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The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder. This is the prodigious Simpsons writer's first book. It's a lot like Police Squad! with time travel. Frank Burly (basically Homer Simpson) is an incompetent private detective solving a mystery he doesn't really understand for a client who has no money. The overall plot takes a back seat to gags and Swartzwelder's love of old timey stuff. It's really short (150 pages) but I liked it and finished in one sitting. 4/5
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Jan 13, 2012 22:40
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The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy -Douglas Adams This is all 5 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books in one big paperback book. I really enjoyed this book. I remember seeing the movie years ago, and I had been meaning to pick up one of the books. I managed to get this on a lucky bookstore sale. It starts with everyday man Arthur Dent and his weird friend Ford Prefect hitchhiking their way off of Earth, and then starts getting zanier and zanier. The first 3 books were great, going from location to location with plenty of wit and charm. Then the story hit the brakes with Arthur back on a rebuilt Earth, and falling in love with a girl who our previous knowledge of was a throwaway line at the start of the first book. It was still greatly enjoyable, despite a few flaws here and there.
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Jan 14, 2012 07:30
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The Wise Man's Fear, sequel to that Name of the Wind. Liked the first book enough to read the sequel, stopped giving a gently caress about it during that tedious poo poo with felurian. The main character is now a genius, wizard, master musician, sex god ninja. how the gently caress am I supposed to relate this a character like that when I'm only one of those things?
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Jan 14, 2012 09:49
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The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle. It was really good, if somewhat depressing. I kept expecting the phone calls to the teacher to go to a creepier place, but thankfully they didn't.
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Jan 14, 2012 18:28
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I just finished A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer It was pretty interesting, especially since I don't know much about viruses, but it seemed like just as things were getting really interesting he moved to a different topic. Also, it was really short. Since it was so short I would recommend it.
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Jan 15, 2012 00:56
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Just finished Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, it is a very important contribution to American Presidential history telling the story of former President James Garfield. I had no idea who the man was and this book summed up the importance of his short lived stay at the white house in a little over 200 pages.
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Jan 15, 2012 02:11
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I just finished Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson, the third book in the Malazan series. Great read, a lot of questions answered, and a lot of new questions gained. I look forward to reading the next one.
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Jan 15, 2012 02:18
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I absolutely love the Malazan series but the world he creates is so massive that even after reading all the books and even rereading a few, I still have no loving idea what was going on. If he got a TV series like Game of Thrones did, that fucker would have to run for 20 years.
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Jan 16, 2012 01:02
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I just finished John Steakley's Armor. It was a fun read, but I kept getting this nagging feeling that a lot of the story elements were very familiar to me for some reason. Mostly the universe/setting elements, like it was almost the same universe Heinlein's Starship Troopers took place in, but just different enough not to be the same one. EDIT: Attempted to read some book called Hyperion that was recommended by Goodreads after some other books I rated and Jesus Christ I just can't do it. The opening paragraph put me off entirely and each page after that is making me hate the book, more and more. I read a few pages and then have to take a break from it for a few days before trying again. Some Pinko Commie fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Jan 16, 2012 |
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Jan 16, 2012 14:25
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I just finished A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the first Sherlock Holmes novel as well as the first Sherlock Holmes novel that I have read. I found it a little frustrating that a lot of the details seemed to be kept from me, but if it was a different narrator other than Watson, I doubt it would be much of a mystery, and I enjoyed the reveal and explanation at the end. I look forward to reading the others novels as well as the other shorter stories that were published.
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Jan 17, 2012 00:26
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I just finished Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Great book that investigates what happens to you when you die and how your body is used for medical science education. It's funny at times, but also really disgusting.
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Jan 17, 2012 03:38
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Just finished The Wasp Factory. I did not see the ending coming. I thought it was possible but Banks really paced the novel so that you always felt you were on the cusp of realizing it. Excellent book. Pacing could be slow near the end, but it really doesn't effect the whole experience.
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Jan 17, 2012 16:14
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Marching Powder posted:The Wise Man's Fear, sequel to that Name of the Wind. Liked the first book enough to read the sequel, stopped giving a gently caress about it during that tedious poo poo with felurian. The main character is now a genius, wizard, master musician, sex god ninja. how the gently caress am I supposed to relate this a character like that when I'm only one of those things? Isn't this what happened with Wheel of Time? That's why I can never read WoT.
