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Living In The End Times, by Slavoj Zizek. It's disjointed, which is what you should approach Zizek expecting, but it has some interesting insights. One of which being that corporations are a sort of memetic organism, who's body exists as a hybrid of branding, law, and organization.
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Nov 12, 2014 18:49
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein): This is quite readable, but a bit uneven in parts. When Perlstein elects to do character studies, they're fascinating. His look into how Reagan created himself is amazing (Perlstein has also been accused of plagiarizing some of the Reagan material). Reagan is the only fully realized individual. Goofball Jerry Ford remains a goofy individual, though Perlstein seems to adore Betty for her individuality. Any mention of Betty in this book is gold, from her candid remarks on everything to having a CB handle ("First Momma"). The book abruptly ends with the Republican National Convention, which was delightful insanity, but sadly not even close to comparable to the 1972 Democratic National Convention that he covered in Nixonland. You get the feeling he absolutely doesn't like Jimmy Carter. Some of it feels like nitpicking for nitpicking's sake, which is sad as Carter had some deeper flaws, such as race-baiting a few years earlier. Carter didn't get a character study, though photos lead you into thinking he was. There is no mention as to the race went between Ford and Carter. Perhaps because the book was so massive, he didn't get as much into pop culture. CIA scandals are frequently mentioned, as well as maneuverings of Dick Cheney. It's still very readable, but not the masterpiece that was Nixonland.
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Nov 14, 2014 09:20
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Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace It needs no introduction. I did this book mostly on audiobook and it took about 3 months. I did however end up getting the paperback anyway.
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Nov 15, 2014 23:54
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Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett It was good but not great. You can unfortunately really tell that he's losing his touch. Roughly the first three quarters are (interesting and fun) exposition and the last bit really feel tacked on as if he suddenly remembered there had to be some sort of story to bind it all together. Nonetheless, it was very enjoyable, but I felt that it would be more appropriate if he were to scrap the whole Dwarven rebellion thing and put it in a Discworld encyclopedia or a 'history and future of the Discworld' collection than as a stand alone novel.
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Nov 16, 2014 00:21
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RC and Moon Pie posted:The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) I just finished this myself and had similar feelings re: some very strong points, but more uneven than Nixonland. I felt like Perlstein did a better job at weaving the character of Nixon with the greater American conservative psyche in the previous book than he did with Reagan in this one. I had no idea how close Reagan actually came to toppling Ford so I found the convention to be extremely compelling. The reveal that Reagan's 'impromptu' speech was pre-planned was brilliant and while the theater of politics being a charade isn't groundbreaking stuff, something about that moment specifically gave me the creeps. Perlstein's disdain for Jimmy Carter is hilariously obvious at times and it's kind of telling how this book received conservative backlash for the typical liberal bias claims when, if anything, Carter comes off as more phony than Reagan. I think Perlstein saves a lot of his anger for the failures of American liberalism and its arrogance in the face of conservative tenacity so it doesn't surprise me that he treats Carter so harshly. There's one paragraph near the end of the book (I think it's somewhere around the discussion of the abortion ban debate at the convention) where he explicitly says that the greatest weakness of liberals is their belief that progressive policy change is an inevitability despite evidence time and again showing that America doesn't work like that. I'm not sure if he plans to write a book about the Carter years and Reagan's election or not, but I hope so. Sometimes he gets a little too cute with his descriptions of events, but he does a drat good job of making sometimes dry and boring and almost always depressing history pretty fun to read. ssbbud fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 04:49
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I just finished Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a Plato-esque dialogue between a disillusioned former hippie and a wise talking gorilla. To be honest, I thought it was rather poo poo. While I sympathize with Quinn's rather radical environmentalist leanings, his critique of modern culture in general is far too broad brushed and without nuance. His prophesies of doom aren't backed up at an empirical level, and him brushing off practically all differences between people in the modern world is somewhat arrogant. His whole argument is basically a huge naturalist fallacy: Ecosystems follows no inherent laws that are relevant to ethical considerations for humans. Finally, while he laughs off "the noble savage"-idea, I'm struggling to see how his characterization of the "leaver-cultures" are anything but thinly veiled and weakly founded idolizations of hunter-gatherer societies.
military cervix fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 21:43
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Round Ireland With A Fridge, by Tony Hawks. It was okay. I'd been led to believe this was a masterpiece, or at least a really funny page-turner of a travel book, with praises sung by all sorts of people. In practice, it was pretty underwhelming. There are a few good vignettes and some fun lines, but it all feels very safe and quite boring for the most part. Also it feels strange reading about a man in his mid-thirties' constant morning erections, not to mention the doghouse sex. I'm sure it's all meant to come off as charming and self-effacing but it just felt awkward and uncomfortable.
