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remigious posted:I just devoured Under the Skin in one sitting, and I am having a hard time processing it. It left me feeling sick and unsatisfied. I must be getting soft in my advancing age, it used to be that the more disturbing and gross the novel, the better, but this was an intensely uncomfortable novel. If the book was an affront to your delicate sensibilities, I strongly caution against the film M Faber is a fabulously versatile author. His other novels are also excellent, but in completely different ways.
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Apr 7, 2015 15:01
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ICHIBAHN posted:yes, did you like it? i thought it was brilliant. very hosed up. I did like it, yes. The overarching message on its own is a bit eye-rolling, but Isserley is such a complex and fascinating character, her suffering is what really ties everything together. My only real gripe is the ending, I wish she had turned herself in to the authorities and shut down the entire processing facility. But I would definitely recommend it. It's weird, I am both dying to talk about this novel with someone and wishing I had never read it, because certain passages won't get out of my brain. Edit: I read up on the plot of the film, and I think I will definitely be passing on that. I really just can't handle abduction in books and movies, I guess it just strikes a nerve with me. I walked out in the middle of District 9 crying 
remigious fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 16:20
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remigious posted:Edit: I read up on the plot of the film, and I think I will definitely be passing on that. I really just can't handle abduction in books and movies, I guess it just strikes a nerve with me. I walked out in the middle of District 9 crying Ugh, I'm sorry I was a dick in my response. The whole vegetarianism stuff serves as a method to move the plot around and give some framework, but I agree, it's totally eye-rolling. His other book out in 2014, The Book of Strange New Things is excellent and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's very "soft" science fiction. I was underwhelmed when I finished it - in one evening - but keep thinking about it, months later. (The backstory, too, is heartbreaking -- Faber's wife was dying of cancer during the writing process and died during final manuscript corrections. The alienation and detachment experienced by the books protagonist is difficult, but especially against the author's life -- it's harrowing and heartbreaking.)
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Apr 7, 2015 16:29
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No worries. I will definitely check out The Book of Strange New Things next. Well, maybe after I take a short break and read something brainless as a palate cleanser. Ever since I quit playing WoW (urgh) I have been reading like a fiend, but I think I need to slow down and read something happy for a bit.
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Apr 7, 2015 16:40
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aww man watch the film, it's very good but very different to the book
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Apr 7, 2015 17:17
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Just finished the last book in the Powder Mage trilogy The Autumn Republic, ahhhh the feels such a good trilogy, I'm wrecked
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Apr 8, 2015 13:50
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ICHIBAHN posted:aww man watch the film, it's very good but very different to the book The film is poo poo and has nothing to do with the book. In fact it's almost the precise opposite of the book in every way.
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Apr 8, 2015 14:36
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wanna say that to my face
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Apr 8, 2015 14:51
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I just finished "Devil in the White City" about the Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer that was operating at the same time. There were a couple of times that I didn't like how the author "filled in" the story about the killer, adding details that my sister perfectly referred to as conjecture, but aside from a couple of those I found the book pretty fascinating.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:43
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I just finished Zodiac by Neal Stephenson. I really liked it and it comes together well. I was surprised at how lean the novel was compared to say Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and it has an ending, albeit one that is just a short wrap up chapter. I'm also working my way through the rest of the Laundry Files after taking a long break after Jennifer Morgue. Liked both The Fuller Memorandum and The Apocalypse Codex even though I found the stuff dealing with The Black Chamber more interesting than the Laundry itself.
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Apr 9, 2015 17:01
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AFewBricksShy posted:I just finished "Devil in the White City" about the Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer that was operating at the same time. I almost wished he left out the serial killer part. I enjoyed the parts about the actual World's Fair (Olmstead especially) more. Also you should now read Larson's "Isaac's Storm". I still think it is his best book.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:45
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Anyone read the latest Palahniuk, Beautiful You? I'm about halfway through, it's unmitigated horseshit.
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Apr 10, 2015 09:35
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ICHIBAHN posted:Anyone read the latest Palahniuk, Beautiful You? I'm about halfway through, it's unmitigated horseshit.
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Apr 10, 2015 12:47
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ICHIBAHN posted:Anyone read the latest Palahniuk, Beautiful You? I'm about halfway through, it's unmitigated horseshit. what was the last decent book palahniuk did anyway? some of his earlier ones were okay, but I gave up after pygmy, jfc.
