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I just finished Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish (Translated into English by Danusia Stok). Picked it up because I'm a big fan of the Witcher video game series. It was really good. Encountering the franchise in game form first, I was amazed how much the book was like the game. So rather, how faithfully and accurately the game's writers and designers adapted the source material. This book is a collection of short stories with a framing device loosely tying them together. Sometimes grim, sometime humorous. As Ii'm reading a translation, I have to give the translator as least some of the credit, but the I really like the style of the prose. I do almost all of my reading in 20 minute sittings during my lunch break at work, and The Last Wish's anthology(ish) format was perfectly suited to this. If anyone is enjoying The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (video game), they should definitely check this book out. I am looking forward to reading more. My understanding is that there is another collection of short stories and three novels. But some of them aren't translated into English yet, for some reason.
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Aug 11, 2015 22:33
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Finished The Room by Emma Donoghue. Oh man. This book devastated me throughout. I cried many times and spent the rest of the time feeling tears pushing at the back of my eyes. What a moving story.
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Aug 12, 2015 02:29
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Silent Victory, by Clay Blair Jr. Recommended to me by the military history thread, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're really interested in the US submarine campaign against Japan during WW2. It's an extremely dense play by play account of the submarine campaign, naming seemingly every US submarine, submarine skipper, and mentioning every last patrol and reported kill during the entire Pacific war by US subs. Very detailed, very thorough, but a slog to chew through. Writing is very dry and the meat of it is just "This happened then this happened then this happened." The book also has Opinions about the conduct of the submarine war, and almost every chapter ends with a paragraph or two about what the author thinks should have been done. Exclusively focuses on the US side of the campaign, probably owing to a lack of good translated Japanese primary sources at the time, and in my opinion it provides a poor overall sense of the submarine campaign, instead offering an extremely in-depth review of US submarine operations in the Pacific. Still, I learned quite a lot. I had no idea that one of the major non-offensive jobs of US subs was "lifeguarding" air strikes throughout the Pacific - rescuing downed aviators in the water. I was also surprised to learn how few fatal friendly fire incidents there were involving US submarines throughout the Pacific war, considering the scope of the conflict, though it seems like just about every US sub got bombed by American airplanes a few times. My favorite incident from the book was the sinking of German submarine U-168 by Dutch submarine Swaardvisch, operating under American strategic command, in October 1944. In the end, a British-built submarine in the Dutch navy under American task force command sank a German submarine in Japanese waters and returned to an Australian base where the feat was celebrated with Canadian booze.        
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Aug 12, 2015 14:51
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So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. I had read The Men Who Stare At Goats years ago when the movie was still a thing. I never saw the movie, but I liked the book enough, though it lost its way at the end. Shamed was better. He flows from topic to topic, the anecdotes are interesting, the style is fun, the writing concise, and it's more relevant than his other writings. It's also one of the scariest books I've read. While it goes into big-name and popular cases (Justine Stacco, Jonah Lehrer, a few others), the reality of internet shaming happens daily, to many people. I'm not one to post every thought I have on Facebook, but now I don't see the point. You can make a joke and all hell breaks loose. God forbid you're a celebrity. Just think about SomethingAwful. We have labeled people as "That crazy girl with the Zelda wedding", "Groverhaus", "the dog fucker", "Star Trek pedophile", "Granos" (well, if you see that last one, call the police); the list just goes on. It's a comedy website, these people are insane, but the shame and its implications are real. When this translates to the real world, people go to prison, lose their careers, lose their families, all because a bunch of neckbeards lose their poo poo on Twitter. Some people deserve it, but some people don't. And it's insane. How far is too far? It's a fun, quick read that shines a light on a major issuer, and I'll be reading the rest of Ronson's catalog soon enough.
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Aug 12, 2015 15:08
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ICHIBAHN posted:Great book. Worth reading a couple of times. American Psycho is good but there are a few really tedious chapters. I hope not too many. By the way Lunar Park was really intense, I don't remember being bored. I read it in three days (which is a sort of record for me).
