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Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I'm a huge Science Fiction reader and also enjoy reading modern Astronomy/Science books. This was my attempt at going back to the roots of scientific writing for me (Sagan was before my time). Cosmos covers such a huge history of science and I'm amazed Sagan was able to fit it all into one flowing discussion. The book covers the beginning of the universe, the first scientific thinkers in recorded human history, an explanation of the Dark Ages where there was very little scientific progress, the Renaissance and rebirth of the Scientific Method, Einstein's theory of relativity, modern space exploration and then looks into the future and ponders how we can travel to the stars. Sagan proposes ship's that could be built now and some theoretical designs. His math and descriptions make it seem so easy. It's really an amazing smear of science and human ingenuity. For those of you familiar with the series Cosmos for television (I have seen a couple of episodes), the book covers essentially the exact same topics but more in depth. Sagan's personality jumps out of the book's pages just like it did in the series. His critique of wasted human energy and science on war instead of space exploration and cooperating together as humans was so moving ... I just felt bad living in a country and not working towards space exploration. Good read.
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Jan 8, 2013 00:02
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I just finished The Lies of Locke Lamora. About to start on the second one. I also finished Monster Hunter Alpha and started the next one the yesterday. I seriously cannot wait until I can start A Memory of Light.
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Jan 8, 2013 02:49
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Ulio posted:Finished The Guns of August and The Time Traveller since December. Based on "the first book with time travel", are you sure you're not talking about the The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895), rather than The Time Traveller (Isaac Asimov, 1990)? (And if so, if you think the future was just "beautiful good people and ugly bad people" you really weren't paying attention.)
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Jan 8, 2013 03:44
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Ulio posted:The Guns of August, on the other hand was brilliant, quite a large book only about the first month of the first world war. I knew nothing about the first world war going in and now I know why the conflict started, European Powers relationship's at the start of the 20th century and much more. None of it's fiction but the people in it are so interesting, to really know a general and his decisions you get some backstory about them, at times I just wikipedia'd them before a battle would happen hoping they didn't die there. Also since the story is told from both sides, it's unnerving with the lack of proper communication in those years, one report would claim a city has been taken, the other would say no attacks have been had. It's amazing how one communication error or General's hatred for another would turn tides and result in entire battles lost. Amazing book, this really made me want to read a bunch on that era. One complaint I had is that the battle that the book is building upto is just summarized. Felt really rushed that. I was despondent when I finished The Guns of August because I wanted her to keep telling the story of those people. What a great book. Tuchman's biography of General Stillwell is also a masterpiece of sympathy and frustration. He's a really dynamic personality you never hear about, because he volunteered for one of the messiest, least glamorous theaters in World War II, but his story is amazing.
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Jan 8, 2013 06:33
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Just finished Roadside Picnic by The Brothers Strugatsky (aka, the Strugatsky brothers... hurr), and wow. It's like the perfect mix of eerie, vague, mysterious, and just plain cool. This one is gonna stick with me for quite a while...
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Jan 8, 2013 15:27
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The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. A light fantasy read with well-written fight scenes.
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Jan 8, 2013 17:19
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ToxicFrog posted:Based on "the first book with time travel", are you sure you're not talking about the The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895), rather than The Time Traveller (Isaac Asimov, 1990)? Yes sorry, I meant the Time Machine, I had the Time Traveller because of the character name. I know there was a bit of social evolution context thrown in there but it was pretty shallow. Randallteal posted:I was despondent when I finished The Guns of August because I wanted her to keep telling the story of those people. What a great book. Yes in some cases I looked up what happened to them, I was mostly disappointed with the Battle of Marne basically being a one page bullshit summary when everything going in was built up to that moment. That recommendation sounds cool, I will check it out.
