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The Emergence of the Great Powers 1685-1715 by John B. Wolf. I picked it up because I wanted to read more about the Nine Years War. The book is over 70 years old so historiography has moved on, but it does grapple with the question of when and how Europe left behind 'feudalism' for 'modernity'. The author himself says that this period is just part of the broader transition but it is an important turning point in several areas, such as the emergence of the balance of power becoming a decisive factor in wars even though they were still fought over dynastic inheritances. The book starts by discussing the major wars that dominated the period, the Nine Years War, Great Turkish War, The War of the Spanish Succession, and the Great Northern War and transitions to discussing state development which all fit together and then at the end he talks about art, science, and culture but it feels at odds with the preceding chapters since it isn't tied together in the same way. Warfare and tax policy go together, but the spread and transition from Baroque to Rococo, while interesting, doesn't cohere.
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Nov 9, 2023 05:08
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Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin is an evocatively written story about a gay love affair that does a beautiful job capturing the protagonist's desire and shame on the page. I picked this as the shorter palate cleanser after The Blind Assassin, but I ended up liking this book much better than that one. Baldwin is a writer I've heard a lot of interesting and admirable things about recently, and so far he lives up to his reputation perfectly.
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Nov 13, 2023 01:47
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I just finished We Are Happy, We Are Doomed, the excellent collection of short stories by Kurt Fawver. These stories span the gamut of cosmic horror, body horror, and just weird, unsettling stuff. One short story is very Ligotti, involving the performance of a clown that looks like a puppet (or is it a puppet that looks like a clown?). From Grimscribe Press, headed by Ligotti acolyte John Padgett.
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Nov 13, 2023 02:14
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Just finished reading Blindsight, and moving onto the sequel tonight. Loved it; great sci-fi and so, so much better than the Three Body Problem books I'm listening to on my commute. Seriously, they couldn't be more different in terms of quality. Blindsight isn't perfect, but it's orders of magnitude better than The Dark Forest. I legitimately do not understand how those stilted, gaping plot holes disguised as books have a positive reputation.
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Nov 13, 2023 04:56
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Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland tells the story of Persia, Athens, and Sparta, and how they came to war. Sufficient, has no surprises. Herodotus probably tells it better.
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Nov 13, 2023 05:47
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PurpleXVI posted:I just finished reading Starfish by Peter Watts and it was like someone put a bunch of sci-fi authors I knew into a blender, then strained out all the good parts. I should not have listened to whoever told me that this was the good Peter Watts book. malnourish posted:Just finished reading Blindsight, and moving onto the sequel tonight. Loved it; great sci-fi and so, so much better than the Three Body Problem books I'm listening to on my commute. Blindsight is awesome, a real mind-bender for sure. The sequel Echopraxia starts with an exhilarating bang, seriously some of the highest density of crazy ideas per page I have ever read, but for me was kind of a letdown by the end. I won't say more as I don't want to color your reading of it. I've never picked up the Rifters trilogy of which Starfish is the first volume, as Watts is a relentless pessimist, especially regarding climate change and environmental degradation. Glancing at the synopses of the Rifters books just sounded relentlessly depressing, which turned me off as both Blindsight and Echopraxia decidedly don't have happy endings.
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Nov 13, 2023 06:21
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malnourish posted:Just finished reading Blindsight, and moving onto the sequel tonight. Loved it; great sci-fi and so, so much better than the Three Body Problem books I'm listening to on my commute. Popping to agree that Blindsight is amazing (the vampire stuff is weird but it doesn't frequent the book) and that Three Body Problem is ... not terrible but a bit lumbering, stilted and info-dumpy, like some very old fashioned SF.
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Nov 13, 2023 10:50
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Starfish is my favorite Watts, absolutely no question. The Rifters sequels are pretty bad, I personally enjoyed them but they were hard to take seriously.
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Nov 14, 2023 04:24
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nonathlon posted:not terrible but a bit lumbering, stilted and info-dumpy, like some very old fashioned SF. This is how I expect regular people to describe Blindsight.
