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bowmore posted:The American Psycho movie is one of the rare cases where it is better than the book I think L.A. Confidential.
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# ? Mar 27, 2022 14:42 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 08:41 |
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The Shining
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# ? Mar 27, 2022 14:50 |
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:I quit Dune after God Emperor. I thought the recommended stop point for Dune was Children of Dune, which frankly still got extremely weird towards the end. Should I continue onto God Emperor?
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# ? Mar 27, 2022 20:25 |
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Sock The Great posted:I thought the recommended stop point for Dune was Children of Dune The... I... God Emperor is pretty great, it's like reading I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream from the point of view of loving AM.
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# ? Mar 28, 2022 00:27 |
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bowmore posted:The American Psycho movie is one of the rare cases where it is better than the book I think Field of Dreams is way better than the book it's based on.
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# ? Mar 28, 2022 22:47 |
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This might be sacrilege, and its not because the book is bad, but I LOVE Wonder Boys the movie more than the book.
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# ? Mar 29, 2022 01:38 |
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I take back the bad things I said about Necroscope.
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# ? Mar 29, 2022 02:51 |
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:I take back the bad things I said about Necroscope. it's absolutely insane. it's like the best possible grindhouse movie.
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# ? Mar 29, 2022 15:38 |
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:The... I... This is like the best explanation of God Emperor that I have ever seen. BaseballPCHiker posted:This might be sacrilege, and its not because the book is bad, but I LOVE Wonder Boys the movie more than the book. Same! That's a fantastic movie. Also incidentally by the same guy who made LA Confidential.
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# ? Mar 29, 2022 23:57 |
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BaseballPCHiker posted:This might be sacrilege, and its not because the book is bad, but I LOVE Wonder Boys the movie more than the book. Agreed.
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 15:11 |
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Finished Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. A lot of executions for a book not about the French Revolution or Stalin.
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 15:46 |
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Finished Wodehouse's Barmy in Wonderland and yeah (like I probably said before) the more I read 'em, the more I believe the Jeeves books were his only good ones. Also, not the author's fault, but when the scene is the male protagonist sets the female protagonist's hat on fire, and you depict the scene on the dust jacket, maybe don't make it this boring:
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 15:54 |
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:I take back the bad things I said about Necroscope. Now you're making me wonder which bit you just got to. "Something is trying to hide", maybe?
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 11:01 |
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The part where our Romanian friend loses his virginity. That whole bit in the boarding house in Romanian was what turned me around.
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 15:00 |
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Jedit posted:Now you're making me wonder which bit you just got to. "Something is trying to hide", maybe? I just read that bit. Looking forward to more.
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 15:10 |
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I finished reading Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman and We Are Bellingcat by Elliot Higgins aka somethingawful user BrownMoses this weekend. Dark Mirror was interesting, and brought up new info about Snowden's life pre-infamy and Glenn Greenwald honing on the Snowden revelations late then making it about him. Stuff like Snowden being addicted to speedhacking everything in real life like a videogame, Snowden liveblogging his life on the arstechnica dot com forums, and Snowden doing something really loving weird and shady online around 2003 he still refuses to speak about a decade later. Greenwald came up a few times negatively, with a couple of footnotes complete with timelines illustrating that Greenwald wasn't as pivotal and came in extremely late versus what Greenwald has stated in print and interviews about his interactions with Edward Snowden. We are Bellingcat mentioned somethingawful a few times, and mostly elided over details like how Bellingcat is organized, decides what projects to focus on and publicize, what funds Bellingcat, etc. The biggest question I have after reading WAB is "did the person who ghost-wrote a bunch of the content for early articles on BrownMoses's off-site blog under the "The Regular Contributor" handle ever self-doxx and reveal what SomethingAwful account they posted under?" As per page 20 of the hardcover edition of WAB, "We noticed each other's contributions on the Something Awful message boards, and I asked if <they> would consider writing a post for Brown Moses. <They> preferred anonymity, so became 'The Regular Contributor'."
