|
Radio! posted:Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood. White Teeth by Zadie Smith.
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2015 22:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 00:34 |
|
|
Dahl book sounds good. Thanks bookfriends. (White Teeth is on my to-read list already)
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2015 00:00
|
|
|
Radio! posted:Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood. Interesting.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2015 00:36
|
|
|
High Warlord Zog posted:Read the Dahl book. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2015 00:38
|
|
|
Radio! posted:Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood. Really, really good book.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2015 02:59
|
|
|
I don't think I will finish anything else this week so here's my September update: Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed Legs McNeil - Please Kill Me (booklord challenge #16) Richard H. Popkin - Philosophy Made Simple (booklord challenge #4) Jon Morris - The League of Regrettable Superheroes: Half-Baked Heroes from Comic Book History Tana French - In The Woods (booklord challenge #22) Ronson's book was really interesting and I'm going to read some of his other work this year. Please Kill Me was great, I'm glad I finally read it after owning it for years, but it really made me lose some respect for some people who I had tangential knowledge of previously. The philosophy book was just a basic primer but as someone who has never studied anything related to philosophy it was the basics. The Jon Morris book was a dud. The Tana French book was great, I loved it and have ordered the next couple of books in the series, so that was a nice surprise! Here's my progress on the Booklord challenge: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Something absurdist 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. I only have one more booklord challenge to finish, and I know what I am reading for it (A Confederacy of Dunces), so I guess I will probably finish the booklord challenge in October. Currently reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and after that I intend to start Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson - then I'll likely move to my last booklord challenge book.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 15:45
|
|
|
September! 89. Tell the Wolves I’m Home - Carol Rifka Brunt 90. Gone Baby Gone (Kenzie and Gennaro #4) - Dennis Lehane 91. Purity - Jonathan Franzen 92. Lucky Alan & Other Stories - Jonathan Lethem 93. The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin 94. The Crossing (Border Trilogy #2) - Cormac McCarthy 95. Ghosts - Henrik Ibsen 96. Trigger Warning: Short Stories and Other Disturbances - Neil Gaiman 97. Stardust - Neil Gaiman 98. Iron Council (Bas-Lag #3) - China Mieville 99. Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts 100. Dead Beat (Dresden #7) - Jim Butcher 101. The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow - Rita Leganski 102. Cities of the Plain (Border Trilogy #3) - Cormac McCarthy Reading a lot these days, in addition to various books pertaining to my impending dad-hood. (After that, who knows how much I'll read outside of Dr Seuss?) Some very good stuff, though: McCarthy's Border Trilogy ended as strongly as it began, as Cities of the Plain was excellent. (The Crossing was good, too, but I felt like I didn't really get a handle on the main character, Billy Parham, until Cities of the Plain.) Shantaram was a very interesting and entertaining read, though the author/narrator seemed a little full of himself at times. And both "Tell the Wolves I'm Gone" and "The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow" were fantastic books that I'm glad I tracked down. Tell the Wolves I'm Gone is about a young girl whose uncle dies of AIDS, and Bonaventure Arrow is about a boy who can't speak but has supernatural hearing. All in all, good stuff. 1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year.: 102/100 2. Read a female author: 15 (Leganski and Brunt) 3. The non-white author: Liu Cixin 4. 5. 6. 7. A collection of poetry 8. 9. 10. The Blind Owl 11. 12. 13. 14. Wildcard (Some one else taking the challenge will tell you what to read) 15. 16. 17. A play: Henrik Ibsen, "Ghosts" 18. Biography 19. 20. 21. Short story(s): "Lucky Alan" and "Trigger Warning" 22.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 23:48
|
|
|
September! I've managed to get more or less back on schedule, so that's good. A few shorter reads this month, which makes the list look more impressive than it is  1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year (37/45) oliven posted:Currently reading Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger. 26. Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger: Insufferable. 27. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Surprisingly not as messy as I thought it would be, considering that it's about a girl who writes a lot of fanfiction. Some parts were less convincing (the fictional excerpts from the in-universe author that was supposedly super famous for writing really well weren't great, for example), but overall I thought the main story was charming. 28. The Five Stages of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton: Turns out I knew very little about fascism, so this was an interesting read. 29. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: Another classic I never got around to reading until now. I thought the universe was interesting and (sort of) well-constructed, however none of the characters really drew me in. Ultimately, I felt the idea was solid and the execution was so-so. 30. Samlede dikt by André Bjerke: Collection of poetry (literal title) by Norwegian poet André Bjerke. I remember reading his poems when I was a child, and they're still really good. 31. George by Alex Gino: George desperately wants to play the role of Charlotte in the class play version of Charlotte's Web. However, she's not even allowed to try out for the role because everyone thinks she's a boy. This story was short and sweet and not nearly as sad as I feared it would be. 32. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: A great introduction to feminism. It's basic, sure, but it's well written and on point throughout. 33. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein: A story about two women (a spy and a pilot) during World War II. I don't normally care much for historical war stories or whatever but this was actually really good. The pace was slightly odd in places, but overall I enjoyed it a lot. 34. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon: This didn't grab me at all. 35. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard: Interesting discussion about the Binding of Isaac. Is Abraham sacrificing his son, or murdering him? One is ethical (ish), the other is not. 36. Asking For It by Louise O'Neill: This book was hard to get through. Not because it's not good (it is), but because of the subject matter. Emma is a narcissistic "mean girl" who gets sexually assaulted at a party by multiple people. She was drugged out and can't remember anything, but there's photos and videos and most people seem to think she has herself to blame. The book deals mostly with the aftermath and how she handles it all, not going into details of the actual assault, but it's still brutal as all hell. 37. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness: I wish I knew the book ended in a cliffhanger before reading it, but oh well. It has a lot of cheap tricks like revealing some massive plot point to the protagonist, but not the reader, so it's all about his reaction to this terrible thing that we don't get to know about until the end of the book. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough to make me want to keep reading the series. Currently reading The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, which will wrap up the booklord challenge for me.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2015 13:31
|
|
|
Prolonged Shame posted:1) The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory September was another good month for reading: 70) The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy - Stewart O'Nan: An account of the 1944 Hartford circus fire. Well written, almost too detailed when it comes to some of the details of the fire. 71) Russka: The novel of Russia - Edward Rutherford: This was so-so. He does better when writing about places he knows well (England). It was difficult to follow the threads of the families through history and I could barely muster up sympathy for any of the characters. 72) Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov: I really liked this, though it wasn't quite as good as Lolita. 73) Just Kids - Patti Smith: The autobiographical account of Patti Smith's time living in NY in the 70's-80's and of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. I really enjoyed this, much more than I thought I would. 74) A Daughter's a Daughter - Mary Westmacott (AKA Agatha Christie): Another of Christie's 'psychological' novels, about the relationship between a mother and adult daughter and how it impacts their lives outside the relationship. 75) Dark Rooms - Lili Anolik: Bad. I picked this up because it sounded interesting and because people kept comparing it to The Secret History, which I loved. It was awful. It started out mediocre and just slowly slid downhill. It seemed like an interesting premise but it just never delivered. 76) Unbroken: A World War II Story of survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand: The true story of an Olympic runner whose plane goes down in the pacific during WWII. He survives over a month drifting on a raft, only to be captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp. Very, very good. 77) The Burden - Mary Westmacott (AKA agatha Christie) The last of the non-mystery novels. Excellent. 78) Fairyland: A Memoir of my Father - Alysia Abbott: A very good memoir by a woman who was raised by her gay single-father in San Francisco in the 70's-80's after her mother died. She has a unique perspective on the generation of men who were lost to AIDS during that time, including her father. 79) An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 - Robert Dallek: This was ok. I would have liked more about his personal life and less excruciating detail about which adviser said what when and to who, but the sections on his health problems were interesting, and the chapter on the Cuban missile crisis was intense. Still, overall it was disappointing. His family post-election was barely mentioned, and his children may as well not have existed for all the attention they got. 80) Living Dead in Dallas (Sookie Stackhouse #2) - Charlaine Harris: This was a cute, quick read. I like seeing the differences from the TV show and these are fun little books to read. Total: 80/100 Presidential bios: 9/12 Non Fiction barring prez bios: 19/25
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2015 14:29
|
|
|
saphron posted:saphron posted: 17. Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker (21. Short Stories) 18. The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg 19. Orlando by Virginia Woolf 20. Uprooted by Naomi Novik (15. Something published this year or the past three months) 21. The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku 22. Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear 23. The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett 24. What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes 25. The Emperor’s Blades by Brian Staveley 26. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (12. Something dealing with space) 27. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison 28. Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (3. A non-white author) 29. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner 30. A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren (18. Biography) 31. Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey 32. The Rose and the Thorn by Michael J. Sullivan Slacked off on posting for a while, but I managed to get through a bunch of books over the summer, if not any of the books I meant to get through at the start of summer. Standouts include Academic Exercises (which ended as enjoyable as it started), Orlando (probably the cheeriest of Virginia Woolf’s books, and the sweetest of love letters), Three-Body Problem, The Goblin Emperor, and A Fighting Chance (I’m wary of political biographies but Warren’s story left me feeling hopeful about America’s ability to unfuck itself, despite the odds). I was also especially fond of Karen Memory and Uprooted, which had female casts that were awesome and that left me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. \o/ So far, I’ve read 32/30 books, which happened a lot faster than I expected, and have a lot of challenge books to go.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 07:15
|
|
|
