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Hamiltonian Bicycle posted:Does House of Leaves have a reputation for being difficult? I don't think it is, it's a pretty light read despite the gimmicks. A quick Google search shows that goons' opinions on the book were mostly one long frustrated scream, but that's usually the case with goons anyway. The prose does come off as something better "felt" than read - Truant's interminable compound/complex sentences and Zampano's reams of footnotes don't really contribute much if you scour them in fine detail, but I find (found; just finished it) if you sort of skim the page and try to take up the base idea of those huge passages, then it gets the intended feeling across just fine. That's most obvious during that passage where Zampano is simultaneously talking about the labyrinth, the things the labyrinth doesn't contain, the buildings it doesn't resemble, and the people who couldn't have built it all at once - the single thread of coherent thought in all those footnotes creates this sort of oppressive babble that's worthless if read word-for-word but is great for tone. The book won't be cracking my "best of" lists or anything, but I appreciated and enjoyed what it did. Now to never ever read any scholarly or literary interpretations of what it meant, especially Danielewski's.
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Dec 30, 2012 21:47
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SilkyP posted:I looked around a bit but couldn't find anything that looked too interesting. Past few days though were pretty good I just started "Under the Dome" by Steven King and it was only 2 bucks. Pretty good so far. For anyone who read it already, does King do a decent job ending it or does it fall flat? Eh, it's decent, but the ending is the typical "Out of my rear end!" King ending. Still, for 2 bucks it's not bad.
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Dec 31, 2012 00:20
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Just picked up the Assassin's Creed books, more out of interest than anything else, never played the games but it looks like it could be an epic series.
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Dec 31, 2012 00:35
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HandClap posted:I just started Billy Budd. I'm only a few chapters in but it seems like every sentance carries far more weight than Moby-Dick. A coworker friend of mine wrote his 200 page masters thesis on this 100 page book. Given presumption and my fist impression, even though it's only 1/6th the size of MD, I think it may take me just as long to read this as it took to finish MD to get any sort of understanding... Is it a novel? I read Billy Budd in 9th grade drama but it was in the form of a play. I always thought that was its original form but I guess it might have been an adaptation.
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Dec 31, 2012 02:55
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I've become addicted to Agatha Christie ever since I read And There Were None. As such, I've got a huge queue of Poirot books to get through. The one I just started is Cat Among the Pigeons. It's one of her later novels (written in 1960!) and takes place in an all-girls school called Meadowbank that apparently has some connection to a revolution in the Persian Gulf. Something about priceless jewels being smuggled in a naive schoolgirl's luggage or something. Upon looking at the Wikipedia page for it, I was astounded to see the unexpectedly large cast of characters. It gets kind of hard to tell apart the Blakes and the Rowans and the Chadwicks and the Vansittarts. And Poirot doesn't even come in until halfway through the book apparently! But despite that, I'm enjoying it so far. Christie was simply incapable of writing anything that was bereft of intrigue.
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Jan 1, 2013 05:44
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Just started in on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Been big into fantasy for ages and had these recommended to me. I can't say I'm disappointed so far. Just finished the third book.
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Jan 1, 2013 10:38
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Just started Warren Ellis' Gun Machine. I'm about 100 pages in and so far I like it better than Crooked Little Vein which I think kinda accentuated some of the worse parts of his writing, this is a bit more toned down.
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Jan 2, 2013 01:04
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Reading a three-in-one police novel featuring the one-eyed detective Belascoarán, written by Paco Ignacio Taibo. It's alright, but I'm struggling with some of the Mexican regionalisms. The dialogues in particular are sometimes a bit unclear for this reason.King Christmas posted:The one I just started is Cat Among the Pigeons. It's one of her later novels (written in 1960!) and takes place in an all-girls school called Meadowbank that apparently has some connection to a revolution in the Persian Gulf. I usually enjoy Christie, but for some reason I didn't really like that one. Maybe it's because, as you said, it takes so long for Poirot to actually show up, but I couldn't get into it.
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Jan 2, 2013 01:27
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Just ordered Watership Down on audiobook 
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Jan 3, 2013 01:44
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Dacap posted:Just started Warren Ellis' Gun Machine. I'm about 100 pages in and so far I like it better than Crooked Little Vein which I think kinda accentuated some of the worse parts of his writing, this is a bit more toned down. Let me guess, the main protagonist is an unconventional old guy, divorced but with a heart of gold under all those layers of alcohol abuse and swearwords. At some point he picks up a girl in her early 20s who falls in love with him and totally loves sex. I mean that's been the entirety of Ellis's characters up to this point, so please don't let me down.