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 16:32 |
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quantumfoam posted:Snowden doing something really loving weird and shady online around 2003 he still refuses to speak about a decade later.
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 20:00 |
I just finished The Famished Road by Ben Okri. I read this for a couple of reasons. First I loved Okri’s story in The Weird. Second, after reading The Open Veins of Latin America, I really appreciated having read One Hundred Years of Solitude first because it gave me a sense of the moral and personal impact and feelings that the events of history had on the people in the region, how their traditional and syncretic pieces of culture recoiled and adapted, stuff like that. I intend to add a book about Nigerian history to my list soon for the same effect. As a book, though, I’m a little speechless. I love the focus on one family in one compound, it really keeps the reader grounded when insane fantastical poo poo happens every couple of pages. The many shapes of Madame Koto and her bar were often hilarious and disgusting, actually the whole book used piss and farts throughout to lighten the mood and highlight the visceral nature of the spiritual onslaughts. I had a pretty hard time staying with it when it really delved into the spirit world. Just a total acid trip of dreams and symbology that I can’t connect to anything, and I’ve read The Fate of Africa, Wretched of the Earth, etc, and have a degree in international development, so it’s unclear if I just didn’t Get It or if I was supposed to be disoriented and distracted to match the experience of Azuo. Overall I think I got what I wanted and feel crushed and hollowed out, as I should. Several passages of prose were so beautiful that I cried, like parts where the protagonist’s parents are praying to his spirit, stuff like that. I recommend it if you like magical realism at all. Edit: Talking to other people about it has kind of clarified my thoughts as well. What I love about this is that it communicates the sensation and collective experience of completely capricious and often malicious social forces that inexorably gently caress up your life, without recourse or effective strategies for dealing with the harm. And really, what other ways are there to understand these things? Even in a mass shooting where there is a completely transparent path to prevention, in the West we just offer incantations to ward against the bad vibes. Call some guns "assault weapons" and those are the bad ones, done! Literally thoughts and prayers for the survivors. I really appreciate the power of this genre for explaining how it must feel to be, say, a local Nigerian cobbler. Just making and fixing shoes for the town, making a decent living. Some white trust fund kids show up and remark upon the lack of shoes on some people. They go away and within a couple of years the cobbler can no longer work because the entire region is flooded with free shoes spun from nothing but misplaced white guilt and the logic of underdevelopment. I don't think the cobbler would believe the shoes are magic, of course, but it must feel exactly the same as: quote:Outside the bar there was a man standing barefoot in the heat. He had on only a pair of sad-looking underpants. His hair was rough and covered in a red liquid and bits of rubbish. He had a big sore on his back and a small one on his ear. Flies swarmed around him and he kept twitching. Every now and then he broke into a titter. I tried to go round him but he kept cutting off my path. tuyop fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Mar 31, 2022 |
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 21:50 |
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Armauk posted:Interesting. Can you post the blurb(s) from the book that alludes to this? It was spread out over 2 or more pages, and I already returned that (library) book on wednesday. Snowden started posting on the arstechnica forum about how to be really private and secure online, said something about being worried about blowback by the government misinterpreting his actions as terrorism when responding to arstechnica forums people saying "what the gently caress do you need with all this privacy stuff. What the gently caress are you doing?" This happened in-book inbetween Snowden learning how to setup a server on the internet from arstechnica forums people and before started liveblogging about his world travels at the CIA.
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 23:04 |
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quantumfoam posted:It was spread out over 2 or more pages, and I already returned that (library) book on wednesday. Thanks. I'm interested to read his early stuff on Ars Technica. Might not be hard to find.
