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muscles like this? posted:If you didn't like Gardens of the Moon you probably won't like Perdido Street Station either. Whoa whoa whoa, I'm not really a PSS fan but Gardens of the Moon is complete poo poo and nothing like it.
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Apr 7, 2010 21:26
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ShutteredIn posted:Whoa whoa whoa, I'm not really a PSS fan but Gardens of the Moon is complete poo poo and nothing like it. Yeah, Perdido Street Station is at least imaginative, if a little overwritten. Gardens of the Moon is just a mess.
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Apr 7, 2010 21:32
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I found them both to be rather boring in the same way. Like the characters and story were almost secondary to the setting.
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Apr 7, 2010 23:11
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I got a Droid Eris not too long ago and picked up the Alkido app for some reading. I've been pillaging their free library and the one book that's stuck with me so far has been Bram Stoker's Dracula. I've gotten through the first two chapters in about a day and it straight owns.
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Apr 8, 2010 18:25
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Just bought For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway and The Railway Man by Eric Lomax at a used book store. I'm about 50 pages into the former and I'm pretty into it so far. Has anyone read the Railway Man?
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Apr 8, 2010 19:06
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I'm just starting Geosynchron. It's the third book in David Louis Edelman's Jump 225 Trilogy. I really liked the first two.. I recommend them.
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Apr 8, 2010 19:12
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Spent yesterday arvo reading Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much. Absolutely gorgeous, anyone who likes Sherlock Holmes would enjoy these episodes. A rich and exquisitely cultivated landscape of language.
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Apr 10, 2010 06:05
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Earwicker posted:Matterhorn is shaping up to be really great so far, but before I read it my favorite Vietnam novel was The 13th Valley by John DelVecchio. It's out of print now but well worth tracking down, IMO. Extraordinarily well written and a lot of interesting, different perspectives. Just ordered used from Amazon. Thanks. WoG posted:Have you read Meditations in Green? I haven't read all that much vietnam lit, but that one's easily my favorite. Just ordered from Amazon. Thanks. muscles like this? posted:Also, how is Black Hills? I really liked Drood and enjoyed The Terror (up until the end at least.) I feel the same way. To be honest I went out and bought Matterhorn the other night (I hadn't started Black Hills yet because I was building 4 bookshelves over the last week with my wife). So I am reading Matterhorn right now (really good so far), and Black Hills will be next. Also to keep on the war theme, another two of my all time favorites are The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (WWII) and The Marines of Autumn by James Brady (Korean War).
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Apr 10, 2010 20:21
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I'm on an unreliable narrator kick, so I just started Lolita by Nabokov and Peace by Gene Wolfe. I've never actually read it before, and man, Humbert is a terrible human being. I've liked Wolfe's other stuff (Cerberus, New Sun), but he really can't compare to Nabokov in terms of sentence to sentence writing. He definitely crafts his works like few can.
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Apr 10, 2010 21:39
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I just opened up Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake. The imagery created from the book after first seeing the motion picture interpretation is interesting. I expected John Dunbar to look just like Kevin Costner but the narration forms a completely different picture.
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Apr 11, 2010 05:03
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Just started The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. Great so far. Going to read The Stand by Stephen King next.
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Apr 11, 2010 21:42
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Got Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse from the library the other day. I'm not too far into it but man is it good.
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Apr 11, 2010 22:00
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C-Euro posted:I got a Droid Eris not too long ago and picked up the Alkido app for some reading. I've been pillaging their free library and the one book that's stuck with me so far has been Bram Stoker's Dracula. I've gotten through the first two chapters in about a day and it straight owns. It will be a book that you either love or hate. It does get quite interesting and engrossing, so if you're happy now, you'll probably love it all the more as it goes on. I've got a few books that I'm in the middle of-- I can never finish one before starting another --but I just bought The Secret History of the Pink Carnation out of sheer curiosity. I absolutely love the Scarlet Pimpernel stories, and when I heard that Willig's books were based on them, I thumbed through a few at the bookstore. They seemed, well, interesting if anything. If I'm lucky, they may turn out to be light, distracting chick-lit. If I'm not, well, I'm sure I can pawn it off on one of my less-discerning friends.
