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American Gods is a terrible book. I finally finished Cellini's Vita/"My Life." I got a bit tired of the organization--long tangents in which Cellini bests all opponents, charms nobles and popes, is flattered by eminent contemporaries, does it with ladies, then demurs with something like "I've done way cooler stuff than that but back to my metalwork" (even though both the tangents and sculpture stuff were cool).
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May 7, 2010 04:01
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Facial Fracture posted:American Gods is a terrible book. It looks like it's also the Twitter book of the month or whatever. Some campaign to have a Twitter book club or something. I read the book a while back, and I wouldn't say it's terrible, just dry in the middle, like the author had a quota of pages to write, and he was stretching it out.
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May 7, 2010 04:25
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Christ- so a mix between being extraordinarily busy, the density of the book, and not really being around a computer has meant that I am verrrrrry truant in my book-timeframe.  In any case, just finished a couple books: The Recognitions by William Gaddis, On Writing by Hemingway, Herztier by Herta Mueller, and Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan by Brecht! Still quite a few more that I need to finish though....
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May 8, 2010 12:51
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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman seems like a good idea for a story, and there is one in there, I just wish he'd fleshed out what seemed to be the bones of a novel with what he's good at. There's no sense of distance, everything seems to pop from place to place, there's none of that world building he did so well in His Dark Materials or the Sally Lockhart stuff. Quite disappointed really.
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May 8, 2010 14:58
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I just finished Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. Its a sequel to Less Than Zero which I haven't read. It was basically like reading an episode of 90210, with a little rape thrown in. Now I'm gonna read C by Tom McCarthy.
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May 8, 2010 21:52
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I finished Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood yesterday. It's the first book of hers that I've read and I'm not really sure how I feel about it. While I enjoyed the whole Oryx, Crake, and Snowman story I just couldn't buy into the world. The entire pre-apocalypse world felt like a strawman of the politics Atwood dislikes. The first part was kind of slow as Atwood had to drop hints for the reveal most people will see coming within the first hundred pages. Then there's Snowman's foot injury which feels very last minute, and for some reason when it gets infected those particular germs can't be killed by the super vaccine. I heard there's a sequel which I'm not sure I'll read. I really liked the way this one ended and I'm afraid the sequel would spoil it. All this said, I would like to read more of her stuff. Is The Handmaid's Tale the best place to go next?
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May 8, 2010 23:42
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I just finished Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. It was excellent, and I really enjoyed the mix of styles. Overall I enjoyed the narrative sections more than the introspective/musing ones, but everything felt like it was nestled in the right place.
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May 9, 2010 01:32
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Finished up Roadkill by Rob Thurman today. I don't know why I read these books, but I enjoy them. This book was pretty good, but it just didn't "feel" like part of the series, and I can't decide if that is a good or bad thing right now. Normally the brothers get involved in something, get their asses handed to them, something horrible happens to one or both of them, they overcome it and then kill whatever the hell they need to kill. Not to spoil anything, but it didn't seem like they actually followed that formula on this one, and I still can't decide if it's a good thing or not. It's pretty decent urban fantasy/fiction, minimum of sex, maximum of violence, and I think with each book I am loving the Robin character more and more. He's so over the top it's hard not to like him. His kitty is even more awesome. I would recommend reading it, but I would preface that by saying "if you are a fan of the other 4".