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Nov 14, 2023 05:14
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Christ, I stumbled into some terrible science fiction lately. If you ever encounter a Brian W. Aldiss book drop it and run away especially if it is An Island Called Moreau. It's a bad updated for the 80s retelling of H.G. Well's original with gratuitous beastiality and extra gratuitous pedophilia.  I binned this book immediately after finishing and feel dumber for having given it a chance.I'm gonna switch gears on genre for a palate cleanser after the sci-fi garbage I accidentally acquired in a lot with Lonesome October . At least I have new appreciation now for how well October was written in comparison. Turbinosamente fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 13:50
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The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is a weird one. It's a steampunk fantasy world set in an ersatz version of Earth and we-swear-it's-not-Britain, centering on two young orphans on the run from... something, who are special for... some reason. Hunt goes a mile a minute, telling the story like you already know what's going on. By context I was able to figure out what some of the slang and proper nouns meant, but I've rarely met a book so overwhelmingly full of weird poo poo and so uninterested in explaining what anything is or what's going on, to the point that I bluntly stopped caring about the characters because I lost track of what was going on, who had what agendas, and what the stakes were beyond that the protagonists dying was probably bad. I feel like it's what you'd get if Guillermo del Toro sat down to write a book, bearing in mind that the guy's a master of visual storytelling but not so good at dialogue or interested in explaining anything with words.
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Nov 16, 2023 02:07
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Cythereal posted:The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is a weird one. It's a steampunk fantasy world set in an ersatz version of Earth and we-swear-it's-not-Britain, centering on two young orphans on the run from... something, who are special for... some reason. Hunt goes a mile a minute, telling the story like you already know what's going on. By context I was able to figure out what some of the slang and proper nouns meant, but I've rarely met a book so overwhelmingly full of weird poo poo and so uninterested in explaining what anything is or what's going on, to the point that I bluntly stopped caring about the characters because I lost track of what was going on, who had what agendas, and what the stakes were beyond that the protagonists dying was probably bad. I feel like it's what you'd get if Guillermo del Toro sat down to write a book, bearing in mind that the guy's a master of visual storytelling but not so good at dialogue or interested in explaining anything with words.
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Nov 16, 2023 19:38
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anilEhilated posted:The sequels get more interesting plots but that element never really disappears. Noted. I checked out from reading the plot closely when he had body horror with women being kidnapped to use their wombs as organic factories.
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Nov 16, 2023 23:43
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I read all four John Dies At The End books back to back. Honestly the first two were better than I remember. The fourth one was genuinely awful.
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Nov 17, 2023 00:03
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UwUnabomber posted:I read all four John Dies At The End books back to back. Honestly the first two were better than I remember. The fourth one was genuinely awful. All the gently caress and poo poo was tedious to read.
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Nov 17, 2023 10:23
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David Wong pretending to be Asian for a decade is funnier than the novel ever was.
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Nov 17, 2023 10:38
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Gaius Marius posted:David Wong pretending to be Asian for a decade is funnier than the novel ever was. He didn't pretend to be Asian, he was playing a gag that he was in hiding and Wong was the most common name in the phone book. This joke aged poorly and he dropped it.
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Nov 17, 2023 12:57
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Yeah the ghost journalist in JDATE explicitly says David isn't Asian.
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Nov 17, 2023 20:57
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An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us catalogues how animals see the world, from sight to magnetic sense. It does what it's supposed to, teaching me way more odd facts than I was expecting given how many nature documentaries I've seen. The author's writing is mildly annoying but not to the detriment of the book.
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Nov 18, 2023 15:40
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FPyat posted:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us catalogues how animals see the world, from sight to magnetic sense. It does what it's supposed to, teaching me way more odd facts than I was expecting given how many nature documentaries I've seen. The author's writing is mildly annoying but not to the detriment of the book. Ed Yong said he's got a third book on the way.
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Nov 19, 2023 23:47
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The Art of War by Sun Tzu gets described as highly abstract and philosphical by some and primarily practical by others. I found it to be a mixture of the two. Many of the principles were sound and thoughtful, but I doubt its overall usefulness for businesspeople.
