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Simon Pegg's autobiography Nerd Do Well. It's the best autobio I've read since Steve Martin's Born Standing Up. It's funny, full of nerdy movie poo poo, and never drags thanks to his breaking up the chapters with a fictional side narrative about himself as a super spy with an android butler sidekick named Canterbury. I found out we have the same favorite werewolf and zombie movies! WOWZERS!!!
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Dec 4, 2011 18:03
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Wow, haven't updated here in ages: Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle In Time Read this in grade school, like everyone else it seems. It takes nerve to call it "science" fiction since it's almost non-existent on the science. Penn Jillette - God, No! Standard funny from a funny guy, even if he is a whacky libertarian. Ian Fleming - Moonraker Arguably the best Bond novel, and almost but not quite entirely unlike the movie. Read it. Madeleine L'Engle - A Wind In The Door It's not called the Time Quartet for nothing, and I'm reading the series because I'm a completist, not because they're actually good or anything. William Blake - Poems Of William Blake I'm an uncultured swine who doesn't really know how to appreciate poetry, but this guy's alright. John Swartzwelder - Earth vs. Everybody Some doofus who couldn't cut it as a private eye or a criminal ends up wandering around the universe. Funny, recommended. Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes Classic weird. First half is so so, but it really takes off in the second. Terry Pratchett - Snuff Best discworld, definitely best Watch novel. John Ringo - Ghost Oh god no John Ringo. Carlton Mellick III - The Cannibals Of Candyland Maximum bizarre and weird. Craig Thomas - Firefox Down Betcha didn't know there was a sequel didja. Kind drags in the middle a bit, but both ends make up the awesome. Shirley Jackson - The Haunting Of Hill House The best kind of scary, ambiguous. Madeleine L'Engle - A Swiftly Tilting Planet This one is actually decent, in a good idea wrapped in crap Harry Potter kinda way. Poppy Z. Brite - Are You Loathsome Tonight Short story grab bag, mostly cool.
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Dec 5, 2011 00:01
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I finished Bradon Sanderson's latest Mistborn book, Alloy Of Law earlier this evening. A good, refreshing read from the heavier stuff I've been reading lately. Not diminishing the work, I greatly enjoy his books, it was just a nice change.
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Dec 5, 2011 04:00
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Zombie Werewolf Spaceship Patton Oswald Very funny. I recommend this to anyone who likes Patton Oswald or just weird biographies in general. The Strain Trilogy Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan. Interesting take on vampires. I thought it was a great read, I read the entire trilogy in two weeks, just couldn't put it down. Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords George Lemoncakes Martin Theses three were good, they did drag in places, but most everyone here knows what these are. I am having a hard time with A Feast for Crows. Its just boring me.
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Dec 5, 2011 16:34
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Just finished The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, did not enjoy it. It didn't feel like Del Toro had any input in the novel - all the phantasmagoric settings and creatures he's known for are completely absent. It also rips off other vampire novels pretty hard (the "concentration camp survivor meets nazi vampire then tries to destroy it decades later" thing is done far better in Dan Simmons' Carrion Comfort), and the writing quality was more screenplay-quality then a full, fleshed-out novel. Worst of all Hogan and Del Toro apparently decided since it's the first book of a trilogy that somehow excuses the complete lack of any resolution and the complete anticlimax of the ending.
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Dec 5, 2011 23:07
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I just finished Triptych by JM Frey, which is kind of like District 9, what with alien refugees trying to adapt to life on earth; only it's set in England, with blue fuzzy aliens instead of prawns... oh and a queer/polyamorous/interspecies sexual relationship emerges between one of the aliens and a human couple. And that was awesome. But sadly that was only half the novel (going by my Kindle, from the 27% mark to the 76% mark). While the half I've mentioned is from the perspective of the alien, and is pretty clever in exploring what human culture and sexuality might look like to an outsider, the rest was a less-than-great time travel/conspiracy plot which left me cold — basically because I wanted more of the stuff from the alien's perspective. Overall I rate it 4 alien genital organs out of 5. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Dec 6, 2011 |
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Dec 6, 2011 11:18
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Pleasant read, but it didn't really captivate me. Try reading it with Heart of Darkness and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh if you're at all interested in the relationship of works to their influences.
