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Goky posted:I finally got around to reading The Call of Cthulu the other night. The first 90% of it had me feeling pretty paranoid and cosmically insignificant, but the ending sort of ruined it for me. I absolutely agree. I think Cthulhu is a cool figure overall, but I think Lovecraft's best work lies elsewhere. My favorite by Lovecraft is The Colour Out of Space. It's more... ambiguous? I don't really know how to articulate what I like so much about it.
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Jun 21, 2012 02:38
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Just finished Neuromancer by William Gibson. It's a book I constantly hear mentioned in discussions (mainly in terms of how much it influenced something) and I've been meaning to read it for ages. Cracking read and amazing to see just how many films and games I've enjoyed have adapted the ideas.
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Jun 21, 2012 13:42
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Finished Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Only about 150 pages, it's a novel about Einstein when he worked at a patent office dreaming about time and reality. Each chapter tells a story about a different concept of time, and how people in that reality would live. Time that moves circular, time that is non-continuous, a etc. Absolutely well written where the words flow perfectly from sentence to sentence, the stories have a very poetic feel to them.
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Jun 22, 2012 20:38
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Finished The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian. It's been awhile since I last read any books in the Aubrey-Maturin series, so I really enjoyed getting re-acquainted with one of my favorite duos in fiction.
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Jun 22, 2012 23:43
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Just finished Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, winding down my couple week long Vonnegut kick. It was fantastic, as expected. Maybe not as good as Breakfast of Champions, but great none the less.
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Jun 23, 2012 01:11
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Just finished reading Volume Four of W. Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories. Honestly, I just want to travel to Malaya in 1920. I want to go upriver in a prahu and spend a few nights with the local Resident drinking gin pahits and stengahs and settling down to tiffin every day, and frankly, being able to use those words for fairly ordinary things without seeming pretentious. Off to the bookstore next week to find a couple of his novels.
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Jun 23, 2012 13:41
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Last week I finished The Bonehunters which is the 6th book in the Malazan series. The story was a little slow in some parts, but when everything came together in the end, it was one of the best endings in the series that I have read so far. I love all the webs that are being woven by the different entities and how they all interact. Recently, I have been working my way through the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. These are basically little mysteries that only take a few pages, at least on my kindle, but they were originally published in Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1892. I'm reading these to take a little break from Malazan.
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Jun 23, 2012 18:54
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I've recently finished reading the Arabesk Series - Pashazade, Effendi and Felaheen - by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. The alternative history notably the Ottoman Empire being still around in the 21st century and Germany winning WWI and availability of cybertechnology are what made me buy the series. Ashraf, the protagonist, is your run-off-the-mill reluctant hero, augmented with cybertechnology. He finds himself in El Iskandryia at the centre of a murder investigation, which is what the whole series is basically about : intrigues, whodunit and a protagonist that simply doesn't want to get involved. Overall I enjoyed the books but had expected more cyberpunk elements.
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Jun 24, 2012 10:05
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Just finished The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch. I really enjoy historical fiction, but this seemed a little bit far-fetched and soft for my tastes. It's really just a typical pop mystery story set in 17th century Germany. I was very excited because the protagonist is obviously a brutal, anti-heroic figure who could really do a lot to color mid-renaissance Bavaria. I mean living in a 17th century Bavarian town would loving suck. Instead, it's just a slightly different setting for a typical happy-ending, best-selling, book club favorite type mystery serial. I'm not interested in following the series at all. However, it was comfortably well-written and painless to finish. Completely innocuous. 3/5 Meanwhile I'm still pecking away at Gilead by Marilyn Robinson, and my phone lost my place in the audiobook of Lolita, which is very dark and funny, in my opinion, so I put that on hold this week. I also started Thinner by Stephen King, but I can't see myself finishing it.
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Jun 24, 2012 17:12
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I recently finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac and it completely blew me away. The sheer energy contained in the book, centered around the ever-restless Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), is nothing short of magnificent. The prose is beautiful and effortless, and the last half of the book gets downright poetic in its descriptions of desire, sadness and hopelessness.
