|
teh_Shane posted:The last book I finished was Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'. You're not alone, I thought it was a really mediocre book as well. Even if you take out all the goon-hype, it was still pretty disappointing. I'd go see the move though.
|
#
?
May 17, 2009 15:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 22:20 |
|
|
Pompous Rhombus posted:You're not alone, I thought it was a really mediocre book as well. Even if you take out all the goon-hype, it was still pretty disappointing. I'd go see the move though. Glad I'm not the only one then. :P - - - At the moment I'm half way through American Psycho, but I'm struggling to get through it as I know mostly what happens (reading snippets of the book in the past, not to mention the movie), and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is sitting on my bed side table, waiting to be read. >_<
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2009 04:33
|
|
|
The Road is one of McCarthy's worst books. It's far from a bad book, because the over-simplified story and writing style works for the setting, but it's just not very well written when compared with his other novels. It's probably one of the last books of his that I would recommend to someone.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2009 04:38
|
|
|
Oh really? I didn't know that. From what I'd heard (which admittedly - isn't all that much), it was one of his best. I'm really interested in reading No Country for Old Men - has it adopted the same simplistic writing style as The Road?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2009 04:48
|
|
|
Just finished Kafka on the Shore, my first venture into Murakami(I'm on a stop reading only sci fi push at the moment). I liked that characterisation, the sense of isolation and the way the fantasy elements were integrated into the plot without excessive exposition. Some of it felt vague for vagueness sake but I've heard this is pretty typical for Murakami. Probably read Wind Up Bird Chronicle next as I've heard it is his best.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2009 05:01
|
|
|
World War Z by Max Brooks. Man, what a great read. I've heard people talk about not wanting to finish the last chapter of a book (or watch the last episode of a canceled TV series, or whatever) because then it would be over. I never really got that, until today when I arrived at the last chapter of World War Z. I hope the movie actually gets made, and is at least somewhat faithful to the book. If they cast mostly unknowns and film it as a documentary (interviews interwoven with "archival" footage from famous battles and such), it'd be so great.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2009 17:24
|
|
|
Recently finished Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark. I know Blood Meridian is quite popular around these parts, so it was surprising to find little mention of this novel around. It's short, dark and filled with entertaining (if a little despairing) exchanges between the two main characters and the numerous personalities they encounter throughout their journey. All in all it offered a nice, brief taste of dark existentialism.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2009 19:59
|
|
|
Robert Ludlum - The Road To Gandolfo Hilarious book about a hot shot general who gets kicked out of the army and decides to kidnap the Pope. Highly recommended if you're into Ludlum type stuff. Henry Beston - The Outermost House Nature stuff, like Walden I guess. Quick read, it's only a couple hundred pages. Fun, if you like birds and such. L. Frank Baum - The Road To Oz I'm determined to read this series in its entirety, but it's already getting a little rough. It's happy-scrappy syrupy stuff, but that's ok I guess because it's targeted at children not teens like Harry Potter and Twilight. James Joyce - Ulysses Holy gently caress. This was worse than Wallace's Infinite Jest. The last 50 pages are one single wall of text with absolutely NO punctuation. There's absolutely no context to anything either. I just had to sit back and let it all go over my head. I need to get an annotated edition or something. Still, proud to say I finished every word, even if I do feel like an idiot because almost nothing made an impression.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2009 20:28
|
|
|
Try some of Baum's non OZ stuff. Its a little less syrupy I love The Master Key
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2009 21:05
|
|
|
Keyz posted:It's short, dark and filled with entertaining (if a little despairing) exchanges between the two main characters and the numerous personalities they encounter throughout their journey. To contribute I recently read Death of a Salesman, The Old Man and the Sea, and re-read for the somethingth-time Hamlet. All three are classics and there's little to say except that everyone ought to read them. I can't believe I hadn't gotten around to the first two years and years ago.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2009 23:48
|
|
|
LooseChanj posted:James Joyce - Ulysses I'm reading Ulysses right now, and I use Gifford's annotations whenever I get really confused. Usually I read through them after I finish a chapter, because otherwise I'd be flipping back and forth and never get anything read. I'm also embarrassed to say that I've snuck over to the online Sparknotes to make sure I got the gist of the main plot after I finish a chapter. Yeah, I know it's really lame and I should be a lot better than that as I've been out of high school for 7 years now, but dammit, the summaries are helpful. That said, I can understand why it's called the greatest book of the 20th century. I really like it so far (about half-way finished).