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Jan 3, 2013 08:20
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How the hell did you guys get past the introduction to House of Leaves? I just recently started the unabridged Les Miserables.
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Jan 5, 2013 23:49
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juliuspringle posted:How the hell did you guys get past the introduction to House of Leaves? I just recently started the unabridged Les Miserables. you really just gotta roll with it. House of Leaves is bewildering at first, but you gradually adapt to the tricks and stuff; the disorientation is partially the point of the novel...my take on it was that it's all a postmodern commentary on the limits of texts and interpretation. It very, very, very, *very* finely walks the line between awesome brainy meta-meta-commentary and pseudo-academic, style-over-substance stuff. Push on, man - it's a tremendous book (even though Danielewski's other stuff is pretty middling). I just started Peter Nadas' Parallel Stories - I just finished the Savage Detectives, so I've been in the mood for really epic projects. It's good so far; even though the prose is a little dense sometimes and I have yet to pick up on any real connections between anything 100 pages in, it's oddly compelling. I find myself staying in nights to read it, even.
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Jan 6, 2013 02:15
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I just started reading We Need to Talk About Kevin, which sounded like an interesting concept (the story of the parents of a school shooter, and how their relationship falls apart), but the way it's written is turning me off. It's supposed to be the mother writing letters to her husband, but the way she 'writes' seems so far from how a real person would write, it's keeping me from being immersed in the story. Going to try to push through more of it and see if it hooks me though.
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Jan 6, 2013 21:09
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I just started Stone of Tymora by R.A. & Geno Salvatore. So far, I think Geno did most of the writing and Robert slapped his name on the book so that people would buy it. Most of the book is about a 12 year old kid who is a whiny bitch and wont listen to anyone around him even though he doesn't know poo poo. Pretty turned off so far but I'm going to power through the rest of the book.
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Jan 7, 2013 16:43
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ravenkult posted:Let me guess, the main protagonist is an unconventional old guy, divorced but with a heart of gold under all those layers of alcohol abuse and swearwords. At some point he picks up a girl in her early 20s who falls in love with him and totally loves sex. He breaks the pattern here, and the characters are genuinely likeable. He's done a better job of giving them more realistic motives for their personality traits, and although they are still caricatures, I thought even minor characters felt three-dimensional. (His promotion-driven lieutenant has beautiful bespoke suits she gets from her tailor father at cost, but the protagonist knows to avoid her when she's wearing a new one because the process of getting it involves being berated for disappointing the family and she'll be in a poo poo mood that day.)
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Jan 8, 2013 16:34
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Only partway through some of the books I started in December, but as I've been finding them slow-moving, I've begun some other books for the new year. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman - Pretty good so far, I need to read more classic SF (pre-1980 SF I've read: Ringworld, Rama, Dune, Brave New World) and I've heard tons of good stuff about this one so I figured I'd start here. It's been quite interesting although the portrayal of gay characters has been slightly weird  The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron - I wanted some nice, nasty horror and the first few stories of this collection have fit the bill. Looking forward to the rest. Un Lun Dun by China Miéville - One of the few books by Miéville (my favourite author) that I've only read once so far. I can't remember much about it so it'll be cool to rediscover. At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson - I like weird, well-written SF/F short stories. Everything I've read by her online or in periodicals has been great, and this book is chock full of more awesome-sounding stories.
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Jan 9, 2013 11:51
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Just started Midnight's Children. This is my first experience with Rushdie, and I'm not sure if I'm 100% on board. It's definitely a more difficult read than I'm used to (still better than Faulkner, though), and I don't know that I fully understand everything that's going on, yet I'm oddly compelled to continue reading even when I do feel exhausted from it. 10% of the way through, I remain cautiously optimistic.
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Jan 10, 2013 17:45
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Hedrigall posted:The Forever War by Joe Haldeman - Pretty good so far, I need to read more classic SF (pre-1980 SF I've read: Ringworld, Rama, Dune, Brave New World) and I've heard tons of good stuff about this one so I figured I'd start here. It's been quite interesting although the portrayal of gay characters has been slightly weird My take is that, since the whole book is a Vietnam allegory, the changes he encounters have less to do with predicting the future and more to do with the disconnected feeling one has after returning from the nightmare of war to find how little it has to do with the lives of those you are ostensibly protecting. My non-SF-reading friend felt the same way as you and thought my explanation made sense, but obviously your mileage may vary.