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Apr 11, 2010 23:28
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muscles like this? posted:Got Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse from the library the other day. I'm not too far into it but man is it good.
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Apr 12, 2010 01:21
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I have the Hilda Rossner translation and while I'm not sure of the veracity of the it as a whole it reads very well.
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Apr 12, 2010 03:42
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Just started on North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. I recently did Hard Times by Dickens as part of my English study and afterwads really craved more of the same. The good people of Amazon pointed me towards this.
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Apr 12, 2010 08:21
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muscles like this? posted:It has been years but I'll read it again by the looks. It can be hard to find in print
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Apr 12, 2010 08:29
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Trying my first DIGI NOVEL, aka Level 26. So far it's ok, but I haven't bothered to log into the website and enter the codes for things like the snuff film and evidence. Part of the joy of reading a book is actually reading a book, not watching a video. That's why I like movies. Plus having the movies seems to be a way to somehow write less, like it takes less talent to make something a movie than to describe what's going on in a decent way. It did occur to me that when the next tablet computer comes out that can multitask, this might be a good book to read on it.
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Apr 12, 2010 12:49
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Figured out how to access both the US and UK Amazon Kindle stores and convert the files to read on my Sony Reader. Celebrated by buying a book from each that wasn't available in the other store. Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding (UK store) and Halting State by Charles Stross (US store). Not sure which to read first, probably the latter.
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Apr 12, 2010 14:32
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Just started Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. I'm only ~20 pages into it so far, but it's already pretty funny and interesting. So far, I've expecially liked the part with the girl who blows up urinals, because they are symbols of the patriarchy.
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Apr 12, 2010 15:16
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I just started Airframe by Michael Crichton. Hoping this is one of his classic thrillers and not crap like Pirate Latitudes. It also happens to be an audiobook and I already like it because it has a female narrator, something I think we audiophiles don't really get enough of.
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Apr 12, 2010 15:20
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Just bought two used hardcover books from an online source. Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, a side by side comparison of the two plays, and Fahrenheit 451, just because I wanted to own it in hardcover. I've recently gotten onto a hardcover kick, I just can't stand to see paperback covers anymore, with the blurbs and "**** STARS THIS BOOK IS GREAT" clutter. I like old hardcover books without their dust jackets, just plainly bound with the title and author's name. Awww yissssss. The books themselves were like $1 a piece, but shipping was much more expensive. I initially had 10 books in my cart, $8 total for the books but $32 for shipping. Still, two books for $11 isn't bad. Can't wait to get them!
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Apr 13, 2010 03:03
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Welp, finished Level 26, and man this book sucked. It combined the "lazy writing" idea of making movies to show what happens between chapters, and the horrible acting of people who probably are either related to the author or managed to get a break from waiting tables to do some quick 2 or 3 minute videos. God drat.. it had a lot of promise, but it just fell flat, and dumb. I don't think I am going to bother reading this guys work again. He may have invented CSI for the tv, but he can't write worth a drat.
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Apr 13, 2010 03:08
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vegaji posted:Just started Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. I'm only ~20 pages into it so far, but it's already pretty funny and interesting. So far, I've expecially liked the part with the girl who blows up urinals, because they are symbols of the patriarchy.
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Apr 16, 2010 16:18
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I just started The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I don't know much about the book, seems like it may be mainstream thriller crap but it was only 5 bux on Kindle so why not.
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Apr 16, 2010 17:10
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Shogun, for the 3rd time. First book I bought on my ipad, as it's one of my favorites...started to read a few pages to check it out... couldn't stop.
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Apr 16, 2010 17:49
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I just picked this up today for $2.99 plus tax.
