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Things Fall Apart, the heartwarming tale of a dude who is simply incapable of making the right decision. Also, yams. After having it on my radar for years I was surprised by how readable it was - it seems like all the sentences are super short which pairs well with the direct/spare narration. I definitely enjoyed the first two thirds or so a fair bit more than the last - as well as ruining the villages, the missionaries started dimming my enjoyment.
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May 28, 2021 00:43
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ulvir posted:I think To the lighthouse for sure is a novel that needs to be revisited again. I need to read it again for sure. Its sublimely written, and the way the connecting section just hazes out between the focus of the first and third sections is brilliant
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May 28, 2021 04:03
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Been awhile since I finished something worth posting about but I just finished Ender’s Game. It took me awhile to get into it then finished the last 2/3rds in about a day. I really enjoyed it. Finding out he was actually a killer from the start was when I realized I wouldn’t be putting the book back down until I was done.
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May 29, 2021 16:46
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Rolo posted:Been awhile since I finished something worth posting about but I just finished Ender’s Game. Are any of the Ender Game books worth reading?
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May 30, 2021 06:20
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ScottyJSno posted:Are any of the Ender Game books worth reading?
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May 30, 2021 06:24
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bowmore posted:The first one definitely is, I haven't read any of the others The first one is, the rest are..interesting, but eventually all converge into a Mormon nexus IMO
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May 30, 2021 06:33
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ScottyJSno posted:Are any of the Ender Game books worth reading? I’m probably not going to continue but the first one was great by itself.
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May 30, 2021 12:37
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The second book, Speaker For The Dead, is very good. I consider it simply act two of the story.
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May 30, 2021 14:20
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ScottyJSno posted:Are any of the Ender Game books worth reading? The first one, yes. You could say it's written for resentful teenagers and there's some stuff in retrospect that's questionable (see John Kessel's essay, the innocent Killer), but it's still a good book. Each successive book erodes the good will of the first with even more questionable choices. For my money, Speaker for the Dead is still worth reading, while Xenocide is not.
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May 30, 2021 17:25
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Ender is in the category of series where you can confidently stop reading once you hit your personal lower bound for quality because it will not get any better if you keep going.
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May 30, 2021 18:33
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Just finished reading Zoologists guide to the Galaxy by Arik Kershenbaum (library copy). Zoologists guide to the Galaxy is a non-fiction book about what alien life forms on other planets might look like, move, communicate, see, etc; using various examples of Earth avian/subterranean/aquatic/mammalian/amphibian species. Highly recommended for others to check out. tldr Almost any alien lifeform body shape or alien lifeform communication system is possible. Except for floating life forms though, way too many unknowns there to even start guessing.
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May 30, 2021 20:05
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nonathlon posted:The first one, yes. You could say it's written for resentful teenagers and there's some stuff in retrospect that's questionable (see John Kessel's essay, the innocent Killer), but it's still a good book. Each successive book erodes the good will of the first with even more questionable choices. For my money, Speaker for the Dead is still worth reading, while Xenocide is not. this essay was also reinforced by the fact that Card became an open fascist in the years since it was written part of the reason Ender's Game is so problematic as Literal Genocide Apologia is that it is an excellent, compelling story
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May 30, 2021 23:04
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I'm the idiot that read all the way through the Bean series before finally throwing in the towel. I'd stick with it through Xenocide but as I said, idiot... Meanwhile I just finished In That Endlessness, Our End by Gemma Files. This is a really good collection of horror short stories that have a very contemporary feel to them. I think there is a bonus impact (and one major annoyance) if you know Toronto and Ontario well as well, but these cultural touchpoints are flavoring and are not at all necessary to follow.
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May 31, 2021 03:11
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I just finished When You Least Expect It, by Haley Cass. I have a soft spot for cute and fluffy romance novels, and this book absolutely fills my need for books like that - it's a fantastic journey through what is probably a bit of a trope of the lesbian who falls for the straight woman, with all the pining that one would expect, but without all of the angst. The only real issue I have with the book is that I wish it was longer. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 31, 2021 |
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May 31, 2021 21:49
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Just finished Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones a few days ago. It's a really delightful fairy tale with some great characters and a lot of warmth and humor. Then I watched the anime and it was a huge disappointment, they stripped poor Howl down to nothing and changed a bunch of plot stuff that just made it hard to follow. A real shame. Also all the bird stuff was weird. artsy fartsy fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 03:32
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artsy fartsy posted:Just finished Howl’s Moving Castle The book sequel is quite good too.
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Jun 1, 2021 04:32
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artsy fartsy posted:Just finished Howl’s Moving Castle I may have to try this too then. I liked the settings and art in the movie but don’t remember too much about the rest. Also not book related but I hope that’s not the only thing you’ve seen by them. I’m not into anime but Castle in the Sky and Spirited Away are fantastic.