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Aug 12, 2015 22:14
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A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. Somehow I've gone this long as a SF fan without actually reading any PKD, so this was my first. I've seen the (excellent) film adaption of this a good few times, so I knew what to expect in terms of characters and plot; what I didn't expect was how gorgeous Dick's writing is, and how deep he plumbs the psyches (and psychoses) of his characters. This is a very good book; a very sad book too. Anything else I said would just be gilding the lily. Once More With Feeling: How We Tried To Make The Greatest Porn Film Ever, by Victoria Coren & Charlie Skelton. A fun story about two best friends and journalists and their attempt to make a porn film, covering the whole story from inception to planning to casting to shooting. It's a cavalcade of interesting and pretty well-drawn characters, some nice observations, and I like "Vicky" and "Charlie"'s chemistry together as friends. I wasn't expecting a grand exposé of the realities of porn, but the book acknowledges that, and you get a sense of the authors' shifting opinions and experiences, both with regard to the porn industry and their own personal relationships with sex and erotica. It's also surprisingly poignant, as towards the middle and end of the book they get to know the cast of their film. It's funny, sure, but it's also a refreshingly human story. The sad thing is that, since the book's publication was 13 years ago, the film is pretty much impossible to find. Rat Queens: Volume Two: The Far Reching Tentacles Of N'rygoth, by Kurtis J. Wiebe, Roc Upchurch & Stjepan Sejic. As with the first volume, the tone and world of Rat Queens is reminiscent of a fun D&D campaign with all your funniest friends. But this story arc goes a little deeper into the characters' backstories, including some pretty hosed-up scenes. Sometimes the action's a little too fast-paced to keep up with mechanically, but it's a small gripe when it looks and reads this good.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:39
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Gertrude Perkins posted:A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. Somehow I've gone this long as a SF fan without actually reading any PKD, so this was my first. I've seen the (excellent) film adaption of this a good few times, so I knew what to expect in terms of characters and plot; what I didn't expect was how gorgeous Dick's writing is, and how deep he plumbs the psyches (and psychoses) of his characters. This is a very good book; a very sad book too. Anything else I said would just be gilding the lily. I'm a huge PK Dick fan, and am slogging through his Exegesis and non-fiction writings right now. He's changed a lot of my views on SF as literature, and his stories will profoundly mess with your conception of the consensual nature of reality (sorry  ). Now read VALIS, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electeic Sheep? ... What's incredible to me is -- not only was he astoundingly prolific -- most of his novels are really very good. Not just "good for SF." They've held up beautifully.
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Aug 13, 2015 15:02
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I just finished reading Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy. I've been on a long crime/noir novel kick over the last year. I blitzed through all of the Jo Nesbo novels in 6 months (read them, they're gritty and amazing). I slogged through half of the Henning Mankel novels before I realized I didn't care about or for Wallander. Black Dahlia had characters who I cared about in spite of being extremely flawed individuals. I wanted to know who committed the murder, but I wanted to know how the characters would react to the news even more. Great stuff. There are 3 more books in the series, so I'm on to The Big Nowhere now.
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Aug 13, 2015 19:14
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LooksLikeABabyRat posted:I just finished reading Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy. I've been on a long crime/noir novel kick over the last year. I blitzed through all of the Jo Nesbo novels in 6 months (read them, they're gritty and amazing). I slogged through half of the Henning Mankel novels before I realized I didn't care about or for Wallander. Make sure to also check out Ellroy's newest book 'Perfidia' after you read the L.A. Quartet. It is the start of his new L.A. Quartet (which takes place earlier than the one you are reading). It has a young Dudley Smith in it (which you will learn all about in the next 3 books).
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Aug 14, 2015 16:17
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nate fisher posted:It has a young Dudley Smith in it (which you will learn all about in the next 3 books). Oh sweet, more of that racist dude. Will definitely read the new series. Thanks for the heads up.
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Aug 14, 2015 16:28
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I've been reading Jennifer Brown lately. I read "The Hate List," about the aftermath of a school shooting and the effects it has on everyone, especially the narrator, who was the girlfriend of the shooter. She and the shooter made a list of people they hated, and he used it to select his targets. Her friends all hate her, her family thinks she did it, and a girl who used to torment her is trying to befriend her because the narrator saved her life. In "Thousand Words," the 17-year-old narrator drunkenly sends her boyfriend a nude photo. When they have a messy breakup, he leaks the photo. This story deals with the aftermath of the leak, and covers her community service for creating child pornography via sext. Her father is the superintendent and concerned parents try to oust him from the position. And finally I read "At Face Value," by Emily Franklin. It's a modern gender-flipped adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrie Bergerac is the editor of the school paper. She has a giant crush on Eddie "Rox" Roxanninoff, another writer for the paper. Her best friend is Leyla Christianson, an air-headed but really sweet girl. When Eddie confides in Cyrie that he likes Leyla, who likes him back but gets nervous around him, Cyrie agrees to help her spell check emails that she sends. It's Cyrano de Bergerac. I listened to the audiobook for this one, and I really liked it, even if Cyrie was frustratingly dumb at times. They were all good books, and I recommend them for quick books you can devour in an afternoon.