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Nov 16, 2014 23:08
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Just finished The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. Oh my goodness, this book is marvelous. The right kind of British dry absurdity, pirates, ninjas, a shocking twist that reveals much about the protagonist, and an army of mimes. Too bad I can't explain why it's so great without sounding like a madman. A+, would read again, but am reluctant to read anything else he's done for fear it won't compare.
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Nov 17, 2014 01:04
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darthbob88 posted:Just finished The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. Oh my goodness, this book is marvelous. The right kind of British dry absurdity, pirates, ninjas, a shocking twist that reveals much about the protagonist, and an army of mimes. Too bad I can't explain why it's so great without sounding like a madman. A+, would read again, but am reluctant to read anything else he's done for fear it won't compare. I loved it, too, up until the twist and the ending. I hated everything after the twist and had to force myself to finish. Real bummer considering how good it was up to that point, and how fun the writing was.
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Nov 17, 2014 01:21
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I just finished Axiomatic, a collection of short stories by Greg Egan, and holy poo poo. This is the sci-fi that I've been craving. Scientifically grounded yet highly imaginative, diverse, premises with an overarching theme of personality, human interaction, and philosophy of the mind. I'll be checking out his novels post-haste.
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Nov 17, 2014 02:03
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Cirofren posted:I just finished Axiomatic, a collection of short stories by Greg Egan, and holy poo poo. This is the sci-fi that I've been craving. Scientifically grounded yet highly imaginative, diverse, premises with an overarching theme of personality, human interaction, and philosophy of the mind. I've been meaning to read more Greg Egan, Axiomatic is the only book by him I've read yet. But yeah I totally agree. He has as many mindblowing ideas as Ted Chiang and is far more prolific. Incredible writer. Luminous (the second short story collection) is high on my list for the next few months.
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Nov 17, 2014 07:46
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I'd recommend Quarantine by Egan. It has two or three incredible scifi ideas in it, each one of which could've been used for a whole book by a lesser author. Wikipedia categorizes it as hard-scifi, but the ideas are more high concept than gritty engineering. It reads like Philip K Dick with a physics background.
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Nov 17, 2014 13:49
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The Blade Itself - The First Law - Book One by Joe Abercrombie Recommended to me by the recommendations thread. I wanted a gritty Conan-esque low-fantasy book. Good world-building, low on the Grognard scale as far as fantasy books go (a plus IMO). I was looking for a bit more of the one man storyline after reading The Martian, but it was excellent. I really enjoyed it and have the other 2 parts of the trilogy coming from Amazon right now.
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Nov 17, 2014 16:40
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The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock (4/5): This is a gritty story (really, three converging stories) about rough people in rural Ohio. I found the whole tale really engaging and thoroughly enjoyed this one. If not for a convenient ending that felt a little too Hollywood, this would have earned a spot on my five-star books shelf. If you like Flannery O'Connor or Cormac McCarthy, I recommend this one. Love Is a Mixtape, Rob Sheffield (3/5): I thought this would be about mixtapes, about how they were fun to make, and about how some of the charm is lost in computerized play lists. Each chapter opens with a graphic depicting the track listing from actual mixtapes, and the first chapter does start with a discussion about the act of making a tape. Even the blurbs on the jacket talk about how it's a great book about music. But this book is actually just a sad memoir that tangentially mentions music. I still enjoyed it for what it was, but I really wanted it to be more about music. How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer (2/5): This one started strong but then I struggled to finish it. It feels like something that might have made a good series of articles in a magazine, but didn't really merit a whole book. It wasn't until after I read it that I learned that the publisher has pulled it from shelves because the author fudged a lot of the research and reporting.
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Nov 17, 2014 17:15
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skooma512 posted:Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace How in the world does an audio book deal with the footnotes?