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Jan 9, 2013 00:00
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I reread The Passage (came out a few years ago) and just finished its new sequel The Twelve, by Justin Cronin. You ever have a book that, based on the subject, you want to enjoy, but in the end just can't? Or a book whose story you could like, if only the minor particulars of it (like, say, the characters) weren't so lovely? The Passage starts out in the present-day United States. The government, in its attempts to create an undying supersoldier (when aren't they doing that?), accidentally unleashes a race of beings that are all but immortal and nearly impossible to kill. It doesn't help that their test subjects were all prisoners on death row - not the best stock. But the bad guys - the virals, as they're called - are great, really neat stuff. Bulletproof, glow in the dark, with super-speed and strength but deathly allergic to sunlight. I've heard it described as a vampire novel, but it's more a cross between vampires and zombies, since for the most part the virals are mindless things who do nothing but hunt and eat. Problem one is that just when you've gotten to know the characters, 200 pages in he changes things and skips ahead by 100 years. Interesting idea, but after the great beginning it's hard to care about these new guys. It gets into some good end-of-the-world thinking, like how to generate and store electricity (gotta keep those UV lights burning somehow) in a world where you don't have the technology to fix decaying batteries. For what it's worth I enjoyed The Passage more the second time I read it, I'll give it a solid "I recommend it." The Twelve is just the sequel to The Passage, and there's a third novel (in what's supposed to be a trilogy) due in a few years. Like I was saying in the beginning, I really want to like these, because I think it's a great idea and the virals are very well done and scary, but in the end the characters in The Twelve are so wooden and cartoonishly evil that it hurts the brain. Oh, and you know how some movie sequels can't afford to have an actor from the original come back, so they write into the story that that character died? He does that poo poo here, too, it's weird; I think someone reminded him he had like 12 supporting characters at at the end of The Passage and it was time to trim the fat. For The Twelve I'll say "I halfheartedly recommend it, because you've already read The Passage, but don't say I didn't warn you." jackpot fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jan 9, 2013 |
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Jan 9, 2013 19:42
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Zola posted:In my quest to read more of the classics, I just finished Charlotte Bronte's Villette this morning. It took me a while, this is no light read! I understand why Jane Eyre is better known, Jane Eyre is far more palatable a read, this one requires a lot more attention and some rudimentary French or willingness to hit an online translator repeatedly. Yeah, I listened to the book and it was enjoyable, but I definitely got tired of the constant french phrases/sentences that I couldn't understand. At least the reader had a convincing accent. Lots of untranslated bits (why is it always French?) is one of my pet peeves. More common in Victorian texts.
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Jan 9, 2013 19:47
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I just finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and I'm all bummed out to discover the drama surrounding the author: that Stieg Larrson's Dragon Tattoo books got published posthumously, that he died of a heart attack when the elevator was out and he had to take the stairs unexpectedly, that he planned ten books and was halfway through the 4th when he died. And that there is still, eight years later, a legal dispute between his girlfriend of 30+ years and his brother and father preventing her from finishing it and releasing it. Read a whole bunch of stuff about the Swedish legal system and his anti-racist newspaper and how getting legally married would have given his address to the public and made him a target to Nazis so he never did it but now he's dead and his really-kind-of-obviously wife got dicked over out of the rights to his work because his family are being bastards. Man. For so many books about how hosed the Swedish legal system is it's either ironic or poetic that his estate is all hosed up because of it and I can't decide which. Anyway I read all three books in the past two weeks, loved them, wondered what took me so long, and started grieving for the author.
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Jan 9, 2013 22:20
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Krinkle posted:I just finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and I'm all bummed out to discover the drama surrounding the author  " kind of moment, especially when you realize the story's not over, that it wasn't supposed to be a trilogy.
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Jan 10, 2013 00:07
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I just finished Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. I read William Gibson's Neruomancer a while back and wasn't really impressed. It kind of turned me off to the cyberpunk genre. I picked this up on a whim and just finished tonight. I liked William's prose and character development a lot. Sometimes he gets a little wordy but I really got a feel for the world and sense of bleakness.
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Jan 10, 2013 02:20
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I just picked up Room by Emma Donoghue after recalling seeing it mentioned here in this thread some time back. My reaction is best summed up by an emoticon:  After I finished the book, I looked up the real-life case that directly inspired the book... and upon seeing that real life was even more horrific than the book, I felt like curling up into a little ball. From a purely literary-critique point of view, the book does drag at times, especially in the second half, and it overstays its welcome a little. But overall the story is such a source of that I know I'll remember the story of Jack and his Ma forever. It's the most haunting book I've read in years.
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Jan 10, 2013 04:44
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RebBrownies posted:The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. A light fantasy read with well-written fight scenes. I just recently finished this series. It was really light, but I loved most of the realism. The flaws of each character just made them so much fun to read about, even with the D&D feel to the book. Are you looking to finish the series? The next few books are really powerful.