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Aug 14, 2015 16:46
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It has been a while since I posted in here, I read a ton of comic books but I also read: Nick Cutter - The Acolyte - A bit different from his gross-out horror books but it was fun as a pastiche of detective novels set in a weird religious dystopia. Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 - A classic that I had never read. I really liked it, though it annoys me how much old sci-fi treats women as pearl-clutching idiots. Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels - A collection of short stories, some great, some mediocre. I prefer the author's full novels but there were some gems in here including 'Daydreams of Angels' itself and a weird Dr. Moreau story. Patton Oswalt - Silver Screen Fiend - A kind of interesting look at low-stakes addiction but generally mediocre. John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids - A lot of kids in my high school had to read this, but I never did, so I thought I'd check it out. It was okay! I thought the triffids themselves were silly but the mass blinding was a nice twist on the "monsters have invaded but aren't humans the real monsters?" type of story. Aziz Ansari - Modern Romance - I don't know what I was expecting but this was actually pretty interesting. It's full of research and statistics about dating and relationships in the era of technology. Not particularly funny so avoid it if you're thinking it's going to be another 'comedian book'. Brian Keene - Darkness on the Edge of Town - He took two Stephen King books (The Mist and Under the Dome) and tossed them in a blender along with some poop. It like a fast food burger - quick, easy, but you didn't really enjoy it and you kinda regret it. Craig Tello and 'Daniel Bryan' - Yes! My Improbably Journey to the Main Event of Wrestlemania - I mostly read this because I used to watch independent wrestling and followed this guy's career. It's okay. It's exactly what you would expect it to be, a pretty basic biography. Ursula K Le Guin - Rocannon's World - The first book in the 'Hainish Cycle' which I plan to read all of. I went in with high expectations and I think this came up a little short but I'll still read the rest of them. The Berzerker fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Aug 14, 2015 |
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Aug 14, 2015 16:56
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nate fisher posted:Make sure to also check out Ellroy's newest book 'Perfidia' after you read the L.A. Quartet. It is the start of his new L.A. Quartet (which takes place earlier than the one you are reading). It has a young Dudley Smith in it (which you will learn all about in the next 3 books). Yeah, Perfidia ties back into Black Dahlia in other ways too, especially offers more insight into Bucky Bleichart, Lee Blanchard and Kay Lake(with Kay being a POV character in Perfidia).
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Aug 14, 2015 17:25
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I just finished ending racism. You're welcome.
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Aug 14, 2015 20:29
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Ordeal by Hunger by G Stewart, about the Donner Party. Written in 1936, it's generally regarded as the definitive work on the subject. Very engaging and well-paced (and lurid). Makes me want to take a backpacking trip through Donner Lake and the Sierra Nevada. Daytripper by F Moon and G Bá. Graphic novel, definitely best enjoyed and considered a bit at a time. Beautiful magical realist themes (essentially each chapter is part of the narrators' life -- and each chapter presents a new death/ending). Came highly recommended in the BSS Vertigo thread. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by perennial favorite PK Dick. In some sense, the least satisfying of his novels for me so far. Lots to think about. I really need to explore criticisms on this particular novel before I form an opinion on its importance and value (especially in regards to his other works).
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Aug 17, 2015 01:07
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Fools Quest by Robin Hobb, my god that woman is sadistic why do I keep reading her novels. Second book of Fitz and the Fool, fifteenth in the realm of the Elderlings and Eight from the viewpoint of our boy Fitz, Hobb once again shows fans why they shouldn’t clamour for more – he had a happy(ish) ending last time, it wasn’t the one you wanted but gently caress off and let the Fitz be content. Some 20 years into the happily ever after Fitz finally receivers the recognition and adoration a thousand awful fanfics have fantasised about… and yet this admittedly happy ending everyone wanted is tainted by what the reader knows has occurred to his daughter. What follows is a tense page turner as our boy builds towards what will be a roaring rampage of revenge. It’s going to be a long wait until the next one.