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Apr 18, 2010 00:50
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I dumped that other book and started on the first in Zelanzny's Chronicles of Amber series. I'm really loving it, it's a lot more gritty than I expected and the style reminds me of Raymond Chandler who is awesome. The ancient edition I have seems to have tons of typos, haha. It's not spoiling it so far.
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Apr 18, 2010 09:24
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Started Neal Stephenson's Anathem this weekend and I'm already hooked. I had tried "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" years ago but never could get into them... but this one seems to have that pull. 800 pages to go!
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Apr 19, 2010 01:12
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Argenterie posted:Started Neal Stephenson's Anathem this weekend and I'm already hooked. I had tried "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" years ago but never could get into them... but this one seems to have that pull. 800 pages to go! Wow, you're in for a treat then. Most people (including myself) seem to think that it starts of slow (the words he made up don't help) and then gets awesome. I got about 100 pages into it the first time then gave up for a month. When I started again I got really into it and finished it in a few days. On topic: Just started A Random Walk Down Wallstreet. I've been meaning to get educated about finances and have heard only positive comments about the book.
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Apr 19, 2010 04:44
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 Any body read this? Yay or nay?
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Apr 19, 2010 21:26
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SilkyP posted:
I read it about a month ago. I really enjoyed it, especially the last part. It starts a little slow, but really picks up by the fourth part.
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Apr 20, 2010 01:09
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Pfirti86 posted:I read it about a month ago. I really enjoyed it, especially the last part. It starts a little slow, but really picks up by the fourth part. Welp, just got a few dozen pages in and I'm wondering something, is it alright if I know hardly anything about some of the literature being referenced and don't consider myself very knowledgeable about literature in general?
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Apr 21, 2010 00:45
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SilkyP posted:Welp, just got a few dozen pages in and I'm wondering something, is it alright if I know hardly anything about some of the literature being referenced and don't consider myself very knowledgeable about literature in general? Yeah, the first part is completely about the academics, who's specialty is literature (and thus the heavy references). However, it's not at all like that the rest of the book, especially the third part (which is nothing short of amazing in its terseness and sheer volume of events). Don't worry too much if you don't know who Goethe is, the story doesn't depend on that sort of knowledge at all.
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Apr 21, 2010 01:31
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Syrinxx posted:I just started The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I don't know much about the book, seems like it may be mainstream thriller crap but it was only 5 bux on Kindle so why not. I just started it too. They're insanely loving popular books, and they HAVE had good reviews. They can't be that bad, right? 
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Apr 21, 2010 20:41
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Just got    very excited!
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Apr 23, 2010 16:14
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I grabbed Lev Grossman's The Magicians from the library, thanks to the recommendations of several goons. Two days later, and I'm already 2/3 of the way through... guess it was a good recommendation? I'm liking it a lot.
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Apr 25, 2010 21:28
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Earwicker posted:I hope you post what you thought of this when you're finished with it. I guess any reading of it is a bit overshadowed by the famous bad review. I read it a few years ago along with The Information and Night Train and I can't remember whether I liked it or not, I was so tired of Amis by the end of that (which I don't remember feeling after running through a bunch of his earlier books in a row). On topic, I bought Cousin Bette the other day. It was mentioned in the notes for Henry James's The Bostonians and since half my reading list is based on things found in footnotes and introductions, I guess this will be my introduction to Balzac.
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Apr 26, 2010 00:56
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paint dry posted:I just started it too. They're insanely loving popular books, and they HAVE had good reviews. They can't be that bad, right? My wife read the first one, and she really disliked the beginning portion of the book. By the end it had picked up enough that she enjoyed it, but she wasn't blown away by it or anything.
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Apr 26, 2010 16:57
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Facial Fracture posted:I hope you post what you thought of this when you're finished with it. I guess any reading of it is a bit overshadowed by the famous bad review. What's the famous bad review?
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Apr 26, 2010 16:59
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