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Just finished The Magicians. I've loved fantasy as long as I've known how to read, and never completely realized how tired the genre was starting to get these days, until I read this book. I've heard people talk about how Harry Potter starts to get pretty dark towards the end of the series, which it kinda did, but this makes it look like what it was - a children's story. This book is what would happen if the kids in A Separate Piece went to a school for wizards. It's fantastic and anyone who has ever enjoyed a fantasy book or heavy coming of age stories like Catcher or the aforementioned A Separate Piece should really give this a shot.
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Feb 28, 2013 19:34
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God Touched (The Demon Accords) by John Conroe (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003G2ZCW0/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title) popped up on my recommended titles list and after reading the sample I purchased and read the whole book in like 3 hours last night. Sure the main character is a 'mary sue' and gets a bunch of awesome powers but drat it, it's like reading a awesome movie. It has vampires, were-things, spirit things, demons, love, angles. Was a fun read and now I'm going through the 2nd book. edit: just finished the 2nd one, loved it 
Danith fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 03:19
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Mixed feelings about Antonio Foscari's Andrea Palladio: Unbuilt Venice, a recounting of the life of the architect with an emphasis on projects that never got off the ground. As far the buildings are concerned, Foscari knows what he's talking about, helped along by really nice book design with visual footnotes reflecting whatever's under discussion. Where the wheels begin to fall off though is his take on the historical context - mostly cause he can't make up his mind whether it diminishes Palladio's genius to admit that he had to play within the Venetian Republic's rules. Foscari's so set on the architect as a unimpeachable superman that the only solution is simply detaching him from life, leaving Palladio, in the words of Charlie Brooker, 'ignoring all the pricks milling around him like he's gliding through the loving Matrix'. At one point the author flatly states that a technical disagreement was 'the only time he had ever complained in his entire life'. Give me a break. Also the Penguin edition of Plato's Early Socratic Dialogues, which has some of the worst commentary I've seen. Constantly interrupting and pre-empting the dialogue while managing to bring pretty much nothing to the table, it's the equivalent of watching a film with someone who's constantly gabbing on about 'oh! I love this bit - this is where they...' until you just want to smother them. February was a good month to be a curmudgeon.
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Mar 1, 2013 10:07
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Danith posted:God Touched (The Demon Accords) by John Conroe (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003G2ZCW0/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title) popped up on my recommended titles list and after reading the sample I purchased and read the whole book in like 3 hours last night. Sure the main character is a 'mary sue' and gets a bunch of awesome powers but drat it, it's like reading a awesome movie. It has vampires, were-things, spirit things, demons, love, angles. Was a fun read and now I'm going through the 2nd book. I tried to make it past the immense layer of smugness in the first chapter, but failed horribly. I think I got about halfway through the barroom scene and just gave up. I might give it another whirl though, once I finish up the series I am reading now.
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Mar 1, 2013 11:53
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I just finished A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Wow, I haven't had such a visceral reaction to a book in a long time. Certain chapters were absolutely engrossing, others had me rolling my eyes a bit. The way the final chapter began, I was groaning in disappointment, but it perfectly sets up the ending that really ties the whole book together and packed a hell of an emotional punch. I highly recommend this novel, the vast majority of it was very good. (There was one chapter written entirely in Powerpoint slides. That was weird.)
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Mar 1, 2013 18:24
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BobTheCow posted:I just finished A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Wow, I haven't had such a visceral reaction to a book in a long time. Certain chapters were absolutely engrossing, others had me rolling my eyes a bit. The way the final chapter began, I was groaning in disappointment, but it perfectly sets up the ending that really ties the whole book together and packed a hell of an emotional punch. I highly recommend this novel, the vast majority of it was very good. I really enjoyed this book. I hate to hear that the planned HBO TV series based on the book is no longer in development.
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Mar 1, 2013 19:47
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Yeah, I loved Goon Squad up until the final chapter. I appreciate how everything came together but all the future-tech stuff was painful to read through.