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Apr 10, 2015 12:48
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Attitude Indicator posted:what was the last decent book palahniuk did anyway? some of his earlier ones were okay, but I gave up after pygmy, jfc.
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Apr 10, 2015 13:55
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thought rant was ok but a little formulaic. this is titillation + fight club nonsense. no bueno
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Apr 10, 2015 14:12
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ICHIBAHN posted:Anyone read the latest Palahniuk, Beautiful You? I'm about halfway through, it's unmitigated horseshit. It's not you, don't worry.
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Apr 10, 2015 14:43
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nate fisher posted:I almost wished he left out the serial killer part. I enjoyed the parts about the actual World's Fair (Olmstead especially) more. Also you should now read Larson's "Isaac's Storm". I still think it is his best book. Thanks. There's a long rear end wait for the Pratchett book (Mort, I decided to start with Death) I'm waiting for at the library, so I'll pick this one up to tide me over.
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Apr 10, 2015 14:54
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I picked up and finished J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country in the same sitting. Despite being 85 pages long the slim book packs a lot in it. The bare-bones of the plot is that a troubled veteran of World War One is hired to uncover a discovered mural in a church in little northern village of Oxgodby, but the interest lies in the details of country live in 1920 and its effect on the protagonist who has a few bones in his cupboard. At the start it seemed like one of those pleasant but forgettable stories about England's Green and pleasant land but it has a few surprises and the inner voice of Birkin is refreshingly irreverent but not acerbic. Though I'm glad I picked it up at the library though as the price on the back is Ł7.99 that's nearly a quid for ten pages (not bad for a writer).
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Apr 10, 2015 17:31
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ICHIBAHN posted:Anyone read the latest Palahniuk, Beautiful You? I'm about halfway through, it's unmitigated horseshit. I haven't but sounds like Palaniuk. They were fun reads back in the late 90s when we were angsty 13 year olds where nihilistic fuckoff twisty type books were right up our alley, but I imagine they've always been unmitigated horseshit.
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Apr 10, 2015 18:09
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I had never read anything by Terry Pratchett before he died, so I tried out The Bromeliad. I loved it. Funny, moving, quirky, and some wonderful metaphor. I know its written for a younger audience, but it was brilliant. Definitely would try more of his stuff. Too bad it took this long.
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Apr 11, 2015 03:04
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Boco_T posted:Rant was great and he has promised it is a trilogy but instead he's making a dang Fight Club 2 comic first. haha, what? Xaris posted:I haven't but sounds like Palaniuk. They were fun reads back in the late 90s when we were angsty 13 year olds where nihilistic fuckoff twisty type books were right up our alley, but I imagine they've always been unmitigated horseshit. I actually re-read Survivor some years ago and thought it was okay, but yeah, it's not a must read or anything, but fairly entertaining. I like his M.O. of making hosed up people and watching them break.