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Aug 18, 2015 04:10
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Franchescanado posted:So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. Yeah this was a really good book, finished it quickly. It's scary that we have become our own surveillance tool.
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Aug 18, 2015 05:23
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The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 by John Darwin The British Empire often features prominently in the history books I read, so I found what promised to be a good, thorough look at the empire from its apex through its decline. What I got was interesting. I'm an American and inevitably the vast majority of the history books I've read have been by American authors assuming an American audience or at least a reader familiar with the American perspective on history. The Empire Project is a work on British history by a British author for an audience already familiar with the major events and figures of the British Empire's history, so while the change of perspective was very interesting and I appreciated seeing a non-American historical view of the United States' intrusions into British history, I frequently found myself clearly missing a familiarity with certain events and figures the book assumes. Likewise, I'm not familiar with the historiography of British history and this is the first book I've ever read dedicated to the history of the British Empire, so I can't comment on the work's scholarly impact. Still, there was a lot of interesting stuff in here, particularly if you're more interested in the diplomatic and economic aspects of British imperial history than the social or military elements. The writing is relatively engaging for an academic history book, and while it clearly expects the reader to already be broadly familiar with the topic I found it nevertheless an interesting and highly educational read that dramatically expanded my knowledge of the British Empire's history and through it also the histories of many British colonies, notably Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, which feature prominently in the book as one might expect. I already had a pretty good understanding of India's history so those sections were less novel.
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Aug 19, 2015 04:47
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Swan Song by R McCammon I wonder if this is what prompted releasing the "uncut/updated" version of the Stand? I really liked the late 80s cold war feel to this, and I was sure that God on the Mountain was going to be the bunker that the First Lady and the rest of the government went to. Really wasn't expecting the Pres to make a comeback! The 7 year gap between Books was kind of jarring, it just seemed like too long of a time for so little to have happened offscreen
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Aug 19, 2015 05:06
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Just finished Nemesis Games, the latest by James SA Corey. If each book is a take on a different genre (something I've read in interviews), then this one is a Disaster Movie. Pretty entertaining. If you like the series you'll like this.
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Aug 21, 2015 20:48
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Fart.Bleed.Repeat. posted:Swan Song by R McCammon Actually a hell of a lot happens in the seven year gap. Most of it just isn't important to telling the story, like how the armies and townships form, how the circlet lost two more spikes and so on. More importantly, large parts of the narrative wouldn't work if Swan was 16 at the start or 9 at the end..
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Aug 23, 2015 00:48
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Jedit posted:Actually a hell of a lot happens in the seven year gap. Most of it just isn't important to telling the story, like how the armies and townships form, how the circlet lost two more spikes and so on. More importantly, large parts of the narrative wouldn't work if Swan was 16 at the start or 9 at the end.. Agreed about the armies and towns and things moving on, but i think why i found it jarring was that ok so we've got our main players in their little groups- swan & josh & rusty, sister & paul- and here 7 years later, it's still just those same pairs wandering around lost, looking for each other, just like they left off at the end of Book1 - while the other side has so much more accomplishment(armies of thousands, towns destroyed in their wake), that it seems they have moved on in that 7 years Once Book2 started rolling and paths started crossing, it was all good
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Aug 23, 2015 05:14
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I just finished The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. It was my first Pratchett book I've ever read and I was a bit underwhelmed by it. I thought it was trying to hard to be witty at the expense of having a storyline. Does the Discworld series get better?
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Aug 23, 2015 09:16
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Ms. Happiness posted:I just finished The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. It was my first Pratchett book I've ever read and I was a bit underwhelmed by it. I thought it was trying to hard to be witty at the expense of having a storyline. Does the Discworld series get better? Colour of Magic is an ok book but is not close to the best of Discworld. Read Mort or Guards, Guards!, and if you don't enjoy those discworld might just not be for you
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Aug 23, 2015 09:30
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Ms. Happiness posted:I just finished The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. It was my first Pratchett book I've ever read and I was a bit underwhelmed by it. I thought it was trying to hard to be witty at the expense of having a storyline. Does the Discworld series get better? Basically the first three Discworld books are okay-ish satire of fantasy tropes. I didn't really enjoy them either and I am a big Discworld fan. After the first three they become heart-warming character-based stories that examine different aspects of humanity through the prism of fantasy. I suggest checking out Guards, Guards, Small Gods or Going Postal.