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2009 01:23
|
|
|
Astroturf Neckbeard posted:World War Z by Max Brooks. Man, what a great read. I've heard people talk about not wanting to finish the last chapter of a book (or watch the last episode of a canceled TV series, or whatever) because then it would be over. I never really got that, until today when I arrived at the last chapter of World War Z. Ahh, I've heard good things about this book. I've got the Zombie Survival Guide and well... it's poo poo. But people I've spoken to who've read both, say that it's as if two different authors wrote them. I might have to pick up a copy.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2009 01:48
|
|
|
Wicked Prey by John Sandford Not one of his best, but not one of his worst. There's two concurring plotlines here - one of which is vastly more interesting than the other, main plotline, which hurts the book a bit IMHO. Wait for it to come out in paperback.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2009 06:39
|
|
|
Finished re-reading the 5th, 6th and 7th book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson in short order. I absolutely loved them. It's like your standard swords and sorcery fare mixed up in philosophical musing. Not to mention the massive amounts of social commentary. Suprisingly deep for a fantasy book. Also features the debut of Tehol Beddict and Bugg, who I couldn't help imagining as Blackadder and Baldrick, with the way they bantered together. Very humorous at times while being quite dark at others. The Malazan soldier sections are always priceless. Altogether a very fun read. Erikson does so well at weaving the different strands together. Yet even the complicated overarching plot of the individual novels is simply another strand in the cobweb that is the main plot. A funnel web that tries to redefine the epic moniker of epic fantasy. Sometimes I wish he'd just dispense with the jumping about though, especially when I was particularly enjoying a section, but that's just a nitpick. EDIT: Next on the agenda: Book 8? Nah, I'm not particularly interested in the areas it's devoted to (Darujhistan/Coral). I think I'll take a break and see what The Sum of All Men by David Farland is like. Xachariah fucked around with this message at 15:19 on May 20, 2009 |
|
#
?
May 20, 2009 15:12
|
|
|
Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody. My wife reads copious amounts of YA fantasy among other things and recomended this series to me enthusiastically. It's been ages since I've read fantasy fiction so I was kind of thrown off by what I thought of as slow pacing at first. Then I realzied that they don't mean to tell a whole story in one book which is sort of the point of FF, I guess, and I got into it. The prose style is gentle and moves along well even if "nothing happens" much; Carmody spends her time developing the characters, her world, and setting the stage for future books. I'm warming up for Rothfuss and Martin but I've moved immediately into book 2 of this series The Farseekers which promises to be much more exciting in terms of action. E for content: Too much about my impression nothing about the book. As established in the first 2 pages, the book takes place in a post apocalyptic world whose fantasy setting is actually an agrarian society descended from the most aggressive remnants of the human race -- all survivalist libertarians apparently. Mutations, in the form of mental powers, are not uncommon. Those identified as "misfits" are generally burned alive but some misfit children are purchased and removed to Obernewtyn, a mysterious and isolated facility which purports to be working on a cure for the mutations. It's also nice that the protagonist is a good strong female character who knows somewhat less about what's going on that the reader does. King Plum the Nth fucked around with this message at 17:18 on May 20, 2009 |
|
#
?
