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Animal Farm was my latest read--although I have been through it a number of times before. I found myself relating it more to the current political climate of Pakistan and Syria (perhaps Iran as well) rather than the Soviet Union of my youth. The United States and the west becomes Snowball and state sponsored television along with the radical clergy takes the part of Squealer. A note about some earlier readers of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I do not intend to disuade you from your opinion of the book. However, that text is often pointed to as the starting point for postmodern literature and the transparent manipulation of the traditional storyline by authors. I found Billy incapable of making decisions due to the lot in life he had been dealt and the incredible cruelty he was subjected to everywhere. Further, reading the book literally--he was abducted by aliens and lived in a zoo with a supermodel--forced me to glean the emotional content from the work. I felt like the emotion of war is what he was after, if the first chapter is indeed Vonnegut being honest with the reader. I hate to write this, but I didn't realize how horrible throwing a kid into a pool really was until I watched the movie--the book made a lot of the cruelty seem humorous, which I think was one of Vonnegut's gifts.
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Feb 11, 2012 22:58
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Wolpertinger posted:Josh Bazell's Beat The Reaper - Hilariously awesome. It's about an ex-hitman for the mob that's on the witness protection program, and managed to become an intern in a hospital, when one of the terminally ill patients recognizes him from his old life and blackmails him - if he dies, his friend will out him to the Mob. It's like some sort of hilariously demented hybrid of House and the Sopranos/Godfather, including all the bizzare accurate medical trivia facts of House. It's a bit far fetched but so entertaining I easily forgive it for it - a bit of the ending is a ridiculously badass example of this and had me laughing he's locked in a freezer and heavily wounded with some men about to come in and finish him off, with him having no weapon, seriously hurt, and freezing to death, so, thinking that he's probably going to die anyway REMOVES HIS OWN FIBULA (apparently it's a a bone in your leg that does almost nothing at all to support your weight and is almost completely unneeded! Went ahead and queued this up on Audible based on your glowing review.
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Feb 11, 2012 23:28
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) and stabs one of them with it! 
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Footfall by Larry Niven I bought this books years ago from a library book sale, and it has been sitting on my shelf until now. Written and taking place in the early 80's during cold war paranoia, the basic plot involved aliens coming to Earth and attacking. Somewhat like Independence Day. Only the aliens look like baby elephants with two trunks, they can fly hang gliders, and have a giant room on their space ship full of mud to roll around in. They haul a big-rear end asteroid out to Earth and toss it into an ocean to let humans know they mean business. United States eventual attaches a bunch of nuclear bombs under a navy destroyer to launch it up to space, and then fight the aliens head on. The worst part of the book is the number of characters. The beginning of the book literally has four pages of just listing character names with a few word description for each. Then around 30-40 more characters are introduced through out the book. Combine that with about 20 aliens who all have names like Sheyphrub, Phruatleba, and Lurphanuna, it becomes seriously annoying and difficult to get attached to any character. There are a lot of other things I could go on about, but I just didn't like it. This is my first Larry Niven read, but likely my last. I hear Lucifer's Hammer recommended a lot. Should I still read it even if I didn't like this book?
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Feb 11, 2012 23:45
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I finished House of Chains by Steven Erikson the other day. It's the fourth book in the Malazan series. I enjoyed this book and a lot of the story in it was really good. I came like a character I had been waffling on for a while. Granted he had only really made a few appearances over the course of the series, but I ended up coming to like him as a character instead of something cool that just happens.
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Feb 12, 2012 02:31
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Finished rereading few golden oldies: 'Salem's Lot by King. There were so many great scenes in this novel: Danny Glick's father jumping into the grave at his funeral; the school bus driver awakening to the sounds of kids vandalizing his bus and discovering that they're all vampires (predictable, but wonderfully written); Mark freeing himself from bondage and then killing Straker in the escape. King at his small-town best without the bloat of other recent works. Captain Blood by Sabatini. I was smiling ear to ear throughout this whole novel. It's an incredibly fun read that has wit and charm to spare.