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Mar 2, 2013 00:43
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Finally finished A Memory of Light, and all I can say is that ended abruptly. I often feel like wishing for an epilogue somehow makes me an unenlightened reader, but I don't think the book could have ended in something more like a cliffhanger without actually failing to resolve the final battle.
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Mar 2, 2013 04:48
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hope and vaseline posted:Yeah, I loved Goon Squad up until the final chapter. I appreciate how everything came together but all the future-tech stuff was painful to read through. That's exactly what bothered me at first, but she managed to just barely walk the line of cutesy future world vs. impactful resolution successfully so I'm letting it slide in this instance. If the whole book were like that though I wouldn't have made it very far. Get it guys, they're called HANDSETS instead of PHONES because nobody TALKS anymore... SUBTLTY! bleh
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Mar 2, 2013 05:45
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Ender's Game: You know how Quiddich bits were the worst thing about Harry Potter? This is 100 % Quiddich bits. A very frustrating experience to say the least.
steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 13:43
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Been on a YA kick lately. Read The Hunger Games. The writing wasn't stellar, but if nothing else the book was very good at holding my attention. I had a hard time putting it down and pretty much hated anyone who decided to bother me while I was reading it. I hear the other books in the series aren't as good, but I don't care. I need to read them. Unfortunately, every copy at my library has been checked out a good week. I may need to get a loan from another library if this continues. After that I read Joan of Arc: Her Story by Régine Pernoud. The biography proper was pretty much nothing new for me, though it was written well enough to keep my attention. Joan/Jeanne/Jehanne is a pretty familiar figure to me and was pretty much my childhood hero for being badass as hell. I did find the biography proper of each important figure in this time pretty interesting. It made a pretty good case for her surname being Darc and not D'arc. Books about her are always great reminders that Cauchon was a huge dick and La Hire being pretty awesome. Afterwards I read Alanna: the First Adventure by Tamora Pierce. Once I got started I pretty much tore through it and grabbed all the other books in the series. Writing was pretty good, and the plot was interesting and clean. So I moved onto In the Hand of the Goddess. This one was also excellent. I think I may have liked the first slightly more, but they were both pretty awesome and work well together. I tend to dislike any romantic bits in books, but I felt like it worked really well in book 2. Though honestly part of me is sick of love triangles any time ever. I just finished the third book The Woman Who Rides Like a Man and I honestly didn't like it nearly as much. It had a few problems (that can be resolved in the next book I'm sure) but what really bothered me was there wasn't much of an ending like the other two had. It felt incomplete on its own, almost like it and the next one were a book of their own but too long combined. While I'm sure the next book which I haven't started yet will make up for this, I really really dislike books in a series that feel cut off towards the end like you need the next book for it to be worth it. It is pretty much why I rarely will read a book in a series unless the series is complete. Pretty glad I grabbed the whole quartet early on. Maybe I'll start the fourth book tonight.
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Mar 2, 2013 22:53
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February was a good month for me. Books got read. Less than Zero by Bret Ellis, nothing happens in this book, Ellis tries to demonstrate the lives of the rich(everyday cocaine rich) and young of LA in the 80s. The main character, Clay(around 17 years old), comes back to LA for Christmas to be with his family and friends. This mostly ends up being the main character going to parties, doing drugs and leaving to another party. Clay starts feeling detached by this lifestyle and questions the morals of people around him who don't seemed bothered by this. Unfortunately Clay is more of the thinking type and not doing, he thinks about a lot of stuff but never actually speaks up to change anything he dislikes. The parties get more intense and so do the situations Clay finds himself(people getting raped) in but as usual Clay seems to not care or ignores it and does his stuff which is nothing. The book is linear but time changes from chapter to chapter, sometimes one chapter is the day after, other times it's a few minutes later. Some chapters end in cliffhanger situations but the next chapter will be a day after so you never know what happened, well thankfully it's hard to give a poo poo about anything that happens in this book so you won't be mad when that happens. Some chapters are flashbacks about Clay's childhood, it tries to show why hes so detached, like I said it tries... Then you have Clay's friends who are drug addicts, dropouts, spoiled rich kids, drug dealers and his best friend who's a prostitute. Clay's break eventually ends and he returns, despite his friends asking him to stay. Well at least it was a fast read, not a great one but entirely a horrible one. Just what the author was trying to say wasn't interesting. Ferragus by Honore de Balzac, I read an English translation which was alright though nothing amazing. This one is set in 17th Century France, where a mysterious group called The Thirteen, who are all rich men in high