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Dec 6, 2011 19:08
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It never snows in September - Robert Kershaw An account of Operation Market Garden, the airborne landings around Arnhem in WWII but told from the German point of view. A brilliantly informative read of what was a savage and brutal fight from a perspective that gets ignored all too often. I picked this one up after reading another book by him, Tank Men, which again is a pretty harrowing read about the realities of tank warfare in both the First and Second World Wars. I'm a bit of a military history buff and I can honestly say that both these books are well worth reading as they take you along a far darker road than most others I have read. Recommended.
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Dec 7, 2011 01:29
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Well, not sure if I "finished" it, but I burned it to save some poor soul from reading it: Daemon by Daniel Suarez. Someone I work with recommended it, saying it was absolutely awesome. It was not. 200 pages in I had to give up in disgust at the horrible writing, the characters I did not care about, the plot that went from interesting at a glance to entirely moronic. Who the hell ever greenlighted publishing this steaming turd? The guy makes Dan Brown seem like Umberto Eco. I did also go through and guiltily enjoy the entire Reacher series by Lee Child. Not scholarly stuff but fun and grabs you from the very first page. On a more real book note, The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind. Fantastic read about his decades long "war" with Hawking about whether information could disappear in a black hole, as well as a fairly decent explanation of string theory. Recommended!
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Dec 7, 2011 22:15
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Just finished Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's a whole lot of repetition if you already read cogsci articles online, but it would be a good book for someone in high school or college that hasn't already learned about a lot of this stuff. It's basically a comprehensive overview of cognitive biases. If you haven't read any of this, I'm sure it would be fascinating. Unfortunately for me, it was a big rehash of stuff I'd already seen. The weirdest part was at the end of each chapter, he has some sample sentences of "how to talk" about this stuff. "Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number." It's all very business-speak and seemed kind of idiotic. I guess he wants to change the way people talk about their businesses, but it just felt way too forced to tack on examples, like "You're probably too dumb to figure this out yourself, so here's how to talk about these concepts."
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Dec 7, 2011 22:50
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I just finished all the Dark Tower books by King. Up yours king*. 8 Books, nearly 10,000 pages, and you end it like that? AND you put in a smarmy page before the "full" ending telling me that the worth of a story is the journey and not the end as if that explains the MASSIVE loving COP-OUT ending. Pound_Coin fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Dec 8, 2011 |
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Dec 8, 2011 13:30
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Pound_Coin posted:I just finished all the Dark Tower books by King. Eight? I thought the eighth hasn't been released yet?
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Dec 9, 2011 03:34
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Recently finished: Software, the first book in the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker. Kind of like Neuromancer meets a Carl Hiaasen novel. Interesting combination. The Forever War, fantastic futuristic sci-fi with space marines and future-shock by Joe Haldeman.
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Dec 9, 2011 17:38
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I just finished Blood Meridian a few days ago. I'm not a big fan of Cormac McCarthy in all honesty, and he didn't exactly change my mind with it. It's very well done and stylistically interesting, but the narrative's flow just kind of bugged me. There's never a sense that McCarthy has any idea where he's going with it. Stuff happens, but very little of it serves a purpose beyond "these were things that happened to the Glanton Gang, also the Judge and Kid were there". Suddenly in the last 1/5 of the book he decides to make the Kid actually matter again when he doesn't die, and suddenly make the Judge care about him because the Judge is the creepy gnostic demon that embodies violence basically. But while the judge is very established in this, his giving a poo poo about the kid or the kid at all aren't established whatsoever, so the overall feeling to me was that he wrote 4/5 of the book just to frame "things then happened", while the remaining 1/5 are the crux of any conflict beyond the circumstance. Not really my thing.
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Dec 9, 2011 19:24
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moana posted:Just finished Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's a whole lot of repetition if you already read cogsci articles online, but it would be a good book for someone in high school or college that hasn't already learned about a lot of this stuff. It's basically a comprehensive overview of cognitive biases. If you haven't read any of this, I'm sure it would be fascinating. Unfortunately for me, it was a big rehash of stuff I'd already seen. I recently read this and it was perfect for me. I'm interested in Cognitive Science stuff but only at a casual level, so this book was a great primer on its current state. Concepts like the "mental shotgun," System 1/System 2, and "people wrongly choose a good story over statistics" are introduced and explained and it never feels like a slog. It's a thick book, but I flew through it. For some reason, it reminds me of Drive by Daniel Pink, only bigger and more in-depth.