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Nov 18, 2014 04:02
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I also just finished The First Law Book 1 by Joe Abercrombie. Fantastic first book of a series. I mean, not a whole lot of epic importance happens yet, but for a first book setting up a trilogy it does a fantastic job. One thing that is amazingly cool to me is how little filler there was in the book. Every single chapter felt like it was pushing the plot forward in some way. I also absolutely loved how after a chapter would set up an event to come, it would just happen either the next chapter or very soon. In other books you would expect to have to wait like half the book before you got to the event in question, while Abercrombie just skips all the bullshit between and just gets there quick. It was really refreshing. So yeah, even though it was mostly all setup for the 2nd and 3rd books, it never felt boring or plodding and nothing I read felt like unimportant filler. What a great novel, I'm really looking forward to the next two books. Damo fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 05:57
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I just finished Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. Man, that was a big book. Not just big page-wise (close to 1000 pages in my version), but a massive cast of characters and a huge world (or many worlds) to discover. It felt slow at times, and it seemed like there were dozens of little tangents over the first 800 or so pages, introducing new characters and dealing with minor sub-plots. There's no central protagonist at all: the book follows many characters on many planets over the course of the book. However, thinking back on the early bits, all that back-story (and there's a lot of it) was really important to fully flesh out the characters and the dynamics of the Commonwealth. In science fiction, humanity is always depicted as a "young" race and as highly ambitious and reckless, as we live such short lives. I loved how Hamilton turned that around with the idea of rejuvenation, recycling human lives and allowing us to live for centuries . (I wouldn't consider that a spoiler, just part of the world he created, but I'll err on the side of caution) It presented our species in a very different way, especially in comparison to the terrifying, relentless nature of the Primes. I'm really excited to find the sequel, Judas Unchained, to learn how things continue. I want to find out how if and how the Commonwealth finds out that Alessandra Baron is the Starflyer, follow Paula Myo in her hunt for Bradley Johannson and the Guardians and what happened with Ozzie, Orion and Tochee on whatever planet they were at the end...that whole plot confused me a bit.
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Nov 18, 2014 06:05
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Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. Bros, hoes, you name it. This book has it all! Especially bros in arms, these are the true bros. As usual, the dialogue somewhat sparse but consistently great. I was expecting a different ending given that we all know how Papa's own love/war story ended. The prose is usual Hemingway, a well-regarded Cezanne of literature (a tired comparison, I know, sorry) if mid-early Cezanne weren't so depressing. A good book. 4/5
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Nov 18, 2014 14:18
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I used to read everything Egan wrote. Don't take "used to" as a real criticism: I weaned myself off his work after I started to notice the tics and habits in his work: we'll stop for a few chapters now to discuss exotic quantum physics which doesn't actually advance the plot. And now we'll discuss the ontological basis of our own reality. But you'll notice these things after you've read a lot from any author. He does really clever stuff, and is one of the few science fiction writers who is actually writing science fiction (as opposed to cowboys / soldiers / detectives with spaceships & rayguns). I'd especially rate his short fiction, Quarantine and Permutation City. Anyways, my own reading has been derailed badly by work but I finished Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Compared to the movie, it does a lot more telling than showing, and the whole thing is a lot more bleak and nihilistic, exploring the crappy lives of almost everyone involved in the story. Which maybe makes it slighter weaker? Still a good read and it feels fairly authentic in that there aren't any one-dimensional bad or good guys, just a lot of messed up and disappointed people.
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Nov 18, 2014 14:48
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darthbob88 posted:Just finished The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. Oh my goodness, this book is marvelous. The right kind of British dry absurdity, pirates, ninjas, a shocking twist that reveals much about the protagonist, and an army of mimes. Too bad I can't explain why it's so great without sounding like a madman. A+, would read again, but am reluctant to read anything else he's done for fear it won't compare. Loooove this book. I particularly loved how it let me feel clever by figuring some things out, and still managed to completely blindside me with other things. E: yeah, I bought Angelmaker, but haven't started it for pretty much the same reason you give. Also, did you know his dad is John le Carre? I happend to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy right before Gone Away World which ended up being a fun coincidence. a kitten fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 23:13
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a kitten posted:Also, did you know his dad is John le Carre? I happend to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy right before Gone Away World which ended up being a fun coincidence. quote:E: yeah, I bought Angelmaker, but haven't started it for pretty much the same reason you give.
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Nov 19, 2014 18:46
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James Ellroy, the L.A. Quartet, blasted through all four books during a number of sickdays. I liked them a lot. Having played LA Noire less than a year ago, I'd say that the books must have been mandatory reading for the game developers. However, criticism wise, there was way too much period slang for it to feel natural and the underlying theme of all four novels seems to have been the hypocrisy of the entire post-war American society. I approve of the message, but binging through all four books brought a bit too much of it at once. Also 'White Jazz's narrative gimmick became old quite quickly.