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Jun 1, 2021 14:08
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I'm not normally a graphic novel person, but on a whim I bought DC's New Frontier a little while ago, for a change of pace. I've just finished it - not bad! It basically bridges the game between the golden age and silver age heroes (superman, wonder woman etc, with green lantern, martian manhunter, etc). I'm not knowledgeable on the topic, but I quite liked it - it provides a good starting point for newcomers, and introduces you to both major/well-known characters and a bunch of more minor, powerless characters who had their own comics etc back in the day. (I think there were the Challengers snd the Blackhawks - the latter were a bunch of pilots) Anyway, with perfect timing my next books to read have just arrived in the mail today! We Few and Whispers in the Tall Grass by Nick Brokhausen. They cover the first and second halves (respectively) of his second tour in Vietnam, this time serving in MACV-SOG, which is an elite recon unit operating way behind enemy lines in Vietnam, as well as in neutral Laos and Cambodia. It was hard to find copies of each book that had the same style cover (I think the hardcover edition of 'We Few' isn't in print anymore and WitTG is HC-only), but thankfully I found a site that sells both. Either way, ohhhh yeah, managing to buy a series of books that perfectly match size, cover and artstyle is like a drug - perfection! 👌  I'm not far in yet, but I like Nick's writing style - it reminds me of Andy McNab, except with the pre-combat drinking and hijinks cranked up a few notches! Haven't got up to any operational details yet, but I've been enjoying it so far. Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 23:06
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War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 by Jeremy Black. It's about conflict between European and non-European military systems, and intra-non-European conflicts. Black argues against the view of technological teleology, that the West conquered the world just because it had superior technology. Black instead focuses on how other factors like political, operational, and organizational capacity contributed as much or more than technological superiority. For example: European sailing ships, which were one of the areas where Europe was inarguably ahead of other continents, had more trouble fighting war canoes operating in riverine and coastal environments than fighting against war galleys armed with cannons on the open ocean. The book was kind of like a coffee table book (lots of pictures, glossy pages) but had much more text than I expect to see in that kind of book. This isn't merely a history of warfare in the world, and for such a short book it covers individual topics in brief, but I think it makes a strong case for Black's thesis.Major Isoor posted:Either way, ohhhh yeah, managing to buy a series of books that perfectly match size, cover and artstyle is like a drug - perfection! 👌 I know the highs, and the lows of that all too well.
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Jun 3, 2021 18:41
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Just finished Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff Vandermeer. Its a ecological thriller set in the near future, and has an interesting, if ill defined, premise. The story is told directly; Annihilation this is not. Ultimately I never really understood the initial motivation of the protagonist, especially in the earliest stages of the story as the danger ramped up. At the end it all had a sort of coherence, but I was still left wondering just why she would ever do any of that. Still not a terrible read, and has interesting ideas. 3/5.
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Jun 8, 2021 05:20
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I just read Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. So good that I enjoyed it despite being pretty sick of pandemic as a plot device.
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Jun 12, 2021 04:28
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I just finished The Interdependency series by John Scalzi. It's very clearly inspired by Dune, which is both a good thing and also the only real issue with the book, in that like Dune, the villains are cartoonishly evil to the point that the only thing that seems to motivate them is that the end justifies the means. Still, it's a well-spun yarn with quite a few good twists thrown in, a wide cast of likable characters not all of whom are goody-two-shoes, and contains liberal use of the word gently caress which I always appreciate.
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Jun 16, 2021 16:42
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Interesting to get familiar with the historical significance of the book, but for entertainment purposes it wasn't my favorite. From everything I'd heard I was hoping it would be more engaging like other older books like For Whom the Bell Tolls or Grapes of Wrath, but it was hard to keep track of characters. Felt like a lot of the symbolism was going over my head. Definitely not trying to act like I'm smarter than the book but it felt like when I read Stranger in a Strange Land, in that I get how the book made a huge impact culturally when it was released but to a modern audience the impact would be lessened. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (audiobook). Modern day rookie London cop starts fighting the paranormal. Not the most original idea but high quality writing and likable characters make it work pretty well.
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Jun 18, 2021 15:59
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Love Everyone by Parvati Markus • This book just gives off so much good energy, it's wonderful. I definitely recommend it to anyone and everyone who wants to find their true self. (Probably requires a bit of background information before reading if you don't know who Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji) is.