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Dec 10, 2011 04:35
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I just finished Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman and really enjoyed it. More than the discussion of the problems faced by a society infatuated with television I found the description of Colonial America and its literary society very interesting. I also feel very strange about discussing this book on the Internet.
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Dec 11, 2011 02:43
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I just finished So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman. It's a story about contemporary rural America, class struggle, and violence against women. The violence against women part of the story is well done, heart-wrenching, and thought provoking; however, the other two main focuses are basically the author being angry and yelling at the reader, "this is what's happening, why doesn't anyone care?" The book is probably best described as a suspenseful mystery, but the first half of the book isn't suspenseful at all. This is probably because the author describes the mundane poo poo in the environment with verbose analogies that drag on and on. Regardless, the second half of the book more than makes up for the first half and I would strongly recommend reading it.
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Dec 11, 2011 04:38
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Today I finished my slog through Zone One by Colson Whitehead. The story was decent, but Whitehead's style is not for me. His narrative is all over the place and hard to follow. I had to go back and re-read paragraphs throughout the entire book to figure out what was going on as he'd jump back and forth through the current timeline and the past pretty much at random. Plot wise, there's nothing totally ground breaking about it but it's a decent zombie plot. The characters were pretty great too.
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Dec 11, 2011 05:11
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Static Rook posted:I recently read this and it was perfect for me. I'm interested in Cognitive Science stuff but only at a casual level, so this book was a great primer on its current state.
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Dec 11, 2011 09:23
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I just spend almost all of the past few days reading Faulkner's The Unvanquished. I really liked this one: each of the stories felt like they were building up to An Odor of Verbena, itself a great story, and even moreso as the climax of this book. It was interesting seeing the characters grow and their relationships changing throughout the stories, especially with what happened to Drusilla or how Bayard and Ringo's relationship changed as the Civil War ended. As I understand Faulkner's works, this was one of his lesser ones. If that's the case, I'm looking forward to tackling The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom; I'd like to see how the two compare.
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Dec 11, 2011 20:49
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Finished off Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series. The last book, Firestorm, was absolutely amazing and I hate it that he doesn't have any news regarding a next book. If you like military history (WWII based stuff) with alternate dimension (a parallel earth) then you'll like this. Trying to finish Strangers by Koontz but he doesn't grip me like he used to.
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Dec 12, 2011 02:31
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Just finished Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. Quite liked it, but the ending leaves so much questions unanswered that it just hurts. The pain of it is that you feel it coming: in the last fifty pages, you think "There's no way he's going to explain everything in what's left".
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Dec 12, 2011 15:55
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Talking of explaining things at the end... I just finished Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear. The whole book felt like Dead Space mashed up with an episode of The Prisoner or something — it was nearly totally incomprehensible. And then I got to the last 50 pages, and he actually did explain everything, and suddenly everything that went before made sense. It completely changed my feelings about the book. Read it if you like sci-fi horror, nasty biological terrors and mysteries that make you think "What the gently caress is going on???" for 250 pages and then "OH! Holy... holy poo poo." for the final 50.
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Dec 12, 2011 16:24
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Over the last couple days, I finally finished book 8 of the Malazan series Toll the Hounds. Really felt like the weakest of them all thus far, the first half of the book was really hard to get through for some reason. The last quarter of it more than made up for it. I will likely read the first to ICE side stories before picking up #9. For a quick break, I then picked up The Magician King. I felt that up to the end it was a decidedly better book than the first one, but the ending pissed me off something FIERCE. Abrupt ending and bountiful kicks in the balls. Seems to be a bit of a trend for me as of late. The last book of The Hunger Games, 1Q84, and now this. These unsatisfying endings are getting to me. All 3 bothered me for very different reasons, The Magician King more than the others. Maybe I'm just not in the "right place" for those kinds of stories and resolutions... Next up is either Night of Knives, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or Fatherland.
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Dec 13, 2011 06:54
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Completed the 4 book Worldwar series, by Harry Turtledove. An alternate timeline like most of his work, this time set during World War 2 during the height of conflict. A race of aliens has had eyes on Earth for some time and has decided to gatecrash the party, hilarity ensues. A decent read. As it is set on Earth in relatively recent times it is fairly accessible to people who aren't heavily into science fiction. It seems that there is a sequel series expanding on the period once the war has ended, the subsequent partisan action etc.
