|
thingfromtheswamp posted:The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. Yes it kept me reading with his bunch of mini cliffhangers, but it's oh so bad. At the end of the novel, and Robert Langdon doesn't even really need to be there at all. The antagonist could have gotten the answer about the lost symbol from the prisoner he had all the while, and Langdon did not have to play find the symbol/clue all over Washington. There was some interesting tidbits about the Freemasons, but there's a whole lot of crap to wade through. Spoiling Dan Brown should be considered a public service.
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2010 14:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 14:12 |
|
|
ICA posted:I was given The Day of the Triffids as a gift for my birthday. I absolutely loved it. Really not a huge fan of chase/adventure movies but this was really engaging. It had me on edge throughout the entire third act. Excellent stuff. I hear the movie is poo poo though. The 1981 BBC TV Series was pretty cool. I don't know how well it's aged though, it's been a while since I've seen it. If you want to read more Wyndham check out The Midwich Cuckoos. Although he's fairly well regarded I haven't liked any other books of his I've read but Triffids and Cuckoos are both pretty cool and fairly significant works in British SF.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2010 00:00
|
|
|
Finished the last two books of the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages. Not my favorite fantasy series, but it was unique and fun. Also finished was Way of Kings. Hell of a lot better than the Mistborn books, very solid, interesting start to a series. And with the rate that Sanderson writes at, we'll probably get to the final book at some point!
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2010 00:19
|
|
|
7 y.o. bitch posted:pre-Modernist vs. pre-modern. Oh. I made this mistake before. Thank you for clarifying this. Any suggestions for an introduction to the subject?
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2010 08:57
|
|
|
Finished reading The Corrections and loved it, but I couldn't help wondering what Franzen's point was in depicting Enid as such a giant bitch. There's a really chilling scene at the end when Alfred's comatose or what have you, and she's totally fine with it because she only ever loved Alfred for his physical body. And sure she makes all these big changes in her life but she's still a nagging Alfred to death every time she sees him. Except for a few lines here and there, Enid was a really unsympathetic character.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2010 20:00
|
|
|
I just finished Russell Brand's autobiography. It was kind of stupid and repetitive - lots of stories about him doing drugs and behaving badly in public. Finally he goes to rehab and sobers up and we can all learn a lesson. It's not something I'll be re-reading probably ever.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2010 16:05
|
|
|
barkingclam posted:I just finished Russell Brand's autobiography. It was kind of stupid and repetitive - lots of stories about him doing drugs and behaving badly in public. Finally he goes to rehab and sobers up and we can all learn a lesson. It's not something I'll be re-reading probably ever. Ha, I'm reading this right now. I like some of his childhood observations and how they affected him later in life. Too early for an autobiography, but he is a funny SOB. He's got a new one coming out too. Just finished Mockingjay, the third book in the Hunger Games series. I know it's teenage/YA stuff but I was thoroughly entertained. Many adults are reading this, unashamedly.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2010 21:13
|
|
|
I just finished Foucault's Pendulum. I bought it in 2004, didn't get very far. I started reading it again about 2 years ago. I've been picking it up and putting it down, interspersing other books in between, for 2 drat years. I finally finished it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2010 06:46
|
|
|
Just finished Angels and Jesus' Son, both by Denis Johnson. Fabulous reads, quick reads. Both are less than 200 pages. I was really struck by his incredibly original and accurate similes and metaphors; his vision of the American landscape; and his commentary on spirituality in a country that has substituted television for God. Very moving and tender at times, but never cloying or sentimental. His characters are creations which supplement each others'fictional existences in the most subtle of ways. I'm so excited that he is now receiving mainstream recognition, most notably with his National Book Award in 2005. I will not soon forget these awesome novels, and I plan to read everything he's ever written in the coming months.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2010 21:56
|
|
|
VideoTapir posted:I just finished Foucault's Pendulum. I bought it in 2004, didn't get very far. I started reading it again about 2 years ago. I've been picking it up and putting it down, interspersing other books in between, for 2 drat years. I finally finished it. How did you like it?