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May 9, 2010 03:49
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I just finished Chuck Palahniuk's new book TELL ALL. The form and the language of the book is pretty interesting, but the plot itself wasn't very surprising. It's a pretty fun read by by no means Chuck's best book. In some ways, it seems like he's trying new things (to an extent) while still carrying with it that standard Chuck style. To summarize it... A woman, whose job it is to tend to and care for a popular hollywood starlet, starts to get concerned when a young gentleman starts calling on her mistress. Hidden away in his suitcase is the rough draft of a 'tell all' book, the last chapter of which has yet to happen. Roydrowsy fucked around with this message at 06:07 on May 9, 2010 |
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May 9, 2010 06:03
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Merou posted:I just finished Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. Its a sequel to Less Than Zero which I haven't read. It was basically like reading an episode of 90210, with a little rape thrown in. I'm not really "in" with the unreleased book crowd but how are so many people reading it before it's out? Are they just in the industry? I just finished The Rules of Attraction and although feeling a bit bored around the middle section I suddenly got more into it and binged through the last half over the weekend. I loved the writing style and really loved the references to his other books, foreshadowing to American Psycho. Now on to Glamorama
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May 10, 2010 01:25
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I just finished The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. It's written by the guy who orchestrated the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971 and it was a great read. He walks you through his experiment from a first-person perspective, analyzes the similarities between his experiment and the war on terror, and really hammers it home how easily ANYONE can fall into "evil" behavior. He also defines how situational evil is a product of systematic evil, and ultimately, he challenges the reader to recognize the choices they make in situations where it might be easier to go with the flow rather than stand up for what is morally right. Now I'm almost 100 pgs deep into Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
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May 10, 2010 03:22
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Just finished the Space Odyssey series. I really liked 2001/2010 , especially as companions to the movies but 2061/3001 seemed to draw too much on the earlier two , and while they held my attention weren't very interesting overall. Reading American Psycho while making my way through Cosmos at a somewhat more leisurely pace.
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May 10, 2010 15:59
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Merou posted:I just finished Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. Its a sequel to Less Than Zero which I haven't read. It was basically like reading an episode of 90210, with a little rape thrown in. I didn't know Ellis had a new book coming out. Thanks because I read all (good and bad) by Ellis.
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May 10, 2010 17:39
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Fodder Cannon posted:I finished Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood yesterday. I didn't realize that there was actually a sequal to it. Since my main interest - the story of Oryx, Crake and Snowman - was pretty much wrapped up in the first book, I don't really know of what a sequal would have that would compel me to continue on with the same story. I haven't picked up any of Atwood's other work, as Oryx and Crake certainly didn't leave me wanting more. However, I'm pretty sure The Handmaiden's Tale is Atwood's most popular book, so it would certainly be the first place I would look.
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May 11, 2010 14:40
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Just finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons last night. I haven't really had a lot of time to reflect on it, but my first reaction is that it was very well done, with a completely puzzling and unsatisfying ending. To the uninitiated, this sci-fi "masterwork" is a far future retelling of the Cantebury Tales. A group of characters undertakes a pilgrimage together, and the narrative unfolds in flashbacks shared through the voice and tale of each character. By way of praise, I thought this was a very effective way of telling the story, though I ended up enjoying some stories better than others i.e. the priest, the poet and the scholar's tales were my favorites. While I thought that the plot twist near the end was compelling the Consul and agent of the Hegemony betrays them , the ending itself was kind of baffling. I mean, really, the group skips off to their meeting with the Shrike, arm in arm, singing "We're Off to See the Wizard"?!? If any of you deeper types feel like explaining this to me, I'd be interested in your take. In separate news, found a copy of Anathem by Neal Stephenson at Barnes & Noble this weekend... a hardcover 1st for $5.98. Looking forward to it.
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May 11, 2010 22:14
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Angel Fire East and Armageddon's Children by Terry Brooks; decided I'd keep going with this series, although the library didn't have A Knight of the Word or whatever the middle book in the John Ross trilogy was called and I am way too impatient to wait on a hold. I finished both of these in the last day and while John and Nest's story was pretty nifty I am digging Armageddon a lot more. Maybe because there is less of the old world in the way and when I read the John/Nest books it just felt weird to me to be reading contemporary fantasy written in his style. I think his writing really lends itself better to high fantasy, I dunno. Gonna pick up the two sequels to Armageddon tomorrow.
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May 12, 2010 00:17
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Just finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I picked it up on recommendation from the "Science books you should read" thread. It was a lot denser than I expected (I guess that's inevitable when you're reading a 200-page essay by a Harvard doctor), but I was able to get through it, and it was very interesting. A lot of what he says boils down to observation, but the explicit and verbose language used serves very well to provide a comprehensive overview of what a scientific revolution is, how it comes about, and what it means to science when they happen. If you don't have trouble understanding very dense language, and you're familiar with all of the major historical scientific revolutions, like Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, etc., then I definitely recommend this book.
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May 12, 2010 00:41
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Firefox Asexual posted:Now on to Glamorama Enjoy the trip, i'm seeing a lot binge reading sessions in your future
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May 12, 2010 01:46
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The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall. Probably the best book I've read in a long time. Incredibly funny and weird, the only problem I had with it was that it jumps between narrators a lot.
