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The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman. A bland, forgettable conspiracy theory thriller. Angsty twenty-something protagonist trying to uncover some web of lies by Medieval alchemists in the 21st century or something.
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Oct 8, 2007 20:28
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Just finished Post Office by Bukowski. I liked it overall, and it had a lot of great moments, but I thought the ending was kind of abrupt. Still, it was good enough for me to pick up Factotum. I also read Crime and Punishment recently. It was really interesting throughout, but Dostoevsky tends to use the same words over and over again (he uses "suddenly" at least twice in one paragraph at least once in the book), and that bugged me a bit. Currently, I'm reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.
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Oct 8, 2007 23:24
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The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. I'd already read The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids, so I knew I'd enjoy this one. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed. The aliens were sufficiently mysterious, the sense of paranoia and impending doom believably constructed, and the characters were the typical Wyndham "let's rely on reason and British wit until the very end when we confess our emotional natures to each other in the face of society crumbling around us, only to be rescued and vow to adapt to the new world through reason, logic and fairness" milquetoastian British couple. My only real complaint about the novel was the ending. After an excellent and in-depth look at how the globe would react to the systemic paralysis of sea travel, and how a competing underwater intelligence would go about colonizing land, he wraps the whole thing up in about five pages. Humanity has been decimated, but the implication is that the whole situation has been neatly resolved by some unseen Japanese weapon, and that while the survivors will probably have to do some outdoors work, things will be back to normal (if not better) before long. I liked the bit where, after finding out that the human population had been reduced to less than a fifth of what it was, everyone concludes that it's probably for the best because they'll be easier to feed.
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Oct 9, 2007 01:20
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Just read Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. Strange thriller/mystery/sci-fi story in which protagonist Jane Charlotte may or may not be crazy and/or working for a mysterious organization meant to eliminate evil people. It's hard to describe, but I highly recommend it. The voice and pacing are compelling enough that you don't get too caught up trying to figure stuff out.
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Oct 9, 2007 03:11
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Read Jan Guillou's "Madame Terror" a few days back. Funniest action-thriller ever written in the Clancy style. Russians sell the Palestinian navy an ultramodern submarine to fight against the Israeli navy. The protagonists are Mouna al-Hussaini, a brigadier general in the Palestinian intelligence service and Carl Hamilton, a Swedish vice admiral who the Palestinians recruit to serve as commander of the submarine. Guillou's hate of Israeli politics really shows.
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Oct 9, 2007 10:11
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joeuser posted:I just finished the second book Red Seas Under Red Skies. Just as good as the first one. I can't imagine these not being really good movies, but then again, maybe I shouldn't wish for it. I didn't think it was as good as the first one. I'm not sure what it was, but it lacked that something which was there in the scenes in the first one where you saw them all together doing what they do best. And worryingly we got our first taste of proper romance in this one, and it really does seem to be all cliched and the kind of thing you can see from a mile off, and it doesn't bode well for the whole Sabetha thing, like I said before. Jean and Locke's relationship is pretty good though now. The book felt pretty disjointed to me as well actually, more so than the first one where all the bits kept tying together.
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Oct 9, 2007 11:13
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Zero Karizma posted:Vampire$ by John Steakley, Jack Crow Ahahaha, I can't believe it, Jack Crow was the name of one of the main characters in Armor as well. (If you've read Armor, are they supposed to be the same person?) I thought the Felix part of the book was a good read, but once Jack Crow's forced-badassness came onto the scene, it was pretty much nonstop eye-rolls. "Ooooh, it's Jack Crow the famous pirate and outlaw! Of course you can hang out at my top-secret government base and have free run of the place, because I'm a nerdy scientest and want to be cool! Don't shut down the shields or nothin'!" Ugh.
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Oct 9, 2007 11:35
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Ahahaha, I can't believe it, Jack Crow was the name of one of the main characters in Armor as well. (If you've read Armor, are they supposed to be the same person?) I thought the Felix part of the book was a good read, but once Jack Crow's forced-badassness came onto the scene, it was pretty much nonstop eye-rolls. "Ooooh, it's Jack Crow the famous pirate and outlaw! Of course you can hang out at my top-secret government base and have free run of the place, because I'm a nerdy scientest and want to be cool! Don't shut down the shields or nothin'!" Ugh. Jesus Christ... I don't know. I just looked Armor up after reading this and, as far as I can tell, they are different characters with identical names. Ridiculous. I mean: What an Artist! Why oh why won't regular people respect science fiction/fantasy!?