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2010 22:08
|
|
|
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. I got it free on a 3 for 2 offer at Waterstones and bought it based solely on the blurb and cover. I loved it! It was managed to be gripping without being too fast paced or feeling rushed; was strangely believable for a book that was slightly surreal throughout (the main character has a pet king penguin, FFS); and was my style of bleak- bleak enough to be grounding, without making you want to slit your wrists with the pages. I'm going to have to get the sequel, Penguin Lost.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 01:13
|
|
|
Finished Freedom, the new Jonathan Franzen novel, about a week ago, and it's excellent. Basically, it has all of The Corrections's strengths
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 01:21
|
|
|
Just finished Kraken by China Miéville. I thought it was excellent. Things I liked: - The idea of Kraken and ink as... potential. It stays in the deep underwater and then, quoting Tennyson, "In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die." Such is the potential power of writing / ink. As soon as you write something with ink, that ink is used up, that potential to write absolutely anything is gone. That's sort of a crude summation of a theme that was handled a little more deftly in the book. - The, I guess, "merging" of myth (Lovecraft-style) and science (Darwin-style), especially towards the end. EDIT: Hey, I guess this is also in Tennyson's poem. - Various genre subversions that did occasionally get a bit annoying, but were very good for the most part. DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Sep 19, 2010 |
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 01:43
|
|
treasureplane posted:Finished Freedom, the new Jonathan Franzen novel, about a week ago, and it's excellent. Basically, it has all of The Corrections's strengths So there's no talking faeces?
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 01:52
|
|
ONE TWO THREE TIMES TWO TO THE SIX/JONESING FOR YOUR FIX OF THAT LIMP BIZKIT MIX
|
Just finished Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor. While at first glance it seems like the usual Baen cheese, it is quite engrossing. I hope that there is a sequel.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 01:58
|
|
|
IM_DA_DECIDER posted:How did you like it? I did. Like it. Looooong setup for a relatively short punchline, though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 02:19
|
|
|
The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch. Gimmicky thriller involving time travel, but no real sci fi elements.quote:At the start of Doetsch's tricky thriller, an innocent man, Nicholas Quinn, is in police custody, suspected of murdering his wife, Julia, at their house in upscale Byram Hills, N.Y. Then a stranger gives Nick a watchlike device that allows him to change the past by sending him back, one hour at a time, for half a day. When Nick goes back in time, he discovers single events are the result of a complex web of causes. Saving his wife means untangling a plot that includes a robbery committed by corrupt cops, a horrendous plane crash and a mysterious family secret. Julia's fate seems to be inevitable, one way or another, and Nick's tampering brings death to friends and allies along the way. The premise was interesting enough to keep me reading through many plot holes and a vomit-inducingly sweet relationship between the protagonist and his wife. Surprisingly, the ending closes up most of the plot holes (although not the main one) and provides a satisfying explanation for most of what happened.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 02:33
|
|
man
|
7 y.o. bitch posted:So there's no talking faeces? The faeces are crushed and vanquished once and for all.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 02:57
|
|
Red Haired Menace posted:The faeces are crushed and vanquished once and for all. Glad they're gone, but kinda gross they needed to be crushed imho.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 03:07
|
|
|
Red Haired Menace posted:The faeces are crushed and vanquished once and for all. I opened picked up Freedom at a bookstore and flipped to a random page. I'm pretty sure it featured someone pooping (possibly while masturbating?) and then someone else asked (the pooper, I think?) for a tampon. Let me know if I should spoiler-tag that.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 03:12
|
|
Facial Fracture posted:I opened picked up Freedom at a bookstore and flipped to a random page. I'm pretty sure it featured someone pooping (possibly while masturbating?) and then someone else asked (the pooper, I think?) for a tampon. Hahaha, holy poo poo, you're not even kidding, it's page 432. Oh. My. God. This proves it: Franzen is a coprophiliac (it seems to reveal an important plot point, but you're description seems fine unspoilered): "Jonathan Franzen's new classic American novel, [b posted:Freedom[/b]"] At least none of the poo poo talks in this one, so an improvement, albeit a small one, I think. 7 y.o. bitch fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Sep 19, 2010 |
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 03:48
|
|
|
He went for the fork and I was like "Uh-oh!" and wow for sure, but not in the way I most dreaded.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 04:29
|
|
|
More... fecal stuff and strange sex from Freedom. One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate. I really enjoyed the book for what it was, but man some of the feces stuff was really terrible.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 14:35
|
|
|
Just finished Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (yeah, the 'of Arabia' guy). My advice? Don't bother. I'm very pleased to be free of Lawrence's endless descriptions of Syrian lava flats and red flint mounds and ridges, his angsty doubts about his betrayal of the Arabs and undying praise of Allenby (who is a better general than God himself, if we are to believe Lawrence). On the back of the edition I read were quotes by John Buchan and E.M. Forster, who I both consider much better writers. Had Buchan written Lawrence's tale, I would have read it in one sitting (in a way, Greenmantle is very much like a dramatised pulp version of Seven Pillars). Lawrence does have the same slow and overly intellectual writing style that Forster has. It took me long to get trough passage of India as well, but Seven Pillars is three times as long. If you do decide to read it, do yourself a favour and print out the biggest map of the Hejaz, Syria and Palestine possible. You'll need it before the second journey back to Wedj. Also: nobody told me this, so I randomly found out in the middle of reading it - the numbers in the upper corner of the page? Those are the dates of the events he describes. Might have put that in the introduction, you rear end in a top hat! To my surprise I could find little of Lawrence's supposed paedophilia or homosexuality. There's some strange racism, but that's to be expected.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 15:53
|
|
|
So is the whole Freedom hype a hosed up effort to make people read about shiteating, like a huge mainstream goatse?
