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AngusPodgorny posted:
The most interesting thing about the Berserker series involves an old Play-By-Mail game called Starweb. In the game players take one of six different roles and explore, colonise and conquer the galaxy. One of the roles is Berserker, which was used without permission. When Saberhagen got wind of this, his response was not a lawsuit. Instead he wrote a humorous novel called Octagon, about a game of Starweb where one player really is a Berserker and is trying to win by assassinating the other players.
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Aug 1, 2022 14:41
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anilEhilated posted:Basically, Dune rules apply for Hyperion sequels - when you stop enjoying it, just stop reading, it's not going to get any better. Can confirm, don’t read Flashback.
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Aug 2, 2022 23:30
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I read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Mixed feelings, mostly frustration. This is a 2/5 for me that could immediately jump to a 4/5 if 30% of the book were deleted. It’s long for no reason. There should only be three POVs (Miryem, Wanda, and Irina) and I cannot figure out why there are more. Most of them could just be deleted wholesale and lose nothing at all, with a couple of key scenes converted to these three protagonists who should have been relating them in the first place anyway. Irina doesn’t even get to narrate her final scene in the book and that sucks. Some of the other POVs are done very well mind you. But I don’t think they add anything meaningful that we don’t already get elsewhere, so mostly they just bog the pacing down. And there are time jumps back-and-forth between POVs that actively detract from the book’s interest. Like you’ll get to the end of one scene and see the outcome of the next scene you’re about to read, and then reading the next scene is not interesting anymore because you don’t learn anything unique from it and you already know how it ends. (It doesn’t help that every scene is long, either.) In addition to long pointless scenes, the prose is repetitive on the micro level. Look at this opening dialogue tag: quote:Then he looked up from them in wide burning fury and shrieked in rage I don’t need “in rage” here, I get it, especially when “rage” is used again in the very next paragraph. There are many repetitive words and descriptions like this, especially adverbs and combo adjectives like “dull-cold” that annoyed me. Something about the usage of those adjectives also doesn’t feel authentic, like it’s Novik’s own expression, it feels like it’s aping “literary” writing for the sake of impressing the reader. If I didn’t know this was traditionally published I’d believe it wasn’t edited. The Jewish representation in this book is also weird. I’m not Jewish, but I do have friends including one who keeps kosher, and something about this just feels off to me. They eat meat and dairy inside the same day. That could be okay. But then Miryem also eats fish without asking what type it is. It felt very inconsistent in what practices were being observed (like whether or not Jewish characters are visibly recognizable as such) and also very modern despite being not otherwise set in modern times. It stuck out to me enough to look for a Jewish review, which wasn’t impressed either, so.  I think an attempt was made, and it’s nice to see that, but I think it fell short.All that said, I loved the characters and the way that the plot unfolds. At several points I thought I knew exactly where it was going and then was pleasantly surprised by what actually happened instead. Characters do clever, unexpected things. The scenes that want to tug on your heartstrings are effective. I want to love this book. I was rooting for the protagonists, rooting for the romances (and the lack thereof), thoroughly entertained by the villain(s). There’s a fantastic book in here, I just wish it wasn’t buried under an extra 50k words - and I’m serious about this number, this book is 167k words long! It’s a hard one to recommend, and yes I know it won awards. If you don’t mind long stretches of character moments with no plot happening in conjunction with them, and the prose doesn’t bother you, there’s an intriguing story and compelling characters here. But if you’re going to feel like I did, that significant chunks of this book are wasting your time, maybe give it a pass. It desperately needs an abridged version.
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Aug 3, 2022 02:23
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Finished Dune which I had read previously years ago. Really enjoyed it overall! A great scifi class that I think has held up well. I've never gotten around to the sequels, may try at least the 2nd book soon. Also ran into a guy doing a book signing at a store a few weeks ago and picked up Beauty at Short: Dave Bancroft, the Most Unlikely Hall of Famer and His Wild Times in Baseball's First Century by Tom Alesia. I'm a big baseball nerd and former SABR member so 1920s baseball biographies are right up my alley. Pretty simple retelling of his career with some good new nuggets picked up here and there through the authors research. I enjoyed chatting with Tom about depression era baseball more, but the book is solid as well.