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Aug 23, 2015 10:00
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Ms. Happiness posted:I just finished The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. It was my first Pratchett book I've ever read and I was a bit underwhelmed by it. I thought it was trying to hard to be witty at the expense of having a storyline. Does the Discworld series get better? It absolutely does. You're completely right in your assessment, I felt the same way rereading that novel. It's only after the first couple of novels that he really hits his stride and starts dealing with central themes that he satirises, which is what (in my opinion) is the structure his earlier novels need. Not to say the first novels aren't entertaining, but they do fall a bit flat if you're expecting the quality of his later novels. The stories about Rincewind aren't my favourites anyway. Google for one of those reading guides and start reading the novels on Death or the Night Watch, which I think are probably the best of the bunch. Still, though, once you get into it you've got one hell of a ride in front of you. So many funny, good books to read, it'll take you a while to get through them all. Oh, to read Pratchett for the first time again. e: Like the poster above me said, try Small Gods. That's the one that got me hooked. Taeke fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 10:09
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Ms. Happiness posted:Does the Discworld series get better? God yes. Immeasurably so.
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Aug 23, 2015 10:11
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Save this image, you will refer to it often: My recommendations of where to start would be: * Mort to begin the Death subseries, if you want to read about the adventures of Death himself (and his family) — these are often quite dark fantasy stories involving other mythical figures * Wyrd Sisters to begin the Witches subseries (there's a book that comes before it, Equal Rites, but it's of patchy quality and entirely skippable), if you want hilarious subversion of fairytale tropes and powerful female characters — these are lighter in tone than the Death books * Guards! Guards! to begin the City Watch subseries, if you want to read police procedurals with many fantasy creatures, set in one of the best fantasy cities ever written — these often have the most touching social commentary * Going Postal to begin the Moist von Lipwig subseries, if you want to read about a con-man being roped into fixing up that city's public services such as the post office or one of these standalones: * The Truth, examining what happens when newspapers and journalism come to a fantasy world * Small Gods, one of the most standalone books in that it's set in a completely different part of the Discworld from most of the books — it's a funny criticism of organised religion * The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, one of the YA Discworld books, but paradoxically one of the darkest — it's a take on the talking-animal fantasy trope Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 10:15
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Thank you so much for the awesome graphic. So is it a general consensus to just skip the Rincewind novels?
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Aug 23, 2015 10:44
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Ms. Happiness posted:Thank you so much for the awesome graphic. So is it a general consensus to just skip the Rincewind novels? You'll still probably want to come back to them after you've read some of the others. But for now, check out some other storylines.
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Aug 23, 2015 10:53
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The Tiffany Aching, while young adult, are very fun, quick reads too, don't skip them. The Wee Free Men are hilarious.
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Aug 23, 2015 11:54
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Just finished Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and some French dude. It's about how analogy is the core of cognition and thinking. It's very pleasant but drat does it beat around the bush sometimes. There's a part near the end where it talks in detail about how Einstein figured out relativity, though, and that's really cool. Basically you should just skip whatever makes you bored in it, because no single part especially requires a previous part to be understood, though the first few chapters are of course more important.
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Aug 23, 2015 13:02
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Girl with All The Gifts I feel like it sort of fell apart at the end (I like the idea of the ending far more than I do the execution) and the Junkers were sort of wasted given their over all appearances amount to maybe three scenes and the story really didn't care much about getting back to Beacon such that they could have had it being shown to be being over run when the base was and it wouldn't have changed the story much overall. ConanThe3rd fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 17:18
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Just finished The Martian and Ready Player One, both on friends' recommendations. The Martian was great and a really fun bit of hard sci-fi. I'm really stoked for the movie. Ready Player One has a lot of glaring problems. It's supposed to be a fun 80s nostalgia romp, which works on that level, but the problems come when it tries to be anything else. I seriously did not like Wade at all, and the feeble attempts at a romantic subplot come off as more creepy/stalkerish than anything. I really thought the lesson Halliday was trying to teach was NOT to get hung up on someone who doesn't want you. Had the ending been "No seriously dude, you made it weird and you don't know her at all" that would be so much better. Still, I liked the supporting characters and the world-building, so it's fun in those aspects. But I don't get the intended demographic - it's references I'm old enough to get, starring characters too young for me to relate to.