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Apr 12, 2015 14:38
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I just finished Vellum: The Book Of All Hours, by Hal Duncan. It took me over a month, and I wrote a lot about it, so I apologise for the wall of text. I forget who originally recommended this book to me, but I remember their pitch was something like "It's a little like American Gods, but much more complex, and also queer". It's got a lot of American Gods in it, but also the Sumerian mythology parts of Snow Crash and a vague postmodern sense of detachment from time and location. There's one(?) gay character, so there's that. Also there's a heavy coating of turn-of-the-millennium DeviantArt edginess. I'm not sure if this review will be spoilery, because honestly I couldn't tell you most of what goes on. In terms of the plot, it felt inscrutable. There's this multiverse called the Vellum, and if you're one of the few who can sense it - supernatural beings known as unkin - you can travel and manipulate parts of it. There's also the titular Book Of All Hours, which is a map of the Vellum. There are two warring factions, loosely rendered as "angels" and "demons", but of course they're both evil and manipulative. It's 2017, and angels made nanomachines, and also not-Satan is a Middle Eastern dictator. But it's also social upheaval during and after the First World War, and also the antebellum American South, and also it's the late nineties. Sometimes it's a world similar to ours, occasionally it's vague steampunk or mythological Mesopotamia. Sometimes it's all of these on the same page. The characters are equally inscrutable. For the most part they exist as unkin with a dozen incarnations across time and dimension, but it's never clear how connected all of these are. There's a young girl, named Phreedom, who as the only female protagonist is laden with all kinds of weird and awkward tropes of sexual assault and romance and motherhood. Also there's Thomas, the gay one, who disappears halfway through, and I thought he'd been killed off until he reappeared at the end. Most memorable is Seamus, who is written as the Ur-Irishman who's grouchy and broody and whose fookin' inner monologue is shot fookin' through with fookin' awkward Irish accent, to be sure. This was a gruelling read. At first glance it's only five hundred pages, but the text on each page is so small and the perspective switches between character, time and place so often that it felt three times longer. Duncan uses four different fonts to complement the dozen different settings and plotlines, to the point where it reaches Illuminatus! Trilogy levels of density. But Illuminatus! was fun, and this simply isn't. I could rarely tell when or where things were meant to be happening, or even who was talking half the time. There are great passages and some lovely ideas but they don't seem to go anywhere or mean anything beyond a shallow "makes you think, huh?". In a word, it was infuriating. There's a sequel, and I'm sure a lot of the seeds planted in this book will germinate and blossom in that, but I don't want to wade through another one of these. Maybe I'm being too harsh, maybe it's too soon after finishing it to write this, but I can't think of any other way to describe how relieved I am to be done with it. Gertrude Perkins fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 14:22
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Finally, The Invisibles (Vol 1) by G Morrison. I've waited years to read this comic -- not much of a GN person, but this was worth the wait. It satisfies the same fascination as RA Wilson for me; had I read this when I was 17-18, it would've been formative (now it's just tremendous entertainment). Vol 2 is up next!
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Apr 17, 2015 02:39
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Bitchkrieg posted:Finally, The Invisibles (Vol 1) by G Morrison. I've waited years to read this comic -- not much of a GN person, but this was worth the wait. It satisfies the same fascination as RA Wilson for me; had I read this when I was 17-18, it would've been formative (now it's just tremendous entertainment). Enjoy five more volumes of Grant Morrison masturbating.
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Apr 17, 2015 12:58
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I just finished Shovel Ready and it made me realize that dialog without quotation marks is really annoying. The plot wasn't really believable but the description of New York after a series of terrorist attacks was good. That's about it.
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Apr 17, 2015 15:34
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Realised that I hadn't posted about finishing Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash. I'd opened it up when I was in a bit of a funk, burnt out by reading things that were too much like work, too "worthy", too much like self-improvement ... and it was just what I needed. Dash has an undeniable talent for crafting great stories out of odd moments in history, scrupulous about adhering to what is recorded but painting great pictures of people and their circumstances: quote:It was at some time after 3 a.m., when the alertness of the crew was at its lowest ebb, that the lookout, Hans Bosschieter, first suspected that all was not well. From his position high in the stern, the sailor noticed what appeared to be white water dead ahead. Peering into the night, Bosschieter thought he could make out a mass of spray, as though surf was breaking on an unseen reef. He turned to the skipper for confirmation, but Jacobsz disagreed. He insisted that the thin white line on the horizon was nothing more than moonbeams dancing on the waves. The skipper trusted to his own judgment, and he held the Batavia’s course, sailing on with all her canvas set. In 1629, a Dutch ship laden with goods, money & jewels went off course on it's way to on its way to Java, stranding it's crew and passengers on a series of deserted island off the coast of West Australia. The captain set off in a ships boat to get rescue, unwisely leaving the other survivors in the charge of a lesser merchant, who was a disgraced bankrupt and a charismatic heretic ... Incredible story that allows Dash to talk about all sorts of things like Dutch trading companies, apostates, Aboriginal archaeology and more. Highly recommended. Followed it up with Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, which is the source for The Thing in it's various incarnations. Entertaining book, if a little old-fashioned that sometimes overplays its hand. "What if these alien creatures have a strange biology unlike ours that - say - allows them to imitate other creatures?" But it's odd to see how much of this made it's way into the John Carpenter film. A decent read.