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Aug 3, 2022 18:50
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Finished Dune which I had read previously years ago. Really enjoyed it overall! A great scifi class that I think has held up well. I've never gotten around to the sequels, may try at least the 2nd book soon. If you enjoyed the first book but found the second to be meh, quit while you're ahead. Children of Dune is a slog but, at least, finishes the trilogy started in Dune. God Emperor of Dune is considered by many to be the pinnacle book in the series (I disagree). Up to you if you want to reach that point. Beyond the fourth book, the rest of the series is a mess.
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Aug 4, 2022 18:20
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God Emperor of Dune is my favorite book in the series. It's like reading I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream from AM's POV and it rules.
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Aug 4, 2022 20:06
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The first and 4th are the only ones I remember, and the major takeaway is Duncan Idaho must suffer.
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Aug 8, 2022 06:09
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kaom posted:I read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I love this book, and one of my favorite things about it is that even though everything is written in first person, I was never once confused about who the POV character was because of context clues and their distinctive voices. Even now that all of these problems have been pointed out, I doubt I'd give a poo poo on a second read, except maybe about the Jewish representation. I can recommend it to everyone here if you can't.
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Aug 8, 2022 09:59
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Will probably read the second half in future, though word on this forum has been unkind to the Endymion series afterwards. I have about 60 pages left in The Rise of Endymion and I gotta say, I enjoyed the sequels quite a bit more than I thought given people's overall feelings toward them. The sequels do seem to have removed (or disappointed maybe?) some of the unique mystique behind the first book's world building, but overall it was a fun ride. The only real complain I have is that Simmons tends to needlessly drone on for pages about dry details, whether it be low-level descriptions of environments or listing off a bunch of side characters that are mentioned only a couple times after that point, if that. Certain sections tend to drag on way longer than they need to because of it, and after the fact you sometimes ask "What even was the point of that?". Still, if you go in knowing you're not going to experience the same greatness from the first book, it's a lot of fun. Endymion reads like a cult classic 90's adventure film. e: finished Rise of Endymion last night and I adored the last 50 or so pages. Lots of crying. Took a lot of priming and world building to get to the end but it was so worth it. The first book is magnificent but the sequels are just fine too. Louisgod fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 17:02
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After a couple attempts when I was younger I finally finished Blood Meridian. Think I’ll read something happy next.
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Aug 10, 2022 23:12
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Rolo posted:After a couple attempts when I was younger I finally finished Blood Meridian. Compared to Blood Meridian, something happy would be literally anything.
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Aug 11, 2022 00:18
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I go through phases where I'll read an author's entire corpus. I like to see how they develop book to book. I took long breaks between the McCarthy's.
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Aug 11, 2022 09:24
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lifg posted:Compared to Blood Meridian, something happy would be literally anything. May I recommend The Road
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Aug 11, 2022 14:19
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"La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada" which, again, strengthened my conviction that "A Hundred Dudes All Named the Same" absolutely is Marquez's worst work. Still have a few to go so we'll see how it turns out.
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Aug 11, 2022 15:18
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MartingaleJack posted:May I recommend The Road Blood Meridian was shocking but it didn’t make me cry like The Road did. He also made me realize how dogshit my vocabulary is. I wanted to understand his descriptors because I love the southwest so I bought it again on kindle for the built in dictionary. That said, I have no idea what to read next. I’m kinda waffling between Salem’s Lot and Catch 22. I haven’t read either. Siding with the former first because I devour books if they’re scary.
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Aug 11, 2022 16:04
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Rolo posted:Blood Meridian was shocking but it didn’t make me cry like The Road did. Salem's Lot definitely lit a fire under my rear end to read more horror as a teenager. It's real real good poo poo.
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Aug 11, 2022 18:20
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The Road is great because McCarthy finally threw away the dictionary and just wrote awful depressing stuff at a high-school reading level.
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Aug 12, 2022 00:38
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I've never got that, The Road is such a hopeful work especially compared to Blood Meridian
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Aug 12, 2022 00:52
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I took a very long break after the first installment, and just finished Shadows Linger, 1984, Glen Cook. If the first installment felt a bit like a campaign setting, this one feels like a proper novel. The mil-fantasy stuff was integrated much more effectively into the rest of the book, which ended up making it significantly more fun to hear about wizardly close air support and counter-mage squad tactics. The biggest thing I keep being afraid of is how freely he includes sexual violence, but so far it's mostly felt functional within the story he is telling rather than mere ornament or shock. I would be interested to hear a warning for if it ever gets worse in that respect. I don't know how long I'm going to give it before the next installment, but it will be less time than this last break.