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# ? Apr 1, 2022 00:46 |
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Tom Swift and His War Tank, or Doing His Bit for Uncle Sam by Victor Appleton (pseudonym). I was on Project Gutenburg to get a copy of Tom Sawyer and saw a bunch of Tom Swift novels next to it, which I knew of as children’s novels about a boy inventor, but had never read. So, I grabbed a title that sounded like it would have some entertaining WWI patriotism, and it didn’t disappoint: “‘He can put me down for more [war] bonds too!’ said Mr. Nestor. ‘I’m going to see Germany beaten if it takes every last dollar I have!’” At the time it was written, tanks were new and intriguing, so it had to go to great length to describe them. Tom’s tank included for example: “compact but not very attractive living quarters of the crew, for provision had to be made for the men to stay in the tank if, perchance, if became stalled in No Man’s Land, surrounded by the enemy.” It had the lack of cultural sensitivity you’d expect from a book over a century old, in particular Tom’s black servant Eradicate Samson. Who has an all-time great name and shows the only common sense in the book, but he still puts on a minstrel-show. Which I guess I'm inured to from having read so much old stuff; I was looking for Tom Sawyer after all.
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# ? Apr 1, 2022 05:38 |
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I grew up reading the 1950s-1960s Tom Swift Jr. books, which are slightly more culturally sensitive than the original 1910s series (the comical black janitor is replaced by a comical Texan cook, for instance). I also note that the CW is doing a pilot for a Tom Swift show, spun off from their Nancy Drew show, where Tom is black and gay. That would have flipped a few wigs back in the day. (As a fan of the old books, what offends me about the new show is that their Tom is also a billionaire. The books were written long before the explosion in CEO pay and the rise of the tech bro. The Swift family of the books may own a high-tech factory and have hangars full of Tom's atomic-powered airplanes and submarine cars and moon rockets and whatnot, but their home life was thoroughly middle-class.) Anyway, I just finished Robert Rankin's Retromancer. Like the few other books of Rankin's I've read, it's mildly amusing -- trying very hard to be Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett and not quite getting there. Selachian fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Apr 1, 2022 |
# ? Apr 1, 2022 15:10 |
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I decided to stop talking about Necroscope here today but I finished it so Necroscope rules.
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# ? Apr 2, 2022 06:22 |
Hey I added it to my list so thanks!
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# ? Apr 2, 2022 07:19 |
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Finished a re-read of 'Carrion Comfort' by Dan Simmons. Would love to see this adapted as some point in the future. Hyperion first though. Also decided to reread the 'Wool' books knowing that Apple TV is adapting those now.
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# ? Apr 3, 2022 23:02 |
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Droll Stories by Honore de Balzac I read a translation from the mid-18th century. Sometimes the humor or idiomatic expressions were entirely lost on me, but for the most part the stories were hilarious. The one that killed me was about King Louis and his mistress pulling a prank on his dinner guests. He sets out a huge feast and encourages everyone to gorge themselves. Late into the meal, the mistress excuses herself to use the bathroom, but really she goes sets up a mannequin of herself in the only bathroom and hides in another apartment. One by one the guests each have to go take a dump, and they open the bathroom door to find the mistress' dummy occupying the stall. They're forced to excuse themselves and return to the party, where the king obliges them to eat more, and they all stuff themselves because theyre terrified of offending the king.. It escalates into a Monty Python skit. Most of the stories in Droll Stories could easily be updated into modern situational comedies minus the anti-semitism. *** Battleground by Jim Butcher is the Avengers assemble Dresden Files book. Every character from the last 16 books gets a turn punch--kicking a big bad until eventually Harry Dresden delivers the coup de grace. It was a tedious read for me because I have very little nostalgia and the formula was too obvious. The villain, a Titan goddess named Ethnui, is thinly drawn. She has no personality to speak of and her motives boil down to "destroy