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Oct 9, 2007 15:08
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Zero Karizma posted:Jesus Christ... I don't know. I just looked Armor up after reading this and, as far as I can tell, they are different characters with identical names. Ridiculous. To be fair, the first half of the book or so is about a completely different character and is kind of a grittier, more psychological Catch-22 in space (with powered armor and bugs, if you liked Starship Troopers). Steakley switches to a completely new and previously unmentioned character halfway through the book, which disorients the hell out of the reader. Having to wade through the Jack As a standalone novella I would consider the first part (with Felix... and oh poo poo, it looks like there's a Felix in Vampire$) to be pretty good sci-fi, not Dune good, but definitely above the level of nerd-candy. If the author had been more intent on exploring the psychological stuff (in the second part, they've got Felix's old suit and are trying to figure out what made him tick from the log, which requires a level of psychological immersion that starts to gently caress with them) rather than throwing known intergalactic badass Jack Crow into all manner of ridiculous and improbable situations, it would have been a really solid book. As it is, I'd still recommend it to someone that had an interest in mil-SF just because it's at least better than John Ringo. Pompous Rhombus fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Oct 9, 2007 |
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Oct 9, 2007 15:55
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I just finished The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but because I kept putting it down and picking it back up days later, I was really really loving confused for most of it. Thankfully a quick wikipedia overview put it all in perspective. I loved the ending.
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Oct 9, 2007 19:35
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Just finished William Gibson's newest book, Spook Country. Good, but definitely not his best work.
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Oct 9, 2007 22:30
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Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief Probably the best book he's done since atleast Miss Wyoming, and about 1,000 times better than that mass of suck known as JPod. The first 50 pages or so are masterful, it then loses some steam. But the characters are really well fleshed out, and the novel within the novel, known as "Glove Pond," is quite possibly the most messed up thing I've read in a long time. Definitely worth reading.
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Oct 10, 2007 04:35
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re: Red Seas Under Red SkiesRukaya posted:I didn't think it was as good as the first one. I'm not sure what it was, but it lacked that something which was there in the scenes in the first one where you saw them all together doing what they do best. I just finished this as well, and I thought it was good, but agree that it was not as good as the first one (The Lies of Locke Lamora), which I think transcended the fantasy genre. It's probably not a spoiler, due to the title and the burning ship on the cover, that a major plotline involves pirates. The first half of the book, however (which I think is stronger) involves Locke and Jean planning a robbery of a casino, and their plans going disasterously wrong, getting them into progressively hotter and hotter water. Once they finally hit the open seas, I thought the plot actually slowed down. There's a fairly strong finish to the book, and some hints of larger events going on in the world, which kept my attention. Overall, it's a pretty solid book which makes it easier to forgive the hackneyed romance plot. I checked out the author's website and he plans this as a series of seven books. I hope he can maintain the quality over a long series like this. I also finished Terry Pratchett's The Truth, which was his take on the newspaper business. It was a strong book, and funny, and the only complaint I have is that he seems to be parodying an idealized version of the news business, rather than what purports to be journalism today. The book was published in 2001, before some of the more egregious recent examples of yellow journalism, so I guess that can be a minor criticism. Considering that he's taken his skewer in previous volumes to religion, racism, government, and war, he seems to hold journalism with more reverence than some of his other topics of parody. Lastly, I finally finished Science Fiction: Best of the Year 2006 which has been sitting half read on my shelf for a while. Overall, it was pretty average, but there were four strong stories in there. Susan Palwick's The Fate of Mice is great, a riff on all the major tropes of mice in fantastic fiction, particularly Flowers for Algernon. It's the closest that a story from this collection comes to potentially being a classic. Wil McCarthy's The Policeman's Daughter is an insane story about a lawyer and client in a legal battle against a younger version of themselves. Mary Rosenblum's Search Engine is a noir take on an idea I'd seen done already (in M. T. Anderson's Feed), in which everyone is tracked constantly by the things they buy in various databases, and how to avoid detection when everything you do is logged. Alastair Reynolds, who is becoming one of my favorite sci fi authors (after only reading two of his stories), closes the book out with Understanding Time and Space which is a story about the end of the human race, enlightenment, and Elton John.
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Oct 10, 2007 15:59
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Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart I don't remember buying this book, but somehow it ended up in my pile. I think I saw it on the Pharyngula blog. Anyway, Arnhart argues that while Conservatives are generally opposed to Evolution for reasons of religion and supposed moral consequences, a naturalist view of human nature supports Conservative thinking. Most of his arguments boil down to the point that Leftism relies on human nature being perfectible and this is incompatible with the innate instincts shaped by our evolution. The book is quite brief and was reasonably well written. Some problems I had with it were: 1. Intelligent Design is given too much credit as an "intellectual" movement. I see many other reviewers felt the same. 2. The discussion on the compatibility of Religion and Natural Science is very shallow. Overall the book was decent. I found some bits very interesting such as the discussion of the French Revolution and Napoleon's rise to power and the parallels between Darwin's writings and those of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.