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Aug 12, 2022 08:16
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I just finished Blindness by José Saramago. This is the 5th book by Saramago I've read since I completely fell in love with this author earlier this year, and the one that I found to be the most upsetting to read. It was the first one to leave me feeling unsettled afterward. That said, it was extremely good, though I personally wouldn't recommend it as a first taste of Saramago (but I'm a wimp when it comes to anything grim). I have the sequel Seeing checked out but since Ursula Le Guin once said of these books, "Blindness scared me to death when I started it, but it rises wonderfully out of darkness into the light. Seeing goes the other way and is a very frightening book," I decided to start Book 4 of Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle and finish that before I tackle Seeing. I figure a Norwegian dude spending a year getting extremely drunk in the arctic will be a pretty good palette cleanser.
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Aug 12, 2022 13:21
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Sharing A House with the Never-ending Man: 15 Years at Studio Ghibli - Steve Alpert Not very good. Just a basic skim of business practices and the strangeness of navigating an international film/entertainment company as DVD explodes in popularity. Some interesting characters but nothing super-scintillating. Anyone looking for a look at Miyazaki's creative processes should look elsewhere.
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Aug 12, 2022 15:54
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Just finished The Lady of the Lake by Sapkowski, which was my first read through. Great series, although it took me a couple of books to really get into it. I've got a prequel book still to read but apart from that, I'm just left with the usual sense of emptiness after finishing a good book. 
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Aug 13, 2022 09:11
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Haven't been good about posting here, so some books I've finished over the last two months The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro Just, kind of blah? I get what he was going for with the whole lost memory thing and this book is HEAVY on the allegory, but none of the characters have clear character motivations (or personalities) so it's a frustrating read. Also since the memory-forgetting fog is a major part of the plot, the narration is very detached and the world-building is lacking. Literally everyone in the book is affected by the fog, so we're forced into this extremely present with no context of the past action/reactions. They could be journeying across anything/anywhere. Felt limiting like an old school, on-the-rails video game. I guess maybe it's ultimately about faith and acceptance of the unknown? The anxiety of not ever knowing that a love is deep enough? Which is kind of what his other books are about, too, but less impactful here. A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles A slow burning, sweet novel about one man's life and relationships he builds while on house arrest in a hotel in Moscow starting in the Bolshevik Revolution. It took a minute for me to warm up to where the novel was heading (went in blind, so I wasn't sure if it was going to be a spy thriller or what), but it won me over with it's Wes Anderson-y magic, deeply drawn characters, and the utter charm of the world Towles paints. Just a really lovely, enjoyable read. Highly recommend. Educated - Tara Westover Yo this is a wiillldd read. If you like browsing r/bestofredditorupdates or the like, this is like that but with great writing. It's a memoir about the author's childhood and escape from a legit crazy, prepper, and fundamentalist Mormon family that has a complete distrust for any kind of government institution. In the latter third of the novel, it’s pretty clear to me that she has some a lot of unprocessed trauma about her upbringing. (Not blaming her - I would too.) Memoirs are always biased with the author’s perspective, so this is not necessarily a bad thing, but there’s a lot left unresolved and the latter part of the book is a lot more confusing because of it. The Devourers - Indra Das It’s a carefully constructed frame story about shapeshifters (read: werewolves) in India. It could also be about like, denial, things that aren’t really love being thought of as love, being extremely horny, the toxicity and fragility of believing in your gender/race/own superiority. The frame story narrator kind of sucks and the first frame story guy really sucks and we have to read how he (TW) rapes a human woman because he ‘falls in love’ with her. To the book’s credit, the typical fantasy romance storyline is thrown out - the frame narrator/other characters are clearly not on board with this and it’s portrayed as vile. Also the prose is dense and just, really graphic in general. A lot of body horror, grimy sex, and pee everywhere. Just like, literally pages about werewolves pissing all the time. Sometimes I’d start straight laughing at some of the descriptions of the details like how one character started clutching and then swinging his wolfy erection around (did I mention the book is v horny?). I didn’t enjoy reading it but I think it’s a well-constructed book with something to say re: the power and consequences of deep, deep denial. I could also see this working as a book for a queer literature class or book club. taco show fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 23:24
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The Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran. A collection of texts from the Principal Upanishads and some others that are commonly regarded as being important. Like the two previous books I've read translated by the translator they approach the texts from a particular perspective and treat it as authoritative to the point of not mentioning other traditions of interpretation. I got the impression that this is a curated selection which made me want a more scholarly translation of the texts instead of one that treats the translator's decisions as definitive.
