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A human heart posted:. In conclusion, George Orwell is a land of contrasts.
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Dec 30, 2017 00:53
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A human heart posted:. Only actually existing socialism as practised in Stalin's empire east of the Elbe; he supported the establishment of one of Europe's most far reaching welfare states in his own country.
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Dec 30, 2017 01:29
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A human heart posted:. Not that I hold Orwell to be some saint or great revolutionary leader, but calling someome who fought in the trenches for six months to defend actually existing socialism and got shot in the neck by a fascist for it opposed to existing socialism seems a bit off. learnincurve posted:No that was more of a comment about Reddit. Young people haven’t read that many books and most of them are on school book lists, if there is a book that they enjoy then everyone MUST know about it even though that book is 60 chuffing years old. Every generation of teenagers acts like they are the first to have ever read Orwell/Bradbury/and so on and so forth and it just gets boring seeing the same six book recommendations all the time. Fair enough, don't have any problems with that. A shame that only Orwell's late work is (mis)read by that group when his early work's quite lovely too and has more shades of grey by virtue of being based on Orwell's real life.
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Dec 30, 2017 02:44
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The Belgian posted:Not that I hold Orwell to be some saint or great revolutionary leader, but calling someome who fought in the trenches for six months to defend actually existing socialism and got shot in the neck by a fascist for it opposed to existing socialism seems a bit off. He was fighting alongside anarchists and seems to have had a fairly confused understanding of the political situation over there generally, but I don't really care about his personal beliefs so much as the ends his work has been used for. cloudchamber posted:he supported the establishment of one of Europe's most far reaching welfare states in his own country.
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Dec 30, 2017 03:09
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Socialist supporters of the welfare state such as George Orwell, Winston Churchill,
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Dec 30, 2017 03:23
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A human heart posted:He was fighting alongside anarchists and seems to have had a fairly confused understanding of the political situation over there generally, but I don't really care about his personal beliefs so much as the ends his work has been used for. The presence of, and desire to expand a welfare state are certainly socialist under whatever common definitions I'm aware of. Of course, they're not communist, but those are not the same things. For instance in the Communist Manifesto it might fall under this category quote:
Orwell, at least around the time he wrote Homage to Catalonia was certainly no communist by the soviet viewpoint but he was a socialist.
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Dec 30, 2017 03:30
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CestMoi posted:Socialist supporters of the welfare state such as George Orwell, Winston Churchill, In the build up to the 1945 election Churchill came out with a load of Road to Serfdom style stuff about how the Labour party's plans for implementing socialism in the UK would require them to eventually introduce an English version of the Gestapo.
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Dec 30, 2017 04:46
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I gave up reading any Stephen King book. Misery was the first book I read by him and i thought it was amazing. So, I gave his other books a chance and I was disappointed. Not to mention IT is like 1000 pages.
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Dec 30, 2017 08:08
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Lightning Lord posted:Orwell is so revered because he's thoroughly misinterpreted. Never seen Steinbeck get much praise from this group. My point here btw, Orwell's views aside, is that his work has been used to say anything even remotely leaning left will inevitably become Animal Farm or 1984, and that I've never heard of a 14-19 year old redditer who gives a poo poo about Steinbeck.
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Dec 30, 2017 09:40
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gaydad posted:I gave up reading any Stephen King book. Misery was the first book I read by him and i thought it was amazing. So, I gave his other books a chance and I was disappointed. Not to mention IT is like 1000 pages. Not picking on your opinions, but why does it matter how big it is?
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Jan 3, 2018 12:17
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I abandoned Ready Player One about 3 chapters in. I was sick of 80's memes by then and knew it wasn't going to get any easier. It felt like Dan Brown decided to "do" Snow Crash or something.
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Jan 3, 2018 13:11
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504 posted:Not picking on your opinions, but why does it matter how big it is? It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it!
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Jan 3, 2018 17:36
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504 posted:Not picking on your opinions, but why does it matter how big it is? if you must read a stephen king book then surely you'd want it to be done with as quickly as possible
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Jan 4, 2018 00:10
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Plus it only has about 300 pages worth reading in the first place King seems to think you can take a cliche and give them 100 pages of backstory and that suddenly makes them deep.
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Jan 4, 2018 01:35
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Well No, otherwise he woundnt be popular.