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Jan 17, 2012 16:56
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Marching Powder posted:The Wise Man's Fear, sequel to that Name of the Wind. Liked the first book enough to read the sequel, stopped giving a gently caress about it during that tedious poo poo with felurian. The main character is now a genius, wizard, master musician, sex god ninja. how the gently caress am I supposed to relate this a character like that when I'm only one of those things? I am going to read it next XD I loved the first one but drat Kvothe needs to clam down. I hope the third makes him a bit more relateable but we'll see.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:33
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RebBrownies posted:I am going to read it next XD There's no way he can conclude this thing in one drat book.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:41
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I read somewhere that it was going to be a tetralogy. So, two more books. I just started Name of the Wind. It's not bad so far.
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Jan 17, 2012 18:00
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Finished up Deep Sky by Patrick Lee. It's the third book in the Breach series, and pretty damned good. This one opens with the president getting blown the gently caress up with a missile and doesn't really put on the brakes till the book ends. (not a spoiler, it's on the back of the book) It's a hell of a ride, and while I can see how some people might be pissed off at the ending, I thought it was pretty cool. Definitely came out of left field. I really hope there are more books in the series. This guy can write some nifty fiction, and the breach entities are always fun to read about.
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Jan 17, 2012 19:26
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Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey, about the 18-19th century fad for stealing famous skulls in order to locate the seat of their genius. Phrenology obviously casts a shadow over most of the thefts, but the book isn't about phrenology, per se—it's mostly about people stealing heads, and what they did with the heads after they stole them. Kind of a thin premise to hang a book on, if you ask me. There were a few great stories, like the one about Haydn's head, but overall I was left underwhelmed.
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Jan 17, 2012 20:09
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dokmo posted:Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey, about the 18-19th century fad for stealing famous skulls in order to locate the seat of their genius. Phrenology obviously casts a shadow over most of the thefts, but the book isn't about phrenology, per se—it's mostly about people stealing heads, and what they did with the heads after they stole them. Kind of a thin premise to hang a book on, if you ask me. There were a few great stories, like the one about Haydn's head, but overall I was left underwhelmed. Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man has a good chapter or two regarding phrenology and compares it to how we measure IQ today. I haven't read Dickey, but Gould presents a very interesting take on the subject. On topic, I just finished the Hunger Games trilogy, and now feel like I can hold a conversation with any 16-year-old girl in the US. Not a bad series considering it's YA, and a quick read. Interested in how the movie(s) will pan out.
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Jan 18, 2012 01:37
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American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. You know, Wall Street stockbroker goes bat-poo poo insane and starts killing people and having hallucinations or so he thought he did. Liked how it's a piss-take on the capitalist, patriarchal yuppie culture altogether.
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Jan 18, 2012 12:31
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Just finished The Four Fingers Of Death by Rick Moody. I've never read anything else by him, but the book reminded me strongly of a cross between DFW and Vonnegut, but never quite achieving the greatness of either. That said, while there were places where the book started to drag, I was glad that I soldiered through because in the end, the final few pages of the book cast an entirely new light on the preceding 700 or so, and made the entire novel much more emotionally resonant. Better than average, but not the greatness I was hoping for. Next up is The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, a gift from my in-laws that my father-in-law is DYING for me to read so we can discuss it.
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Jan 18, 2012 18:55
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A bunch of Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. Awesome author.
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Jan 18, 2012 20:34
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I just finished Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I never read it as a kid and finally decided I'd do it. I was not disappointed. It was a good read.
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Jan 19, 2012 00:39
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Three to review this time, many thanks to my Santa for two of them  First up: By The Great Horn Spoon Sid Fleischman This is a children's book (grades 4-7). I've been on a kick of collecting books I loved as a kid, it's been fun to re-read old favorites and see if they are as good as I remember them. This one was. It's a cute story of the California Gold Rush as seen through the eyes of a young boy who has gone to seek his fortune because his aunt, who has been raising him and his sisters since their parents died, has been having financial troubles and may have to sell their home. He is accompanied by his aunt's butler Praiseworthy. Lots of fun stuff here with Praiseworthy and Jack experiencing a series of improbable but funny situations and solving them all with panache. The Serpent's Shadow Mercedes Lackey Definitely a light read that would fall into the category of fantasy romance, this one is the story of Maya, a young (of course she's young! It's a romance!) , beautiful (of course she's beautiful! It's a romance!) half-English, half-Indian (Indian as in from India) woman who has come to England after her parents' death. Maya has magical ability, but her (Indian) mother always refused to train her because her magic was "from her father's blood" and thus her mother's training methods were likely to be ineffective due to the magic being different. Maya is very suspicious that her mother's death was a result of magical foul play, and hopes to find out what happened. Aside from gritting my teeth at intervals when 2012 American sensibilities were dragged into Edwardian England, it was overall a good romance, complete with obligatory happy ending. Definitely fluff, but sometimes you NEED fluff. Farewell Earth's Bliss DG Compton Finding this one was unexpected. In one of my recent posts, I mentioned having read "The Steel Crocodile" because I'd gotten it as a Santa bonus from Quad. I went to put that book on the shelf and realized I had another book by Compton that I hadn't read. This one gave me the creeps. Another dystopian novel, this time set on Mars, which has become the new penal colony for those convicted of crimes on Earth who refuse to have their personalities wiped. I don't want to go into plot details too much because it's carefully arranged and might spoil a couple of well-done twists, but when I finished it, I waved it in front of my husband and said "THIS is horror. Sci-fi horror. No slashing or dripping blood required." My husband is a big horror fan and has been complaining about the dearth of original horror over the last few years. He pretty much devoured it in less than a day and also enjoyed it. Very grim and creeped me out especially because it's completely plausible. Like Steel Crocodile, this is fairly dense prose, but well worth the time.