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Feb 12, 2012 16:21
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funkybottoms posted:But don't take my word for it... On a more positive note, I read David Benioff's When the Nines Roll Over and thought it was pretty good, and started to re-read City of Thieves (a recent favorite). I've got The 25th Hour queued up next. Easychair Bootson fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Feb 12, 2012 |
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Feb 12, 2012 18:35
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James Shapiro's Contested Will about the "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays" conspiracy theories. Surprisingly engaging read considering I don't care about conspiracy theories or, really, about Shakespeare. I always thought this skepticism was based on the snobby idea that no uneducated hick from rural England could have written such art--an idea that today carries much less weight. But it turns out there are other ideas at play: the rise of the idea that works of high art are autobiographical contrasted with the meager biographical details that were known about Shakespeare sent people looking for other candidates whose lives, they believed, fit the "autobiographical" details in the plays attributed to Shakespeare. For example, the lawyer character in Merchant of Venice had too much verisimilitude for Shakespeare to have written it--it must have been written by someone with training in law. Apparently the concept of research never occurred to these people. Anyway, the whole book was really good, although it never got around to answering my main question: why do these skeptics care so much about who wrote Shakespeare's plays?
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Feb 12, 2012 20:11
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Meclin posted:Animal Farm was my latest read--although I have been through it a number of times before. I found myself relating it more to the current political climate of Pakistan and Syria (perhaps Iran as well) rather than the Soviet Union of my youth. The United States and the west becomes Snowball and state sponsored television along with the radical clergy takes the part of Squealer. I just finished Animal Farm as well, but the country I kept coming back to was North Korea. Everybody's suffering horrendously but by all appearances drinking the state Kool-Aid. It's weird and disturbing how the allegory is still relevant rather than having become a relic of the past.
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Feb 13, 2012 06:50
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I just finished "Ready Player One". It had a few deep flaws but all in all a fun little romp around a fictional future VR internet.
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Feb 13, 2012 08:31
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I just finished reading The Law of Nines by Terry Goodkind. It was good, but I was expecting it to be separate from the Sword of Truth series. Don't want to give out any major spoilers, but the two are closely linked. Also recently finished all 5 volumes of the collected short works of Philip K. Dick. If you've never read any of his stuff, and you like Sci-Fi, I highly recommend it. If you have no idea who he is, I'll give you some titles: Minority Report, Total Recall (We Can Remember it For You Wholesale), Paycheck, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), A Scanner Darkly... arinlome fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Feb 13, 2012 |
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Feb 13, 2012 19:16
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I finally got around to reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and I loved it! Sharp, smart, sexy and dark and some of the descriptions and turns of phrase had me laughing out loud. I definitely need to read the rest of his Marlowe books.
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Feb 13, 2012 23:28
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Just finished John Dies at the End. Wasn't really a book for me, and I kind of had to power through to finish it. Most of the horror portions just kind of seemed random in a dull, nonthreatening way. Don't get me wrong, the guy is imaginative and good at descriptions. Sometimes there are just things like a gorilla riding a giant crab that serve no purpose other than being a gorilla riding a giant crab. Before that, I read the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. Pretty good series. The third book was actually the most fun I've had reading since American Gods a few months ago. Only complaints I have is that two characters who were great in the first book become kind of unbearable in all the other books. All their chapters can be boiled down to "they went on a side-mission somewhat related to the main plot whilst being super-deep in love." I also wasn't a huge fan of the final villains, but what can you do? Those two things aside, a really fun read.
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Feb 14, 2012 16:42
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ES Turner's Roads to Ruin: A Shocking History of Social Progress, a book about people who really hate change. Turner finds ten instances of social reform (mostly 19th century England) and studies the people who opposed the reforms. The author conciously chose reforms that were so minor, or so clearly justifiable, in order to try to shed light on the the kind of people that would oppose these changes. One chapter shows how attempts to outlaw the use of very young boys to clean chimneys were repeatedly thwarted by chimney sweep masters, even after a device was invented that could do the job at no risk to anyone.  There are lighter chapters, like the fight to prevent a law allowing a man to marry his dead wife's sister and the fight against daylight savings time, and heavier ones, like the fight against a law to prevent overloading of ships with cargo. It's a terrific book.
