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oh hey I just finished of mice. & men, now that you mention it. also recently finished The Disaster Artist, Under The Skin and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I'll post more about them later when it's not 2am. it's too early.
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Aug 26, 2014 01:48
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Finished The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It was pretty good. I don't hate the grimdark stuff that saturates the genre but I will say it was extremely refreshing to actually have a medieval-esque political intrigue type story where the protagonist is actually a decent and reasonable person. It's nice to get away from the GRRM school of everyone is an rear end in a top hat to everyone for a change. The plot itself isn't anything special, but the characters are likeable and it's definitely a nice read overall.
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Aug 26, 2014 04:44
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I recently finished two books about games and game design. Characteristics of Games is basically a textbook for a college game design class. It does a great job of codifying different game mechanics and exploring their inherent benefits, drawbacks, and trade offs. Most importantly, it builds an objective framework for discussing games and their mechanics which I find helpful when talking about games with designers and other players. Also Things We Think About Games, which is a bunch of random, bite-sized thoughts about (mostly board and P&P RPG) games from game designers. There were some gems in there but I don't think there was enough content to justify the $20 cover price. JuniperCake posted:I don't hate the grimdark stuff that saturates the genre but I will say it was extremely refreshing to actually have a medieval-esque political intrigue type story where the protagonist is actually a decent and reasonable person. If you haven't already, you should check out The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. It's a band of rogues pulling off a heist (think medieval/fantasy Ocean's 11) that isn't too grimdark (people die but not everyone; it's probably halfway between Robert Jordan and GRRM on the grimdark scale), has likable protagonists, solid political intrigue, and is just a good adventure yarn. The second and third books are also enjoyable but shift from being heist stories to a pirate story and a...Shakespearian drama troop?...story, respectively.
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Aug 26, 2014 14:02
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Just finished Philip Roth's American Pastoral. I'm not incredibly familiar with Roth's work, but the couple novels of his I've read before have left me pretty unsatisfied, so this was easily my favourite work of his thus far. The story goes on a little too long and Roth makes sure to hammer his point home, but his prose here is so elegant and captivating that I had a hard time putting it down.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:35
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Franco Potente posted:Just finished the new Haruki Murakami novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. After the tremendous waste of time that was 1Q84, I was wary on picking up another Murakami novel, but this one was vastly superior. Shorter, tighter, with a plot where things actually happen (don't get me wrong, I did Murakami's flat characters, unexplained weirdness, and continual digressions, but 1100 pages of it was far too much). There are still characteristic dream-like atmosphere, but the stakes felt much more real and personal. I may be in the minority, but I think Murakami's shorter, lighter novels are far better in general then his big tentpost books. Like, Kafka on the Shore was kind of muddled and pointless but After Dark just had incredible energy and never overstayed its welcome.
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Aug 27, 2014 00:45
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Baby Babbeh posted:I may be in the minority, but I think Murakami's shorter, lighter novels are far better in general then his big tentpost books. Like, Kafka on the Shore was kind of muddled and pointless but After Dark just had incredible energy and never overstayed its welcome. Oh I definitely agree. His quirks are a lot more forgiving when he doesn't spend nearly a thousand pages indulging in them. His short story collections are where I started reading him actually.
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Aug 27, 2014 01:29
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Baby Babbeh posted:I may be in the minority, but I think Murakami's shorter, lighter novels are far better in general then his big tentpost books. Like, Kafka on the Shore was kind of muddled and pointless but After Dark just had incredible energy and never overstayed its welcome.
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Aug 27, 2014 21:19
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1Q84 is not a good place to start with murakami, because its long and bad. Try some of his shorter works first. short-story collections, after dark, the wild sheep-chase, dance dance dance, hard-boiled wonderland, etc. kafka on the shore is fairly long, and very murakami, but one of his best.