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Jan 19, 2012 04:41
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Petersburg by Andrei Bely. I can see why people call this the Ulysses of Russian literature, as it encapsulates the entire Russian literary tradition in one book in a way similar to how Ulysses brings in much of the Western tradition (through Homer of course). It seems like at least every page has at least a small reference to Gogol'/Pushkin/Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/etc. I read the Maguire translation, but I'm rereading it in Russian in a month or two. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution by Richard Stites Not bad! It's outdated, as it was written during the Gorbachev era, but it's very well-written and has a great overriding narrative to Stites's view on the early 20th century in Russia. The best part was how he brought in utopian visions of not only the Russian revolutionaries in Petersburg, but the bureaucratic utopias put forth by Peter II, Catherine II, and so on and how they conflicted with the peasant utopias.
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Jan 19, 2012 04:56
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I just finished Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan by William Vollmann. It's a 60 page Kindle short that I had on my wishlist and forgot about, then bought the other day because it was $3 and I figured why not. Normally I wouldn't even bother posting about it except that it annoyed me so much. I've never read anything by Vollmann before. I was actually pleasantly surprised at his prose style which I though was overall very beautiful and flowed well, even if it's a little wordy. My problem is the manner in which he conducted his interviews. He went to Japan with a self-admitted bias against nuclear power. Fine, I don't agree but that's his stance. The problem is that it seemed like every time he talked to someone, he would bring up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and ask them their opinion. This might not sound so bad, except the first half of the book takes place far north in areas that were devastated by the tsunami. I was actually in the area during the earthquake, and although I didn't experience the tsunami, I have a good idea of how life was for people in the months afterwards. Vollmann comes to these places and asks people who are literally trying to piece their lives back together and identify the bloated corpses of their loved ones if they have any worries about nuclear radiation from a place almost 100km away. He then seems surprised when they don't have much of an opinion about it. Maybe I'm overstating it, but it just struck me as though he was trying to shoehorn his own (seemingly poorly informed) worries about nuclear radiation to the point of trying to ask people about Hiroshima and whether they think this is worse. There's a time and a place for these kind of interviews, but less than a month after the tsunami, in areas where no one knows how the hell they're going to pick up the remnants of their lives, to me, are not appropriate. /rant
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Jan 19, 2012 17:28
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That sounds about right for Vollmann, who's usually pretty hit and miss. Some of his nonfiction is pretty good (like They Came Out Like Ants, and other stuff is dreadful (like his bloated book Imperial).
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Jan 19, 2012 21:36
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Are there any good, more indepth books about the tsunami and the resulting nuclear disaster yet? Or will we probably have to wait a while more?
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Jan 19, 2012 21:38
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Just finished: Supergods by Grant Morrison. A thoroughly entertaining read that gives a bit more insight into Grant's personal relationship with comics and why he writes the kind of stories he writes and what they mean to him. Also works as a primer on superhero comics since the inception of Superman 80 years ago. My only real complaint is that there's a lot of back and forth when he's talking about certain subjects, where he'll mention something and go on a derail that ends up breaking the chronology of the timeline he's describing, but I get why he wrote it that way. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I kept meaning to read this since I loved American Gods and this book felt very similar to me, like slipping into old shoes. It has a colourful cast and a lead that is very easy to identify with from the get-go. The final chapter was fantastic and pretty much the only fitting ending to the main character's story arc.
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Jan 20, 2012 00:47
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NorskHotDog posted:I just finished Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I never read it as a kid and finally decided I'd do it. I was not disappointed. It was a good read. My favorite series ever. Also, the new novel in this series Shadows in Flight, came out about 2 days ago. 