everything". Her defining traits are having thick armor and a lot of hit points. She's also hot, but this the Dresden Files, so it would be strange for the text to skip out on describing her hotness level. Harry's brother's wife in the depths of her grief, is distractingly hot. So are both queens of Faerie, Harry's young apprentice, every valkryie, the leader of the white vampires, and all lady cops. This is escapist fantasy that caters to a certain audience, so whatever. Not every book has to pretend to be feminist. It still gets a little tiresome. There's an in-world reason for Harry's rampant skeevinesss--the Winter Mantle--but he was just as skeevy if not more so in the earlier books before he took on the Mantle. This book didnt have any of the noir detective stuff I liked about most of the rest of the series. Harry's emotional development retreads the same ground previous books have covered again and again. I think this may be the longest Dresden book. It felt like it. The editting was not tight. Many passages will state or describe something, only to restate the same thing in a slightly different way a few paragrapgs later. The status quo of the Dresden Files world is changed by the end of the book. I'll read the next one because its popcorn, but I hope the series doesnt totally become a comic book movie pastiche going forward. *** Piranesi by Susanah Clarke is a really quick read with a great premise, lots of symbolism, and a small cast of enjoyable characters. I felt like more could have been done with the plot and that the main villain was criminally incompetent. Really, I just wanted to explore everything more because the setting is so cool. MartingaleJack fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Apr 4, 2022 |
# ? Apr 4, 2022 19:38 |
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select xposting from booklord 6. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays - Esme Weijun Wang This is a series of personal essays about the author's experience with schizoaffective disorder. I really wanted to like this book but I found it increasingly problematic and frustrating as I went on. It starts off extremely clinical, like I'm reading a research paper at school (with citations and everything), but then there are some promising interludes of her struggles/decisions and reckoning with the illness, but by the end it is completely off the rails in a non-interesting kind of way. The essays are incredibly disjointed and unmoored in time or theme. The last few chapters are spent talking about her "Chronic Lyme" diagnosis (I didn't think this was a real thing?) and her and a friend seeking out a bunch of alternative medicine for it. I think there's something interesting to unpack when having an 'uncurable' diagnosis like schizoaffective disorder can lead to seeking other forms of comfort/treatment when western medicine is out of answers, but she is not quite honest enough with herself to be able to convey anything insightful in her writing. Her intense amount of privilege (wealth, beauty) and acknowledgement of the privilege WITHOUT examination of it is completely exhausting. Again, I really wanted to like this book, but if you're writing a memoir/personal essays you should either have lived a very interesting life or be very interesting yourself and she doesn't really clear the bar. BananaNutkins posted:Piranesi by Susanah Clarke is a really quick read with a great premise, lots of symbolism, and a small cast of enjoyable characters. I felt like more could have been done with the plot and that the main villain was criminally incompetent. Really, I just wanted to explore everything more because the setting is so cool. I loved Piranesi and I agree the other characters were a little thinly sketched. I would love an entire world set in the eerie world of that mansion... the pure solitude reminds me a bit of reading survival books like Island of the Blue Dolphins
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# ? Apr 7, 2022 22:23 |
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Lyme disease can have chronic effects, but that specific phrasing is a red flag. Edit: Searched the book on Amazon, and no, what she's talking about is pure quackery. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Apr 8, 2022 |
# ? Apr 8, 2022 00:51 |
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tuyop posted:Hey I added it to my list so thanks! I hope you like it! Its got some pretty cringey sex in it but I liked it overall. I just finished Necroscope 2: VAMPHYRI! and it was more of the same which isn't really a bad thing. It crept more into one of my favorite types of stories where we have a spiritual world parallel to the physical one that has some kind of conflict with it. Here for it. Starting 3 tomorrow.