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 20:50
|
|
|
No, Franzen just seems to enjoy using poo poo as a literary device.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 22:22
|
|
|
In an interview I heard of his said to the interviewer that part of the reason sex shows up so much in his books is because he goes into a pseudo dream state when writing and that sex shows up a lot in dreams. I imagine its the same with poo poo. That said I liked Freedom and The Corrections (Freedom was probably better) but his first book was pretty lovely.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 22:57
|
|
|
Finished The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello, about a man who wanders away from a life he doesn't enjoy, reads in the newspaper that he has "died" (he hasn't), and decides to invent a new life for himself. Pirandello uses this as a vehicle for reflections on the meaning of identity and living. I'll definitely have to check out some of his other works, but it seems only a few of his novels have been translated (despite the fact that he won a Nobel prize in literature). Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas is a collection of "notes without a text" (really a fictional diary of sorts) about the "writers of the No" - a mixture of famous and fictional writers who conspicuously did not write. I really, really enjoyed this and it's given me all sorts of other things to read. Starting with Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten which I polished off in a couple days. Also written in a diary form, the narrator has a unique voice and outlook, which is kind of necessary when he's describing his life in a small, bizarre school where the only thing the boys are taught is submission to authority. I found it surprisingly amusing and engaging, but I can see how it could be divisive. Also read The Crying of Lot 49 which as the first Pynchon I've read defied most of my expectations of it (i.e. it wasn't impossible and opaque, but easy, clear, and funny). I suppose I'll have to try Gravity's Rainbow at some point.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 23:10
|
|
Listen, I didn't face ten long tours against the goddamn 'bots to come back home and lift baby weights.
|
Chamberk posted:No, Franzen just seems to enjoy using poo poo as a literary device. poo poo is a literary device??? Dem Bones posted:Finished The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello Cool. A store here had a bunch of NYRB stuff that wasn't selling on for $5 and that's one of the books I bought. I haven't read it yet though. Facial Fracture fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Sep 19, 2010 |
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 23:16
|
|
|
Facial Fracture posted:poo poo is a literary device??? It is a Thing in a Literature, thus
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 23:20
|
|
|
Facial Fracture posted:Cool. A store here had a bunch of NYRB stuff that wasn't selling on for $5 and that's one of the books I bought. I haven't read it yet though.  ).
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2010 23:26
|
|
|
A few weeks ago I finished Adam Langer's The Thieves of Manhattan. It was pretty good and uses a lot of literary references that don't make sense at first, however over the course of the novel, they start to make sense. The book itself is about a young writer who is pretty much down on his luck and can't get a break, until he meets a former publisher and asks him to change a novel of his into a fake memoir with crazy results. It was a fun light read that got me through work some night and also had a lot of plot twists that I didn't see coming.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2010 01:40
|
|
|
EricBauman posted:Just finished Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (yeah, the 'of Arabia' guy). drat. I love the movie and I've been wanting to read this for a while. I was hoping there'd be lots of homoeroticism in the book but if there's none to be found then I'm out 
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2010 03:53
|
|
|
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.quote:Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. I've read quite a bit on the way science, over the last two hundred years, has systematically interpreted observed group differences as evidence for innate causes (as opposed to cultural or environmental causes), so Fine's book doesn't have many surprises -- scientists are still routinely chalking up the difference between male and female behavior to biology, using the flimsiest or most contradictory of evidence. There were a couple of chapters on studies resulting from fMRI (brain scan thingy) evidence that were really good, showing how difficult it is to interpret these machines, and the way neurologists are willing to overlook these difficulties in order to make blanket statements about women's inability to become superstar mathematicians or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2010 04:56
|
|
|
Facial Fracture posted:poo poo is a literary device??? What, you haven't read Gravity's Rainbow? 