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Oct 11, 2007 02:38
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Blindness - José Saramago God, this story was long. Not a ton of pages but for some reason it really seemed to drag on. I don't think there was enough description of what was going on in the story (yeah, I know most of the characters were blind :v ) and the lack of punctuation and long run-on sentences were extremely annoying. We have punctuation and grammar rules for a reason: they make reading easier. The last book I read with this sort of lack of punctuation was Drown and even then it drove me up a wall. Not to completely poo poo all over the book, there were parts that were enjoyable. The story was clever but the writing style, huge portions of unnecessary writing, and a retarded anticlimactic ending made me dislike this book, despite its being in the TBB Hall of Fame.
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Oct 11, 2007 04:28
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I finished Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man today, and I must say I was impressed. It's my first experience with any of his novels, and it's got me chomping at the bit to read Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake which apparently are even better examples (if somewhat elusive, in Wake) of his style. The writing itself is great fun and I went into a kind of trance reading the book and not realizing how long I'd been at it. I intended to chip at it slowly and ended up finishing it in two sessions. The plot didn't exactly speak to me in any appreciable way, being neither Irish nor Catholic and having only basic knowledge of both, but it's certainly one of the better coming-of-age works that I've read. I think I'll go back and read it again with a keener eye; as I said above my senses were dulled by the trance the prose and dialogue lured me into.
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Oct 11, 2007 06:01
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I just finished reading an English translation of Les Liasons Dangeureuses by Choderos de Laclos. I had to read it for a class, and I actually enjoyed it. I kind of like that it is written in the form of letters, it's interesting to see the characters and events being displayed that way.
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Oct 12, 2007 03:10
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Finished the Sherlock Holmes adventure "The Hound of The Baskervilles" last night, and am working on finishing "Martin Chuzzlewit" by Charles Dickens. Of course, any Sherlock Holmes adventure is worth reading, in my humble opinion.
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Oct 12, 2007 05:09
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And I just finished Sherlock Holmes and The Valley of Fear which was the last full length novel of the Great Detective. I'm with Paradoxical, I loving love Sherlock Holmes.
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Oct 12, 2007 05:25
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Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett Finally some watch action after all that witch stuff. I love Vimes, and Carrot seems to be evolving. One of the better discworld novels I have to say.
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Oct 12, 2007 12:30
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Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. Brief overview: A magistrate in a remote outpost of a large empire clashes with higher officials after he has an affair with a barbarian prisoner. I didn't want to give anything away, but it is reminiscent of Conrad and Beckett with respective themes of trying to understand the Other and isolation. This is one of the best books that I've read in a while. I highly recommend it.
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Oct 12, 2007 16:01
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Don Oot posted:Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. Brief overview: A magistrate in a remote outpost of a large empire clashes with higher officials after he has an affair with a barbarian prisoner. I didn't want to give anything away, but it is reminiscent of Conrad and Beckett with respective themes of trying to understand the Other and isolation. That reminds me. I gotta start reading that one again someday. Disgrace was one of the most powerful books I've read in my lifetime. I just finished No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, which I liked just as much as (if not more than) The Road. There is something about McCarthy's use of the English language that captivates me. The book had well-written characters, great suspense and brilliant pacing, but I do feel that it lost some momentum near the end of the story. Still, good stuff.
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Oct 12, 2007 18:42
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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It was a pretty good book but it felt a little sterile for a book about grief. She shows her weaknesses but you can never really relate to her. It's also the second book I've ever read where I didn't feel a great sense of closure, accomplishment or contentment at the end. It was just over and I didn't feel anything.
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Oct 12, 2007 21:59
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Finally picked up and read Dune for the first time. What an amazing book. I'll probably read the second and third books in the series and stop there, but for now I'm going to start Gaiman's Neverwhere.
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Oct 13, 2007 01:59
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Soma Soma Soma posted:Finally picked up and read Dune for the first time. What an amazing book. I'll probably read the second and third books in the series and stop there I liked God Emperor and so did a lot of other people  I just finished The Alchemist by Paul Coelho . It was sitting on my shelf for a few months (along with a few other books I bought but then decided I didn't have time to read) before I realized hey, a book would make the subway ride go by a lot faster. I started reading it and just really wanted to see how the story ended, so I finished it that afternoon (it's a short book). It was really simply written, but still a great book with a positive message that I think someone of any age would get something out of.