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Jan 20, 2012 03:23
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I just finished "Twenty Palaces, A Prequel" by Harry Connolly, a pretty good quick read similar in style (though slightly darker) to Jim Butchers "Dresden Files". Basically the origin story for the main character, Ray, that explains some of the events that they always hint to in the other books. This appears to be a self published e-book, unlike the rest of the books in the series that are available via mass market paperback, so there are a few typos and oddities but that can be easily forgiven; I found it a fun, fast urban fantasy book to read while we wait for more from Butcher.
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Jan 20, 2012 22:10
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Finished The Fall of the Roman Republic, a selection of Plutarch's Lives, translated by Rex Warner. It's a good series of biographies on some of the more important figures from that time period: Cicero, Casear, Pompey, Crassus, Marius and Sulla. They're occasionally misleading (or flat out inaccurate) but are compelling reads, full of drama and intrigue: his account of Casear's crossing the Rubicon is completely different than Casear's own account, but Plutarch's is far more dramatic. It's also interesting in how people from ancient rome viewed these figures: Plutarch wrote in the first century AD. I'd recommend it, but it's not a great place to start when learning about ancient Rome.
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Jan 21, 2012 18:25
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You should try and get the Modern Library edition of the Parallel Lives seeing as it's one of the few editions that preserves the 'parallel' bit. They're written to be presented in pairs, a Greek matched with a Roman, and told to exaggerate particular virtues (or flaws) of the subjects. Plutarch was a moralist, not a historian, so the result tends to be that some figures (like Pompey) appear multiple times in wildly different lights, depending solely on the rhetorical point he was trying to make at the time. Really not sure why Penguin chose to publish it split up like that.
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Jan 21, 2012 19:44
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Yeah, I've seen the Modern Library one and I'll try and track down it in hardcover someday - I'm not too sure how well a paperback of that size would hold up. For now, buying cheap used Penguins is pretty much my MO. That reminds me: Penguin's edition is just stuffed with notes, which might be helpful to students, but I didn't get anything out of a constant cross-referencing to academic works, sometimes two or three times a page. It also points out how much Plutarch got wrong (everything from years to names to events), too.
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Jan 21, 2012 21:39
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Argh, matey! Argh! Just finished the last of my Santa gifts, Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. This is the grandaddy of all pirate novels, and was still good for all that it was written 90 years ago. I highly, highly recommend this. The language is a little old fashioned, but not tediously so, and it's a rip-roaring story that keeps you turning the pages. I did crack up several times when the author described Captain Blood, because now I know where they got the look for Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. I of course hasten to add that Captain Blood did NOT wear eyeliner. Definitely worth checking out if you've never read it. If it weren't only January, I'd recommend picking it up in celebration of Talk Like A Pirate day.
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Jan 22, 2012 02:59
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Just finished The Forever War. Whoever said it seemed like it would fit right in with Starship Troopers wasn't kidding, but it also reminded me of the Ant War segments of a book simply titled Armor. Now I want to read more books in a similar setting. Sci-Fi war stuff with space travel and ludicrous weaponry.
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Jan 22, 2012 04:18
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Wade Wilson posted:Now I want to read more books in a similar setting. Sci-Fi war stuff with space travel and ludicrous weaponry. I believe I saw a Bulletstorm novel at my local Coles recently, I poo poo you not.
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Jan 22, 2012 05:22
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My re-reading of To Kill A Mockingbird, ten years on. Probably the perfect book. Boy howdy I really embarrassed myself on the train when I got to "Thank you for my children, Arthur" though. And pretty much every other line after that.
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Jan 22, 2012 20:13
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Evfedu posted:My re-reading of To Kill A Mockingbird, ten years on. You know, you've got the PC-police who say the book should be banned for its racist language and then you've got the post-modernists who say that Atticus is not nearly as progressive as he appears and and then you've got the lit snobs who say that the book is too cliched and simplistic. gently caress 'em all. It's still a masterpiece. And so moving. I'd be more embarrassed if I didn't get a little weepy at the end there.
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Jan 22, 2012 21:44
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What about the Faulkner snobs who say that Intruder in the Dust is a more nuanced treatment of the same themes and a very similar plot?  Anyway, I just read The Hunger Games. It was an entertaining but flawed novel. Collins does a good job developing her world through narration. Her clear foreshadowing is a good quality in a YA novel. Little things like the ongoing William Tell theme tie the novel together very well. And Collins makes good use of the voyeuristic 'reality show' premise. On the other hand, Katniss is a dullard and sometimes very difficult to sympathize with. Her focus on food, while appropriate to her character, reminded me too much of GRRM's feasts. The actual Hunger Games drag on a bit. The climax was just awful, although I did like the full bore cliffhanger leading to the second book. And though I have to give her credit for making it mostly work, the first-person present-tense narration gets awkward in many places.
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