places who work together to help each other achieve whatever their goals might be. Sometimes this can be murdering someone, extortion, basically any illegal action. The book starts off with the young cavalry officer named Auguste who sees a married women he's in love with go into a really dangerous part of Paris by herself. The importance of this is related to the time period, married women going into a strangers house in that part of town would be ridiculous apparently. Even more so for this woman who's name is Clemence, she's known in society as a saint. Well things start to get lovely and bizzare here from Auguste's point of view. He knows this lady has no relatives and certainly not in this part of town. He starts following her for sometime and notices her coming to the same house daily, alone. Auguste goes on full Sherlock mode trying to find out why she's apparently cheating on her husband and this leads to multiple murder attempts at Auguste this is where we find out the Thirteen have a hand in this affair. The plot takes off from there. The story is good but most of the pages are description of Paris's streets, description of the baker who has one eye, descriptions of the cloud above Avignon street, descriptions about the rain puddles, descriptions about a woman's make-up table. Every time something interesting is about to happen, like when Auguste receives a letter from his belligerents, the author will start describing where the paper came from and why papyrus is better than regular paper. He goes on this expositions that are 4-5 paragraphs and serve no end. Would recommend this if it had less of this. Also this seems to be the case with all great french writers, Victor Hugo and Jules Verne are two others I know of. Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern, it's a book about the author's Dad who is crude sense of humour is really good but everything else in the book is not. Most of it's the author's anecdotes about himself and his dad helping him out. The anecdotes are real life stories which are fairly mundane but each chapter at least has one great quote from the dad with many more standalone at the end of it. I thought I'd read something funny, funny is hard to write and different for everyone but this had it's moments. Ulio fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 23:10
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Ulio posted:Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern, it's a book about the author's Dad who is crude sense of humour is really good but everything else in the book is not. Most of it's the author's anecdotes about himself and his dad helping him out. The anecdotes are real life stories which are fairly mundane but each chapter at least has one great quote from the dad with many more standalone at the end of it. I thought I'd read something funny, funny is hard to write and different for everyone but this had it's moments. I didn't read this one but his second book I suck at girls was really good. I laughed a lot reading it because it reminded me of my relationships.
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Mar 3, 2013 01:20
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Caustic Chimera posted:
I seem to recall Pierce saying that she didn't want to do 4 separate books but her publisher required her to split them up that way because they didn't think kids would read really long books. She thanked JK Rowling because after Harry Potter started getting longer with each volume, the industry realized that if kids like a book they'll read it regardless of how long it is. As for what I just finished, the latest J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts Calculated in Death. I'm not really sure why I keep reading these; they're genre novels but not really romances and not really mysteries and not really scifi. I do like a lot of the characters but I found myself today wishing I could read a book about them just doing their own jobs instead of popping up for 10 seconds as background color. I guess if nothing else they series is mostly just unobjectionable. Roberts has written enough books by now that she can spit them out pretty smoothly. wheatpuppy fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Mar 3, 2013 |
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Mar 3, 2013 01:30
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A while ago I saw a goon on Goodreads make a recommendation request for "something with a wide cast of eccentric or quirky characters (preferably set in a small town), maybe some dark secrets, preferably with an underlying supernatural events (but not mandatory). I'm not looking for a direct rip-off, but something along the same vain and/or with the same tone (extra points for bizarre events, surreal moments, dark or quirky humor)." I love Twin Peaks so when someone recommended The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath for this request, I picked it up. Now, I'm fully aware that I may have given this book a more favorable review had I not read it with this Twin Peaks frame of mind, but my god, this book was such a disappointment. I hate it for being so uninteresting, and for not living up to my expectations. Firstly, it's British, so it doesn't have that small town America-feel that I was hoping for. Secondly, there are only a handful of characters and none of them are quirky or eccentric. Some of them barely even make it past two-dimensional. There are some dark secrets but I found myself just not giving a gently caress. Right up until the last page I was hoping for a twist that would redeem the book, but it wasn't there. It's a gothic book, but not a particularly good one, and definitely not one that you can compare to Twin Peaks. Someone else recently asked for a recommendation for Twin Peaks in book form here on the forums, and I saw Pines by Blake Crouch being recommended, so I'll give that a go.
