Kaczynski
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Mar 13, 2020 04:47
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the climate crisis is only a source of stress if you a) don't realize that we're currently in an ice age and so a "warming" period is really a return to approximate normality and b) believe that globalized industrial civilization is in any way sustainable or worth saving Hahaha what. The rate of change is alarming no matter what weird wordplay you want to use to define “normal”. https://www.johnenglander.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CO2%20550my%20Extinction%20Chart%20from%20Ward.jpg Check this poo poo out. The worst extinction event in the history of life on earth was from runaway GHGs (sound familiar?) except in that case the running away took 25-50 million years. We’re pumping this poo poo out thousands of times faster than that. At zero on that chart the scale gets wacky as gently caress.
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Mar 13, 2020 04:50
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the best way to analyze the nerd fantasy of colonizing the universe is through the lens of terror management theory, pioneered by greenberg et al. nerds, who are largely atheists and (due to a profound lack of socialization and a lifetime of being told that they are smart) mostly narcissistic, must find an 'immortality project' - something in which to invest energy that transcends their pitifully short lives and which offers an illusion of meaning and permanence in a fundamentally meaningless and impermanent universe. this view is crystalized in tsiolkovsky's much-parroted view that earth is but a cradle from which we must escape. the nerd knows, deep down, that he will never escape; that he, and almost certainly humanity, will die on this rock. of course, even if we *were* to surmount the insurmountable barriers of interstellar travel - even, as in the nerd's wildest dreams, we were to succesfully colonize another rock - we would simply die on that one as well as this one. the fantasy of interstellar empire indulges the latent (western, narcissistic) impulses towards empire and assuages anxieties about the terminus of the race while giving the nerd a fantasy of continuation into which he can sublimate his own deep fear of death. that the fantasy is ultimately a form of religion, and inescapably doomed by the reality of the heat death of the universe, is either rationalized away or never confronted directly. all of this, again, is perfectly in line with the predictions of terror management theory. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 13, 2020 04:58
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tuyop posted:Hahaha what. The rate of change is alarming no matter what weird wordplay you want to use to define “normal”. did you look at the graph you posted, because it does not say what you think it says further, no one remotely acquainted with the scientific literature would claim that the p-tr extinction "was from runaway GHGs", at least not in a vacuum chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 04:59
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tuyop posted:Hahaha what. The rate of change is alarming no matter what weird wordplay you want to use to define “normal”. Thanks tuyop I thought the temperature was getting real weird in here for a second  Ice Age was making me thirsty content: A Little Hatred I think GRRM's blurb made me feel good and bad. It's got great character development and no dragons though. Honestly it really grabbed me by the middle and I stayed up way too late trying to find a stopping place a couple times.
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Mar 13, 2020 05:05
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tuyop posted:Hahaha what. The rate of change is alarming no matter what weird wordplay you want to use to define “normal”. sorry this actually makes me a little mad because it and you seem to be suggesting that every mass extinction in the history of the earth is due to greenhouse gases. nevermind that that conclusion isn't supported by the graph itself, and i'll start by looking at why, using only the graph itself: 1) suggesting that the p-tr extinction was caused by greenhouse gases alone makes no sense on its face. the end permian extinction was much, much more severe than the end devonian, and yet on this graph it's 1000 ppm lower in CO2 levels. if we're adhering to a GHG explanation for extinction, that makes no sense 2) as with above, there should have been another extinction between the permian and triassic extinctions, when CO2 levels were higher than during the triassic. there wasn't. 3) there should have been another extinction immediately after the Toarcian (which was really a very minor extinction event and not counted by scientists among the Big Five), but there wasn't 4) the Turonian is also not a major extinction and, given that CO2 rates were higher throughout the cretaceous than during that extinction, clearly not attributable to GHGs, and 5) current CO2 levels are so small compared to the rest of that chart that the author has to invent a hypothetical jump upwards - and even then it's still well below any of the extinctions he charts that's politely leaving aside the fact that you pulled this chart from the website of a guy who's a paid speaking consultant, not a peer-reviewed source, and which in fact provides no sources for its data it also takes a particular kind of scientific illiteracy to smugly claim that the p-tr extinction was due (solely) to "runaway GHGs" (it wasn't) - let alone the K-Pg extinction! at that point you're either lying or ignorant. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 05:09
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i note also that the author excludes extinction events that don't fit his preconceived model, like the pliocene-pleistocene event, the eocene-oligocene, the aptian, the lau event, the mulde event, or the great oxygenation, and that's just off the top of my head
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Mar 13, 2020 05:20
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Yeah you’re right surely this will all be fine. Consider your strawman tipped.