May 20, 2009 17:05
|
|
|
I just finished The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon. I definitely need to give it a closer read through though because I don't feel like I've taken everything it has to offer. For such a short book, it contains a good amount of mind expanding use of the English language. It occurred to me that I could be poetically idiosyncratic with my language, but I very rarely see someone integrate it so well into prose to tell a story.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2009 22:58
|
|
|
My roommate convinced me to read the first three books of The Dresden Files (by Jim Butcher). I enjoyed it in a cheesy, action-packed supernatural way. If I were a meek, nerdy guy I'd probably aspire to be like Harry Dresden... well, I guess I'm aspiring to be like him anyways, but if I were a meek, nerdy guy, it would be even moreso.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2009 00:28
|
|
|
Just finished The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. A wonderful, if occasionally disjointed, tale of childhood, adolescence and family. There were moments that struck me as odd, for example a ways into the book Gaiman takes us on a Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath style escapade that I felt took a little too much in the way setting and characters from Lovecrafts tale. But they can't diminish the really good and passionate story contained within and the nicely formed characters and the that occupy the hero Bod's world. I'd have no problem recommending it to just about anyone. It's fantastical enough to spark imaginations in even the dullest of peoples while also being grounded enough to keep the reader moving along at a pace and you never feel like Neil is taking the story anywhere unnatural, as so often happens with fantasy tales. Everything flows and the writing style keeps everything together and lucid enough that you never feel out of depth, no matter what is happening. As a note, I listened to this on the audio book version, read by Gaiman himself and his delivery is remarkable. I'm a big fan of authors reading their own work and Gaiman's genuine affection for his creations comes out tenderly. He also knows how to creep you out if he needs to. Very recommended.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2009 18:26
|
|
|
Jim Butcher's "Storm Front". It's the first novel of the Dresden Files. Great start to a supposedly great series.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2009 21:52
|
|
|
Cavilleria Rusticana, a bunch of Giovanni Verga's short stories. Despite being fairly wealthy himself, Verga was big on Realism (with a capital R), so the majority of these follow the grinding down of peasants and working folk, particularly in Sicily. I'm not necessarily all that wild about the realists, but if you're going to limit yourself to a few, Verga is a good enough bet. Never drifts too far off point on any of the stories, avoids getting bogged down in pamphleteering (not counting the odd parable), and most of the stories are genuinely interesting. There's even a couple in particular that are strikingly modern (War of the Saints is one). Also got through Rediscovering Homer by Andrew Dalby, which is basically a summary of sorts of all the theories relating to the history of Homer and the epic poems. It's a bit of a mess to be honest; I think I only got as much out of it as I did because I'd read Moses Finely's much better The World of Odysseus at the start of the year. Suffers from a flimsy structure which threatens at times to reduce it to an information-dump. Also irritating was Dalby's consistent inability to acknowledge the value of anyone else's work, even people like Finley who are obviously head and shoulders above him. I don't think it's crossed his mind that he could be wrong about anything actually; he claims Homer was a woman solely because women were also epic poets, and were generally "better". With that definitive and triumphant proof under his belt, he then starts referring to Homer as "she" whenever possible. Better to look elsewhere on this one. Last was Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, which is a loosely-focused series of essays on early 20th century figures (mostly artistic). I'm usually a big fan of James' articles and such that I've come across, which is probably just as well cause there are some real headscratching moments in here. First off, you have to admit James' bloke-ish erudition is very entertaining in itself, and there's a lot to be learnt from what he's saying, but there are some jarring inconsistencies through the book. Take for example the essay on Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which he slams as having a "bogus" conceit and acting as a vehicle for a kind of elitist fetishism. Fine, but why then devote what must amount to pages and pages describing which editions you have on your bookshelf? An example from the essay on Tschuppik is one of many: "When I got the four volumes back to London, I laid them out on my library coffee table and drank their appearance in. I opened them and caressed the thick, good paper that will never grow