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Mar 3, 2013 06:44
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Just finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. It's a really interesting, self-reflexive book about reading and the relationship between reader, novel and author. That makes it sound dry as gently caress - I did find it slow going at times, but mostly it was engaging and darkly funny. Definitely going to be thinking about it for a while.
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Mar 3, 2013 14:03
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Picked up and polished off This Side of Paradise again - and coming out of the other side of University (I was in my final year of secondary school last time I read it) I felt it resonate more, and was ballstruck again by its combination of audacity and (albeit endearingly shaky) control of detail. The scene with the girl in the lightning struck field is worth the price of admission (some heavy soppy spoilt white boy stuff early on) and I think this is, by far, my favourite Fitzgerald. It's less worn than Gatsby, a little more on its third drink - but not as plastered and spilling everywhere as Tender Is The Night. Good stuff.
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Mar 3, 2013 14:42
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Ripley posted:Just finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. Hey! I just picked this up from the library. If you haven't already, check out Invisible Cities. It has this really languid, dreamlike quality to it and the story itself has no real implications outside of the pleasure/instruction between the two main characters, making the story seem tiny and impossibly large at the same time.
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Mar 3, 2013 17:58
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steinrokkan posted:Ender's Game: You know how Quiddich bits were the worst thing about Harry Potter? This is 100 % Quiddich bits. A very frustrating experience to say the least. Ender's Game is a great source for personal reflection on maturity. I think most sci-fi fans who grew up in the 80's and 90's read it as adolescents and adored it; now look back on it's content or revisit it in some other way and are absolutely disgusted by its fascist schlock. Great turnaround.
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Mar 4, 2013 15:52
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Just finished One Hundred Years of Solitude. Slick Willy has a good taste in books I tell you hwut. Very powerful, very human, and there were parts that genuinely made my stomach churn. I enjoyed it immensely.
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Mar 5, 2013 01:24
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Just finished On the Road by Kerouac again.. god drat.. i love that book...so much.. 
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Mar 5, 2013 13:21
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I just finished reading "The Memory of Light". I'm still amazed that they actually managed to tie off all of the loose ends. It was actually one of the better sequel endings that I have read. Though, I wasn't sad when I read the ending even though I've known the characters for such a long time. Still, there's a lot to be said for having an actual ending to the series.
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Mar 5, 2013 13:28
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Just finished Greywalker (Kat Richardson). I really enjoyed this, it was recommended by a number of goons. Gritty urban fantasy without the concentration on loving supernatural creatures, thinking about loving supernatural creatures, and dealing with the aftermath of loving supernatural creatures. The second book in the series is on the way, if it's as good as the first I will be happy.