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Aug 23, 2015 19:55
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Bonk posted:Just finished The Martian and Ready Player One, both on friends' recommendations. Just finished it on a plane ride. I really liked it and almost everything he talked about is pretty realistic. I saw the trailer before reading it so I imagined him as Matt Damon the entire time.
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Aug 23, 2015 22:54
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Finished Go Set a Watchman. TKaM is my favorite book, and I quite enjoyed GSaW with the understanding that it's essentially an alternate-universe rather than a true sequel simply because of the way it ended up being published at all. It's a quick read, and it's easy to see why the original editors wanted Lee to go back and expand on the childhood sequences. It's definitely her voice through-and-through, though. My only complaint is that it's enjoyable until the last chapter or so. At that point, Lee handwaves a lot of issues that she spent the entire book bringing up. She's significantly more heavy-handed about racism in it, but most of Scout's trouble with it get folded into a happy-ish ended where no one is really hurt and "that's just how things are work to fix it, I guess." It took what would have been a very good companion to TKaM and turned it into a merely "good" book on the whole. Definitely worth a read if for no other reason than the literary significance of it, but it didn't stick the landing nearly as well as it should have.
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Aug 24, 2015 04:36
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The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle Of The American 80's by Paul Slansky. A blow-by-blow (and sometimes even day-by-day history of the Reagan presidency, serving as a catalogue of the bizarre mediatised waking nightmare of the 80s in American politics. The daily format gives Slansky room for plenty of juxtaposition, narrative threads and continuity, and makes it a pretty zippy read (I finished it over the weekend). There's plenty of decent snark to temper the sense of staggering frustration and dread that comes from having almost every major event of the Reagan administration laid out in sequence. Equally infuriating is the campaign coverage, with figures like Michael Dukakis eagerly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. One thing I was unprepared for was just how many modern political figures and issues would have their genesis under Reagan - it sometimes reads like the origin story of a cast of supervillains, and Slansky is happy to maintain that tone, writing with a sense of grim disbelief. It's a very good book, a candid history untainted by time (it was first published in 1989) and I wish it were better-known.
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Aug 24, 2015 04:40
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Bonk posted:Ready Player One has a lot of glaring problems. It's supposed to be a fun 80s nostalgia romp, which works on that level, but the problems come when it tries to be anything else. I seriously did not like Wade at all, and the feeble attempts at a romantic subplot come off as more creepy/stalkerish than anything. I really thought the lesson Halliday was trying to teach was NOT to get hung up on someone who doesn't want you. Had the ending been "No seriously dude, you made it weird and you don't know her at all" that would be so much better. Still, I liked the supporting characters and the world-building, so it's fun in those aspects. But I don't get the intended demographic - it's references I'm old enough to get, starring characters too young for me to relate to. I just read it a few weeks ago and I"m glad you felt the same way about the romantic subplot. Wade felt creepy and hell. The "romance" made me cringe everytime I read it.
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Aug 24, 2015 05:21
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Just finished The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 by John Clark. The Guns of August is usually regarded as one of the best books out there for understanding the scope and nature of WW1, but in my opinion The Sleepwalkers solidly displaces it and many of its now outdated conclusions. In short, this is the most thorough and definitive book on how and why WW1 happened currently published. The book stops with the beginning of the actual war, but instead follows the people, events, and geopolitical forces that created the war in the first place. Personally I found it a highly enlightening read, particularly the pivotal role Russia played in starting the war, a role I'd previously seen heavily downplayed in every history of the war's origins I'd read. The Sleepwalkers is perhaps somewhat narrow in scope, looking only at the events directly leading into the war rather than the much longer geopolitical evolution that created the circumstances thereof, but if you want to understand why the First World War happened this book would be at the top of my list to read.
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Aug 24, 2015 16:50
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The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin. It was excellent and my first time reading her as an adult -- I'd read some of her children's books when I was very young. I already picked up The Left Hand of Darkness to read soon.
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Aug 25, 2015 04:57
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