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Dec 13, 2011 10:16
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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Astonishingly bloated and poorly edited, yet with enough nuggets of interest to pull me through. An odd duck.
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Dec 14, 2011 12:10
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Haruki Murakami is one of those authors like Salman Rushdie* that started out great but have gotten worse as time goes on. A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Norwegian Wood were his best books, and everything written since then have either been rote, by the numbers books trying to recapture the magic of Norwegian Wood or weird, highly ambitious books that fail to live up to their promise (I don't know about his non-fiction or short stories, I never read any of them). Kafka on the Shore was sort of a combination of the two, and the breaking point for me. It sounds like I made a good decision to quit reading his novels, seeing how bad 1Q84 (ugh, even that title is terrible) sounds. *Not that anything Murakami's written is anywhere near as good as Midnight's Children.
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Dec 14, 2011 22:51
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Damned, by Chuck Palianuik. Think "The Breakfast Club," in hell. It ends too quickly, leading into a sequel, but otherwise I felt it was very clever. A Bad King fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2011 02:31
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Yeah, I finished 1Q84 and it was by no means his best, though it was a pretty entertaining read.
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Dec 15, 2011 04:04
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Conduit for Sale! posted:Haruki Murakami is one of those authors like Salman Rushdie* that started out great but have gotten worse as time goes on. A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Norwegian Wood were his best books, and everything written since then have either been rote, by the numbers books trying to recapture the magic of Norwegian Wood or weird, highly ambitious books that fail to live up to their promise (I don't know about his non-fiction or short stories, I never read any of them). Kafka on the Shore was sort of a combination of the two, and the breaking point for me. It sounds like I made a good decision to quit reading his novels, seeing how bad 1Q84 (ugh, even that title is terrible) sounds. His book on running is a lovely little read. When I think about it in comparison to 1Q84, a what, 900+ page beast, I wonder how on earth he managed the reverse alchemy of turning so many words into so little substance. I've really enjoyed most of his titles before this: Kafka on the Shore and Wild Sheep Chase in particular, so this is coming from someone with a semi-chubby for the guy already. I usually dig the somewhat naive style he has (at least when translated into English - I've no idea whether or not he's considered a fancy-dan in Japan) but there were so many redundant or completely obvious descriptions and phrases that the book felt mannered and patronising - a bad children's novel for adults. Granted, he's trod close the edge of that in much of his work, yet this book really slapped me in the face with it. Chamberk posted:Yeah, I finished 1Q84 and it was by no means his best, though it was a pretty entertaining read.
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Dec 15, 2011 10:47
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I just finished Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. I really enjoyed the book. Only other Orwell book I've read was Animal Farm, and while both were great, I think 1984 was better. I would highly recommend this book. CosmicMeat fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Dec 17, 2011 |
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Dec 16, 2011 16:13
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The Great Silence (Juliet Nicolson): Solid, but unremarkable look at the lives of Brits at the tail end of World War I through 1920. The pages of Harold Gillies and his plastic surgery developments are the most amusing, but on the whole the book falls a bit flat as there aren't enough details on anything.
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Dec 17, 2011 07:35
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Despite my Kindle 2 dying mid-book and having to wait for my Kindle 3 replacement from Amazon, I was able to finish last night: Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire I'm not sure if it's a great ending or not. Maguire knows that fans adore these characters, especially the characters that have been around for 100 years. So in the process he leaves a lot of unanswered questions of fates at the end. That said, its beautifully written, especially the ending, and he re-iterates that this isn't an ending, because the characters still have years left of their lives and people change, move on, etc. It hangs where it would hang in real life: there is no end, we just move to the next part of our lives. But it's "up to the reader" to decide. Not sure how I feel about that.
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Dec 17, 2011 19:02
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Just finished "The Passage" by Justin Cronin. Its a really good read, and I love the "feeling" of the world he describes. I think Mr. Cronin is writing 2 more books in the same universe. Nevertheless The Passage great book to read.
