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I just finished "The Lost City of Z" which is the true story of a Victorian explorer named Percy Fawcett who disappeared while exploring the Amazon. Fawcett is a really fascinating character, and his story is pretty good, but the book was adapted from a magazine article and it shows. There are times when it drags a bit, but overall its a cool story about a larger than life character.
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Apr 7, 2010 21:38
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Just finished Codex by Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians) and it's kind of funny but if you had asked me an hour ago my opinion of the book I would have said good, not great, an interesting story and a fast read. However the very end of the book shot it right up to greatness for me. Originally I was going to say not quite as good as The Magicians but based on this ending I'm going to say it's even better.
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Apr 7, 2010 23:15
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Just got done with Fool By Christopher Moore. It was a fun little romp into a fake England. I have not read or seen King Lear but based on Moore's afterword I am not sure I missed out on much. It was not as full of laughs as Lamb or Fluke but I can't wait for his next piece.
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Apr 8, 2010 02:02
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Finally finished 1984 by George Orwell. Started reading it a couple of months ago but stopped at the part where Winston is reading "the book" and forgot about it. After I managed to finish that part I pretty much read the entire rest of the book in a day. The ending manages to be simultaneously fantastic and terrifying - I couldn't put it down. Incredible.
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Apr 8, 2010 03:25
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Just finished All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It was really entertaining but I thought the ending was a little cut short and anticlimactic. I guess everyone is supposed to pretty much know the rest of story but since I wasn't around back in '72 I don't know much about what happened next other than that Nixon eventually resigned. Also I'm told I should track down the movie version.
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Apr 8, 2010 19:11
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"Hell's Angels" by Hunter S Thompson. Good read, there are some great quotes and lots of awesome stories. I really want a bike now. One of my favorite quotes from the book: "Whaddya mean by that word, 'right?' The only thing we're concerned about is what's right for us. We got our own definition of right." -A Hell's Angel sunk in philosophy
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Apr 9, 2010 01:35
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QVT posted:I'd highly recommend Invisible Cities by Calvino. I thought Winter's Night was poo poo but I really loved Invisible Cities. I've got a ton of clippings from it since I read it on Kindle. I really love that feature. After these two, what would be good recommendations from Calvino's hand? Re: Invisible Cities. I want to read more of such fantastic books - in literary value or fantastic descriptions. Maybe Borges might do it? Anyone else? rasser fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Apr 9, 2010 |
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Apr 9, 2010 12:33
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The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I hadn't been at all interested in this book but I'd been meaning to get around to it eventually. I read the other Brown books in college and didn't outright hate them back then, but I outright hated this one, and it's retroactively made me hate all of the rest of them as well. The story was ridiculously contrived, and the only moment where Brown seemed to do anything adventurous with the plot (Langdon's 'death' by drowning), it was reversed within three ridiculously short chapters by some ridiculously shoe-horned plot device. I'm also immensely irritated by Brown's half-attempt to pass off bullshit psuedoscience as fact, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this point.
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Apr 9, 2010 22:19
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an uncanny otter posted:Finally finished 1984 by George Orwell. Started reading it a couple of months ago but stopped at the part where Winston is reading "the book" and forgot about it. After I managed to finish that part I pretty much read the entire rest of the book in a day. The ending manages to be simultaneously fantastic and terrifying - I couldn't put it down. Incredible. Wow, really? I always found Goldstein's book to be the most interesting part of the book. The crushing realization that it's not just England and America that is under this crushing regime, but the entire world.
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Apr 10, 2010 03:22
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I just finished A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again by David Foster Wallace. Some of the really wonky lit-crit essays were interesting if a bit of a slog, but the title essay (about being on a cruise ship), and the essay about the Illinois state fair were hysterical and had me in tears most of the way through (laughing tears).
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Apr 10, 2010 18:18
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Splaa posted:I just finished A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again by David Foster Wallace. Some of the really wonky lit-crit essays were interesting if a bit of a slog, but the title essay (about being on a cruise ship), and the essay about the Illinois state fair were hysterical and had me in tears most of the way through (laughing tears). I finished Oblivion by David Foster Wallace about two minutes ago. The twist at the end of the last story ("The Suffering Channel") was absolutely heartbreaking and put everything together so well. I especially enjoyed "The Soul is not a Smithy"
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Apr 10, 2010 18:27
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rasser posted:Re: Invisible Cities. I want to read more of such fantastic books - in literary value or fantastic descriptions. Maybe Borges might do it? Anyone else? Just read around in those categories and you'll find something. Calvino himself did nothing else quite like Invisible Cities; most of the rest of his things are earthy folk tales rather than lyrical prose constructions. The postmodernists were big on myths -- deconstructing them, reconstructing them, and joyfully pulling them out of their asses -- so that's really where to start.