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Mar 5, 2013 15:48
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The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. I was casting around for some good fantasy that was not chock full of bad writing and blah blah hero's journey, magic sword, destiny blah. This series of books kept cropping up and, once I learned it includes "undead space velociraptors with blades for arms", I thought hell yes, let's give it a whirl. The first book is Gardens of the Moon with the following blurb - Bled dry by decades of warfare, infighting and bloody clashes with Anomander Rake, Lord of Moon's Spawn, and the mysterious Tiste Andii, the Malazan Empire simmers with discontent. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet the Empress Laseen's rule - enforced by her feared assassins, the Claw - remains absolute. For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his squad of Bridgeburners, and for Tattersail, surviving sorceress of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the Siege of Pale should have been a time to help the still-living and mourn the many dead. But the Empress has other ideas. Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, still holds out against her and it is towards this ancient and noble bastion of independence that she turns her predatory gaze. However the Empire is not alone in this great game. Other sinister, shadow-bound players are poised to make their first moves - as Captain Ganoes Paran, aide to the Empress' Adjunct, is about to discover. For he has been chosen for an altogether higher purpose - as harbinger of the gods themselves... Steven Erikson, throughout the series, loves eschewing any authorial omnipotent gaze or exposition. This means the first hundred pages or so of this book are confusing and hard to get through because you do not know who the gently caress these people are, you are lagging behind on what the gently caress they are doing, no-one explains anything to people who already know this stuff anyway and everyone has their own thing going on that sounds bad or portentous but you are reading this thinking I HAVE NO loving CONTEXT AHHHHHHHHH! Just to cap things off, the system of magic is quite different than the standard and, no, that isn't really explained either. So why read this stuff? Well, Erikson, as his titchy biog tells us, is an archaeologist and anthropologist and uses these to construct a world with magic in it that makes internally consistent sense. People behave like real people, rather than fantasy constructs that ooh and aah and introduce the reader to legendary sword +5 of plot armour. His battles make sense from a strategic perspective. He doesn't have the usual elves or dwarves (Tiste Andii aren't elves and T'Lan Imass are not dwarves, got that?) and everything is built on the ruins of what came before. If you love world-building fantasy, this poo poo is right up your alley. If you love people being badasses, this poo poo will have you fist-pumping like some sort of OCD happy finish machine. If you love super uber powerful people getting wrecked by Johnny Ordinary with a plan, yep, you'll love this. However, it's not all rainbows and lollipops. Ten books clocking in at 3.5 million words or so means some parts can be... ugh. The first book is a heffalump of a thing. It was written a few years before the rest and, stylistically, it's a first novel that keeps searching for a voice to call its own. It's not bad, exactly, just ungainly and occasionally awkward. The second book, Deadhouse Gates, is orders of magnitude better and much more indicative of Erikson's style. Also, it is awesome for one plotline. I found a certain amount of reading fatigue set in with the third book, mostly because a lot of the Malazan army characters are, well, samey. It makes sense, I grant you, and their sense of humour bears a marked resemblance to any army/ex-army people I have met who have been in war but I started getting very sick of mopey, depressed people who continually harped on about the horror of war and the feelings of survivor guilt and how they just wished they didn't have to go around killing people and on and on and on. Try not being a loving soldier then. At this point, I was really jonesing for someone who was just "gently caress, I love killing and pillaging and all that great stuff, poo poo gets me hard!" You know, just for a nice change. Then the fourth book happened.  Characters will, and do, philosophize. This isn't bad the first bunch of times it happens, all very interesting and all that but, after the gazillionth time, it gets a bit Oh Christ and then I find my eyes skipping down until I find when the philosophy stops. It just gets old. The eighth book is an exercise in the writer playing around with the format, presumably a chance to stretch himself in the back straight of the series with an eye to other things. I didn't mind it exactly but the book took me a while to get through and I stopped reading for a few weeks until I regained interest. Also, it is ostensibly narrated by a character I dislike, which did not help at all. Last but not least, Erikson introduces new characters every book. I cracked open the tenth and last book and immediately busted up laughing because Holy gently caress, more new characters. By this point named characters with plotlines and such are probably in the region of over four hundred. I keep forgetting who people are and what they did because so much happens and so many people and, gently caress it, I'll re-read this from the start. All in all, I loved the books and am in awe of Erikson's writing pace - a thousand page slab every 12-18 months. It has such intricate plotting that things in the last book refer to things from the first book and all the others and every so often you twig connections and  Also, undead space velociraptors with blades for arms are barely in the top twenty awesome as gently caress moments.
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Mar 5, 2013 19:17
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Zola posted:Just finished Greywalker (Kat Richardson). Is that the one where the police detective chick died for like, 3 minutes and now sees crazy poo poo? I think she got cracked in the head or something... I think I bought it years ago but never really read past the first few pages. Not in a "BLEH! THIS IS HORRIBLE!" way, just in a "Hey, I'll read this later and completely forget I own it until someone mentions it on somethingawful.com!" kinda way.