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# ? Apr 8, 2022 21:35 |
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While struggling through Gorhmenghast, which was a tedious and relentless chore, I finished a bunch other books. A Clock for Mr. Kelly - a vehicle accident leads to a murder investigation, which in turns leads to discovery of a smuggling ring stealing Soviet watch parts and smuggling them abroad. High stakes to be sure*. The Vayner Brothers, a former crime reporter and a former investigator with the Moscow police, are probably the best known USSR detective authors (specifically police procedurals, due to censorship demands and local realities). If you ever heard about them (and let's face it, you probably haven't) it's due to the serial adaptation of The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed. But that works particularly well mostly due to the combined acting talent of the cast, and the authors stretching beyond their comfort zone. The rest of their stuff ranges between decent to adequate, though always readable. Easily readable is about what I was looking for, and this early (possibly their very first, some contradictory info out there) book is just barely that. Numerous and barely distinguishable characters (two well known future protagonists are not at all recognizable beyond the barest characteristics), very moralizing plot (USSR detective fiction would always have moral elements, but this pushes the limits. The main villains include an industrial saboteur who hates the Soviet regime, and a former Wehrmacht officer) and very little in the way of tension. I was genuinely shocked the film adaptation came out two years before Meeting Place - it genuinely seemed like a third rate cash-in. Really only notable for the oddest chill jazz chase scene. * One of their later books also involves the smuggling of stolen goods - but it's a unique cultural artifact, a Stradivarius violin, so it ending up in a rich collector's safe matters a lot more. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking - a baker with talent for animating dough winds up embroiled in a series of magic-users murders and political intrigue. I used to really love Ursula Vernon's work. Either I grew out of it, or she lost something over the years; her work no longer seems as consistently and frequently funny as Digger or Hangnail Castle, touching like Summer in Orcus, original even when exploring a well-trodden subjects like her Beauty and the Beast take. Even though the afterword bills this as a book she couldn't publish under her child-friendly pen name (people die in really bloodless and non-threatening ways! Surely no book for children could have that!), this is just a very fluffy and non-memorable teen adventure story. I don't know if "no matter how minor your magic talent (that only one person in many thousands is born with) seems to be, you can save the day with it" seemed like an original idea when first conceived, but it's cliche af in the late 2010's. Like I said - not very funny, not too tense, and you kinda have to decide whether you want your 12 year old heroine to be able to handle herself through pluck and magic talent, or get rescued by adults over and over and over again. Captain Alatriste - I was sold on these as swashuckling adventure stories, but the first novel, at the very least, is... not much of anything. The Captain is hired for political assassination, then changes his mind, then has to survive the repercussions of changing his mind. Which he does, mostly by sticking to what principles he found, being decent with a sword (but not, strictly speaking, fighting his way out of things or defeating a main bad guy), and refusing to run or scheme or compromise or actively do anything at all. Weird, because on paper, this is a very cynical world, where this sort of behavior shouldn't be rewarded. Apparently, this book is also supposed to be informative about Golden Age Spain, and there are a lot of random observations that never coalesce into a coherent whole. A whole bunch of random tangents, anti-climaxes and cut off storylines in general. The political assassination the hero foiled was meant to scuttle an international alliance... that falls apart on its own regardless, so nothing really gets accomplished either way. Foreshadowing about how the hero really should have killed this one dude. Why? Because that dude ended up being rude to and cuckolding a bunch of off-screen characters the heroes don't care about, before loving off and not harming or hindering the heroes in any way. Honestly not sure what was the point here. Gormenghast (books 1 and 2). I considered doing a review in an imitation of the densest and purpliest of purple prose these books consist of, but it was more than enough of a chore to read, much less write. The first book had a fascination of sorts, and the second first lost me when it went into a huge tangent about a newly introduced, utterly irrelevant and entirely boring batch of characters. But then it went back to the protagonist - Titus. And that was the problem. It's so weird that "Titus Groan" is about Gormenghast, which is a fascinating gothic castle, while "Gormenghast" is about Titus, the most generic of protagonists speedrunning the Heroes Journey. I'm sure I'm not the first person to note that, but still. The book could have been better if it focused on anything else or had any other sort of slant. An ideological focus. Steerpike seducing Titus (literally of figuratively) with notions of rebellion. Any sort of character motivation that wasn't pure Jungian "impulses" that did not require a narrative justification or logical development. Some kind of role for female characters beyond how their death affected the blandest of protagonists (one was so incidental I had to hack my way back through the purple prose to ascertain she died literally, rather than metaphorically) Turns out the third book is all about Titus. I think I'll skip that. Xander77 fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Apr 10, 2022 |
# ? Apr 9, 2022 01:11 |
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The best things about Gormenghast are the descriptive passages, which can be very evocative and beautiful, but are often seld-indulgent. Mervin Peake was an artist, and you can see that in the imagery, especially the obsessiveness with lighting in the prose.