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Nov 19, 2014 19:19
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I just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. Absolutely amazing. Very down to Earth (Mars?) and rooted in real science. The author actually researched all the aspects of the book down to the orbital mechanics involved. Not to mention that it's hilarious. Airlock hamster ball? Comedy gold. The only thing I didn't like was the ending. For a book as grounded and realistic as this one the ending was a bit too 'action movie' and over the top.
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Nov 21, 2014 04:22
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Well, I just finished a H.P. Lovecraft short story that was ... different. Using the pen name Sally Theobald, he wrote "I Wore the Brassiere of Doom", a true-confession story that mixes smalltown-girl-coming-to-the-big-city, those titular occult cups, random racism, glimmers of humour, and naturally some familiar Cthulhu Mythos beings. Don't really know what to do now.
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Nov 21, 2014 11:09
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Perfidia posted:Well, I just finished a H.P. Lovecraft short story that was ... different. Using the pen name Sally Theobald, he wrote "I Wore the Brassiere of Doom", a true-confession story that mixes smalltown-girl-coming-to-the-big-city, those titular occult cups, random racism, glimmers of humour, and naturally some familiar Cthulhu Mythos beings. Google is telling me that was actually by Robert M. Price, not Lovecraft.
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Nov 21, 2014 15:25
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I know Price published it in one of his fanzines/pamphlets (which is where I read it: Lurid Confessions #1, June 1986), but I didn't see anything in that issue claiming this. Maybe he clarified things somewhere else, or perhaps more likely I was just too shellshocked to understand the joke. e: no, you're right --- further study reveals I was heinously bamboozled by an unscrupulous fictioneer and I will now hang my gullible head in shame. Perfidia fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 22, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 17:04
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Tonton Macoute posted:James Ellroy, the L.A. Quartet, blasted through all four books during a number of sickdays. I liked them a lot. Having played LA Noire less than a year ago, I'd say that the books must have been mandatory reading for the game developers. However, criticism wise, there was way too much period slang for it to feel natural and the underlying theme of all four novels seems to have been the hypocrisy of the entire post-war American society. I approve of the message, but binging through all four books brought a bit too much of it at once. Also 'White Jazz's narrative gimmick became old quite quickly. You need to read Perfidia next. It is Ellroy's new trilogy that is set before the events of the LA Quartet. A younger Dudley Smith is amazing in it.
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Nov 22, 2014 01:18
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I just finished William Gibson's new book, The Peripheral. It was absolutely fantastic. I'd say it's almost a return to his neuromancer days. He takes a bunch of our current technology and socioeconomic issues and takes them to their possible conclusions 80 or so years from now, and then paints an entire world around the subsequent repercussions (stuff like cell phones just being implants in our bodies put there at birth, video calling being live feeds in your peripheral vision). Of course, the first 80 pages or so are intense and can make your head spin. He just whips a bunch of story by you without any real explanations. Then, within the span of one chapter, he snaps all of it into focus. I promise, you'll then suddenly be so loving cock hooked on what's happening in this book you'll end up finishing it in two days like I did. The best part about reading this book is that while the future in it feels technologically very far away, the ruined conditions in that future certainly feel very near nowadays. It's things like watching twitch stream of those people playing arma III like it's real life, or watching Buffalo NY get its poo poo caved in by snow on the news, or reading about the growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics (I'm a clinician). One of the most advanced hospitals in the nation had to be shut down for 10 days because of an outbreak of gently caress-off super resistant bacteria that had a 50% mortality rate. At the same time, we just landed a probe on an asteroid, and everyone's wearing a fit bit and has location based social media platforms in their pockets. I think sometimes we waltz right through all this without even putting it all together. The Peripheral puts it all together and then some, and you won't soon forget how terrifying it may all become. It's a great read.
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Nov 23, 2014 01:00
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Before They Are Hanged - The First Law - Book Two by Joe Abercrombie I'm tearing through this trilogy considerably faster than my normal reading speed. The flow of Abercrombie's writing style and speed of the story are pretty amazing. There's a few parallel story lines made up of multiple different sets of main characters the whole time, and unlike the first book, I find them all to be very engaging (the first 3/4ths of Jezal's storyline in the first book was a bore) I realize the thing I'm digging most about these books is the complete lack of 'black-and-white' options. There's never a time when a character makes a choice that is a good/bad move. There's always consequences and they're usually terrible either way.