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Apr 10, 2010 19:25
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LooseChanj posted:Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis I just finished this, and after reading a bunch of semi-mythological tripe lately (see Lost Symbol), it was refreshing to see a similar novel that didn't take itself seriously and just had fun with the idea of a archeological action movie in a novel, with characters named Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase (I can only hope that in a later novel they also team up with a Jim Goose). Here is a spoilery list of the things that happen in this book (don't read them, buy the book. But if you don't intend to buy the book, read them in order until you want to buy the book). A car chase. The car chase becomes a gunfight. A deal for an artifact turns out to be a setup and Chase kills about twenty soldiers before escaping by falling off a cliff. Chase hijacks a train, rams it into another train, and while those trains are exploding he jumps onto a passing third train to make his escape. There is another gunfight on that train. The characters find a temple that points to Atlantis. After you complete three challenges, of course. The temple gets blown up. They find Atlantis. Atlantis gets blown up. That is roughly how the first half of the novel plays out. Leovinus fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Apr 11, 2010 |
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Apr 11, 2010 11:48
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Well, I recently finished the seventh book in Asimov's Foundation Series and was very impressed by the scope of it. I found the two post-trilogy sequels (Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth) to be a bit forced and long-winded, it became more of an adventure book with a narrower scope character wise but broader implications for Asimov's universe, which somewhat bothered me. The two prequels however I found to be much more engaging and kept the characters, locations, and implications "to scale." Immediately after that I read The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun also by Asimov. Both novels are fun in a pulp detective novel mixed with scifi kind of way and move at a good pace. I'm now attempting his sequel to those two books which is a book twice as long, it seems that when he returned to fiction after taking 25 years off his novels pretty much doubled in size generally, which is a mixed blessing.
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Apr 11, 2010 15:47
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Leovinus posted:The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I hadn't been at all interested in this book but I'd been meaning to get around to it eventually. I read the other Brown books in college and didn't outright hate them back then, but I outright hated this one, and it's retroactively made me hate all of the rest of them as well. The story was ridiculously contrived, and the only moment where Brown seemed to do anything adventurous with the plot (Langdon's 'death' by drowning), it was reversed within three ridiculously short chapters by some ridiculously shoe-horned plot device. I'm also immensely irritated by Brown's half-attempt to pass off bullshit psuedoscience as fact, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this point. I really did enjoy Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. This one really really did suck and felt totally rushed.
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Apr 11, 2010 16:51
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Leovinus posted:(I can only hope that in a later novel they also team up with a Jim Goose). In case you're still not sure exactly what kind of story this is, at one point I introduce a character wearing a red shirt, then promptly kill him off. Also, there are SA shoutouts in the second, fifth and sixth books.
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Apr 11, 2010 18:00
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Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris. A great read about the five Best Picture nominees of 1967 (The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Dolittle, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) and how the first two changed American film. It's very informative and tells you everything you'd ever want to know about their troubled productions and the people behind them.
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Apr 11, 2010 18:59
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muscles like this? posted:Just finished Codex by Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians) and it's kind of funny but if you had asked me an hour ago my opinion of the book I would have said good, not great, an interesting story and a fast read. However the very end of the book shot it right up to greatness for me. Originally I was going to say not quite as good as The Magicians but based on this ending I'm going to say it's even better. Oppositely, I just finished this book and about the only redeeming quality I found about it was that it was a fast read. I suppose I have to give it credit for keeping me hooked into it enough to finish in a day, but dear god I found it predictable. Also, the characters seemed to make very few choices that actually had reason behind them; there were so many times that Grossman actively wrote, 'X didn't know when or why they decided to do this, but they did'. Anyway. Despite that, I didn't hate it. I just didn't like it very much.
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Apr 11, 2010 19:57
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Payndz posted:In case you're still not sure exactly what kind of story this is, at one point I introduce a character wearing a red shirt, then promptly kill him off. Haha. I didn't pick up on the red shirt, but I loved that line he had where you could instantly tell he was going to be killed in the first sentence of the next paragraph, which he was.