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May 12, 2010 03:42
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Finished Ann Patchett's Bel Canto this morning. Loosely based on a hostage situation in Lima in 1996, it tells the story of a large gala (a birthday party, in fact) that is taken over by terrorists. Though the hostages start out fearing their captors, as days and then weeks pass, they become used to - and soon dependent on - their captivity and the people who hold them captive. There's also an opera singer. Overall, it was a pretty good read. I might have to read more Ann Patchett sometime.
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May 12, 2010 21:13
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O Rapture posted:Just finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons last night. I haven't really had a lot of time to reflect on it, but my first reaction is that it was very well done, with a completely puzzling and unsatisfying ending. As far as Hyperion goes, it's actually a single large book split into two halves. The second half is called The Fall of Hyperion and continues seconds after the first book ends. I can't imagine stopping after just Hyperion, and not reading the second book -- if this is what you did, I can see how you'd be terribly confused/lost. I hope you enjoy reading the rest! That quartet is one of my favorites! To stay on topic,I just finished Sabriel by Garth Nix, a young adult fantasy novel with some sequels I can't wait to read. I actually listened to it on audiobook, and was very impressed. The Abhorsen's bells are a particularly interesting type of magic I hadn't seen before. Recommended.
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May 12, 2010 22:20
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I've been reading a lot of scholarly works on comparative religion and mythology lately, and one of the most interesting was The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist by Carl Ruck, Clark Heinrich and Blaise Staples - not because I necessarily agree with their claims, but because those claims are way, way out there. The authors basically argue that the original sacrament of the Eucharist was amanita muscaria, the fly-agaric mushroom. They trace the whole sacred history of the mushroom, and make the claim that everything from the soma of the Vedic religion to the titular apples that Hercules stole can be interpreted as some kind of psychedelic initiation rite. Some of their assertions are pretty far-fetched, but the book is pretty entertaining and thought-provoking nonetheless.
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May 12, 2010 23:19
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Firefox Asexual posted:I'm not really "in" with the unreleased book crowd but how are so many people reading it before it's out? Are they just in the industry? I don't know how other people do it, my roommate works at a large popular local bookstore. They get advanced copies he says are readers. Its just a plain book with a paper binding that has release information and the name of the book on the cover. He read Imperial Bedrooms before me and then let me have it. I think he said they encourage employees to write reviews for the stores website and they get a little money or something for doing it. But its basically just a free box of books for whoever whenever they come in. Imperial Bedrooms comes out in June, the other book C is coming out in september.
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May 12, 2010 23:19
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Argenterie posted:To stay on topic,I just finished Sabriel by Garth Nix, a young adult fantasy novel with some sequels I can't wait to read. I actually listened to it on audiobook, and was very impressed. The Abhorsen's bells are a particularly interesting type of magic I hadn't seen before. Recommended. I completely agree on the coolness of the magic system. I really enjoyed Sabriel but Lirael was a huge letdown to me. The magical systems were still cool, but the main characters drove me crazy with their whininess, and it felt like Nix really needed an editor to yell at him to cut a third out of the bloated mess. Just my thoughts though. Abhorsen is next up in my queue as soon as I finish Bel Canto. e: narrator? editor. blrgh. Bohemienne fucked around with this message at 21:31 on May 13, 2010 |
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May 13, 2010 02:26
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I've never really posted here before, but I have my Kindle now, so I've been reading like crazy lately. Maybe I will have to stop by more often. I just finished 'The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution' by Richard Dawkins. That book was the type that is hard to put down. I was really impressed.
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May 13, 2010 06:32
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Juaguocio posted:I've been reading a lot of scholarly works on comparative religion and mythology lately, and one of the most interesting was The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist by Carl Ruck, Clark Heinrich and Blaise Staples - not because I necessarily agree with their claims, but because those claims are way, way out there. The authors basically argue that the original sacrament of the Eucharist was amanita muscaria, the fly-agaric mushroom. They trace the whole sacred history of the mushroom, and make the claim that everything from the soma of the Vedic religion to the titular apples that Hercules stole can be interpreted as some kind of psychedelic initiation rite. Some of their assertions are pretty far-fetched, but the book is pretty entertaining and thought-provoking nonetheless. I think you'd probably like the Siva Samhita and the Hathayoga Pradipika. They're both also about inducing certain mental effects of a religious/spiritual nature, albeit using different methods, and are full of all sorts of wild claims. (In addition, if you're feeling adventurous, you can try them out without the complications involved with adding entheogens into the mix.)