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Nov 20, 2023 14:43
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FPyat posted:The Art of War by Sun Tzu gets described as highly abstract and philosphical by some and primarily practical by others. I found it to be a mixture of the two. Many of the principles were sound and thoughtful, but I doubt its overall usefulness for businesspeople. It’s been a while but I remember it mostly as “make drat sure you’re prepared” which is probably good advice in life Also that bit about poisoning your food as you retreat 
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Nov 21, 2023 21:19
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100 Spanish Short Stories for Beginners and Intermediate Learners by Christian Stahl: This was the only book my library had (both physically and digitally) for Spanish learners. There are plenty of books written in Spanish, but what appealed to me with this book is that it said it had vocabulary and English alongside the stories. I didn't want to have to constantly look up words or phrases that I didn't know. It was not good. The vocabulary it decided to define was haphazard at best, and the English alongside only happened for 10 of the stories, so I had to use a translator pretty regularly regardless. The English versions of the stories were almost always translations of a different version of the short story. One translation was so bad that it had different characters' names. Looking up this author, he has a number of "100 <Language> Short Stories" books, so I'm guessing he popped all the short stories into Google Translate for a dozen different languages and called it a day. As for the content of the short stories, they were mostly about German retirees living in Spain (the author is from Germany), but there were a few really off-the-wall stories. My favorite was the one about the businessman who fell in love with a prostitute, and his boss threatened to fire him if he married the woman. Another was a rehashing of the scene from European Vacation when the Griswold's show up at a random elderly couples house thinking they're relatives. Personally, I felt pretty good about my Spanish learning, as I understood about 70% of the book without having to look anything up. I still get tripped up on verb endings and turns of phrase. I'll probably find a better book online and actually buy it for my next round - rather than relying on my local library system.
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Nov 22, 2023 15:50
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I'm on paternity leave now and I've finally got some time to get back into reading. My wife got me a kindle for Christmas last year so I decided to start reading novels to my newborn son. We already breezed through The Hobbit and Catch 22 in the last few weeks. I've read both before but it's always fun to revisit the old favorites especially when getting back into the swing of things. Bilbo's adventure is always a pleasure. I really think the Hobbit is my favorite just because it's so much more light hearted and fun, where as LOTR is always so grim. Also Catch 22 was a lot of fun to revisit. Yossarian and his crew are awesome and its a lot of fun until you get to the final segment where you really get into the nitty gritty details of his PTSD and trauma. I've always loved the story though as an air force vet, myself. After those two I decided to switch it up and work through the shorter Steinbeck novellas. I just finished The Pearl which was way more depressing than I remember. Next up is Tortilla Flat which should be a chill read with the drunk Paisanos. I'll probably follow that up with Cannery Row. I think I'm going to wait to reread Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, though. Next up I'm actually thinking of doing Tale of Two Cities and Count of Monte Cristo since they both take place in similar settings (the bastille) and I haven't read either before. Or Maybe switch to russian and finally try to finish Crime and Punishment from the beginning again. Last time I tried I got lost a couple hundred pages in (10 yrs ago). I'm a sucker for the classics so I guess we'll see but all in all I'm really enjoying getting back into the hobby. davey4283 fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Nov 25, 2023 |
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Nov 25, 2023 06:05
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You must be thinking of Man in the Iron Mask. Dantès was locked up in the Château d'If
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Nov 25, 2023 06:13
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Gaius Marius posted:You must be thinking of Man in the Iron Mask. Dantès was locked up in the Château d'If You know, I read the first 5 or 6 chapters during covid and I assumed he would be sent to the Bastille but it looks like you're right. It's not the same location at all lol
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Nov 25, 2023 06:22
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FPyat posted:The Art of War by Sun Tzu gets described as highly abstract and philosphical by some and primarily practical by others. I found it to be a mixture of the two. Many of the principles were sound and thoughtful, but I doubt its overall usefulness for businesspeople. In a similar vein I finished The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, which had hype quotes on the back implying it was mostly about dealing with confrontations and worded vaguely like it was trying to sell it to managers. In actuality it was like reading a textbook a professor wrote for their class, which makes it useless unless you attend the class or you don't get as much out of it if you had. I'll admit the tip to use all of the tools at your disposal was nice and it was a small if straightforward look into Mushashi's mindset on his success at dueling. Still unsure if I should keep this on the shelf or not though.
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Nov 25, 2023 07:20
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Forgot to post this but I finished Tantalus Depths by Evan Graham and it was a cool read for sure. Lil scifi jaunt with some AI fuckery and Old God stuff tossed in Also just finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons and now I gotta read the rest of the trilogy(?) now
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Nov 25, 2023 22:15
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verbal enema posted:
Hate to be the one to tell you but that was the high point of the trilogy
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Nov 25, 2023 22:52
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Bilirubin posted:Hate to be the one to tell you but that was the high point of the trilogy Also, obligatory "don't support Simmons."