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Feb 14, 2012 17:22
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Greywalker and Poltergeist by Kat Richardson. A female P.I. gets shot, dies for two minutes, and then can see into this ghostly world called the Grey. Pretty good books, interesting writing style, and it goes well with all the Jim Butcher novels I've been reading. Speaking of him, I also finished Ghost Story, the last of the Dresden Files books. Really good, a huge change from his other novels, and it's great to see how Harry changes from the first book until the last. Gonna pick up the second and third novel of the Dresden Files soon and then the next Greywalker novel as well.
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Feb 14, 2012 21:14
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dokmo posted:ES Turner's Roads to Ruin: A Shocking History of Social Progress, a book about people who really hate change. Turner finds ten instances of social reform (mostly 19th century England) and studies the people who opposed the reforms. The author conciously chose reforms that were so minor, or so clearly justifiable, in order to try to shed light on the the kind of people that would oppose these changes. One chapter shows how attempts to outlaw the use of very young boys to clean chimneys were repeatedly thwarted by chimney sweep masters, even after a device was invented that could do the job at no risk to anyone. Arg, that sounds incredibly interesting, but it's apparently so out of print it doesn't even show up on Amazon.
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Feb 14, 2012 22:38
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I don't think you can find it anywhere new, but I found my used copy through amazon for less than five bucks.
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Feb 14, 2012 22:47
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Just finished Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I was reading it for school and had the ending partially spoiled for me during a lecture when I still had 150 pages left, but to the novel's credit it still managed to keep my attention and interest. While I didn' always fully identify with the female religious and orphaned main character, I always liked her and wanted to see more of her journey to find herself and her position in the world. I am fascinated by the book's legacy as a protoypical feminist nove and can definitely see that it argues for a more independent and strong woman than what must have been the norm at time. It's interesting that a seemingly very conservative woman such as Brontë would write what many would have considerd a very progressive novel. So yeah, I liked it a lot. Hansen85 fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Feb 14, 2012 23:28
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dokmo posted:I don't think you can find it anywhere new, but I found my used copy through amazon for less than five bucks. I did some googling, and there's a new printing coming out next month you can get for about 16 bucks. I finished Burton Raffel's translation of Beowulf last night. I thought it was a nice translation that both was clear and easy to get through while still being fairly close to the original (as I understand it, anyway). It was a blast to read, too. I enjoyed it more than the old, public domain one I read a while back.
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Feb 15, 2012 00:03
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I just read the Raw Shark Texts, and last year I read house of leaves. I'm in the mood for more narrator-possibly-isn't-all-there experimental novels. Just the idea of an unreliable narrator appeals to me even if it's completely rear end backwards to go looking to be deceived ahead of time. e: poo poo, yeah, narrator Krinkle fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Feb 15, 2012 |
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Feb 15, 2012 01:20
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Krinkle posted:I just read the Raw Shark Texts, and last year I read house of leaves. I'm in the mood for more author-possibly-isn't-all-there experimental novels. Just the idea of an unreliable narrator appeals to me even if it's completely rear end backwards to go looking to be deceived ahead of time. Do you mean the author or the narrator or the implied author? The classic example of an unreliable narrator is in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The book is still pretty awesome, once you get used to Henry James's insanely hypotactic sentences. EDIT: Oh yeah, Maupassant's "The Horla" is also really good for this, though it's a short story. DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Feb 15, 2012 |
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Feb 15, 2012 01:30
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I just finished Perspective by Pete Howells, his first book. A very interesting little story about a young guy from somewhere up north in the UK, how he ended up in prison and how he seemingly finds rehabilitation through learning to read and write. The author has apparently worked with young offenders for some while and it seems to show, the protagonist does some messed up poo poo but the story manages to keep him sympathetic without glorifying his actions. It's a really good read, looking at the struggles within the UK's youth correctional facilities and day-to-day life of them 'oop north. There's a reading of the first chapter here. He's got another book coming out soon, Disentangled, which I'll be keeping an eye out for.