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Apr 17, 2015 16:50
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Finishing up my initial foray into learning about WWI. Read All Quiet on the Western Front, which I somehow missed in High School. Great, sad book. Also finished Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August based on a suggestion from the Recommendations thread. Well written and impressively researched history of the first month of the war.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:18
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This week I finished On China by Henry Kissinger. Definitely a must read for any sinophiles. I don't know how to feel about Kissinger. Sometimes I got the feeling he was not reporting everything he knew for diplomatic reasons--not getting banned on the mainland. Goes downhill after Deng shifts power to Jiang.
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Apr 18, 2015 02:44
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Yesterday I finished In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, about the Dodd ambassadorship to Berlin in the 30s. Interesting book and history, more about the social and political climate than anything else -- I enjoyed it, but can see how one could find it poorly paced. It was the first book of Larson's I've read; I borrowed it to hold me over until I could get a copy of his new one, Dead Wake.
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Apr 18, 2015 15:26
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Just finished Liminal States by Zack Parsons. Overall I liked the epic scope and the three genre arcs. The western segment was the strongest, the noir part took me a while to get through (to be fair I don't really like noir fiction), and the dystopian society at the end was solid. Next I'm reading To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. I loved Doomsday Book so I'm excited.
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Apr 18, 2015 16:17
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rock2much posted:I just finished Shovel Ready and it made me realize that dialog without quotation marks is really annoying. The plot wasn't really believable but the description of New York after a series of terrorist attacks was good. That's about it. Dang, I liked it. But there's also that thing where I can totally see where you're coming from. I read A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King. Basically "Watchmen: The Novelization" where there are superheroes coming out of retirement to fight off a mysterious thing. I really, really liked it. The prose is made of concise sentences - it feels like there's no word wasted - and a few of the backstories of the characters are truly heartwrenching and affecting. It gets a little meta-up-it's-own-rear end by the end though, but I was entertained throughout. The review at the A.V. Club puts the appeal of it into better words than I can.
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Apr 18, 2015 20:17
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Redeployment by Phil Klay. I love how unwavering some of the language and characters are. There's no agenda here about whether or not the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were worth it. Just short stories that really put you in their boots. NYTimes interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/books/redeployment-iraq-war-stories-by-phil-klay.html?_r=0
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Apr 18, 2015 23:36
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cowbeef posted:Redeployment by Phil Klay. I am a former Marine (served in 90's, so missed the wars thank God), and the book does a great job of capturing Marines. Only second to me as the best military short story collection to The Things They Carried.
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Apr 19, 2015 00:32
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nate fisher posted:I am a former Marine (served in 90's, so missed the wars thank God), and the book does a great job of capturing Marines. Only second to me as the best military short story collection to The Things They Carried. Goddamn. Both of these books are on-point and I can't recommend either enough.
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Apr 19, 2015 03:09
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Captain Hotbutt posted:
That book wants to be The Watchmen so badly that it's loving unbearable; the only thing I liked about it was the fact that the advance readers were dust-jacketed hardbacks.
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Apr 19, 2015 06:32
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nate fisher posted:I am a former Marine (served in 90's, so missed the wars thank God), and the book does a great job of capturing Marines. Only second to me as the best military short story collection to The Things They Carried. If you liked either I recommend The Long Walk which I thought was much stronger than Redeployment. I felt like the rawness of Klay's stories started to drown in the calculated effect of MFA prose after a while.
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Apr 19, 2015 22:41
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rock2much posted:I just finished Shovel Ready and it made me realize that dialog without quotation marks is really annoying. The plot wasn't really believable but the description of New York after a series of terrorist attacks was good. That's about it. How did it work without quotation marks? I kind of like the way Steinbeck / Paton used dashes instead of quotation marks. For whatever reason I don't really like the way signifiers break up quotations in dialog. Oh right, 'she said,' no poo poo she said it, that's why it's in quotation marks you big old dummy, now I interrupted her voice in my head so I could read those two words, and now what the gently caress was even happening again? Gosh, I'll just start at the beginning of the paragraph all over.
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Apr 20, 2015 17:57
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I'm about to finish Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. I've read several of his other books but so far I think this one is my favorite.
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Apr 21, 2015 15:38
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Shogun, by James Clavell. Basically 1,000 pages of suckers gettin stabbed, disembowelling themselves and using anal beads. A fun read.
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Apr 21, 2015 16:59
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