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Jan 10, 2013 05:11
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jackpot posted:stuff about the 2/3 of The Passage trilogy I really enjoyed The Passage for what it was. I wanted a big-budget action flick of a book but with half-decent writing (see: Cronin's various accolades prior to writing this trilogy) and that's exactly what I got. I cut my teeth on Stephen King in my youth, and this is essentially "The Stand, with mutant vampires." I, too, would recommend it. I finally got a Kindle this year and The Twelve was the first thing I bought for it. I couldn't wait to read it. And I would say that the first, say, 50-60% of it was great. Perhaps better than The Passage. But then -- and I can't really put my finger on it -- it just got to be a chore. I swear it's as if Cronin himself got sick of writing it. The prose became dry, stiff. The characters were caricatures of caricatures. And he threw in some ultraviolence to distract the reader from how trite the plot was becoming. (I will say that the insurgency was kind of cool). And your point about bringing back previous characters or explaining away that they're dead is the biggest point of all. By the end of it, I was so loving confused. Spoilery: Wasn't Wolgast dead? How in the hell did he come back as a viral? And, gently caress you Cronin for referring to Babcock all throughout The Passage as "Zero" then setting up previously-basically-unknown doctor character as "The Zero" for the big bad in the final book. Jesus Christ the entire ending was so hamfisted and fuckkkkkk Now I'm reading Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill and it is wonderful as an antidote. Straight-forward linear plot, and the first book to remotely scare me since Clive Barker's The Books of Blood
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Jan 10, 2013 13:54
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epoch. posted:Spoilery: epoch. posted:The characters were caricatures of caricatures. "Rapist Nazis!"
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Jan 10, 2013 19:32
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I'm sure this is common knowledge to most people, but I got an ipad for Christmas and have discovered a wonderful thing: my local library has a shitload of ebooks available for free through Amazon, either on the Kindle, or the Kindle app on the ipad/iphone. I paid $13 for The Twelve in itunes, only to find out the next day that the library had five digital copies available. Definitely something worth checking out. So to speak.
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Jan 10, 2013 19:37
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jackpot posted:Yeah, I think I made it most of the way through the third book before I found out he was dead; that's such a "goddamnit I read these in English and later in Swedish, and the translation at least in the editions I read was horrendous; did you find a lot of non-sequiturs in them? I could luckily translate them back to Swedish in my head and make sense out of them but I imagine that to a native English speaker some parts would make no sense whatsoever.
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Jan 10, 2013 23:02
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So I finished The Stone of Tymora by R.A. and Geno Salvatore. Like I said in my post in the "I just started reading" thread, it is my belief that Geno wrote this book and Robert stuck his name on it so that people would buy his son's books. The story is pretty much about a bitchy teenage boy who doesn't listen to anyone no matter how much of a lovely situation he throws himself into. No spoilers but I would skip this book unless you're a die hard R.A. Salvatore fan (like myself)and just want to check a box.
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Jan 10, 2013 23:40
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I finished Ready Player One earlier today. It's not the worst book I've ever read but the best way I can describe is just by calling it Reddit: The Book. I have no idea how this book received as much praise as it did. Between the random two page rant about how stupid religion is, random pop culture references that seemed to have no real function and the self-diagnosed aspergers stuff, the book read like something I'd expect to read in a freshman creative writing class.
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Jan 11, 2013 00:54
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The Last Policeman by Ben Winters. Giant rear end rock about to drop out of space and kill the entire human race. People are leaving their jobs, taking up religion. A two month prison bit becomes huge with only six months to go. New Orleans drops off the grid and becomes a giant pile of sexual pilgrims turning the last days into Eyes Wide Shut. And one cop is convinced a suicide is actually murder. So he decides to investigate against the current of "why bother?" Hell of a premise. Mostly lives up to it. Recommended.
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Jan 11, 2013 02:03
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Finished Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff today. It's a fun look at the seven test pilots who became the first astronauts, the test pilot culture they came from and America's first moves in the space program. I enjoyed it a lot, although it's a little different than the movie.
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Jan 11, 2013 02:30
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Boondock Saint posted:I finished Ready Player One earlier today. It's not the worst book I've ever read but the best way I can describe is just by calling it Reddit: The Book. I have no idea how this book received as much praise as it did. Between the random two page rant about how stupid religion is, random pop culture references that seemed to have no real function and the self-diagnosed aspergers stuff, the book read like something I'd expect to read in a freshman creative writing class. I'm about halfway through this and I just can't bring myself to finish it. It's like this bizarre mishmash of the author's fascination with Second Life and WoW and a wikipedia vomit of every 80s video game, movie and tv reference possible. It just reads like James Halliday is the author's Mary Sue if all of his nostalgic personal interests suddenly became the defacto standard for social interaction.