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Aug 16, 2022 16:48
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I just finished book 4 of Knausgård’s My Struggle and I feel a bit trolled by the end and possibly the whole book, though I still had a pretty good time reading it. Definitely the most premature ejaculation I’ve read in a single book, or even all the books I’ve read combined, and pretty close on the binge drinking too. I do love this guy’s incredibly detailed descriptions, particularly of the Norwegian countryside and small towns that make me feel almost like I’ve been there, as well as the small details of every interaction. There were definitely some uncomfortable, problematic things but it wouldn’t be Knausgård without something like that.
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Aug 17, 2022 14:52
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Finished Voices from the Front: An Oral History of the Great War by Peter Hart. The first oral history I've finished that isn't a work of fiction. Don't know what to say other than that it did a fine job of condensing the collective experiences of millions of British servicemen into its pages.
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Aug 20, 2022 02:48
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Finished I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy and while not super riveting, it was an interesting and very sad portrait of childhood abuse and eating disorders.
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Aug 20, 2022 03:14
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I just finished Heat 2 If you even remotely liked the movie give it a shot. It goes into what the crew was doing before the la heist and also Chris’ (Val Kilmer’s) escape from La after the shootout.
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Aug 20, 2022 04:14
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The Star Rover (Jack London, 1915) Darrell Standing, once a professor of agriculture, is serving a life sentence in San Quentin. When another prisoner invents a plot to escape and confesses to it in a bid to get a pardon, he names Standing as his accomplice and claims he’s hidden a large quantity of dynamite somewhere in the prison. Nothing will convince the warden that no dynamite exists and so Standing is sent to the dungeon—solitary confinement—and kept tightly laced in a straitjacket until he confesses to its hiding place. He learns from Ed Morrell, another prisoner who’s spent five years straitjacketed in solitary (that’s real, incidentally—Standing’s story is a fictionalized account of Ed Morrell), how to essentially will himself into a coma and divorce his mind from his body. It’s then that Standing unlocks the interstellar paths that lead him to his past lives. He was once a nine year old boy murdered by Mormons in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a fourth century zealot mortifying his flesh in the desert while eagerly expecting Armageddon any minute, a Parisian count killed in a duel, a sixteenth century English castaway who briefly finds himself a prince of Korea before spending forty years very slowly starving, another who finds himself shipwrecked alone on a rock living eight years on raw and rotting seals and rainwater, and an orphan Viking child who later becomes an officer in the Roman legions serving with Pontius Pilate as the Sanhedrin court calls for Jesus’s execution. Eventually escaping solitary, Standing is blinded by the light after spending more than a decade in darkness and runs into a guard, which the court considers assault and so condemns Standing to death. He hurriedly writes his account of his past lives before being led to the scaffold, refusing to be sedated—not wanting to miss the start of his next life.
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Aug 20, 2022 04:57
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Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix is an action thriller novel about slasher movie tropes. It has a nice twisty plot and distinctive characters, which is impressive because there’s a lot of them for such a small book. Hendrix has a lot of small ideas about slasher movies and the culture around them, but they’re not fleshed out enough to call this book a deconstruction of the genre, it’s more like a cocktail conversation of the genre on top of a beach read plot. But a beach read is exactly what I needed.
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Aug 20, 2022 12:21
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lifg posted:Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix is an action thriller novel about slasher movie tropes. It has a nice twisty plot and distinctive characters, which is impressive because there’s a lot of them for such a small book. I've been going back on forth on picking this up (good lord my read pile already) but I like what I hear. Thank you!
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Aug 20, 2022 16:42
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the Spain Virus posted:The Star Rover (Jack London, 1915) “Thank goodness that awful life is over, off to my lucrative job at the World Trade Center.” I might check this one out. I like London and the premise reminds me of the short story Teddy by Salinger, which I vaguely remember enjoying.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:59
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AFewBricksShy posted:I just finished Heat 2 Heat 2 was really good, the first book in a long time I couldn't put down.
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Aug 21, 2022 15:28
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Finished José Saramago's Seeing, the sequel to Blindness. Oof. Really good, but oof. Seeing started out in much the same style as All the Names and Death With Interruptions so I was kind of lulled even though I'd been warned. Cheered myself up by knocking out the remaining unread stories in Ursula Le Guin's The Unreal and the Real collection so I could return it. I'd gotten it to reread "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" but I really wound up getting into her other stories much more, which I don't think I'd ever read before. I was especially surprised by how much I enjoyed her more realistic fiction. Le Guin is a fantastic short fiction writer; I can't recommend this collection enough.