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Aug 28, 2014 09:21
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Just finished up Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It apparently is the front runner for the Hugo and Nebula awards this year? It was an interesting story but felt a bit forced in places. Author had a habit of telling you exactly what gesture a character did and what that gesture was meant to indicate. It was irritating to me for whatever reason. Seemed like she was copping out of painting the emotional picture and letting the reader discern the mood. The other weird thing was the ending. It seemed to climax at the end and then just stop. It was very abrupt and sort of unsettling.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:04
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rufius posted:Just finished up Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Well, it was the first book in a series, so there's your ending,* and the point-of-view is from an artificial intelligence that relies on indicators like body language, heart rate, and vocal patterns to decipher the emotional state of its crew/force, so I'd say the lack of an "emotional picture" makes perfect sense. *I really dug the book, for the record, but I get what you're saying about the ending and agree that maybe the pacing could've been a little better.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:22
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rufius posted:It was an interesting story but felt a bit forced in places. Author had a habit of telling you exactly what gesture a character did and what that gesture was meant to indicate. It was irritating to me for whatever reason. Seemed like she was copping out of painting the emotional picture and letting the reader discern the mood. I got the distinct impression that the gestures were a formal language (like American Sign Language) that people used to communicate with the ship or station AI non-verbally, and that it had kind of bled over into a secondary method of communication for person-to-person communication. So it wasn't like she was describing and attributing meaning to vague gestures but rather documenting non-verbal but very specific and precise communication.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:56
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funkybottoms posted:Well, it was the first book in a series, so there's your ending,* and the point-of-view is from an artificial intelligence that relies on indicators like body language, heart rate, and vocal patterns to decipher the emotional state of its crew/force, so I'd say the lack of an "emotional picture" makes perfect sense. Oh, I didn't realize it was intended to be a series. I do think pacing should have been improved but that makes me feel better about it. I actually wasn't bothered about the 'emotional picture' thing as much with the AI as I was with Seivarden and the rest of the Radchai which leads me to what Lawen said... Lawen posted:I got the distinct impression that the gestures were a formal language (like American Sign Language) that people used to communicate with the ship or station AI non-verbally, and that it had kind of bled over into a secondary method of communication for person-to-person communication. So it wasn't like she was describing and attributing meaning to vague gestures but rather documenting non-verbal but very specific and precise communication. Had not considered it might be some formalised language. That paints that in a different light and one I'm more receptive to. I think the way in which she conveyed the gestures were made seemed very scripted:
I felt like that pattern was overly repetitive. It's also entirely possible that I'm imagining the amount that it appeared and I just nitpicked on that. Anyway, it was a neat premise and I'm more than happy to read the next one. e: a word
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Aug 28, 2014 17:07
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rufius posted:Had not considered it might be some formalised language. That paints that in a different light and one I'm more receptive to. I think the way in which she conveyed the gestures were made seemed very scripted: Lawen's point was good and one that I had kind of forgotten about- it's a super-rigid, ultra-formal society, being able to convey commands in a way that doesn't betray emotion would also be important.
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Aug 28, 2014 17:20
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Lucifer, Book One. A really fun comic book! The first collection of the Sandman spinoff, written by Mike Carey, author of the excellent Girl With All The Gifts. The writing is a great blend of the macrocosmic scale of the original series and the more personal excitement of a character-driven adventure thing. Lucifer himself is a magnificent bastard, and Carey seems to revel in making him more devious and "ohh, OHHHHH" clever. Will definitely be picking up the next book.
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Aug 29, 2014 11:49
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A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Surprisingly readable for a stream of consciousness book. Appears impenetrable at the beginning but with a bit of patience it pays off. It's an ANGRY book. Not that the characters are particularly aggressive (besides the mother), more that they're aggressive caricatures, but not to the extent to make this satirical. If you're a fan of isolation, suffering, growing up in an oppressively religious household, sexual abuse, terminally ill loved ones and a whole load of guilt, I guess this is for you.. whoever you are. It is really good though.
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Aug 31, 2014 18:42
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Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Was great to read about the events of Oryx and Crake from different perspectives, and to flesh out some of the minor characters from the first. I am also really glad she resolved the outstanding cliffhanger from the first book; pages were growing few and I was starting to fear it wouldn't happen until the third. Its a really interesting, and chillingly believable, world she created. Can't wait to read the third.
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Sep 1, 2014 05:48
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Gertrude Perkins posted:Lucifer, Book One. A really fun comic book! The first collection of the Sandman spinoff, written by Mike Carey, author of the excellent Girl With All The Gifts. The writing is a great blend of the macrocosmic scale of the original series and the more personal excitement of a character-driven adventure thing. Lucifer himself is a magnificent bastard, and Carey seems to revel in making him more devious and "ohh, OHHHHH" clever. Will definitely be picking up the next book. Yes, Lucifer is great. In case you haven't already read it, I'd also recommend The Unwritten which is another excellent comic written by Carey. As for me, I just finished The Persian Boy by Mary Renault; a historical fiction novel about Alexander the Great, told in first-person by Bagoas, the eunuch who became Alexander's lover. Renault does a great job depicting the time-period as well as the cultural differences between the Macedonians and the Persians. A very enjoyable novel from an author I'll definitely read more of.