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Mar 5, 2013 22:53
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Is that the one where the police detective chick died for like, 3 minutes and now sees crazy poo poo? I think she got cracked in the head or something... Yes. It's definitely worth the read.
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Mar 6, 2013 00:15
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e. Woops, wrong thread.
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Mar 6, 2013 18:49
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At a great cost, I've read two Mike Nelon (of MST3K fame) books: Mike Nelson's Mind over Matter: A mediocre collection of feuilletons. Nelson likes to use observational humor and not-too-shocking subversions, plus the sort of self-depreciating humor you might expect from a MST3K host. Topics include children, shopping, fast food, leaf blowers (seriously); I suppose it could be called "American Middle Class' Nightmare" for greater clarity. Woudn't recommend, bland with some reasonably funny moments. Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese: Nelson explores a number of somewhat significant films and TV series that plagued late 90s entertainment. He likes to insult people, and his negativism can get grating. A better book of the two, with some really good moments, but not worth a read unless you can name all members of the Baldwin family (His texts often devolve into long lists of movie titles and obscure actors). Also, he spends several pages ranting about how stupid Van Damme was, which is really awkward, and he is fixated on describing greasy men grappling each other wearing nothing but jockstraps. Interesting if your surname is Freud. P.S.: Consideing my previous entry in this thread was Ender's Game, I'd like to clarify I only report on schlock, and I do actually have something resembling a taste.
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Mar 7, 2013 23:34
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steinrokkan posted:At a great cost, I've read two Mike Nelon (of MST3K fame) books: I think Movie Megacheese is pretty entertaining if you're an MST3000 fan, but he was trying too hard to be Dave Barry in the other, and Death Rat was pretty awful. Kevin Murphy's A Year at the Movies is great, though.
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Mar 8, 2013 02:48
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I just finished Pet Sematary by Stephen King... surprisingly philosophical. I went into it with low expectations, but finished the drat thing in less than 2 days. His short stories are really hit and miss (mostly miss)... Besides this, I really only loved On Writing which I have read many times as a burgeoning writer. Also finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut... also philosophical and riveting, but not surprisingly. What a beautiful, fantastic book. I drank caffeine to stay up and finish this book! So drat good. Quickly became one of my favorite books of all time. Loved the metafictional construct, the be careful what you pretend to be, because you could very well become it, even in your own mind. What a fantastic book. A must-read, I think. escape artist fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Mar 8, 2013 |
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Mar 8, 2013 04:14
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Just finished up Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino, a set of three novellas set in the medieval era. The Cloven Viscount, about a man who is cut in half lengthwise during battle and returns to his homeland as half a man, was my favourite of the three novellas, detailing the duality of good and evil within men and the ambiguities that can lie between the two extremes, with a delicate sense of humour throughout. The Baron in the Trees was a much lengthier story of a young baron who decides to spend the rest of his life living in the trees, never setting foot on the ground again. This one dragged quite a bit and although it was a good idea, there were several passages that didn't seem to bring much to the plot and only served to frustrate. The Non-Existent Knight is an almost Shakespearean story of a knight that exists purely through will power, "living" only to fulfill his obligations as a knight errant. Definite overtones of Don Quixote in this one. escape artist posted:Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut...What a fantastic book. A must-read, I think. This one has been on my Kindle for a while now, so after such a glowing endorsement I think it'll have to be next.
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Mar 8, 2013 15:25
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Just finished The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. I had been interesting in checking out Thompson's work for some time and this one seemed like a good title to start with. I wasn't disappointed, I know that Thompson was once nicknamed the Dimestore Dostoyevsky and it seems fitting, since like his Russian colleague, Thompson shows an incredible aptitude for showing the mind of a seriously disturbed individual. Great read and it definitely want to make me check out more of the author's body of work.