brittle. I did everything but read them." Steady on, Clive. That mildly erotic example is comparitively vague next to earlier moments when he'll ocassionally stop to describe the texture and colour of the binding, not to mention typeface and spacing. Where could the reader possibly find elitist fetishism in being told that Ellington was the last true jazz artist (everyone from Charlie Parker and Davis onwards has defiled his genius, apparently), and that James has a complete collection of Ellington records? His love of Ellington evens spills over into a moment of soda-commercial kitsch: "[after the concert] Ellington smiled and twiddled his fingers at the fans, the bags under his eyes like sets of matched luggage. (I got a wink from him, which I filed away among my best memories.)" The difference between James and Dalby though is that you'll have fun raging against James. It's easy to forgive irrational bias when the rest of the book is as good as it is. Plus it provides a ton of fodder for your reading list.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2009 23:24
|
|
|
Just finished The Sum of All Men By David Farland. An interesting concept executed beautifully. The society is feudal in nature, and people can bequeath their virtues on another. As such, Runelords have risen, men or women who have a large number of these virtues given to them, in return for protection or money. Brawn, Sight, Hearing, Wit, Grace, Metabolism, any and all virtues of a person can be given to another, at the cost of losing those virtues yourself. The antagonist is a Wolf Lord who seeks to take everyones virtues by force, and become 'the sum of all men'. A decent book, to say the least.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2009 11:29
|
|
|
Just burned through Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn in less than two days. This is an awesome, short, and very enjoyable book. It's about a society that basically worships the guy who came up with the pangram "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog" and there's a statue that has that sentence on it, but as the tiles with letters on them start falling off, those letters are banned in society. The novel is told through letters from the characters to each other, so as the letters are banned, the author stops using them. It's really impressive and neat, and the story itself is also fun. I'm definitely going to look into some of his other books.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2009 14:37
|
|
|
Just burned through Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn in less than two days. It's a very enjoyable and quick read. It's about a society that basically worships the guy who came up with the pangram "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog" and there's a statue that has that sentence on it, but as the tiles with letters on them start falling off, those letters are banned in society. The novel is told through letters from the characters to each other, so as the letters are banned, the author stops using them. It's really impressive and neat, and the story itself is also really fun. I'm definitely going to look into some of his other books.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2009 14:38
|
|
|
I just finished The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley. The writer spent about 2 years (87 to 89) with the guards and inmates. He focuses mostly on specific individuals, from the black warden to a guy who is kept isolated and permanently harassed by the guards, since he killed two guards. He is still in solitary confinement. Here are some of his drawings. I always enjoy reading about prison culture, and this book has plenty of interesting anecdotes, history about the prison, and the background of people in it. Juanito fucked around with this message at 19:20 on May 23, 2009 |
|
#
?
May 23, 2009 18:21
|
|
|
A shitpile of crime and mystery fiction: The Sweet Forever and Shame The Devil by George Pelecanos - The second two books in his "DC Quartet" of novels set in Washington DC with some recurring characters. Pretty good, though after reading several Pelecanos books, I think he's better at writing characters and dialogue and not so hot with plotting. Darkness, Take My Hand and Sacred by Dennis Lehane. Two books featuring a pair of private detectives. Pretty good on the whole - interesting characters and fast-paced. Dancing Bear by James Crumley - Another enjoyable read from Crumley. A world-weary private detective takes on what should be a simple surveillance job that spirals out of control. The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr - Picked these up based on a recommendation from the GoodReads.com site I use to keep track of what I've read. Very well-written historical mystery novels set in 1890s New York that features a psychologist and his diverse team of investigators who use (at the time still viewed with skepticism by the general public) psychology to build a profile of the suspects they're pursuing. Carr's excellent attention to detail really brings the period to life. Encryptic fucked around with this message at 23:34 on May 23, 2009 |
|
#
?