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Jan 4, 2018 08:36
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King does best with shorter novels, novellas, and short stories. I could have sworn he's even said that himself, but I can't think of where.
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Jan 4, 2018 11:18
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504 posted:Well No, otherwise he woundnt be popular. popularity itself isn’t a sufficient indicator of quality. something can be simultaneously popular and trash, such as marvel movies and stephen king
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Jan 4, 2018 12:58
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Different Seasons is a very good book.
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Jan 4, 2018 13:02
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All of his short story collections are solid, especially the Bachman collection
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Jan 4, 2018 17:05
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504 posted:Well No, otherwise he woundnt be popular. ok
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Jan 4, 2018 22:01
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mitochondritom posted:I abandoned Ready Player One about 3 chapters in. I was sick of 80's memes by then and knew it wasn't going to get any easier. It felt like Dan Brown decided to "do" Snow Crash or something. I abandoned Armada by Ernest Cline for that same reason. I also abandoned The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim.
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Jan 6, 2018 19:17
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mitochondritom posted:I abandoned Ready Player One about 3 chapters in. I was sick of 80's memes by then and knew it wasn't going to get any easier. It felt like Dan Brown decided to "do" Snow Crash or something. The writing is just as lovely as Twilight but it get a social pass because it's aimed at men instead of teen girls and young women. I gave up on the Dresden Files series. My SO really loves them and I just...can't make myself give a poo poo. I just find the titular character too convenient and unlikable and Butcher is seemingly allergic to writing an interesting female character. SO swears they get better but I'm not up to putting in the time to find out when there's millions of other books out there.
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Jan 7, 2018 02:27
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13Pandora13 posted:The writing is just as lovely as Twilight but it get a social pass because it's aimed at men instead of teen girls and young women. I got turned off by all the contrived mindcontrol/date rape scenes plots over the course of the series in Jim Butcher's books, on top of the cardboard female characters. Of which there are about way too many. Dresden Files, off memory, had poo poo like his backstory centers around his abusive mentor doing it to a girl, repeated supernatural kidnapping-rape plots in his side stories, his brother raping a villain to death while she screams in pleasure, entire villain group whose thing is doing it to people, siblings mind controlled into having sex, causing them to commit suicide, love interest for a novel+ was actually mind controlled the whole time.. Then his other series had even more over the scene in codex alera with a villain who breaks women into slaves via gang rape while forcing them to like it with magic and I realised it was just going to be him wanking off for a chapter every now and then.
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Jan 7, 2018 02:43
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Frank Viola posted:I abandoned Armada by Ernest Cline for that same reason. I also abandoned The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim.
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Jan 8, 2018 02:29
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No Wave posted:TPP summary: what saves the project is adopting continuous integration but it's written to sound as if "agile development" as a whole is responsible. So basically: "Save us DevOps!".
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Jan 8, 2018 02:37
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No Wave posted:TPP summary: what saves the project is adopting continuous integration but it's written to sound as if "agile development" as a whole is responsible. People who work in IT shouldn't be allowed to write books
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Jan 8, 2018 04:52
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A human heart posted:People who work in IT shouldn't be allowed to write books People who have Lum avatars shouldn't be allowed to comment on books.
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Jan 8, 2018 05:48
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I wish I gave up on Ready Player One. I read it on a dare and it’s the worst loving thing. Is there an active thread where I can complain about it?
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Jan 8, 2018 06:18
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Jew it to it! posted:People who have Lum avatars shouldn't be allowed to comment on books. Why not?