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Sep 1, 2014 15:38
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Just finished Ship of Fools aka Unto Leviathan by Richard Paul Russo. poo poo was awesome. Read like a tightly scripted TV drama, and I kept imagining Pär the dwarf as Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones and captain Nikos as Michael Hogan from Battlestar Galactica. Giant spaceships, monsters, intrigue, mystery. Everything I approve of in a book, really. I need to check out his Carlucci books.
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Sep 1, 2014 23:43
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Ayem posted:I recently finished Wool by Hugh Howey - the novelized collection, not just the short story. Just finished the Wool Omnibus earlier this evening. It was recommended as 'hard sci fi'. The world building left a lot to be desired in that respect. The best compliment I can give is that I immediately purchased 'Shift', the next part of the story, just to see what's going to happen. Character dialogue is kind of pretty bad. Character motives, much more logical. The world has it's own rules and actually tries to follow/justify them (a rarer thing than it should be) and it's pretty fun to imagine what's happening next, so all in all, a fun ride so far.
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Sep 2, 2014 02:22
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I just finished Wireless by Charles Stross, which is his second short story collection. Not too bad a collection, but not the career-defining retrospective that I hoped to read. None of the stories really blew me away. But they were all fairly solid science fiction. Stories: Missile Gap - A bizarre kinda-alternate-history story, with a Big Dumb Object thrown in. Lots of cameos from historical figures, and a weird story-telling structure, make this pretty compelling. Rogue Farm - A rather funny—and kinda creepy and repulsive—story about baseline humans clashing with post-humans in a strange future. A Colder War - A very bleak Lovecraftian alternate-history story that I would have liked a lot more if it didn't completely rehash Missile Gap's structure. Has an incredibly depressing ending! MAXOs - Very short and funny; presented as a scientific paper on the decoding of interstellar signals. Down on the Farm - Not the best Laundry story I've read so far, but pretty solid. Bob Howard investigates the Laundry's own psychiatric hospital for its former agents... Not all is well in the ward. Unwirer - Maybe the best story in this collection. A really interesting tale about paranoia and subversion in an alternate USA where wireless internet is illegal. Has a great ending! Snowball's Chance - A mean-spirited little Faustian tale with a climate-change spin. Trunk and Disorderly - Another great one. A positively wacky story that reads like a Jeeves and Wooster story set in a decadent, Futurama-meets-Hitchhiker's-Guide-meets-The-Culture universe. There's also a Dalek, because why the hell not! Riotously fun. Palimpsest - Went on a bit long and was confusing in places, but this is mostly a clever novella about humanity's expansion through deep time, as mediated by a time-travelling organisation called Stasis. The reveal near the end as to what the Opposition is up to makes this great science fiction. 4 stars.
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Sep 2, 2014 03:01
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Supreme Allah posted:Just finished the Wool Omnibus earlier this evening. It was recommended as 'hard sci fi'. The world building left a lot to be desired in that respect. I'm reading Shift right now, and it's actually a prequel, not a sequel, just so you know. I wonder why someone would recommend Wool as 'hard sci-fi', that's pretty inaccurate.
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Sep 2, 2014 08:45
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Burning Chrome, short stories by William Gibson. A great collection, including some excellent stories set in Gibson's Sprawl universe. The best of the bunch, though, is The Belonging Kind, which Gibson wrote with John Shirley. It plays out almost like a Twilight Zone-style horror story, with some great creeping unease.
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Sep 2, 2014 14:06
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About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews - Samuel R Delany. I've read a couple of 'on/about writing' books. This is the one I most enjoyed. Probably because all of the boring technical advice that shows up in every writing book about not using adverbs and how to punctuate dialogue have been moved into an appendix, leaving the main text to discuss far more interesting structural and sociological concerns. Some reviews of this book complain that he comes across as academic and offputting, but if you're upset by long words and people saying that you probably won't ever be a writer, then you definitely shouldn't be a writer. Love's Executioner - Irvin D Yalom. Ten entertainingly narrated psychotherapy cases, edited to preserve anonymity but apparently true stories. Gotta be honest, the therapist comes across as a massive rear end in a top hat (rambling about how repulsive he finds fat women, how boring or sexy he finds his patients, how much he idolises women's bodies), but at least there's an afterword from years later where he admit he did sounds like an rear end in a top hat. Other than that it was pretty fun. I got another similar psychotherapy book called 'Confessions from the Analytic Couch: A Kafkaesque Memoir' because it was cheap, and I should have expected it from the title but both patient and therapist are unbelievably pretentious. Go into psychotherapy if you're a huge pretentious goony prick imo.