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Oct 13, 2007 03:51
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. It's an essential book if you want to read about the 60's. The book puts you in a state of mind that makes you somewhat experience mentally what was going through the heads of hippies when they're on acid. You'll understand if you read it; the wording is so cryptic that you need to be in the right state of mind to read it. I actually found it easier to understand while reading in early morning hours.
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Oct 13, 2007 04:24
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Pompous Rhombus posted:I liked God Emperor and so did a lot of other people Yeah, in all honesty God Emperor is pretty cool, if only for the main character. Definitely worth a look. It gets a bit nutty after GE, though.
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Oct 13, 2007 05:02
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John Dies At The End by David Wong. Pretty enjoyable horror-comedy read. It falls a little flat at points, but I had fun with it.
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Oct 13, 2007 22:24
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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. Very good book. I got it for my English class, not realizing that it was translated from German when the books we picked had to be by American authors  I'm going to start the second book, Inkspell, pretty soon.I finished it several weeks before we had to by the way.
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Oct 13, 2007 22:47
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Encryptic posted:John Dies At The End by David Wong. Pretty enjoyable horror-comedy read. It falls a little flat at points, but I had fun with it. I'm asking a bunch of folks about this. Would you recommend it to other people, or is it a little too "Internety?" I'm actually fairly curious about this book.
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Oct 13, 2007 23:25
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Zero Karizma posted:I'm asking a bunch of folks about this. Would you recommend it to other people, or is it a little too "Internety?" I'm actually fairly curious about this book. If you're the type of person who really enjoys cognitive dissonance, this is the book for you. It's to horror what the Hitchhiker's Guide is to science fiction, except not quite so much.
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Oct 13, 2007 23:45
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Snowcrash. I started it because I made a joke about killing people with binary somehow, and somebody recommended it off that. very entertaining with the right mix of action, computer mumbo jumbo, and religious history mumbo jumbo with enough humor so that it didn't take itself too seriously.
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Oct 14, 2007 03:57
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snyprmag posted:Snowcrash. I started it because I made a joke about killing people with binary somehow, and somebody recommended it off that. very entertaining with the right mix of action, computer mumbo jumbo, and religious history mumbo jumbo with enough humor so that it didn't take itself too seriously. I loved the opening to that book but after the pizza got delivered I wasn't as thrilled. It was still an enjoyable read, but the beginning was just fantastic and it never really caught me the same way again.
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Oct 14, 2007 04:41
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Zero Karizma posted:I'm asking a bunch of folks about this. Would you recommend it to other people, or is it a little too "Internety?" I'm actually fairly curious about this book. Hmmm... I liked it, to be sure, but I wasn't blown away by it to the point that I'd recommend it to everyone. It sets out to be entertaining and it certainly accomplishes that. If you like the Evil Dead style of horror-comedy, you'd probably like JDATE - it doesn't take itself too seriously.
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Oct 14, 2007 05:41
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Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut Loved it. Vonnegut makes the end of the world sound like just another day in a Banana Republic. I guess this is where Satriani got the name for his song.
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Oct 14, 2007 15:31
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The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman, pretty hilarious read if you love stupid and silly humor. It has a pretty unique format, and by that I mean it's written like an almanac. I always hated John Hodgman for being the PC Guy in the Mac commercial but I have to say, that man can write
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Oct 14, 2007 21:35
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LooseChanj posted:Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut I am now a devout Bokononist
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Oct 15, 2007 00:58
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Re: John Dies At The End. I recently finished this and thought it was a lot of fun. If a mix of Lovecraftian "there are things man was not meant to know" horror, Evil Dead/early Peter Jackson movie gore, and Kevin Smith-esque dialogue and narration sound good, and if you're in touch with your inner 12-year-old for occasionally juvenile humor, you'll like this book. I'm re-reading L. A. Confidential. Again. Hijinks Ensue fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Oct 15, 2007 |
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Oct 15, 2007 04:08
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perceptual_set posted:I am now a devout Bokononist Man, but isn't everyone after reading that? What a loving awesome book. I actually like it a little more than Slaughterhouse V.
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Oct 15, 2007 05:05
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Zero Karizma posted:Man, but isn't everyone after reading that? What a loving awesome book. I actually like it a little more than Slaughterhouse V. Cat's Cradle is actually my least favorite Vonnegut after Piano Player. Not that it's bad, but I thought Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, Sirens of Titan, Bluebeard, and even Galapagos were better. I really wanted to like it, but it didn't really affect me the way Vonnegut's stuff usually does :-\
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Oct 15, 2007 15:58
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