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May 13, 2010 06:59
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"The Card" documenting the controversy behind that T206 Honus Wagner card that makes headlines.
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May 13, 2010 19:53
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Cannery Row by Steinbeck I was never much of a Steinbeck reader but after reading the reviews in the thread, I thought I would reattempt his stuff. Cannery Row was breathtaking. It was the best mixture of joy and melancholy I have found in a long time. The characters were full and rich and even the most minor had something living, a spark of the real that created this world. I think Tortilla Flats might be the next of his I attempt.
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May 13, 2010 22:13
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Incompleteness, by Rebecca Goldstein. It's sort of a biography of the incompleteness theorem, which was first proved by the mathematician Kurt Godel. It's a very well known result in pure math, demonstrating that any formal system sophisticated enough to contain arithmetic will contain theorems which are true but not provable. She interweaves the story of the theorem and its philosophical and mathematical consequences with the story of Godel's life. The book is nontechnical, though of course the section walking the reader through the proof is of necessity a little mind-bending. Goldstein is just the right person to write this sort of thing, since she's a talented fiction writer who happens to have formal mathematical training (she actually met Godel while at Princeton, for that matter). Well worth picking up if you're at all interested in one of the most profound discoveries of modern times.
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May 14, 2010 05:06
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The Japanese obsession continues - I've just finished 'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kobo Abe and starting 'I am a Cat' by Natsume Soseki. I really enjoyed 'Dunes...' Abe is a bit Kafka-esque and I enjoyed the exploration of the value/s of live/s. I'll definitely be getting more of his stuff.
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May 14, 2010 10:30
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Argenterie posted:As far as Hyperion goes, it's actually a single large book split into two halves. The second half is called The Fall of Hyperion and continues seconds after the first book ends. I can't imagine stopping after just Hyperion, and not reading the second book -- if this is what you did, I can see how you'd be terribly confused/lost. I hope you enjoy reading the rest! That quartet is one of my favorites! Yeah, the chopped-in-half ending really prevents Hyperion from standing on its own. A fair number of goons don't like the second book or the way it ends, but I personally loved it. I've been meaning to pick up the Omnibus edition even though I have both in mass-market papaerback.
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May 14, 2010 13:01
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Just finished a couple of novels in the past week: Finally got around to reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It didn't take long for me to do away with trying to find any positive character traits in any of the characters; just sitting back and soaking in the unmitigated cruelty and chaos of the characters and landscape was enough. Some of the most vividly beautiful, yet decidedly gritty prose I've read in a while, and it was quite the shock to the system coming on the heels of the rather simple The Road. Good luck finding a more interesting character than that misanthropic polymath Judge. Also polished off Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game, set in Lebanon during the 1980s, tracking two early twentysomething hoodlums, one with intentions on gaining power, and one with aspirations of leaving his homeland behind. Beautiful writing, well-developed characters... was a little disappointed with the outcome after the scene-shift.
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May 14, 2010 16:35
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Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids by Peter Tompkins - Great non-fiction read that chronicles the various excavations/studies of the numerous pyramids/surrounding ruins in Mexico and the accompanying theories that run the gamut from logical (the Pyramid of the Sun in the ruins of Teotihuacan is nearly perfectly aligned to the sun) to far-fetched (the Maya and other Mesoamerican tribes were remnants of survivors from the sinking of Atlantis). Going to read the accompanying volume Secrets of the Great Pyramid that covers similar territory albeit with the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
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May 15, 2010 01:19
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Just finished rereading some Terry Pratchett and an absolutely amazing book called An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Starts out rather Wodehouse like but is a seriously moving book by the end.