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Sep 3, 2014 13:07
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The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars by Steven Brust This is two stories that are mixed together. The main character of one story is telling another story and we alternate between the two. The main story is about a young painter and his friends; who are struggling to make a living and define themselves as working artists. He tells a story to his friends about a gypsy priest/magician who lives in a world of eternal darkness and sets out with his brothers to find the sun, the moon and the stars. The stories play off each other and both add together creating a better story than they would as singular works. It was an alright read and if you find a used/free copy somewhere check it out.
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Sep 3, 2014 19:39
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Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer. What starts off as a fun and slightly plodding mystery grows wildly into an exhilarating, uncanny and addictive SF novel. I read the last 2/3 in a single sitting. The way it slowly pieces together the psychologist/director's relationship with Area X, the fact that we now have the full, unbroken text of the words in the tunnel/tower, Whitby's art project, the bleedthrough of Area X into the Southern Reach facility...loving hell. On a lighter note, I couldn't help but picture Control's mother as Malory Archer. A worthy successor to Annihilation, and I've already cracked the spine of Acceptance. Can't wait to see how the Southern Reach trilogy ends.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:24
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Fungal Tide by Ian Woodhead. You can find it on amazon. I was expecting another fungal monster zombie fight for survival book, but this one had a lot more to it. I really enjoyed it.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:23
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I just finished Veins by Drew. I mulled over this purchase for a couple weeks, wondering if $5 for a book of less than 200 pages was worth it, but now that I've bought it and finished it, I feel I got way too much for my money. The story is brilliant, being both depressing and hilarious at the same time, and it was sort of inspirational to see how much poo poo the MC had to put up with and still keep going. Drew, you're the hardest working man on the internet. Keep up the good work.
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Sep 8, 2014 12:09
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Just finished reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre. Pretty good, suspensful read, but I have to wonder... was the whole thing really a plot by Control to keep Mundt in place, or was that explanation just Leamas rationalizing a failed op?
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Sep 8, 2014 20:14
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SintaxError posted:Just finished reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre. Mundt also shows up in Call for the Dead, Le Carre's first novel and the first in his George Smiley series. The plot of the Circus using Mundt as a double agent sort of explains what happens to him after Call for the Dead and is in keeping with the bureaucratic underhandedness of the Circus. I don't think it was an invention of Leamas' mind.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:36
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Alice in Deadland by Mainak Dhar I didn't think this would be very good but it was surprisingly entertaining. It's basically a zombie apocalypse story but the twist is fresh and the writing is better than average. It's a quick read but worth the time.
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Sep 8, 2014 23:52
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The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. His influence on Stephen King is undeniable. Great book, but I felt really icky afterwards. Now, on to The Dinner by Herman Koch.
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Sep 9, 2014 15:25
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Just finished David Mitchell's latest novel The Bone Clocks. I think Mitchell is a solid writer but the way he structures his novels (which someone less charitable would call "gimmicky") sometimes take precedence over the story he's telling (I'm not a huge fan of Cloud Atlas, I should say). I found this to be my favourite of the books he's written thus far. While it started to get a little too fantasy for my tastes toward the end, his writing is at its sharpest, and I like the continual focusing on one character's development while still employing the time-jumping progression he's known for. At 624 pages it's a hefty read, but I'd say it's well worth your time.
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Sep 9, 2014 19:52
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I just read Cloud Atlas for the second time this year. I am now reading the same author's The Bone Clocks, so I'm just going to not read the post above this. In any case, I am someone that hates having a favorite anything--I feel life is too short to narrow down a favorite song, food, etc. Still, right now I would label Cloud Atlas as my favorite book. It has so much going for it. I love the themes that the book expresses: predation, social class, the birth lottery, rebellion, propaganda, human weakness. Furthermore, I love the harmony of the book; each of the six stories is like a different instrument playing the same song but in a different way. I greatly enjoyed the second reading. Since I knew how each story turned out, I could really focus on the details and the commonalities between each story. There were a ton of references to the other stories that I didn't catch, or couldn't catch, on the first run-through. I've got to confess, though, that I did skim a portion of the above post. Even though the novel has a definite gimmick, that of six stories of different genres in different time periods, the author uses the gimmick to tie together--rather than segment--each of the stories and highlights the common struggle of the human condition through many different situations. For me, the novel is great as it shows how values change between different cultures and modalities of political rule. I can't recommend the book highly enough.