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Apr 11, 2010 20:11
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Just finished: Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite. Good book. Enjoyed it. Just started: The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 11, 2010 21:39
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The Ancestor's Tale. What an amazing book. It made me realize I've spent a large part of my life dreaming up science fiction type species and civilizations, but there is so much beauty and diversity right here. It also made me realize how dismal my education about evolution was, and how important it really is for everyone to understand. I did struggle a bit when the "pilgrimage" went into marine life, and it was difficult to share Dawkins' enthusiasm. Even still, I can't recommend it enough.
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Apr 12, 2010 04:33
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Just finished The Executioner's Song, a 1000+ page book about a convicted murderer, Gary Gilmore. Since I was born in 1983, I had no idea who he was, but apparently in 76-77 he was big poo poo. Most of the book is about his fight for his right to be executed (rather than spend the rest of his life in prison) and the legal complications that ensue. It's an enormous book, and quite thorough - by the end, I felt like I knew Gary Gilmore personally - which makes the end that much more sobering. Good, good book.
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Apr 12, 2010 14:03
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I just finished up The Lightning Thief. I had pretty low expectations of an "American Gods Jr. meets Harry Potter" YA novel but I found I enjoyed the book. The audio book narrator sucked balls so I will read the others in the series on my kindle.
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Apr 12, 2010 18:34
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I just finished Red Mars. I loved it. The first hundred (heh) pages are a bit tough, but once you're into it, you're really into it. Robinson does a fantastic job of describing the new world, and the detail he goes in to about Mars (in terms of scientific, technical, environment, social etc etc) is stunning. Red Mars is the first book is a three book series, and I'm already about half way through the second one (Green Mars) and enjoying the poo poo out of it. I love books on an epic scale, and Red Mars covers literally hundreds of years, from the absolute first people to colonize Mars to...well, I don't know yet, but I'm hoping it'll be as awesome as the first half of the trilogy.
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Apr 12, 2010 22:35
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Just finished Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller this weekend. Both were absolutely phenomenal and deserve all the praise that they get from academia, and I urge anyone that hasn't read them to at least give it a try, especially Barbarians because the premise is so simple that literally anyone can relate to it.
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Apr 12, 2010 23:55
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FakeHipster posted:I just finished Red Mars. I really need to pick those up. I worked with a guy at the EPA who has part of the book dedicated to him. He helped out the ecology portion of it, and went to school with him. We talked about Robinson for a good bit one day he sounds like a cool dude.
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Apr 13, 2010 00:52
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I like my science fiction soft, and the Mars trilogy could be quite tedious at times, but on the whole they're still pretty awesome. Green Mars is by far the best. My biggest gripe was that in Red Mars he kills off the three most interesting characters - Frank, John and Arkady.
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Apr 13, 2010 02:53
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Just finished Khomeini's Ghost by Con Coughlin. It's a pretty good popular history of Khomeini's life, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Coughlin is a little biased when it comes to Britain's actions in Iran during the 40s and 50s (the UK basically gets a free pass for invading southern Iran during WWII and helping to push out Mossagadeh in the 50s), but it's still probably the best non-academic history of the Revolution that I've read.
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Apr 13, 2010 20:22
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I finished Christopher Moore's Dirty Job and i thought it was some of his best work. It was well thought out, although a little formulaic but it kept me laughing. I have now read ALL of Christopher Moore's books! I think he is a great author and storyteller. I really enjoy that he weaves his characters in and out of each others stories. If you like sometimes dark humor with a heavy does of whimsy and sarcasm check out any of his fine works. Goes well with Tom Robbins and 
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Apr 14, 2010 02:08
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Just finished The Dispossessed. I did not like this as much as The Left Hand of Darkness. The political leanings of the author were fairly obvious, and as someone who loves the market and is extremely skeptical of any sort of basic decency in human behaviour I didn't like the utopian depiction of Anarres. I realise they still showed problems with the society, but they weren't as prominent as the criticisms of Western society. I also found some of the characters Le Guin created as typifying A-Io to be entirely too simple. I'm thinking particularly of the wealthy man at the party. There is complex thought behind the schools of economics underlying Western society, and reams of literature on the subject. As someone with a degree in economics and nearing completion of my law degree with property law and law & economics being major interests of mine, I was perhaps more sensitive to this than others would be. I kept waiting for even a simple argument in favour of our social structure which would be opposed by the author; something concerning exploitation of the competitive instinct humans naturally feel, or the virtue of a strong rule of law and its importance in maintaining a society with free thought (something the Anarres were admittedly losing, but this wasn't developed enough). Le Guin did not give a single convincing argument in favour of her revolutionary utopia besides some vague nonsense about value being in some abstract esprit de corps. If you're going to propound some sort of idealistic anarchist society, at least have a good understanding of the opposing arguments, and refute them in a convincing way. As I said, I didn't have these problem with The Left Hand of Darkness because the themes there were mostly concerning gender issues and they presented a fairly balanced view on the differing outcomes which might result in a society of hermaphrodites - peace without progress, tunnel vision thinking, unconventional but understandable relationship dynamics. That was a very interesting and very enjoyable book. This... I'm glad I read it, I like reading things from opposing schools of thought as sometimes they can broaden my thinking a little, but I don't think it had enough real exploration of the political themes. I will say the later parts of the book were better about this than the earlier ones, but it was nonetheless an extremely frustrating read for a lawyer cum economist.