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May 15, 2010 02:02
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I just finished reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It's a very good example of feminist dystopian fiction, and it's interesting to think that it's not that far off from, say, modern Saudi Arabia. I also recently finished Freakonomics, and it wasn't quite as amazing as I'd heard, although it's a good example of this newish genre of popular economics. I think it was one of the first - am I correct?
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May 15, 2010 04:02
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Propskill posted:Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - took about 50 pages or so for me to settle into the flow of the narrative, but once I got it, I tore through the book in a couple of days. I liked this book alot. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. Apparently there's a sequel coming out. I made the mistake of researching Cromwell on the Internet afterwards, which inadvertantly led to spoilers for the second book (I didn't know there was a sequel, and I knew nothing whatsoever about Cromwell when I started reading it.) Facial Fracture posted:American Gods is a terrible book. I enjoyed it a lot - why didn't you like it?
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May 15, 2010 04:08
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I just finshed reading Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. It's been on my shelf for years and I only picked it up the other day because the trailer for the film looked interesting. I can't make up my mind about it to be honest. 90% of it was entirely forgettable and dull and I have very little patience for dream sequences in books whilst 10% was pretty exciting and did what a good thriller is supposed to do. The ending was totaly unexpected to me, but in the end I really hated it. The 'he was crazy after all', or 'it was all a dream' style twist in the tale has always left me feeling frustrated and angry with the author.
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May 15, 2010 17:31
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Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Read Initially a confusing account of a murder in 16th century Istanbul but evolves into a discussion of art vs. religion with a romance side plot. I don't think I even cared who the murderer was by the end, the topic of the illustrators and their religion and how that affected their work was the most engaging topic. The romantic bits were a little passionless I thought, since the primary motivation was a marriage of convenience, even if there was love involved. Kurt Vonnegut - Galapagos I just happened to have finished On the Origin of Species a couple weeks before picking this up, and I'm glad I did. This book is the story of the human race as descended from a small group of survivors on a lonely island somewhere in the Pacific. It's every bit as goofy as Vonnegut gets, and he riffs on evolution here. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby Excellent ending, so-so until then. I liked The Beautiful and Damned much more. Phillip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly Excellent, but I think the movie conveyed the final twist a little better. C.S. Lewis - Perelandra Interesting treatment of the Eve & the snake myth, with the addition of an advocate for the other side is the meat here, but there was a little too much meandering fluff. Gregory McDonald - Fletch Well, what can I say about Fletch? He's been fantastic. He boxes out for us, gets the tough rebounds...and does what we need to win. Oh wait, that's the movie. This is the book, and it's quite a different animal. Very funny double mystery, with some poignancy. J.G. Ballard - The Atrocity Exhibition Boy is this a strange piece of work. I'm not really sure what the plot was, so I made up my own, about a man escaping from the insanity of pop culture. There was some James Bond kind of stuff in there somewhere too. All in all, quite a fun process. Gregory McDonald - Carioca Fletch The direct sequel to the events in Fletch has the newly retired newspaper reporter lounging around Rio De Janeiro when he is found by two women: the widow of the man whose money Fletch absconded with, and the widow of a doppleganger who was murdered several decades previously. Not quite as good as Fletch, but still funny and definitely worth reading if you liked the original. Phillip K. Dick - The Divine Invasion Second of the VALIS trilogy, this was a bit easier to follow. It's an interesting look at the whole God becoming man thing, and it's fairly easy to follow up to a certain point. (That point being the whole alternate universe thing.)
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May 15, 2010 18:42
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Dr Scoofles posted:I just finshed reading Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. It's been on my shelf for years and I only picked it up the other day because the trailer for the film looked interesting. I too finished this a few weeks ago. I completely agree with you. It was just meh. The movie was a lot better and the changes they made in the film made the story better too in my opinion.
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May 15, 2010 19:21
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I just finished Blindness by Jose Saramago. Had just been thinking that I wanted to read it, then found a copy randomly in a TINY bookshop in the Himalayas when I was on holiday. Decided it was fate, because its one of the best books I've ever read. Even the style of writing is really clever, and although the subject matter is terrifying (basically blindness becomes contagious and sweeps through an unnamed city, and it describes the subsequent fallout), its fascinating to read. The film is a bit pish, so give it a body swerve. Liza Ginnelli fucked around with this message at 23:28 on May 15, 2010 |
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May 15, 2010 23:21
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