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Jan 10, 2013 17:55
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Just bought the SF short story collection Space Magic by David Levine. Have been dying to get this for a while but it's previously only been available in paperback, and too expensive. Now it's only $5.99 for Kindle. Has the excellent "I Hold My Father's Paws" as well as a bunch of other ones, some having won Hugo/other awards. Going to get stuck into this after I finish the Kij Johnson and Laird Barron collections I'm reading. I think this year I'll read quite a lot of single-author collections.
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Jan 16, 2013 12:47
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PT6A posted:Just started Midnight's Children. This is my first experience with Rushdie, and I'm not sure if I'm 100% on board. It's definitely a more difficult read than I'm used to (still better than Faulkner, though), and I don't know that I fully understand everything that's going on, yet I'm oddly compelled to continue reading even when I do feel exhausted from it. 10% of the way through, I remain cautiously optimistic. If you feel like you are getitng stuck, check out his Shalimar the Clown instead. It was amazing and I felt it was a much "easier" (though not easy!) read than his other books. On topic, started Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation last night, which is quirky and entertaining as expected. Nothing fantastic, but a quick and enjoyable read (halfway through it already). edit: have to say that by now it is painful getting through it, seems like every other page has some anti Bush rant on it, for gently caress's sake get an editor... Clayton Bigsby fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 23, 2013 |
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Jan 16, 2013 21:34
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So I just started reading The Black Company by Glen Cook. It's pretty fast paced and brutal which is definitely keeping me interested. If I lie the book there are a bunch of others in the series.
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Jan 23, 2013 04:49
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Finally got my copy of Runes of the Earth by Stephen Donaldson from Amazon, (finally decided to buy it online after not finding it at local bookstores, and due to my sister getting me both Fatal Revenant and Against All Things Ending for Christmas, which I didn't want to skip a book to be able to read) and it seems pretty good so far! Definitely liking the returning races from the First Chronicles, like the Ramen and the ur-viles (well, they WERE in the Second Chronicles, but they didn't feature much in it directly, and you assume they got killed off by Foul for going against him. Also, after finishing the second chronicles for it a while back, I'm not really sure why the user  a kitten (Sorry, just thought I'd use the sirens to grab his attention, if he's still posting in this thread) stopped after the second chronicles/trilogy. Since well, Covenant does kind of make it clear to Linden+the reader that it's most certainly not over yet; that Foul's just depleted his power on trying to destroy Covenant, and that he will be back again. Plus the third chronicles does seem to be worth reading, if you enjoyed the second chronicles - I'll try to remember to post my impressions of it in the 'What did you just finish?' thread when I'm done with it, I guess.
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Jan 23, 2013 23:34
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Picked up a couple books at the local thrift store today: H.D.F. Kitto's The Greeks, a collection of poetry called The Seagull Reader and a big anthology of Pablo Neruda's poetry. I'm looking forward to Neruda's, he's someone that keeps coming up in my recommendations.
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Jan 25, 2013 20:43
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Major Isoor posted:
The sirens worked. Especially since on the off chance I think about namesearching myself I just end up in PYF or in the catte thread in YOSPOS. The main reason I haven't read the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covanent is because I read the first 6 books back around 1990 or so, and they didn't come out 'til 14 years later and I just kind of moved on in my reading interests since then. Maybe I'll give them a look though, at least once I plow through the stacks of books that I got over the holidays. e: that was a whole different thread anyway! a kitten fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Jan 27, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 20:05
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Clayton Bigsby posted:If you feel like you are getitng stuck, check out his Shalimar the Clown instead. It was amazing and I felt it was a much "easier" (though not easy!) read than his other books. I'm not exactly reading it quickly, but I don't feel like I'm getting stuck, and I do think it's an excellent read even if it's rather difficult at points. Still better (and so far more rewarding, at least in my personal opinion) than reading Faulkner.