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Nov 24, 2014 19:34
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robotsinmyhead posted:Before They Are Hanged - The First Law - Book Two by Joe Abercrombie I envy you. I wish I could erase my memory and read that trilogy again. I've just finished Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. It's an absolutely fantastic, brutal book about World War One and the psychological trauma it has on the troops in the trenches. It's an excellent book, and the first in a long time to actually make me cry. Occasionally Faulks forgets he's writing a fiction rather than a history text book, but on the whole it's beautifully written. Having said that, I now need to read something nice and light as a unicorn chaser.
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Nov 25, 2014 22:10
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Sadsack posted:
Try The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.
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Nov 25, 2014 23:17
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(I'm cross-posting this from the "Read proper literature" thread) I just finished Catch 22 yesterday. While I enjoyed it alright, thought it was quite clever in parts, and I feel like I "got" the various commentaries and absurdities that Heller was trying to present, I didn't love it the way everyone else seems to. This is a novel that appears on every "Top 100 novels of All Time" list you'll ever see, often in the top 20 or even top 10, and is many peoples' favorite book ever, and I only thought it was good. For these reasons, I face that dilemma of wondering if I'm the problem here, which I'm open to accepting as entirely possible. Does someone who really loved the book want to chime in and maybe describe for me what Catch 22 means to them, or why it deserves all the praise it receives? I'd love to get a deeper perspective, and maybe some more explanation on the aspects I might have missed that make this novel one of the greats.
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Nov 25, 2014 23:27
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I only just read Catch-22 recently, and I guess the reason I loved it so much is how funny it is. Genuine laugh out loud humor, which is so rare. And how all the absurdities just kept layering and interlocking in on each other, until the most ridiculous conclusions were also the most inescapably logical. It also does a non-linear narrative correctly, which I always love, in that it only makes sense in its current order; it can't be "unraveled." Now that I think about it, it reminds me a lot of Pulp Fiction.
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Nov 26, 2014 05:01
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A significant thing about all those novels on the 100 greatest lists is that you must consider them relative to the time they were first published. I can't speak with any great authority on Catch-22 specifically, but how many novels like it do you think were published prior to 1961?
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Nov 26, 2014 15:06
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The Divide by Matt Taibbi A good read if you want to look into the void of the criminal justice system and feel impotent rage and depression. I'm a big fan of Taibbi's work with Rolling Stone, but this is his first book that I've read. He loses something in the expansion to 400 pages, but he's still really good at explaining opaque financial jargon in a way that makes it clear how hosed up it all is. Bonus points for the awesome cover art by Molly Crabapple.
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Nov 26, 2014 15:12
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The Saga of the Seven Suns series - Kevin J Anderson. Great series, from a great writer and a riveting read, read the first one to pass time at airports and had to get the rest to see how the story ends.
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Nov 27, 2014 08:09
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The Game by Neil Strauss. Yeah, the PUA one. I went into it thinking it was going to be more of a manual, and while it does explain how the thing works in general (and sometimes bizarre detail - carry lint and a UV light around with you to fake finding lint on a woman and then check her for more lint??? Does this work?), it's actually a narrative about the guy's time becoming a famous PUA and then dropping out. I actually really enjoyed it and though I thought I was going to hate all of them, I mostly felt sorry for them. Mystery keeps having complete psychological breakdowns to the point of becoming suicidal over women leaving him, and his mom says he has low self-esteem.  Even the really gross PUAs were just sad people who'd tried to learn social skills by rote and hosed them up - the basic advice of 'be funny and confident', 'learn interesting things' and 'don't look like poo poo' became the nasty robotic tricks and misogyny that people associate with PUAs now. It's basically a story about how nerds ruin everything, as usual. (Especially when finally it turns out that they've gamed every woman around them and are now just getting baffled replies of 'Why do all the men here keep asking me about when I floss my teeth?')Also this book showed me that Courtney Love owns.
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Nov 27, 2014 13:48
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The sequel is more of a legit manual.
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Nov 27, 2014 14:00
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The Game is the story of Orpheus. He descends into this alien world, populated by broken and damned souls, eventually reaches his goal, and slowly extracts himself and returns.
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Nov 27, 2014 21:38
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lifg posted:The Game is the story of Orpheus. He descends into this alien world, populated by broken and damned souls, eventually reaches his goal, and slowly extracts himself and returns. Without the girl.
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Nov 28, 2014 03:22
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