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# ? Apr 9, 2022 01:49 |
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You know what book sucks, like sucks so bad on multiple levels? Devil House by John Darnielle. I LOVED wolf in white van and loved universal harvester even more. Which I think built up a lot of expectation for me on his new book. The new book is a boring story about people I don't care about that turns out to be Total bullshit, as in none of the characters actually existed You can't tell a whole fuckoff story, littered with pretentious writer monologuing out of a king novel, and then rug pull me at the end. He tried to use the porn store stuff to shock but it really just reads like he's a horny teenager. Way too much tell and not show. And if this is supposed to be some meta commentary on the integrity of true crime writing and how these works view both the perpetrators and the victims, well, you hosed up John. I'm so mad. The book is a waste of time. Don't read it, reread universal harvester instead.
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# ? Apr 9, 2022 04:37 |
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:I hope you like it! Its got some pretty cringey sex in it but I liked it overall. I'll warn you now that Necroscope is horror's answer to Dune: read them in order of release and when you reach the point of not liking one stop, because they won't get better.
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# ? Apr 10, 2022 08:42 |
I just finished Solomon Gursky Was Here, a novel by Mordecai Richler. And I had so much fun with this book I hope at least one of you goons decide to try it out. What is it about...well, er. Its basically a multigenerational story about your typical immigrant, rags to riches Jewish family coming to the new world. If by coming to the new world you mean scamming your way onto the Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage and running alcohol to the United States during Prohibition. As I have been saying in the discord, its nutso, and just a riot. The book is written from several perspectives during several time periods and the narrative focus switches between them from chapter to chapter which is the source of much gnashing of teeth on Goodreads, but after seeing how it works a few times you quickly get used to it. There are many characters, some more prominent than others, but all tie in together well by the end. The author uses just a touch of magical realism, arising appropriately from native (Haida) trickster stories. All of the characters are real people, flawed, very much of their time (book was published in the late 1980s). Even the mysterious central focus of the entire thing, seemingly ultra competent, has huge blind sides. And believe it or not it actually holds together to the end. Read it if you like good writing, if you are interested in about 200 years of Canadian history, if you have fond memories of Montreal, if you are curious about the north, and especially if you are interested in the progress (or lack thereof) of humanity. In total, this is a loving meditation on Jewish identity in the West and how it changes over the time depicted, roughly 1815 to 1985.
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# ? Apr 10, 2022 20:53 |
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Bilirubin posted:I just finished Solomon Gursky Was Here, a novel by Mordecai Richler. And I had so much fun with this book I hope at least one of you goons decide to try it out. Sounds interesting. I only know Richler from his children's books, especially Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.
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# ? Apr 10, 2022 22:50 |
Selachian posted:Sounds interesting. I only know Richler from his children's books, especially Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. I have Jacob Two-Two Meets the Dinosaur. His adult work is very adult; the central narrative voice is an alcoholic male writer in his early 50s, so a different flavor than the children's books.
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# ? Apr 11, 2022 00:51 |
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Just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I almost never read what could be considered "literary fiction" aside from trying to catch up on known classics that I feel like I should have some background with. Even though it wasnt my normal read I enjoyed it for the most part. I liked the gimmick that it was written from the point of view of the grim reaper. I liked reading about the books within books. I enjoyed the characters and thought the author did a good job fleshing them out and making me feel like I could recognize them off the street. Overall I enjoyed it and am glad that I am making an effort to read more fiction these days!
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# ? Apr 11, 2022 02:17 |
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Selachian posted:Sounds interesting. I only know Richler from his children's books, especially Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. He's won the same award as the seminal Canadian bildungsroman Bear, but twice!
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# ? Apr 11, 2022 03:07 |
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Finished Necroscope 3, starting Wounds now to get a break from it.
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# ? Apr 14, 2022 22:52 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 08:41 |
Shitstorm Trooper posted:Finished Necroscope 3, starting Wounds now to get a break from it. The Ballingrude one, right? I loving love Nathan Ballingrude. New book when???
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# ? Apr 15, 2022 03:40 |