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Jan 8, 2018 06:40
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Professor Shark posted:King does best with shorter novels, novellas, and short stories. I just re-read his 1993 story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes and he wrote this in the introduction http://bestettler.com/EBooks/eBooks/King,%20Stephen/Nightmares%20and%20Dreamscapes/Stephen%20King%20-%20Introduction.htm posted:The leap of faith necessary to make the short stories happen has gotten particularly tough in the last few years; these days it seems that everything wants to be a novel, and every novel wants to be approximately four thousand pages long. A fair number of critics have mentioned this, and usually not favorably. In reviews of every long novel I have written, from The Stand to Needful Things, I have been accused of overwriting. In some cases the criticisms have merit; in others they are just the ill-tempered yappings of men and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of the last thirty years with a puzzling (to me, at least) lack of discussion and dissent. These selfappointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail-paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Greg Matthews's Heart of the Country is all but ignored. I never bailed on any King stuff that was written before 1990 or so. His really recent novels, I bail on more of them than I finish. The Kennedy one was good though. God Hole posted:So I picked up Anna Karenina and it was just a dull slog all the way through. It was about an extramarital affair and somehow managed to be as boring and passionless as possible. I got as far as the horse race and knew exactly what it was foreshadowing and where the book was going to go and just put it down and never picked it up again. I quit reading it twice at that exact same spot! It took me three tries to finish it. But dude, you should give it another try, it turns out to be way better than War and Peace. I agree the Anna/Vronsky parts are big bummers, and you know how it's going to end, but you need them to contrast with the Kitty/Levin parts. The scene where they write on the tablecloth is like the most  thing ever written.But if you're dead-set on shorter works with doomed, passionate lovers then you might like Turgenev a lot
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Jan 8, 2018 07:29
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Jew it to it! posted:People who have Lum avatars shouldn't be allowed to comment on books. If had a nickel for every dude who thought "you have an anime avatar" is a comeback to a human heart
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Jan 8, 2018 22:07
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Weren't the Lum avatars bought en masse by a mysterious benefactor anyway?
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Jan 8, 2018 23:58
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If had a nickel for every dude who thought "you have an anime avatar" is a comeback to a human heart Yeah, he (or she) is just a whiny bitch that refused to do a mod challenge.
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Jan 9, 2018 01:34
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:Yeah, he (or she) is just a whiny bitch that refused to do a mod challenge. ah poo poo, i didn't do a Mod Challenge!! that's bad for some reason
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Jan 9, 2018 05:01
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I gave up in Ancillary Justice barely 50 pages in because I can't see why it got a Hugo. The main character basically had no personality, the imagery was vague, the pronoun thing just confused and annoyed me because it hosed with my ability to visualize anybody, and I couldn't find a plot or theme that entire time except maybe some weaksauce anti colonialism things. Also I don't need to read three shopping trip reports in a row when nothing happens except overcharging for bread.
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Jan 10, 2018 07:23
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business hammocks posted:I wish I gave up on Ready Player One. I read it on a dare and it’s the worst loving thing. Is there an active thread where I can complain about it? I wish there was I would be in there with you. Armada is worse.
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Jan 12, 2018 12:50
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I like Stephen King, but I gave up on Bag of Bones. I regret not finishing it cause it was a favorite of an ex of mine and she gave it to me when we were dating, but I wanted more ghosts and less 100-page monologues about writer's block and trying to help a trailer park woman pay her legal fees.
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Feb 1, 2018 04:54
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Anything by Neal Stephenson that isn’t Snow Crash or Reamde. And I only finished Reamde out of spite. That man needs an editor. How do you write a book that has MMO drama and globetrotting soy poo poo where the MMO drama is more interesting? I mean that in a relative since, because it wasn’t really interesting, but whenever it got back to the spy/terrorist stuff I would be dissapointed.
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Feb 18, 2018 22:08
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Redshirts by John Scalzi. Poorly written fan fiction. At points I literally couldn't tell who was talking because they all sound the same on the page. It also wasn't remotely funny or clever as the inexplicable 5* reviews had lead me to believe. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece but I was expecting something better crafted than a "hilarious" post on a tech support forum. The Camel Club by David Baldacci - No one talks like that!!! It's worse than Dan Brown. People introduce themselves like they are living CVs. "Hello, I'm Juliette Beautysmart from the CIA's special super division. I've been working on exposing a secret underground group but I also spend a lot of time studying Cryptography and shooting at the range." "Err hi, I'm Dave." Arrrrgh!
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Feb 19, 2018 02:13
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Anything by Neal Stephenson that isn’t Snow Crash or Reamde. And I only finished Reamde out of spite. That man needs an editor. How do you write a book that has MMO drama and globetrotting soy poo poo where the MMO drama is more interesting? I mean that in a relative since, because it wasn’t really interesting, but whenever it got back to the spy/terrorist stuff I would be dissapointed. Have you read Cryptonomicon? It and Snow Crash are his only books I think are worth reading--the prequel trilogy had some good parts too, but was way too bloated with filler to be worth it.
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Feb 23, 2018 02:22
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