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Jun 21, 2021 07:19
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I finished The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard. Not sure how I feel about this one, seems to be a pretty respected work of Dystopian Fiction. The basic premise is that solar flares mucked up the whole equilibrium of Earth's ability to block and regulate the sun's heat and now the world is undergoing a nice, slow bake. Zoom in on our protagonist Dr. Kierans who is doing some fancy survey and science stuff over the former city of London, now a mostly flooded tropical hellscape complete with giant lizards and bats... The concept of the slowly baking and flooding world doesn't feel as novel in 2021, what with it being a somewhat sincere threat these days, though not to the extent here obviously. I'm told Ballard likes to focus on isolated people and imagine what the madness does to them. That is a lot of what this is, especially the latter half. The uhhh... race representation in this is not the best. The words "large negro" get used a lot. The few black characters in this book don't get real names but slick nicknames like The Admiral and Big Caesar... I get that it is the 1960s UK, but I still feel like there's numerous works that are exceptionally less racist in the time period. To be honest, the treatment and descriptions of the black characters reminds me a lot of Robert E. Howard Conan stories or Poe's The Golden Bug. Like, I guess they aren't literally brain dead slaves but uhh... they might honestly be better not being there. Anyway, revel in the fall of the British Empire, pre-Brexit... I also hope you like the word "gilt" because it is written no less than 25 times. Zurtilik fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 14:07
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I also recently read City by Clifford Simak. I previously read his book, Waystation, which was a breezy, pulpy sci-fi read and this isn't much different in that regard. This is another alternative future, one that catalogues the rise and fall of humanity and then the rise of uhhh... Dogs and ants?! It is an anthology essentially, loosely tied and narrated as legends passed down to Dogkind from the days of humans. We begin with technology finally allowing humans to flee the busy and dense world of the city and founding their own estates anywhere they wish. Eventually we end up in another dimension because ants can't quit building. It's a wild ride! As I said it reads largely like pulpy nonsense, but it is a ton of fun. Follow the Webster family and eventually their robot butler Jenkins as humanity transcends itself and dogs learn that bow and arrows are frightening. Zurtilik fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 14:21
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City is one of my favorites. Most of it was written immediately after WWII, after the Holocaust and nuclear bombs, when people weren’t sure that humanity was worth it, and weren’t sure we heading in a worthwhile direction. So Simak wrote about humanity collectively giving up being human.
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Jun 21, 2021 14:43
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It's the start of the Summer so I've gotten into reading again and decided I'd also try to participate in society more so here I am. My latest reads were a mix of science fiction and Revolutionary France. A New World Begins was a condensed history of the French Revolution. A good read if you already know many of the details and participants, but not something I would recommend to a newbie on the topic. As for science fiction I've been reading Solaris, Roadside Picnic, and Hard to be a God. I wish I had read Solaris earlier because I didn't realize how much that book had impacted science fiction culture. The Strugatsky bros books were also pretty good.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:52
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I recently finished The Godfather and really enjoyed it. I've seen the movie plenty of times, but the book adds so many details that one misses in the film. I'm about half-way through Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. I didn't like his second book, Artemis, but saw a bunch of rave reviews for PHM and decided to try it. I'm liking it so far. The writing for the protagonist, Dr. Grace, is a bit cringe at times -- he sounds like Mark Watney, if you've read The Martian -- but it's not unbearable.
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Jun 23, 2021 17:57
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I just finished The Pursuit Of The Pankera, which is a novel posthumously published by the Heinlein estate, based on a set of manuscripts that's apparently only recently been put together into a whole book. According to the editor, the only thing that was done was assembling a full story from the manuscripts. It's a delightful twist on The Number Of The Beast, and reminds me more of a Heinlein juvenile with some of the same (and yet very different) plot points of the earlier book.
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Jun 25, 2021 11:06
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Finished Inherent Viceby Thomas Pynchon, after having watched the 2014 movie of the same name. Great writing, loved the story, and the characters. However the movie is basically a shot for shot imagining of the story, kinda like No Country for Old Men. I personally didn't have a problem with that but it isn't like you're going to get much more out of the movie than the book or vice versa. I'm definitely interested in more of Pynchons writing, and things in the same vein as Inherent Vice.
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Jun 25, 2021 17:35
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Trauts posted:I'm definitely interested in more of Pynchons writing, and things in the same vein as Inherent Vice.