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2010 06:36
|
|
|
I just finished The Windup Girl and it was... disappointing. It's nicely written with a nice attempt at a setting, but it's just so bland. It lacks energy. Stuff. Happens. The characters are stick figures who don't do anything for any reason. They're just "Oh, I'm a farang and I work for this company." "Oh hi, I'm that farang who knows more than him." "Oh, I'm a twitchy farang sex doll," and "Hey look, an obvious bad person!" "Oh, my village was burned by the people I now work for. Oh look, my two-timingness saved the day. Whoop dee doo." "Oh hurr, we don't have guns so instead we shoot disks." In summary, in the future: 1. We use springs instead of petroleum. 2. Springs can achieve better energy density than capacitors or batteries. But we use flywheels. 3. We talk about calories a lot. 4. Lots of diseases happened, killing lots of people. 5. The Japanese still have first world problems. 6. We have the ability to make our children superfast killer femmebots with Ferengi-like immune systems and yet... we don't. 7. We don't even have efficient solar panels. Or wind farms. Or tidal energy. Or nuclear power. 8. Somehow in this post-petroleum post-coal society where everybody uses sailboats, blimps, mammoths, and rides around on bicycles, we're still paranoid about releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. All technology is based off an ancient copy of The Way Things Work.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2010 11:07
|
|
|
Hedrigall posted:drat. I love the movie and I've been wanting to read this for a while. I was hoping there'd be lots of homoeroticism in the book but if there's none to be found then I'm out Two of his one time servants are gay, I think. Other than that, I hope you like descriptions of valleys. Maybe Revolt in the Desert is better. At least, I think that's the title of the (abridged) version he wrote for the American market.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2010 15:41
|
|
|
Recently finished The Jokers by Albert Cossery and Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, would recommend both. I mentioned The Jokers a while back - it's one of those short, crystalline novels that the NYRB loves to publish (Dem Bones & Facial Fracture: I agree, almost everything they publish is really interesting. They're one of the few publishers I trust when it comes to unknown authors). Set in an unnamed Middle-Eastern town, the plot revolves around a bunch of revolutionaries whose way of rebelling against their corrupt Governor involves covering the town in posters which are so ludicrously over the top in their praise that they're more effective than actual criticism. It's kind of absurdist and full of ironic, black humour that should be pretty understandable to anyone who's read this website. As the introduction points out, there's an unsettling misogyny about a few passages, but the novel's humour makes that somewhat forgivable. Kind of a funnier version of The Outsider, I guess. Wittgenstein's Mistress is a really strange and occasionally difficult novel. It's made up of the autobiographical musings of a woman who is either mad or the last person on Earth, written in a single unbroken length of short sentences. She muses on all the random bits of information that pass through her mind, a lot of them about painting and other art forms, thinking of all the personal connections between the artists, getting things wrong, forgetting, correcting, repeating, reinterpreting - basically talking to herself. Along the way she passes on shreds of information about her own life, and her activities since everyone else in the world disappeared. There were an extraordinary number of cultural references which meant nothing to me, but I read a little bit of criticism of the novel (there's a fascinating essay on it by David Foster Wallace in the Summer 1990 edition of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, for those with journal access) and it's clear that Markson constructed the novel to stand as an allegory for various things - the futility of art, the necessity of human contact, a feminist reconstruction of Western culture – but also as an autobiography and a philosophical critique of some of Wittgenstein's ideas (which went completely over my head, knowing nothing about Wittgenstein). Basically, a really interesting, if challenging, novel for anyone interested in ambiguous, experimental fiction.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2010 03:22
|
|
|
Just finished Mason and Dixon after something like a year of on-and-off reading. First and third books were great, but the second seriously dragged. All in all, I'd give it a 7.5 out of 10.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2010 01:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 14:12 |
|
|
Finished de Tocqueville's The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, the first volume in what would have been his epic study of the French Revolution. Surprisingly interesting given that it's a fairly indepth, sometimes dry, look at the administration of the French monarchy, and how little it changed at its core after the Revolution. Tocqueville suggests the middle classes essentially held the real political power even before 1789, since the aristocracy thought it was beneath them to administer their own government, and the revolution in effect didn't really overthrow so much as just discard them. He's pretty adamant about it too, already clearly disgusted only 50 years later at what he sees as some sort of culturally-endorsed narrative obscuring the reality of what France went through. Not at all concerned with people storming barricades though, so best look elsewhere if that's what you're after. Had to laugh at his Can you believe this poo poo? tone talking about the Royal Highway department occasionally demolishing people's homes in their quest for nice straight lines, when Haussmann did it to half of Paris just 10 years after Tocqueville's death; would've had a rage-induced brainbleed.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2010 20:09
|
|