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Jun 24, 2012 22:06
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HOW COULD YOU posted:Just finished Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, winding down my couple week long Vonnegut kick. It was fantastic, as expected. Maybe not as good as Breakfast of Champions, but great none the less. There's an author I should really read something from. Trying to work through some "things you really should read" stuff in between the other things I've got lined up. Might shove some Vonnegut in there now. Just finished Flim-Flam: The Truth about Unicorns, Parapsychology and Other Delusions by James Randi. Fantastic analysis of the delusions and downright trickery of those claiming psychic abilities.
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Jun 24, 2012 23:15
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The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I've been meaning to pick up this beast for a while and I chugged through a majority of it on some long place rides. Essentially, the story explores a handful of characters from present day and World War II that become linked in a story surrounding cryptanalysis. Through a majority of the book I had no clue how all of the characters were going to be tied together but it was done in an interesting way towards the end. The book includes a lot of random characters like Alan Turing, General MacArther, Ronald Reagan, etc. I've been meaning to see how accurately they were portrayed in the book. Good read.
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Jun 24, 2012 23:32
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Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut - last book he published before he died. I can't say I really cared for this one. It is a really quick read, so much so that I didn't even realize I had about 30 pages until the end, and once I realized that I really struggled to finish it since I knew that the plot had never really gone anywhere and it was just going to be more social commentary vignettes until the very end. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic is a fantastic book. It helps to know at least a little of the history and figures beyond Pompey and Caesar before going in since the author, Tom Holland, skimps on a few other figures (probably notably Marius and Cinna, though those are just two of my favorite figures that happened to stand out). I was pleasantly surprised how much he wrote Cicero in, and get the feeling like he had a secret crush on the guy and wished he could have just gotten a small break in life after his time as consul. A great read if you need something away from fiction for a while.
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Jun 25, 2012 04:42
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tuyop posted:...my phone lost my place in the audiobook of Lolita, which is very dark and funny, in my opinion, so I put that on hold this week. Is it the one read by Jeremy Irons? Because that one owns and all y'all should listen to it.
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Jun 25, 2012 04:49
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I just finished Dune by Frank Herbert. It was the 40th Anniversary edition from Kindle and they have some editing to do. There are problems with spelling & spacing that do not exist in the printed versions scattered from front to end. That said, this was my first re-read of this book in at least 20 years, and my youthful self never realized how many other Authors were influenced by Herbert and included reference to this work in theirs.
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Jun 25, 2012 13:22
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Just finished...
Been cruising through books since summer started. There's probably like 10 more on there that I don't have listed that I've read since May. Best of the bunch was Disgrace, but it's more in the traditional fiction category that you would read in your high school English class.
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Jun 25, 2012 16:24
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TFNC posted:Is it the one read by Jeremy Irons? Because that one owns and all y'all should listen to it. Haha yes! It's a really good production.
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Jun 25, 2012 20:30
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rufius posted:Just finished... I think it has been close to 20 years since I read Salem's Lot or the Mist, but they are some of my favorites from King (the Shining I think is his best). Salem's Lot scared the poo poo out of me when I was in junior high. I kept waiting for one of the Glick boys to be floating outside my window.
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Jun 25, 2012 22:56
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Well, I just managed to finish: 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill Distrust that Particular Flavor by William Gibson A Bad Idea That I'm About to Do by Chris Gethard I am reading either The Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Ubik next. I loved Gibson's essays, the Gethard book was sincere but meh, and I liked Hill's stuff, but only two or three of the stories really shone for me.
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Jun 26, 2012 16:58
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To Rule the Waves (Arthur Herman). The two main things I learned: a) you can knock the Royal Navy about, but they're going to get you in the end and b) if I build a time machine, I'm going wherever Woodrow Wilson is so that I can kick him square in the balls. The book is an overview of British naval activities from the Middle Ages onward. It doesn't get deep into much, which is good if you know as little about the overall happenings as me. The one bit of history I did know was confirmed - Francis Drake had a ship called the Cacafuego. Forget the Dreadnought, Invincible, Excellent or Temeraire. They should have kept naming ships the Cacafuego.