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Jan 27, 2013 02:32
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a kitten posted:The sirens worked. Especially since on the off chance I think about nameserching myself I just end up in PYF or in the catte thread in YOSPOS. Ah, well that's fair enough then. But yeah, if you ever do have a shortage of books to read, I'd definitely suggest giving the Last Chronicles a go - I'm maybe halfway through Runes of the Earth now, and it's certainly a good read; so I'd say if you enjoyed the first two chronicles, it likely won't be a bad move! (and it's good to see that my sirens weren't in vain!  )
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Jan 27, 2013 03:04
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Currently reading Wilt by Tom Sharpe. It's... an eye opener for me. It's not the sort of thing I normally go in for and the front cover makes it embarrassing to read in public, but I'm enjoying it all the same.
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Jan 31, 2013 01:36
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I just bought The Darkness That Comes Before based on what I read on TV Tropes and what people were saying on this very forum. Haven't started yet, but if I don't like the book (as people have suggested might happen), I plan to just cut my losses and buy Ellis' Gun Machine.
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Feb 1, 2013 12:12
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I just started The 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers. After that I am going to finish my Princess Diana biography that I started while stuck in Vegas.
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Feb 2, 2013 00:04
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squeee posted:I just started The 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers. After that I am going to finish my Princess Diana biography that I started while stuck in Vegas. I've wondered for a while how well Moers' books translate. He has a pretty idiosyncratic tone in German.
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Feb 2, 2013 01:02
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Just started reading Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie. I've been watching heaps of Poirot on the telly and it is absolutely amazing, so I decided to try reading one of the books.
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Feb 2, 2013 11:32
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I have The White Luck Warrior by Bakker sitting over there on the counter, but I can't drag myself through the last 150 pages of The Judging Eye to begin it. loving ruin my favorite series more, Bakker. Sitting next to it is The Lies of Locke Lamora, of which I have seen way too many people have spontaneous bookgasms over, so I suppose I'd better read that soon, too. Oxybeles fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Feb 3, 2013 |
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Feb 3, 2013 04:09
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Just got Richard Doetsch's Half Past Dawn. I'd read his 13th Hour and liked it well enough. It was an interesting take on the time travel genre.
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Feb 3, 2013 04:20
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Started Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan tonight. It's written by a New York Post journalist, about her brief foray into mental illness. I'm already 40% into it (~100 pages)- which is absurdly fast for an ashamedly slow reader such as myself. I think it's because it satisfies my morbid curiosity/rubbernecking impulse. Not to mention the whole "I'm mentally ill and everything but man, I'm not this bad" feeling.
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Feb 3, 2013 05:45
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I just started a book of Evelyn Waugh's letters, and did you know that he was the most detestable old-school-tie, anti-semitic, classist gently caress out there? Oh you did? Did you know that the Times Literary Supplement when reviewing his first book constantly referred to him as "Miss Waugh"?
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Feb 3, 2013 20:59
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Just started reading Zombie Fallout 2: A Plague Upon Your Family. I read the first book at while ago at the recommendation of a friend and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I enjoy this one I'll probably get the next few in the series, as I understand I'm a couple of books behind.
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Feb 5, 2013 20:07
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Just picked up London Falling by Paul Cornell, who Amazon tells me wrote some Doctor Who scripts, but I'm trying not to hold that against him. Recommended to me as gritty urban fantasy with a police/procedural aspect. After that I have John Talbot and the War in France and Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses as 15th century is one of my favourite periods of history and the reason I wear armour and hit people with a poleaxe.
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Feb 5, 2013 21:17
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Started Alan Furst's The Foreign Correspondent. Furst does one thing -- spies in pre-World War II Europe -- but he does it well, and I've liked the other books of his that I've read.
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Feb 6, 2013 02:30
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Selachian posted:Started Alan Furst's The Foreign Correspondent. Furst does one thing -- spies in pre-World War II Europe -- but he does it well, and I've liked the other books of his that I've read. I should read more Furst, I really enjoyed Dark Star. Reading Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough, the third book in her [b]The Masters of Rome[b] series. Like the previous books in the series, it's a very engrossing read and one I'd recommend to anyone who's a fan of historical fiction. My only problem with it, is the fact that McCullough's hero worship of Julius Caesar at times becomes quite hard to digest.
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Feb 16, 2013 23:34
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Picked up STALKING YOU NOW by Jeff Strand. It's his newest, and it's a whopping 2.99 on kindle, and I can't really remember a lovely book by him except like his FIRST ever book about how to rescue a dead princess. This one has an axe murderer 
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Feb 17, 2013 00:34
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