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Mar 13, 2020 05:29
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tuyop posted:Yeah you’re right surely this will all be fine. Consider your strawman tipped. i didn't say it would be fine. i said we're currently in an ice age, which we are, and which even your simplistic CO2 graph will confirm. i also made clear that it will most likely be fatal for global industrial civilization. but our ideas about "rates of extinction" are wild guesses and completely unfalsifiable due to the poor resolution of the fossil record, and pretending that the anthropocene is the worst thing to happen ever or that it poses a serious threat to the continuation of life *itself* on earth is either ignorance or masturbation.
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Mar 13, 2020 05:33
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None of us here on an internet forum about books should be taking firm anti-masturbation stances. Also, I would like to hear more about books people have read.
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Mar 13, 2020 05:54
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I've stumbled into a weird subgenre of sci fi for a couple of books. It started with an Egan kick after I loved Diaspora. So, Permutation City. I didn't like it as much as Diaspora but it was definitely more grounded. Kind of a fun ride through the singularity with a bit more physics meat than Neal Stephenson can put into it. Then Quarantine, which did some fun mind-bending physics stuff. Trying to play with the idea that quantum effects could have weird results on our perceptions. Just some speculative fun, and I liked it a lot, but more for the forms of control through "mods" than the pop quantum mechanics stuff. I tried to read Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder, but it sucks. I stopped about halfway through. The protagonist is insufferable, the world isn't compelling, all the other characters are one-dimensional. Then Chuck Wendig's Wanderers. Which you don't think is going to be similar to an Egan novel, but it has a fun twist! Otherwise pretty unremarkable. Now I'm just finishing up Recursion by Blake Crouch and I think it's doing a really good job of exploring time travel in a new way. Very reminiscent of Primer. And away from that a trip down the last year or so of post-apocalyptic fiction. Doggerland is excellent. Two men on an offshore wind farm in the near(?) future. I was captivated and I don't really know how to describe it. A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World: Fun YA adventure novel. Helen Marshal's The Migration is a YA novel that thinks it's not a YA novel about a plague in the near future affecting young people. Lots of breathless, credulous descriptions of the beauty of sisterhood and the ignorance of parents. I finished it, but just barely. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel. Worth the hype, it's a good novel. In more traditional Hard SF fare: Red Moon by KSR is fine. Delta-V by Daniel Suarez is good, scratches that Rendezvous with Rama itch pretty well, now updated to portray billionaires somewhat realistically. Read a couple of Nonfiction books in between as well. Silent Spring: I can see why this was so influential. It's great. It's also funny recalling my parent's repeating the talking points against this book when it's obvious now that they never read it. My main takeaway from this is the notes about fish stocks and wildlife populations. Carson writes about a world that she sees devastated by the chemical revolution and deregulation, but her world was that much richer again than ours. It just really broke my heart. All this abundance wasted so we could have profits and purple dyes. Bullshit Jobs: Followup to the famous essay. Graeber categorizes and discusses bullshit jobs and their effects on the people who have to suffer them, and how that relates to current labour struggles and class consciousness, or lack thereof. He even spends some time discussing solutions, which is weird for him. I loving loved this book, it's beautifully written and clearly sympathetic and outraged at what's being done to us, by us. It even helped explain the weird situation teachers (and nurses, doctors, etc) find themselves in where they're reviled by the rest of the working world even while their working conditions and relative pay decline. (I had a conversation at a lake during a summer off with a friend. Just watching all these people with jet skis and the time to use them and poo poo like that, while I was recovering from my 90-100 hour work weeks in a failing school. I was like, "Man, imagine having enough free time, money, and energy to enjoy a jet ski!". And my friend said, "Yeah but this is the price you pay to have meaningful work.") That comment, its absurdity, and its roots in moral philosophy and puritanism is also explored in Bullshit Jobs. Recommend. This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein: It's adorable how hopeful Klein was just six years ago. We're hosed, but might as well fight while it happens. Out of the Wreckage by George Monbiot: This is another fantastic book. I couldn't put it down and it's fairly short. Monbiot describes some of the root causes and symptoms of the deaths of our communities and democracies, then explores some current trends in community development that are working to address those causes. It's very powerful and now I'm having apartment building potlucks, canvassing my neighbours and going to community meetings and planning a local composting/gardening project! Send help! Blueprint for Revolution by Popovic. Veteran of the Serbian revolution that ousted Milosovic describes case studies of other recent nonviolent liberal revolutions. Of limited usefulness for organizing for systemic change in places without dictators, in my opinion. Also a bit meandering and self-aggrandizing. tuyop fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 14:38
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Just finished proofreading a cool book about these people, which involved reading it.
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Mar 15, 2020 12:00
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