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Jan 11, 2013 03:58
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Books I've read in the past week or so: World War Z by Max Brooks. I was noticeably quiet when I was done with this one. Just terrifying. Good writing. Loved the interview format. Curious about the movie, although I suspect it'll just be Yonkers because HOLLYWOOD. Storm Front: A novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. loving hell, that was a lovely book. My husband assures me it gets better, but I'm having a hard time getting through Fool Moon. The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Read this to wash the taste of Dresden out of my mouth. Incredibly disappointed with the last book. It just dragged on and on until there were no more words. I felt the same way with the final showdown in The Dark Tower series. It blows. Not sure what to read now. Le sigh~
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Jan 11, 2013 18:06
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Trust me on this when I say the first 2 books of the Dresden files are the worst. There is literally nothing worth reading about in Fool Moon except one pretty good fight scene, and the rest of it is instantly forgotten and never brought up again in the series that I can recall. The being said, once you get PAST it, there are some awesome things coming up 
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Jan 11, 2013 18:34
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hope and vaseline posted:I'm about halfway through this and I just can't bring myself to finish it. It's like this bizarre mishmash of the author's fascination with Second Life and WoW and a wikipedia vomit of every 80s video game, movie and tv reference possible. It just reads like James Halliday is the author's Mary Sue if all of his nostalgic personal interests suddenly became the defacto standard for social interaction. I just found out part of the reason why I didn't like this book so much. Ernest Cline also wrote the script for Fanboys. If you haven't seen it, it's basically a cliche road trip comedy about Star Wars fans going to see Episode I six months before it releases. foxatee posted:Books I've read in the past week or so: If you really liked this book, I recommend checking out the Day by Day: Armageddon series. It's not as good as WWZ but it's written pretty well and I found it pretty entertaining to read after I had read WWZ. The movie does look like poo poo though 
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Jan 11, 2013 22:42
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Boondock Saint posted:If you really liked this book, I recommend checking out the Day by Day: Armageddon series. It's not as good as WWZ but it's written pretty well and I found it pretty entertaining to read after I had read WWZ. I will still go see the movie because, you know, zombies. 
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Jan 11, 2013 23:37
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Just finished Odd Thomas by Deen Koontz. It was on sale a week or so ago for like 2 bucks. Not a bad book actually, and the first I've ever read by Koontz. Some of the dialogue between Odd and his girlfriend were pretty cringe worthy but otherwise a quick fun read with some pretty neat scenes. Anyone read any of the other Odd Thomas books? Are they worth a read?
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Jan 12, 2013 04:41
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SilkyP posted:Just finished Odd Thomas by Deen Koontz. It was on sale a week or so ago for like 2 bucks. Not a bad book actually, and the first I've ever read by Koontz. Some of the dialogue between Odd and his girlfriend were pretty cringe worthy but otherwise a quick fun read with some pretty neat scenes. Anyone read any of the other Odd Thomas books? Are they worth a read? I read the second book years ago. Don't remember it that well so it can't have been tragically awful, AFAIK it was pretty standard Koontz - a quick fun read. About halfway through The Passage right now, and I'm enjoying it, but I'm getting a little annoyed at the way he zips forward. I thought the initial story, with the creation of the virals and the ensuing events, could have been fleshed out a lot more. (Just read back and saw that jackpot made a similar comment. Glad I'm not the only one!) Finished We Need To Talk About Kevin a couple of weeks ago, and it's still rattling around in my brain. First time I've ever finished a book, put it down, taken a really deep breath and gone, "Hooooooly poo poo." Had trouble trying to figure out who to recommend it to, because I thought the book itself was amazing, it sucked me in and I couldn't stop reading, but poo poo. The narrator is the mother of a kid who shoots a group of students at his school, and I went back and forth from screaming at her to sympathising with her.
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Jan 12, 2013 06:43
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Just finished 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Really really liked the world building and exposition, but I just could not get into the plot at all. The pacing was thrown off by all the random extracts and lists (which as I said, were interesting), and the main character was really annoying.
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Jan 12, 2013 08:32
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Finished The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes yesterday. I spent the whole day reading it. It was quite good and really touched on the subjects of interpretation, memory, and consequence. I especially loved how Adrien's suicide at first seems logical, other worldly, noble, illuminated, and beyond our feeble understanding of the world, but is later commented on as being the result a fearing "the pram in the hallway." Definitely a notable book, it took me a few read overs to understand the ending, but when I did  .
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Jan 12, 2013 19:22
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Cradle by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee. Started off quite nicely but was way too light on any science stuff and progressively slowed to a blah ending. Surprised and disappointed. Picked up Flood by Stephen Baxter to get my sci fi fix instead.