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Jun 26, 2012 20:17
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I just finished Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden. It's a biography of Shin Dong-hyuk, a man who was born and raised inside a North Korean prison camp before escaping the camp and the country. It's impossible not to compare the book to Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, also on North Korea, but dealing with the stories of ordinary people instead of those in political prison camps. Both books are filled with horrors. They're both worth reading, and both are musts for anyone interested in the DPRK. But Nothing to Envy is the better "intro to North Korea." For all that Shin's story is even more horrific than those in Nothing to Envy, it's by necessity a much narrower tale. There's a lot less context of North Korean society, and practically nothing of the regime that does such terrible things. If you're only going to read one, make it Nothing to Envy. But if you're going to read either... prepare to be haunted. This is deeply disturbing stuff.
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Jun 27, 2012 02:29
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I just finished The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn. It's like a murder mystery and chase thriller set in a Star Wars-like setting. Very light on the hard-sf ideas, the focus being on the characters and the mystery. The best character is Ixil, a bipedal iguana-like alien who has a symbiotic/psychic connection with two ferret-like creatures that ride around on his shoulders. He and they are adorable as hell  Here's a cool bit of fan art I found just by searching GIS. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads. No mindblowing SF ideas, just a fun ride with a cool mystery. my review on goodreads posted:A pretty fun and fast-paced murder mystery/space chase thriller.
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Jun 28, 2012 10:20
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I just finished The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven. It was good, and I enjoyed reading more about the Ringworld and the people that live on it and etc. But drat, what is with all the alien sex? By the end there it was pretty much just all alien sex, all the time. I felt like I was reading an R-rated episode of classic Star Trek.
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Jun 28, 2012 18:40
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Slackerish posted:I thought the sequel managed to be even more depressing. It got a lot of hate from well, pretty much everyone, but I thought it was a solid read. But it probably could have been replaced with a "Clay is just as bad as the rest of them!" sticker on a 25th anniversary edition of Less Than Zero.
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Jun 28, 2012 22:21
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Finally got around to reading Stephen King's Lisey's Story, and it just annoyed me. I started getting annoyed with the character's name about page 2, and there was some really grating private slang. In the end it seemed not so much Lisey's story as her husband's anyway. Very repetitive, and not in a way that always served the story (unlike certain other King works). All around disappointing. Fortunately I also got Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and it did not disappoint at all. Hard to say much about it without running into spoiler territory but: Psychological suspense, with lots of twists and lots of humor. Thriller + humor is a hard line to walk, but Flynn managed it.
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Jun 29, 2012 08:43
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I'm just finishing up Contact by CARL SAGAN. Carl Sagan loving owns. He is so cool I love everything about the guy. I've watched all of his Cosmos TV series and interviews on YouTube. It wasn't until I was watching Cosmos that I found out the movie Contact was based on his book. Take one of the smartest guys ever that has published over 600 scientific papers ranging from astrophysics to philosophy, smokes weed, and got bored with making Earth shattering astronomy discoveries and give him a type-writter. He tried his hand at a novel and we got Contact: a true-to-science work of fiction detailing what would happen if we ever did come into Contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence. What makes it so fun to read is, if you've watched his TV show, you can see where he borrows from Cosmos to explain things he's talking about in the book. Even though he uses legitimate scientific principles and laws to describe things like phase correlation, superunification, and Hawking Radiation, you're not left with what you know to be total bullshit fluff invented by the author or a complex technical schematic you need an advanced degree to understand. If you've ever wondered how we might ever visit the nearest star or follow up on contact from another life form, while remaining true to the laws of physics, Contact is the best you can do. lite_sleepr fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jun 29, 2012 |
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Jun 29, 2012 09:41