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Mar 9, 2013 16:41
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I just finished The Stand by Stephen King (abridged) and I am sorry to say that I was really disappointed with it. I am sorry to say that because everyone has always told me how good of a book it was. The premise of the book was great and there are a few stellar characters, like Flagg, but the book was just so boring at times I couldn't stay awake while reading it. The first 300 pages could have been condensed down to 100 through better writing and were quite painful to get through. Once I was midway the story picked up quite a bit and actually became interesting but it did not take long for SK to lose focus and the book stagnates for a bit, again. The ending was by far the best even though a minimal amount of time is taken to talk about Flagg, who is by far the most interesting character in the book. Not sure the ending was good enough to make up for 800+ pages of "meh" though...
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Mar 9, 2013 17:09
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I read The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin in one sitting. It's philosophical science fiction about a man whose dreams change reality, and his psychotherapist who can control his dreams through hypnosis. Fantastic book overall, with most of what I look for in sci-fi: an interesting concept thoroughly explored, large-scale events with a tight narrative focus, and elegant and clear writing. Only a couple complaints: the first is that because it was originally published serialized in a magazine, each chapter starts with a recap of the plot. Second, the last third or so leans a little heavily on deus ex machina, including one egregiously cheesy plot point involving With a Little Help from My Friends.
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Mar 9, 2013 17:34
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DeadLocked by Charlaine Harris (book #12 of the Southern Vampire Mysteries). Eric and Sookie have a lot of questions and have to find the answers before time runs out with the other vampires. It was a good book with a big ending. It is the second to last book in the series. I hate to see them go but I can also see why Harris wants to end it.
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Mar 10, 2013 13:51
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Ebjan posted:DeadLocked by Charlaine Harris (book #12 of the Southern Vampire Mysteries). Eric and Sookie have a lot of questions and have to find the answers before time runs out with the other vampires. It was a good book with a big ending. It is the second to last book in the series. I hate to see them go but I can also see why Harris wants to end it. I can barely remember the plots to the last 2 or 3 books to the series, Charlaine Harris seems like she's just going through the motions. Hopefully it won't end with a whimper, or a description of Sookie's sunbathing outfit.
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Mar 10, 2013 14:30
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I just finished "we wept without tears" by Gideon Greif, its about the men who work in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Gideon has interviewed the few survivors from Sonderkommando and its really heartbreaking. The men had no other choice than "help" the nazis take care of the killing of other Jews. They were selected to Sonderkommando when they arrived at the station, where they would be seperated from their family and taken to their new home. After some days they would begin the work, some helped the victims down to the changerooms where they undressed completly, others cleaned up they gaschambers, carry dead bodies, and others fueling the ovens with bodies. The main question in this book is, should the men who did these jobs refuse to do it?, they could not refuse they would have been killed instantly. Read the book if you are into worldwar II or just want to read a horrorbook from the real life.
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Mar 10, 2013 16:42
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I just finished Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It was a great book until you actually stopped and thought about it, then some of the stuff in the world didn't hold up so well. I think it tried too hard to be fantastic, too -- like the dance scene where the romantic interest turns into a mermaid for a bit. The ending battle also falls in that category, but I won't say more. It should probably just be taken as something fun to read.
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Mar 10, 2013 23:41
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I just finished The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I picked it up because I heard it was a classic book to read for CS students (being a hard sciences phd student regretting my choice, I like to romanticize over the career I wish I could have had.) Enjoyed it quite a lot, and I think I managed to follow along quite well with my layman knowledge of computers. edit: I found this thread and decided on "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" My PIN is 4826 fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Mar 11, 2013 |
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Mar 11, 2013 10:51
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I finally got around to reading The Name of the Wind. I am not a hardcore fantasy person (only other fantasy books I read in the last 15 years are the 5 books in ASOIAF, the First Law trilogy, The Magicians, and The Lies of Locke Lamora) so my thoughts on books of this type should be taken with a grain of salt. The book is packed with a ton of fantasy and college cliches (I wished Bret Easton Ellis would of written a fantasy book 10 years ago), but still I really enjoyed it. It was a fun read, and the only part that I didn't like was the dragon bit. I will be picking up book 2 this summer (no hurry since it looks like book 3 will not be out anytime soon). It did make me want to read more fantasy, and may try out Prince of Thorns next.
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Mar 11, 2013 13:10
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