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Jun 25, 2021 18:03
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Burning the books : a history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge by Richard Ovenden. The Bodley Librarian of the University of Oxford UK Richard Ovenden and the Director of the Bodleian Library's Centre for the Study of the Book (also Richard Ovenden) decides to do a unattributed rewrite of Fernando Baez's A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day because "A Universal History..." didn't have a sufficient amount of English scholars/England as savior of historical documents slant. Skip reading Burning the books, and instead read A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day
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Jun 25, 2021 18:37
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Finished Piranesi and This Is How You Lose The Time War this past week. Thought both of them were great - Piranesi was just magical and a lot of fun to unpick and speculate what was going on, and TIHYLTTW was just a blast to run through - really fast paced and a lot of fun sci fi vignettes to run with alongside the main ~romance~ framing device. Immediate edit: finished Sixteen Ways To Defend A Walled City a week or two ago as well! Again, a lot of fun to run through and discover stuff - I remain a sucker for competence drama, and the storytelling was consistently interesting and surprising at points. Not the Messiah fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jun 30, 2021 |
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Jun 30, 2021 19:17
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Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien This guy writes some of the best goddamned war books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Things They Carried was better, but this is a close second.
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Jun 30, 2021 19:53
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A few days ago I finished The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which is a delightfully slice-of-life character driven space opera with a little bit of romance. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but just forgot to post about it. The second book in the series, A Closed And Common Orbit, is also good although it's only very tenuously related to the first book in that they share universe and a character.
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Jun 30, 2021 22:07
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Killing Commendatore by Murakami. I felt that this one was not only a mixed bag, but a collection of Murakami tropes - a lone artist exiled from his wife, lots of weirdly-specific Classical music references, extremely awkward and detailed sex scenes (including the ubiquitous dream rape sequence, some weird magic, and a plot that goes nowhere for hundreds and hundreds of pages aside from the tiniest of details. Having been recently on a Murakami binge (Men Without Women is an amazing and severely cutting collection of short stories, and also loved Kafka On The Shore), this one was clearly the weakest. There was an interesting twist in the storyline at the end (even if it was pretty strongly telegraphed about halfway through), but overall something that I felt obligated to finish instead of enjoying reading. 5.5/10.
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Jun 30, 2021 22:25
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I read Call of the Dragon by Jessica Drake. This was my first read in my dive into Kindle Unlimited trash fiction. The book starts horribly, I almost put it down even with the expectation of it not being the best. The first couple chapters read as almost stream of conscious from a teenager with an exclusive and steady diet of fan fiction. Admittedly, the writing and the pacing seems to chill out as the book goes along, though some part of me wonders if it was just me getting accustomed to the style? But at the same time, if the author actually did become better and more confident as she went along, is that not a sign of a poorly edited book? Was she in such a hurry to push out a 6 book series she couldn't go back to the beginning to apply some of her improved craft? IDK, she's wrote like 10+ books with plenty of well-received reviews so I guess it is working out for her! I find Zara's power confusing, as it seems to imply the world has a concrete concept of "value" or that she is somehow able to know an item's worth to someone with no context or prior history? IDK. If you don't think about it too much it's fine. Here are some choice lines that I highlighted: "He pulled me in for another kiss, and this one had an edge of hunger to it that made my nipples tighten in response." "As I watched him jog away, unapologetically admiring the way his pants molded to what looked like a firm rear end and powerful thighs," “I have been listening to humans converse for hundreds of years, and have picked up the idiosyncrasies of your language. Now are you going to feed me or not?” "Zara, watch it!” Tiana cried just as I was about to step into a pile of dog poo poo Speaking of bad editing. I apparently posted my same review twice on this post originally. Zurtilik fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Jul 2, 2021 |
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Jul 2, 2021 02:16
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I always figure that Kindle Unlimited is for a certain type of reader. Years ago, someone who worked in publishing told me about a phrase they had: "commodity fiction". It was for books like bread or milk - people were going to buy them anyway and the actual quality was fairly irrelevant - it was like they needed a pound of reading every week, and it could have been shovelled into a bag from a stockpile of random books. At one time I worked in a book store and there was a sizeable clientele that showed up every week and bought all the new (just arrived on that day) romance novels. There were the guys that came in every long vacation looking for "just a book with a good story", who you'd steer across to the "manly men making tough decisions" section. And the people who just devoured every new SF/F trilogy. And that's the typical user of Kindle Unlimited. nonathlon fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jul 2, 2021 |
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Jul 2, 2021 10:00
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nonathlon posted:I always figure that Kindle Unlimited is for a certain type of reader. Years ago, someone who worked in published told me about a phrase they had: "commodity fiction". It was for books like bread or milk - people were going to buy them anyway and the actual quality was fairly irrelevant - it was like they needed a pound of reading every week, and it could have been shoveled into a bag from a stockpile of random books. At one time I worked in a book store and there was a sizeable clientele that showed up every week and bought all the new (just arrived on that day) romance novels. There were the guys that came in every long vacation looking for "just a book with a good story", who you'd steer across to the "manly men making tough decisions" section. And the people who just devoured every new SF/F trilogy. You've discovered this subforum's primary demographic!
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Jul 2, 2021 10:06
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