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Nov 25, 2023 23:14
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Ah well good thing infinity amounts of books exist
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Nov 26, 2023 00:51
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The Hyperion sequels suck, don't read them.
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Nov 26, 2023 01:47
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mellonbread posted:The Hyperion sequels suck, don't read them. They’re so bad. I mean book 2 was.. okay but I’d say stop there if you absolutely must see what happens next. Book 2 wraps things up fine, I guess, but jesus christ the Endymion books suck. They have some very interesting concepts peppered in but the whole Raul/Aenea plot is hosed up. Just way, way too much pointless exposition along with worldbuilding that goes absolutely nowhere. It’s very good bad sci-fi.
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Nov 26, 2023 02:39
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If you have to read a Simmons book, read The Terror
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Nov 26, 2023 03:15
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I just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Haven't read a good novel in a long time, and I definitely had a few tears at the ending which I thought was beautiful.
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Nov 26, 2023 03:19
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I like that there’s a nice, secret ending to that book that comic book fans will see: Joe bought Empire Comics right at the time that superhero comics is about explode in popularity.
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Nov 26, 2023 03:43
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I just finished Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer by Judea Pearl, Madelyn Glymour, and Nicholas Jewell. Before reading this book I believed that structural equation modeling and Bayesian analysis were useful, if sometimes counterintuitive, frameworks by which complex causal inferences could be derived, based on carefully examined and articulated assumptions. Thanks to this short text, which took me only a couple months to struggle through, I now understand that all statistical reasoning is worthless and that mathematics itself was a divine joke visited upon mankind. I am now going to read some other books on causal reasoning in statistics that I can hopefully use to undo the effects of reading this book. Judea Pearl is apparently a very important innovator in statistics and computer science, but the book totally, completely, fails to effectively work as a primer on causal inferences from pretty much any direction other than, I assume, whatever specific theoretical framework he is coming out of. Rather than explaining concepts using grounded examples or articulating them in order, the book almost immediately jumps to pure, extended algebraic proofs of middle concepts (sometimes at way, way more length than necessary), frequently failing to articulate prior assumptions. While some useful concepts are explained at some points, they are surrounded by a landscape of text spent on the least useful elements of the framework. Other terms are used inconsistently, particularly ones that are explicitly the authors' inventions. Little discussion of actual causal reasoning or the underlying assumptions involved is provided, and the book instead leaps to repeated examples or applications of SEM and later counterfactual reasoning that just...handwaves these assumptions, to spend pages upon pages of text re-proving relatively trivial and useless applications of the concept of SEM. Yes, I understand that you can precisely model counterfactuals if you have a fully specified model and the values of all exogenous variables, Dr. Pearl. Do you see why I might want to do some groundwork before I make the claim that I have fully specified my model and the values of all exogenous variables? Especially horrifying was a section of material from the end of the text where the authors effortlessly transposed their reasoning to court cases, complete with an entire raft of bizarre assertions about science, policy, and the assumed distributions of data. One standout was a hopefully hypothetical case where an individual died after using a drug for back pain and his estate sued the manufacturer, arguing that safety data from approvals experiments was not valid because the deceased "took the drug of his own volition, unlike subjects in the experimental study, who took the drug to comply with experimental protocols", and provide nonexperimental data on postmarket outcomes. The authors begin to apply their analysis by saying "we ignore sampling variability." Using data from this nonexperimental set, the authors assert that "barring sampling errors, the data provide us with 100% assurance that the drug was responsible for the death of Mr. A." I fully believe this guy knows that's not an okay thing to say, and that he's a careful and cautious researcher who understands the importance of the context of reasoning with statistical modeling. But that's absolutely at odds with the what he's presented in this text. edit: upon reading reviews and the book webpage I now understand that a lot of my struggles to understand parts of the middle of the text were because it's also riddled with errors. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jan 12, 2024 |
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Nov 26, 2023 04:35
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oldpainless posted:If you have to read a Simmons book, read The Terror I read Carrion Comfort this year and it was amazing.
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Nov 26, 2023 13:58
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I've been continuing on in my reading of Ursula Le Guin's first 3 Hainish books and just finished Planet of Exile. Excellent once again, how she can make these worlds so small yet so big and the cultures alien to one another. A meditation on exile and belonging, and what it is to be human.
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Nov 27, 2023 01:57
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Silo Trilogy, looking forward to reading the short stories and the eventual(?) new book
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Nov 27, 2023 02:14
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