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Finished two books pretty much at the same time: one was Omensetter's Luck by William H. Gass and the other was Norman Lewis' A Dragon Apparent. The first is the story of a stranger, the eponymous Bracket Omensetter (fantastic names throughout), coming into a dusty Ohio town which is populated entirely by creeps. The setting reminded me strongly of James Purdy, which is great to see. Structurally it's divided into 3 sections, each told from the point of view of a separate towns-member, with the lions share of the book being dominated by priest and king-creep Jethro Furber. The writing is for the most part a stream of consciousness of whomever character, although this is not a hard rule. Lots of proustian rushes and unwanted thoughts breaking in, and throughout it's beautifully readable. Very good book, I should read more of his. The second is a travel-book from 1950 of a Brit wandering around Laos, Cambodia and most importantly Vietnam, where the French are clinging on by their fingertips to their colonies. Lewis' prose communicates his thoughts with extremely well, although I prefer sentences like Gass' which are beautiful in themselves. He skitters around a large area very quickly, the superficiality countered by an astute insight and the occasional subject he's researched (eg on royalty, missionaries and the ruins of Angkor). Emotionally, it's very restrained, with Lewis blithely trusting to his luck to keep him from the tigers and hand-grenades, although his disapproval of colonialism and his fondness for the Laotians especially is affecting. I suppose from that I should roll onto Graham Greene's A Quiet American, but instead I'm half-heartedly reading Kafka's Amerika while wondering where a Samuel Butler I ordered got to. e: "Norman Mailer's A Dragon Apparent" Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Jun 29, 2012 |
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Jun 29, 2012 12:54
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Aziraphale posted:I'm just finishing up Contact by CARL SAGAN. Welp. *orders*
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Jun 29, 2012 13:46
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Aziraphale posted:If you've ever wondered how we might ever visit the nearest star or follow up on contact from another life form, while remaining true to the laws of physics, Contact is the best you can do. It's a bit geeky in parts (I'm thinking especially here of "continental drift man") but I always think of the reviewer who commented that while most "science fiction" was actually cowboys / detectives / etc. "in space", Contact is actually science fiction. It's well worth reading.
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Jun 29, 2012 14:07
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outlier posted:It's a bit geeky in parts (I'm thinking especially here of "continental drift man") but I always think of the reviewer who commented that while most "science fiction" was actually cowboys / detectives / etc. "in space", Contact is actually science fiction. It's well worth reading. Pretty much. It's like anything Heinlein would come up with in terms of factual science based fiction. If you liked The Moon is a Harsh Mistress because of the science involved in maintaining a mining colony on the moon and how a society born into miners on the moon evolves, you should like Contact.
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Jun 29, 2012 14:16
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JUST finished Cloud Atlas, was phenomenal. Really excited for the movie. Finishing books on the kindle is weird man, I blew through the book in like one week, then went on wikipedia to read about it and saw it was 500+ pages long.  With paperback books that would have taken me like, a month. Though it may be because Cloud Atlas was loving impossible to put down.
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Jul 1, 2012 00:17
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Hedrigall posted:I just finished The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn. It's like a murder mystery and chase thriller set in a Star Wars-like setting. Very light on the hard-sf ideas, the focus being on the characters and the mystery. The best character is Ixil, a bipedal iguana-like alien who has a symbiotic/psychic connection with two ferret-like creatures that ride around on his shoulders. He and they are adorable as hell
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Jul 1, 2012 00:20
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Aethersphere posted:I just finished The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven. It was good, and I enjoyed reading more about the Ringworld and the people that live on it and etc. But drat, what is with all the alien sex? By the end there it was pretty much just all alien sex, all the time. I felt like I was reading an R-rated episode of classic Star Trek. Dunno dude, that's why I gave up midway through the second book. I don't think I am a prude or anything, but freaky alien sex for the sake of "Hey, gently caress it, why not and it'll pad my word count" doesn't really sell me on anything. It was weird enough in the first book, but by the second book it just went full retard like some kinda genital based handshake for whatever society deems itself fuckable.
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Jul 1, 2012 05:56
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Dunno dude, that's why I gave up midway through the second book. I don't think I am a prude or anything, but freaky alien sex for the sake of "Hey, gently caress it, why not and it'll pad my word count" doesn't really sell me on anything. I listened to the audiobook version of the first few books. Man those sex scenes were really awkward. Interesting premise but the books did slide down to what kind of aliens can he gently caress.