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Feb 15, 2012 13:19
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about the Raw Shark Texts: one thing I don't get is the book is about a man who is disassociative, the idea is he's been shattered by this event and left with fragments of his life, and the story is fragmented also. There are 32 chapters, and 32 lost fragments (called negatives: Photographs and negatives play into the main story), so half the book is out there somewhere hidden on the web. What I don't get is after five years the official forums has a lead on like two. There's an extra chapter translated from the hebrew version, and an extra chapter translated from the portuguese edition. 80% of the negative chapters are "I have no idea" and the rest are "I heard it was this but who knows". One of them the author admits to leaving under a park bench in england and if nobody published it for him then OH WELL. House of leaves had a lot of extra interpretations and codes and things that you could get online and it really helped my appreciation of the book. Raw Shark Texts came out five years ago and has huge question marks over half the story? It feels really frustrating. I feel if they can't figure it out by now, they never will?
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Feb 15, 2012 19:42
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I just finished Death and the Maiden, and even though I can't say I know much about the past or present government of Chile it still really got to me.
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Feb 15, 2012 23:17
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A few moments ago I finished the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I liked this one more than I did A Study in Scarlet. It had more of an adventure feel because of the background taking place in India, and the mystery seemed a bit more taxing on Holmes this time around. This is only the second Holmes novel I have read, and am looking forward to the others and the novellas. However, the next book on the docket is the next Malazan book.
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Feb 16, 2012 04:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Arg, that sounds incredibly interesting, but it's apparently so out of print it doesn't even show up on Amazon. Not familiar with Abe?
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Feb 16, 2012 04:17
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I just finished Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi. I've seen Goodfellas a few times, so I feared it might be boring to read the true crime version of a story I already knew, but I found the book to be compulsively readable.
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Feb 16, 2012 05:17
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I just finished reading Lolita last night, and Snow Crash the day before. Vladimir Nabokov was a better writer in a foreign-to-him language than most people can even dream of being in their native languages. In the afterword, he wrote "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abondon my natural idom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those appartuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illustrationist, frac-tails flying, can magically use too transcend the heritage in his own way." Second-rate! Devoid of implied associations and traditions! This book is a solid wall of implied associations, with traditions woven throughout, though written by an outsider from the perspective of an outsider. What kind of crazy poo poo was he writing in Russian? Also, I was following the Reddit Pedocalypse while reading the latter half of Lolita, and the rationalizations of the narrator were found all over Reddit. It was uncanny. Snow Crash really shows its age in terms of its virtual world, but is really on top of the state of the art for its time, so still has some things right. The only other Stephenson I'd read was the Diamond Age (which I'm reading again)...I'd probably have liked Snow Crash better if I'd read it first. It's harder to tell there what of its goofiness is satire (or satire in the mind of the characters) and what is the author not really knowing what he's doing, where in the Diamond Age it's starkly obvious. I guess I really should read his newer stuff, now that I realize how he was growing as a writer during that time.
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Feb 16, 2012 05:38
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VideoTapir posted:I just finished reading Lolita last night, and Snow Crash the day before. Nabokov owns. I read Pale Fire last month after getting hooked by Lolita, and it's equally good. I found a first edition of his next novel (after PF) Ada at a local used bookstore last week and you can bet that's now queued up. Much of his Russian work was translated into English by either Nabokov himself or his son, so you can at least get a vague glimpse of what he's like in his mother tongue, though I understand he looked at translation as an opportunity for revision. Read Pale Fire, though. It's stunning.
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Feb 16, 2012 06:13
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Johannes Cabal: Necromancer was at times fun, but mostly predictable. I think that Howard wanted the inanity of the setting/subject matter to carry the book as a dark humor novel, but even then it didn't quite deliver. Decent, but not great. Okay, so that's four fictions in a row for me. Gotta do a non-fiction next...