May 23, 2009 23:32
|
|
|
wlokos posted:Just burned through Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn in less than two days. Oh Jesus, why would a writer do this to himself?? I'm going to have to check this book out. Thanks for the c-c-c-combo review.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2009 23:45
|
|
|
I finally finished I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki. It's about 600 pages and I made it about halfway before not reading anything for a couple of months. Last week I picked it up again and finished the last half. It's an interesting book, although not a ton happens in it. If nothing else, it's a inside look at Japanese society during the early 1900s and a satire of various aspects of it. The first chapter was published as a story in a newspaper and Soseki had no intention of continuing but it received such positive reviews that the newspaper asked him to keep writing. Because of that, the first chapter feels self-contained, and the quality of the rest of it fluctuates as Soseki gets his bearings on how to write this kind of thing. Overall it's probably only really worth it if you have a particular interest in Japanese culture or the development of Japanese literature (which I do so it's something I'll probably have to slog through again down the road).
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2009 12:48
|
|
|
Finished reading The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. I read most of the discworld books about 4 or 5 years ago so I idlily chose to re-read the first book. Still goddam hilarious as it was when I was a teenager.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2009 12:58
|
|
|
Based upon suggestions from this forum I just finished Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Overall I was satisfied. It certainly falls in it's own genre; not quite scifi, not traditional fantasy. Some reviewers hate how much time he spends describing the city but I felt the exact opposite. His descriptions of the city grounded me in the story. Coupled with the map at the beginning of the book I felt like I could see the slum right down the street or off to parliament in the distance. I'm usually a snob when it comes to pure scifi vs fantasy. Nothing makes me madder than reading a fantasy book where the author breaks their own well defined rules of the world to get the characters out of a sticky situation. Perdido had a little of that but overall it really held up to my standards of defining a world and sticking to those definitions throughout the book. As far as the story goes the book really started off with a bang but I found the ending to be a little less cohesive. That said, the characters were unforgettable and often quite human (even if they weren't human themselves). I enjoyed it enough that I'm about to read his next book in the Bas-lag universe, The Scar.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2009 17:57
|
|
|
z0331 posted:I finally finished I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki. It's about 600 pages and I made it about halfway before not reading anything for a couple of months. Last week I picked it up again and finished the last half. Fantastic book. I've read it in both languages but I honestly have to say the translation wasn't bad at all. I gave the english version to my family to read! Reading two books at the moment. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. A veryy very thought provoking read. Also reading Japan: The System That Soured by Richard Katz. If you're interested in how corporations in Japan managed to find a balanced between competitiveness and cooperation among competing firms in Japan.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2009 08:20
|
|
|
I just finished Dune Messiah. It was fine. It only took a couple days to read, and was interesting enough that I'll probably pick up Children of Dune at some point. I read Dune last summer, and I think summer is the only time I can read those books, so I'll try and finish the series by October, I guess.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2009 09:26
|
|
|
First I read Until Dark by Mariah someone--Stewart, I think, but I don't care enough to go upstairs to the sell-back pile and check. It was pretty damned bad. In better hands, the plot might have had some promise. I'll admit that. However, I am at a loss for words trying to describe how absolutely nonexistent her characters' personalities were. 'Cardboard' implies too much depth. 'Cookie-cutter' is too nice a word for it. I can't forgive that in a book, and her amateurish handling of the foreshadowing of the Shocking Plot Twist really just put the cap on a terrible reading experience. Foreshadowing should not be a bludgeoning weapon. Sometimes, my policy of buying absolutely anything at Half-Price Books that looks even vaguely interesting pays off. Usually, it doesn't. That being said, one of the other books I bought on that same Half-Price Books trip was Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry's autobiography. It was wonderful and I was sorry to see it end; I'll probably end up reading it multiple times just to enjoy his unique voice. All in all, a great apology for Mariah Whatever.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2009 09:47
|
|
|