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Jul 1, 2012 13:07
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I picked up a series of short storiesI found through recommendations from Wool called Rx by author Robert Brockway. Right now there are only two stories, and actually number one ends then number two picks up right where it leaves off, with a planned third composing one "book". They are short, really fun reads. Brockway is a better author than Hugh Hower (of Wool) by leaps and bounds, and the setting and world are great. The tone and attitudes of characters, as well as the world building Brockway does reminds me a lot of cyberpunk, except without the "cyber". Everybody is just a bunch of hosed up drug addicts abusing the hell out of nano technology. Recommended read for any sci-fi fans. E: Oh... and Abraham Lincoln fights a dinosaur.
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Jul 1, 2012 22:41
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I finished The Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. As soon as I finished the book, I knew I would reread it in the near future. The prose is phenomenal, the violence is harrowing and Judge Holden is such a compelling antagonist. It demythologizes the Western genre so thoroughly, I don't think I'll be interested in the genre again. Now to read every bit of analysis I can find.
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Jul 2, 2012 01:35
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I just finished The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I read it for the sole purpose of comparing to the musical. The plot varied in many ways from the musical; the hantom was much more ugly and much more evil. Leroux explained the purpose of keeping your hand at the level of your eye in a satisfactory manner, given that it is a big and unexplained deal in the musical. I would not read again, but that is only due to a personal disinclination for French Literature.
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Jul 2, 2012 03:11
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Here's a buncha books: The Wars by Timothy Findley. Got it because I moved to Canada and hadn't read any literature from that place, plus the cover caught my eye. A young Canadian officer goes to WWI and as usual everything is horrible. Some of the story is told from the officer's perspective and some of it told from the perspective of the reader who is researching the story, at times interviewing people, listening to records, reading diaries and looking at picture books. There are some quite striking parts that reminded me of Vonnegut when he is not trying to be funny. Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan. Collection of essays, most of them about 1970s astronomy and quite frankly too technical to really hold my interest. Not his strongest book. The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. A friend made me read it, I don't normally read fantasy. It's not a complete Fellowship of the Rings ripoff but it comes close. Entertaining enough if you like fantasy but apparently the book spawned a million sequels which is kind of mystifying. Props for having ok female characters. Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway. Elderly American officer in occupied Italy has a love affair with young woman and reminisces about his days as a soldier. Good, but not outstanding compared to some of Hemingway's other books. You can tell he really loves the Veneto and it made me want to go there again as well. Is it a spoiler if I say the book has a Hemingway ending? Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov. For some astounding reason I had never read any of his stuff before. A collection of essays, all dealing with robots in society. Smart, thought provoking. My favourite story is the one where edit: Realized I missed some books: Seeing by Jose Saramago. An entire town decides to hand in blank votes during an election, causing the government to panic and use increasingly drastic methods to bring the citizens back into democratic society. A harsh case against the way democracy works but by no means meant as a realistic what-if. At first I was annoyed by the smug tone but as things got more and more crazy I got pulled in. It is a quasi-sequel to Blindness, involving many of the same characters. It's not necessary to have read the previous book but it will probably increase you enjoyment of it. A dark, dark satire that probably won't make you laugh. Chance and Necessity by Jaques Monod. Philosphical musings on life based on 1970 molecular biology. Some very interesting points and sad to see how much the "debate" on the origins of life has deteriorated in the last decades. married but discreet fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jul 2, 2012 |
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Jul 2, 2012 03:44
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I'm looking forward to reading through the whole thread (ok, maybe not all 200 pages) and adding to my "to read" list. I just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris - a collection of humorous essays about Sedaris' upbringing in North Carolina, mid life in NYC, and his later move to France with his partner. I know this is terribly un-hip of me, but I thought it would be... funnier. I thought it was just ok. I'm currently reading Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore - a darkly comic fiction taking place in 19th century Paris. I'm loving it, and Moore's style, so far. frenchnewwave fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Jul 2, 2012 |
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Jul 2, 2012 15:03
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Yesterday I finished Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't very good either. If the length was doubled, and some things fleshed out more (or at all), I think it could have been really excellent. Instead it's just kind of Stereotypical Pirate Adventures: The Book!
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Jul 2, 2012 18:56
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