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Feb 16, 2012 16:45
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Religion for Atheists: Alain de Botton A bitter disappointment. Unlike what was arguably the author's magnum opus The Consolations of Philosophy the author's insight was less revelatory and more painfully obvious to the layman. Boton kept with his usual pop philosophical theme well enough but about 20 pages into the book it became painfully obvious to me that the author was just writing a horrible excuse to jump on the pre-eminent atheist bandwagon rather than assembling genuinely sincere and interesting thoughts on the subject, as he usually does. Overall a disappointing read - not horrible, but not what i have come to expect from the author. Valk fucked around with this message at 05:45 on May 9, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2012 08:44
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Just finished Caves of Steel by isaac asimov. I got exactly what I hoped, a buddy cop detective novel where one of them is a robot and the other doesn't like robots! Oh man the capers they get up to. It was great. I also read I, Robot last week.. the real one, not the one with will smith on the cover. I'm going to stick with Asimov for a while since I'm enjoying these.
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Feb 17, 2012 08:51
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Krinkle posted:Just finished Caves of Steel by isaac asimov. I got exactly what I hoped, a buddy cop detective novel where one of them is a robot and the other doesn't like robots! Oh man the capers they get up to. It was great. I also read I, Robot last week.. the real one, not the one with will smith on the cover. I'm going to stick with Asimov for a while since I'm enjoying these. Read the other two Robot novels. Then read Foundation. Also, I loved his editorials in his science fiction magazine.
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Feb 17, 2012 08:59
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thanks! I had no idea all his novels were in a series. It looks like the naked sun is next?
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Feb 17, 2012 09:07
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Krinkle posted:thanks! I had no idea all his novels were in a series. It looks like the naked sun is next? The Naked Sun then The Robots of Dawn, yes. Foundation is a separate series that gets tied in to the Robot novels at the end
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Feb 17, 2012 09:20
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I'm currently reading The Gods Themselves by Asimov, and it's one of the non-robot stories he wrote. It's interesting because the first part so far was something of a chemistry science fiction story, but now it's currently following a species of lifeforms different from anything that exists in our universe. Such as a three gendered species.
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Feb 17, 2012 15:37
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IUG posted:I'm currently reading The Gods Themselves by Asimov, and it's one of the non-robot stories he wrote. It's interesting because the first part so far was something of a chemistry science fiction story, but now it's currently following a species of lifeforms different from anything that exists in our universe. Such as a three gendered species. What makes you think species with three genders don't exist in our universe? Buddy there are plenty of multigendered species on this planet.
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Feb 17, 2012 23:13
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Hedrigall posted:What makes you think species with three genders don't exist in our universe? Buddy there are plenty of multigendered species on this planet. The universe they are in have a different set of physics. I don't know if you're trying to start up some kind of political debate in this thread or something, but they are really unique from anything in this universe because it's established early in the book it's an alternate universe where matter behaves differently. Also, they're really robots anyways, as I just found out in the book. I haven't finished the book, so unless there's a surprise twist, I don't want to know it now until I read it myself from the author. I just brought it up because Asimov was the topic.
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Feb 18, 2012 00:07
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I think he is objecting to this statement.IUG posted:...following a species of lifeforms different from anything that exists in our universe. Such as a three gendered species. He is simply drawing attention to the fact that there are species on Earth with sexual polymorphism, more than two sexes. There are lifeforms like that on our own planet, let alone our universe. How could that start up some kind of political debate?
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Feb 18, 2012 00:23
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MrGreenShirt posted:I think he is objecting to this statement. Alright, well there were other things about them that made them unlike life on our planet. Like the fact that they phased through stuff, are mostly transparent, eat from the sun, may be robots, made of matter that can't exist in our universe, etc. Gender or sexes was just one of the things that made them different. I don't know if I didn't mean political or not, but just the whole born a man/woman/transgender thing, considering the main character of there doesn't identify with their gender with their sex in a way. I was just bringing up Asimov's creative ideas with these characters.
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Feb 18, 2012 00:29
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I figured I would finally read the Harry Potter series. Just finished the first one. It was pretty enjoyable. The movie follows it quite closely. I don't really feel like reading Chamber Of Secrets, but I have to get through it to get to the 'darker', more interesting ones.
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Feb 18, 2012 11:33
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