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Jan 12, 2013 21:25
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The Many-Colored Land by Julian May. First in her nine-book-long Pliocene Exile/Galactic Milieu series. Interesting premises and concepts, but thinly drawn characters and dialogue that sounds like nothing any human being has ever uttered. Also close to finishing R. A. MacAvoy's "Damiano" trilogy (Damiano, Damiano's Lute, Raphael). Pleasantly low-key fantasy about a male witch and his angelic mentor in medieval Europe. The third book feels like a noticeable dropoff from the first two, though.
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Jan 12, 2013 22:44
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Xandu posted:Just finished 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. I have that book sitting around somewhere, I never got very far into it. Would you say it's interesting enough to justify giving it another chance? Edit: Also, I just finished reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I was skeptical of it despite recommendations from friends, but I ended really enjoying it. The last 4th of the novel or so was especially good. I'm interested in some of his other books, but I've heard mixed things about them. AlternatePFG fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jan 13, 2013 |
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Jan 13, 2013 00:36
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I just finished an anthology called "How to Save the World", someone had posted about a story in it to the "The identify that story/book thread", and the book description sounded interesting. It was reasonably entertaining, definitely a fast read, and when I see the list of libertarian-leaning authors on the back cover, I'm not surprised that there are problems being solved that aren't really problems as many of us would define them--although allowances should be made for the book being nearly 20 years old. A pleasant way to while away an afternoon if you happen to spot it second-hand.
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Jan 13, 2013 03:10
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AlternatePFG posted:I have that book sitting around somewhere, I never got very far into it. Would you say it's interesting enough to justify giving it another chance? Maybe, read the first few chapters and a couple of the extracts, if nothing is appealing to you, skip it.
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Jan 13, 2013 08:49
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Finished The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, another 5 star sci-fi novel. One of the most brilliant concepts in science fiction I've yet read, and told so concisely. The book really could have been twice the length. Also, after some initial weirdness, the book ends up featuring some pretty positive portrayals of homosexual characters. Well, for the 1970s, anyway.
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Jan 13, 2013 13:49
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I just finished re-reading Stephen King's short story collections: Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and Everything's Eventual. Anyways, King is a really, really good short story writer. "The Jaunt" is still excellent. "Survivor Type" is effective, especially because of the beginning bits (i.e., the doctor's shady medical practices and reasons for it). I really like King's ability to flesh out characters in ways that both are and are not related to the story's main hook. For example, the fact that the characters in "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe" are going through a divorce. It's totally not necessary, given the hook, that the characters be in the middle of a messy divorce, but the story absolutely would not be the same story at all without that aspect. "Dolan's Cadillac" is probably my favourite. One subtle character moment I liked was how at the end his ghost/head-wife on his shoulder becomes -- just once, and only briefly -- ever-so-slightly threatening as she's willing him to continue with the scheme despite the pain. It doesn't really say anything about the wife, because it's just a memory talking, but it says a lot about what that relationship has now become to the narrator. left_unattended posted:
The next book does go into the ensuing events a bit more. I posted this back when The Passage first came out, but I think the slightly frustrated feeling created by the skip in time is intentional, and effective for what it's trying to do. That is, the first bit is clearly "our" world, with recognizable brand names and cultural semiotics (e.g., Wolgast's feelings towards Texas). The quick skip makes you experience the fact that this world is gone, kaput, not coming back. It's supposed to be jarring, and even frustrating, just as it's frustrating for the new society not knowing what the hell happened. At the same time, I think a better written book (though I do think I like the series more than most goons) would achieve the same effect even while actually narrating the immediate aftermath of the fall of civilization.
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Jan 13, 2013 16:49
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What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it those Murakami fans who are runners, have been runners or attempted to use running as a form of (painful) exercise. A lot of his thoughts reflect those of runners in general and I feel that having running experience of one's own adds a lot to the enjoyment of the book.
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Jan 13, 2013 20:02
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I just finished No Easy Day by Matt Bissonnette (aka: "Mark Owen") and Kevin Maurer. It's an interesting look into the world of the US military's Special Forces, and it's honestly pretty amazing how often the difference between life and death comes down to pure luck, and how people who seem like supermen can have face-palming moments like the rest of us (there's one bit where a SEAL can't figure out why his radio isn't working, and it's because he dropped the thing along with his entire backpack). There's a fair amount of filler, and some parts read like an airport novel, but overall it's a quick and worthwhile read.
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Jan 13, 2013 20:23
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