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Apr 14, 2010 10:39
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Without Pants posted:The Ancestor's Tale. What an amazing book. It made me realise I've spent a large part of my life dreaming up science fiction type species and civilisations, but there is so much beauty and diversity right here. This is on my list! I'm really looking forward to it, I just finished The Greatest Show on Earth which I really liked even if all the stuff about genes went a little over my head (it was mostly bed time reading). I like to break up every 3 or 4 fiction books with some non-fiction so maybe another 2 books and this is what I will be reading next. I just finished Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, which was excellent, if a little bleak. I think people cite it as an example of 'hard' science fiction and I would agree with that, he crams a lot of stuff in there for a book from the 50's. If you're a fan of Clarke and haven't read it get to it because it's great stuff.
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Apr 15, 2010 05:19
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Haaat! posted:I just finished Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, which was excellent, if a little bleak. I think people cite it as an example of 'hard' science fiction and I would agree with that, he crams a lot of stuff in there for a book from the 50's. If you're a fan of Clarke and haven't read it get to it because it's great stuff. It's based on his short story "Guardian Angel", which is well worth reading separately. Personally I liked the story better, as it scraps everything after the big reveal of what the aliens look like and changes the explanation of that to something considerably harder-SF.
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Apr 15, 2010 15:43
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I just finished Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. I hadn't read the Ender series and figured I needed to catch up. I liked it up to the end when things get a little ... well, metaphysical. Thinking your way into FTL travel?? Creating entirely new people with your mind? Really? I couldn't decide if I should read the next one since I didn't like the direction it was going, but I figure I can at least force me way through since at least his writing style is interesting.
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Apr 15, 2010 16:00
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Haaat! posted:I just finished Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, which was excellent, if a little bleak. I think people cite it as an example of 'hard' science fiction and I would agree with that, he crams a lot of stuff in there for a book from the 50's. If you're a fan of Clarke and haven't read it get to it because it's great stuff. This is not hard sci fi in any way. The only real connection to hard sci fi it has is being bleak as gently caress. It may as well just be nihilistic porn, though. I say this as an Arthur C Clarke fan.
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Apr 15, 2010 16:14
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Just finished Clive Barker's The Great & Secret Show, loved it. Going to hold off on the sequel, though, because I started The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and it's really awesome so far.
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Apr 15, 2010 16:51
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Just finished Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and enjoyed it a lot; I'm continually amazed at just how good of a satirist Vonnegut was.
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Apr 15, 2010 18:39
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Kerafyrm posted:Just finished Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and enjoyed it a lot; I'm continually amazed at just how good of a satirist Vonnegut was. I wish I could re-read the Vonnegut books I've already read for the first time. 
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Apr 15, 2010 22:42
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Hi my name is Daniel Mehlhorn (aka slimredninja) and I'm the co-creator/writer for Morning Squirtz comics. We have had a wonderful history you and I and while I realize we have had problems with a mod or two we really like you guys (except for the ones we don't you know who you are) and have even been call goons by other goons (this menat alot to me. I say its time for us to bury the hatchet and for you guys to show us some love. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Somebody fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Apr 16, 2010 |
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Apr 16, 2010 02:54
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What in the flying gently caress
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Apr 16, 2010 03:01
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ShutteredIn posted:What in the flying gently caress I'm assuming random thread spam which this guy does every once in a while.
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Apr 16, 2010 03:07
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