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Aug 23, 2022 23:35
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Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's been a while since I've read some good, old-fashioned space opera, and this book caught my eye at the library. It's mostly traditional fare, of the 'ancient eldritch aliens haunt the galaxy and few who see them live to tell the tale' variety, with some nods to LGBT representation to stand out from the genre conventions. Really, this felt like a better Mass Effect novel than any of the Mass Effect novels. Imagine if Virmire was the game's opening mission, complete with Sovereign, with Ilos and the Battle of the Citadel being your big post-tutorial dungeon set piece before the galaxy opens up. The protagonist is one of the very few people in the galaxy - the others were on your team with you - who's talked to a Reaper and has some idea of what they really are. That's what this book felt like.
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Aug 27, 2022 00:07
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I really enjoyed Children of Time, I’ll have to check that one out.
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Aug 27, 2022 07:30
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After spending pretty much the whole day reading... Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The sequel to Shards of Earth, and a disappointment. Very much not as good at the first, and I think it's mostly a question of pacing. Most of the book is intrigue and galactic drama that felt like it existed just to fill space, and the only plot-relevant stuff happened near the end with the net result that it felt like not a whole lot actually happened. Yes there's the mandatory big reveals about the Architects and more hinting at future plot, but the whole book felt to me like he either doesn't want to advance the plot too quickly or is struggling to actually write the plot he set up for the series. I think Tchiakovsky struggles very much with balancing his desire to write a personal story about a ragtag band of misfits in a dangerous galaxy with his desire to write a grandiose space saga with the fate of the universe at stake. I feel that he pulled off a good balancing act with Shards of Earth and failed in this book, and my instinct for why is that he wrote the big cosmic stuff to be a plot that only one character can interact with. What was mysterious and evocative the first go-around when they were more a looming threat in the background became tedious when it became a central active element of the plot.
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Aug 27, 2022 22:37
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Just finished Knausgård’s The Morning Star. I’ve been reading his autofiction and wanted to get a sense of what his regular old fiction would be like. I’d intended to real A Time For Everything since he described the writing of it in book 2 of My Struggle but my local library didn’t have it so I went with this much more recent book instead. I’m not sure I got the insight I wanted because it seemed like he was to some extent riffing off his autofiction, first person but rotating through a set of characters, with the same sorts of digressions and reflectivity. One character in particular was obviously a much shittier version of himself, and I was pretty annoyed at first since it was the first character, but the other characters proved more interesting and I think this character was meant to act as a foil to some degree. I was curious to see how he would write women and I wound up enjoying the women characters’ sections the most. I’m not sure what I think of the book overall; apparently more are forthcoming. The story didn’t really have a conclusion or big reveal but I wasn’t expecting one. The essay on death at the end, written from a character’s perspective, was pretty interesting reading on its own and I wasn’t sure how much of it was a callback to the essay on death at the very beginning of My Struggle, which was purely about the physical and social aspects of death rather than the spiritual side, as this was. Knausgård’s writing was definitely as much of a pleasure to read as in his other work that I’ve read. Vienna Circlejerk fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Aug 28, 2022 |
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Aug 28, 2022 16:37
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How to Take Over the World by Ryan North: If you like Ryan's work (Dinosaur Comics, How to Invent Everything, To Be or Not To Be), you'll like this one. It's a humorous look at how one might actually do the things super-villains do in comic books using real and theorized science (e.g. cloning dinosaurs; becoming immortal; etc.). Most of the topics end up being not physically possible at face value, but he pivots on the theme and still makes an interesting case for something similarly super-villainous that could be achievable given enough resources. What Your Teachers Are Playing by Christian Cardenas, Dylan Altman: A collection of essays and interviews from professors talking about video games. I'm not sure where I got this, but it was on my Kindle and was short. The essays were largely dull and uninspired takes on video games circa 2015. Good-Natured Filth fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Aug 29, 2022 |
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Aug 29, 2022 01:08
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Cythereal posted:Imagine if Virmire was the game's opening mission, complete with Sovereign, with Ilos and the Battle of the Citadel being your big post-tutorial dungeon set piece before the galaxy opens up. The protagonist is one of the very few people in the galaxy - the others were on your team with you - who's talked to a Reaper and has some idea of what they really are.
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Aug 31, 2022 23:03
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