Marithecamel posted:Fantastic book. I've read it in both languages but I honestly have to say the translation wasn't bad at all. I gave the english version to my family to read! Do you mean the Tuttle version? The language, I thought, was pretty stuffy but I assumed that was to mirror the original Japanese. I thought some of the descriptive passages, especially towards the end, were fantastic though. I'm also curious how the translator came up with the names? Are the English names at all related to the Japanese ones? One thing that did bother me, though, was the excessive amount of typos. It's a 600 page book, but there were still far more mistakes than I would expect to find.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2009 00:20
|
|
|
Just finished Fidelity, Grace Paley's last book of poetry before her death. Some of those poems brought me to tears, goddamn. Focused a lot on the strangeness of aging and death, seeing as she wrote it in her mid eighties and died just a few months after it was released, and her insights are really beautiful. Can't figure out why, exactly, but they really resonated with me.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2009 03:28
|
|
|
The Scar, i loved it, going to start the iron council. I think i have a new favorite author.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2009 06:07
|
|
|
Along with I Am a Cat I've had several books lying around half finished that I've finally gotten around to. Yesterday I finished off both Lolita and Catch-22. It was my first time reading Lolita and I think part of the reason why I stopped halfway was because I just kept feeling uncomfortable reading it. I can only imagine how he felt writing it. I just wasn't really comfortable with feeling sorry for a pedophile. The writing is, as anyone who's read it will tell you, incredible. Nabokov is one of those lucky people who knows and is able to correctly use the perfect word for what he needs. Any feeling or mood or scene he wants to describe, he knows exactly what vocabulary to use to do it perfectly and to suit his needs. The ending left me feeling mentally drained. It's a book I'll need to read again, possibly with the annotated version. It also makes me want to pick up Pale Fire It was my second reading of Catch-22. I think the biggest difference was that, the first time around my impression was mostly from the humor and absurdity of the book. The second time, however, the pain underneath that humor and absurdity was more clear. The Eternal City is an incredibly powerful chapter, and everything after that, as well as the continuous revisiting of Snowden is pretty heartwrenching, I think. Next I have to finish up the last third of Moby Dick and then I can start a book not already half-read.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2009 00:32
|
|
|
I just finished Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Man, what a depressing book. None of the characters ever try to do something about their situation. They don't ever fully see anything wrong with it.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2009 17:24
|
|
|
I've just finished Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy, a modern fantasy series and frankly a breath of fresh air after the some what over bearing epic fantasy I've read of late. Conceived, written and finished as a trilogy, with it's primary characters introduced in the first book and a manageable level of threads to the story. It's very led by it's characters and definitely a very modern fantasy tale. It probably won't appeal to everyone, but if your looking for something a little more light weight in your heroic epic fantasy then it's worth a go. The story was possibly a bit predictable in parts, but it was always fun.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2009 21:13
|
|
|
I just finished reading Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series up to the latest release of Turn Coat. The entire series is absolutley gripping and each novel only got better. The main character is a guy named Harry Dresden. Harry is a professional Wizard, like professional as in he advertises in the yellow pages and has an office. Basically if you took Dashiel Hammett's Maltese Falcon and mixed it with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, and threw in the wit displayed by Stan Lee's Spiderman you would wind up with the story premise. The supporting characters are an awesome contrast to Harry who is a sarcastic down-trotten protagonist. Everyone from his friend Michael, a religious zealot, to his teacher and mentor Ebeneezer McCoy who strikes me as an old country-bumpkin. Every novel is more and more addictive. Sci-Fi channel tried to make a TV series based on the character and botched it in it's entirity.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2009 22:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 22:20 |
|
|
LooseChanj posted:Nature stuff, like Walden I guess. Quick read, it's only a couple hundred pages. Fun, if you like birds and such. 300 pages actually, and I only point this out because I'm 250 in and it's taking me foreeeever. I guess I don't like nature as much as I thought I did. I've read four books since I started Walden. And now I'm going back to my bed and Franny and Zooey, which is really drat good. Edit: Aaaaand finished. WOW so, so good. I need to reread 9 Stories and find that other Glass book he wrote. Snowmanatee fucked around with this message at 01:37 on May 28, 2009 |
|
#
?
May 27, 2009 23:45
|
|