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Dec 17, 2011 20:32
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Beanbox posted:Just finished "The Passage" by Justin Cronin. Oh that's interesting. For some reason I thought it was a standalone with a really open ending
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Dec 17, 2011 20:47
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Finished 1776 by David McCullough. I picked this up because I really enjoyed and was impressed with his John Adams biography. This one in my opinion is a bit of a step down. It is much more focused on a short time frame, and while McCullough neatly frames the book with two very different speeches by King George III, with the antics of Washington and the Continental Army in between, it just felt a bit lacking. I was hoping for a broader look at the year, and the book only really gives the military side of things, and even that reads a bit clunky at times. On the other hand the character study of Washington during this period is fantastic, and comes across as supremely interesting.
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Dec 18, 2011 00:20
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I've just finished Shike: Last of the Zinja by Robert Shea, and god drat... It belonged to my late Father, and I found it going through old stuff of his the other day, and thought I'd give it a go. Wow, glad I did. For anyone who's a fan of anything Japanese, this book is amazing. Ironically, it seems some of it is historically accurate, despite being fiction, which was nice to find out afterwards. Highly recommend it if you can get hold of a copy.
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Dec 22, 2011 14:28
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Just finished 1Q84, another book that's the victim of its author reaching a stage in popularity where editors and the concept of paring things down disappears entirely. At around a half - maybe even a third of its length - it would have been a great book. As it stands its an average book with some very good parts. The book traces the parallel narratives of Tengo, a cram school maths professor cum aspiring writer who gets half persuaded half bullied into rewriting a novel called Air Chrysalis penned by an enigmatic 17 year old, Fuka-Eri. Then there's Aomame, a physical fitness instructor cum assassin for hire. Both of them gradually discover that their worlds are out of joint There are two moons in the sky for instance, and there's mounting evidence that at least in this world, the events outlined in the fantastical Air Chrysalis may not be as far-fetched, imaginative and fictional as Tengo previously assumed. The problem is its probably Murakami's most horribly overwritten book. Several chapters begin with 'Not much happened for the next two weeks' followed by unnecessarily elaborate description of what the characters did in these two fallow weeks including, in some cases complete recipes. You wanna shake him and yell "Murakami-san, how about you get to the part where something loving happened?" So even though I liked 1Q84 a lot more than I did Kafka On The Shore (which pissed me off something fierce with its whiny protagonist meets boring by the numbers surreal buddy movie plotline), it's nowhere near his best books like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland. Besides being repetitive it's also got some of the most egregiously awful writing I've read in ages. You can argue this is a function of translation, but there's no way such a line should pass muster. Ever: "And she mourned their lovely breats - breasts that had vanished without a trace."
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Dec 23, 2011 11:49
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As part of RC and Moon Pie's occasional attempts to make up for the classic literature she missed in school or otherwise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. I came in expecting a big boom novel, as in something happens and the universe gets completely out of kilter because of it. I had expected this to happen after Abe North's drunken craziness and the murdered black man in Rosemary's room, the revelation that Nicole had an incestuous relationship with her father, Nicole trying to kill Dick and the children in the car, and Dick's drunken police brawl. But this is not a big boom novel. It is a drifting novel. Major things happen, but not loudly and or extremely quickly. Rosemary is presented as a major character at the start and she is a major character, her relationship with Dick being three different things, the three different times she shows up, but she's not always part of the action (her personality hangs in the air at times, but she isn't responsible for everything, especially as nearly a third of the book predates her). Random note: Dick Diver sure liked the teenage girls. Nicole, Rosemary, the patient at the clinic... Overall, I liked it better than The Great Gatsby. I thought Gatsby to be very good and I think this to be very good, but this just seems more complete to me. RC and Moon Pie fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Dec 23, 2011 |
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Dec 23, 2011 18:41
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Just minutes ago finished 'The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again'. Everyone and their mom who's already interested in Andy Warhol probably read this years back, but if you haven't it's basically his biography, except instead of narrating what happened during his life, he narrates how he feels about things that happen in general life, which is interesting. I think he should of done more writing, he's excellent at putting things very sharply. I didn't actually laugh, but the humour is still very much there, just not overt - even so, everyone should pick it up if they see it in a random second hand store or something - I had some weird idea when I started that it might 'change me' or 'give me some new perspective' which it didn't really, but it still made me think, which is always nice in a book. And now, onto 'The Comfort of Strangers' 
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