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Sep 9, 2014 20:17
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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy) by N.K.Jemisin This is a great first novel and I really enjoyed reading it. The setting is lush and the characters felt real to me. I was able to cheer for the main character throughout the entire novel. The story is of a young woman who is suddenly named one of three heirs to the throne of a world-spanning empire. She struggles to determine the rules of this new game that she finds herself embroiled in and her role in it. The ending comes as a pleasant shock.
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Sep 9, 2014 20:35
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Franco Potente posted:Just finished David Mitchell's latest novel The Bone Clocks. I think Mitchell is a solid writer but the way he structures his novels (which someone less charitable would call "gimmicky") sometimes take precedence over the story he's telling (I'm not a huge fan of Cloud Atlas, I should say). I found this to be my favourite of the books he's written thus far. While it started to get a little too fantasy for my tastes toward the end, his writing is at its sharpest, and I like the continual focusing on one character's development while still employing the time-jumping progression he's known for. At 624 pages it's a hefty read, but I'd say it's well worth your time. Totally agree with you on this. I appreciated the work that went into The Cloud Atlas but I just didn't find it to be engaging - every time I would get into the storyline, he would jump into an entirely different story and while I appreciated all the work that went into the structure I felt that it was to the detriment of the flow of the story. Would you say that The Bone Clocks would be more interesting to someone that isn't a fan of The Cloud Atlas?
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Sep 9, 2014 21:50
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Poutling posted:Would you say that The Bone Clocks would be more interesting to someone that isn't a fan of The Cloud Atlas? For what it's worth, my significant other tried to get into Cloud Atlas multiple times but it didn't interest her. However, she's tearing through The Bone Clocks in its first week.
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Sep 9, 2014 22:16
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Poutling posted:Totally agree with you on this. I appreciated the work that went into The Cloud Atlas but I just didn't find it to be engaging - every time I would get into the storyline, he would jump into an entirely different story and while I appreciated all the work that went into the structure I felt that it was to the detriment of the flow of the story. I would say definitely. Whereas Cloud Atlas has six pretty separate stories (there is a bit of bleed between them, but it's mostly thematic), The Bone Blocks follows the same character throughout the course of her life, while having each section come from the perspective of a different character. It's a harmonious way of reconciling Mitchell's love of multiple viewpoints and geographical locations with a more centrally focused narrative. Cloud Atlas can easily be read as short stories linked by a theme, but this one very much feels like a novel.
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Sep 10, 2014 01:55
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I'm reading The Bone Clocks right now, and jesus christ the way Mitchell writes dialogue pisses me off. No-one can loving simply state something, everything is some kind of smug smarmy slang that makes me want to punch the character. I also don't like how there's loving tons of references to his earlier works. Hugo Lamb actually being a character from Black Swan Green is alright (I loving hated him in that book too), but when it's like "I met Doctor Marinus at the Thousand Autumns Chinese Restaurant" you just want to throw the book down because of all the  . I wonder if someone is gonna open a book later on and go "Hey... This kind of looks like a map, but its actually just pictures of clouds... An atlas of tons and tons of clouds!!!" It's doubly annoying because his narrative prose is incredible. I've only just finished Hugo Lamb's part, so hopefully with older characters the dialogue might be toned down. Jacob de Zoet might actually be my favourite novel, and I think I'm realising it's because the period setting forced Mitchell to tone the glibness down.
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Sep 10, 2014 11:51
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Ian McEwan's Black Dogs is, probably, the author's most minor work (I am maybe jumping the gun here, as I've only read about four other books of his). While the prose is tight and there are some exceptionally good moments, it all feels a bit pat. The dichotomies of reason/spirituality and good/evil applied to the post-Second World War and pot-Berlin Wall Europe don't really feel particularly revelatory or even all that interesting, and the story feels oddly padded, even though it's 150 pages long. I like McEwan a lot, but this book is eminently skippable.
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Sep 11, 2014 03:34
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Franco Potente posted:Ian McEwan's Black Dogs is, probably, the author's most minor work (I am maybe jumping the gun here, as I've only read about four other books of his). While the prose is tight and there are some exceptionally good moments, it all feels a bit pat. The dichotomies of reason/spirituality and good/evil applied to the post-Second World War and pot-Berlin Wall Europe don't really feel particularly revelatory or even all that interesting, and the story feels oddly padded, even though it's 150 pages long. I like McEwan a lot, but this book is eminently skippable. Yeah I think Black Dogs is one of his most forgettable with Enduring Love and Atonement being my favourites.
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Sep 11, 2014 04:14
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