Female authors: 16/24 Non-fiction: 12/12 Goodreads. The Diamond Queen was entertaining and interesting, but obviously very pro-queen - as you'd probably expect. I wouldn't have read it if I hadn't been researching the queen, but I enjoyed it enough to finish it after I'd got what I needed from it. Taken at the Flood is one of those Poirot books where the titular character shows up late and does very little, so I wasn't that into it, and the ending was bad. It seems like one character is thrown under the bus at the last minute for the sake of making sure the young woman ends up with the "right" man (who Poirot basically lets get away with murder, attempted murder and fraud). The solution does work, but it feels like it shouldn't, and Poirot himself comes across as disinterested. Unless you're determined to read every Poirot story, skip this one. The Phoenix Code is another one I'd say to skip unless you're particularly keen on the author. It's pretty generic, the twist can be seen coming a mile off, and it doesn't really seem to have much to say. It does get better as it goes along, but the start is really awkward and it takes a while before the main plot even starts, but mostly it's just that there are a million books like this out there, and many of them are better. The other book I read this month was one I was asked to read by the author (apparently because I gave a positive rating to John Dies at the End) and it was amazing. Just not in a good way. I've already posted some of the "best" quotes from The Savior Cometh to the PYF terrible book thread. There's a time traveller with a dick the length of his thigh, there's a presidential candidate taking orders from the archangel Gabriel, there's some kind of body-stealing sex-demon, there's dinosaurs... it's an incoherent mess and it's hilarious that someone not only wrote it but then asked strangers on the internet to give it honest reviews. If it were free, I'd recommend it for a laugh, but I can't suggest that anyone actually pay money for it, even if it is less than a dollar.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 08:16
|
|
|
September update: Please suggest a biography to read, otherwise I'll land on something lulzy like Morrissey's autobiography or whatever 4. Philosophy - 5. History 6. An essay - 9. Something absurdist - Waiting for Godot 17. A play - Waiting for Godot 18. Biography - 1. Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Murakami 2. Pinball 1974, Haruki Murakami 3. On The Beach, Neil Shute 4. Collected Poems by Per Sivle 5. History of the Siege of Lisbon, José Saramago 6. Wayfarers, Knut Hamsun 7. The Seed, Tarjei Vesaas 8. Morning and Evening, Jon Fosse 9. The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa 10. Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann 11. Collection of poems, Gabriela Mistral 12. Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg 13. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez 14. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino 15. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon 16. Road to the Worl'd End, Sigurd Hoel 17. The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem 18. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 19. The Clown, Heinrich Böll 20. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Lev Tolstoy 21. Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev 22. A Theatrical Novel, Mikhail Bulgakov 23. Sleepless, Jon Fosse 24. Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard 25. Confusion of Feelings, Stefan Zweig 26. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Böll 27. The Elephant's Jurney, José Saramago 28. Shyness and Dignity, Dag Solstad 29. Krysantemum, Rune Christiansen 30. The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa 31. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 32. The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan 33. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera 34. Homo Faber, Max Frisch 35. Not Art, Péter Esterházy 36. Faust, Ivan Turgenev 37. Selected Poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley 38. The Russian Master and Other Stories, Anton Chekhov 39. Vinternoveller, Ingvild H. Rishøi 40. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector 41. Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor 41/40 Getting back on track, and surprisingly meeting the goal too. I won't bother setting a new reading goal, but I'll keep reading just to see where I end up by new year's eve. I also have to figure out some of the last challenges (and get to reading the challenges I've already planned ahead). The Biography category is open for suggestions, because the one I originally planned is a massive two-volume biography. Not Art was ... well, it's hard to describe really. It kind of draws on the trend of blurring the line between reality and fiction. He draws a lot from his own life, and uses his dying mother to reflect on Hungary in the cold-war, musings about love and sexuality and football. Faust on the other hand, was an incredibly nice read. The books is a series of letters sent from the Narrator to an old friend of his, all about unrequited love, where he falls in love with a friend's wife while reading Goethe's Faust to her. The overall thematic is also typically Russian as it's all about a dude trying to accept that he's getting older. Vinternoveller (lit. translated Winter short stories) consists of three short stories, about different people pretty down on their luck. The first one is about a single mum who's broke having to buy a new pair of underpants to her daughter, the second is about a recent ex-con needing to get a pillow to his son, and the third is about three siblings running away to avoid the child welfare services. They all follow the same format, where in parallell to the story, the narrating character also reflects on their life, their choices and everything that lead up to the situation they're all in at the moment. Worth a read imo, if you can read Norwegian. Don't think there's any English translations of her work. The Passion According to G.H. was hella interesting, too. All it took to spark an almost spiritual and existensial crisis was a dirty room and a cockroach. I haven't actually finished Wise Blood yet, but I'm gonna read the remaining part of it before I go to sleep tonight, so I added it up nonetheless, since I'll finish it before October hits us. ulvir fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:23
|
|
|
quote:1. The Forge of God by Greg Bear 38. Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson 39. The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy 40. Nemesis Games(The Expanse #5) by James S.A. Corey 41. The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold 42. Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman 43. The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickenson 44. The Remaining: Extinction by D.J. Molles September update: Doing a bit better in the reading department. First up was my choice of a banned(or at least challenged book), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I’ll make a confession, somehow I got through all of elementary, high-school and college with never reading Mark Twain. I can see why many consider this book to be the first great American novel. It gives a snapshot of America, particularly along the Mississippi in good detail. I thought the section with the con artists went on a little long but overall it was pretty good. I can also see why so many people object to the book. While I understand that the book is is anti-racist and was written in a time that the words were in common use, the amount of times the N-word is used it staggering. Next is Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I had little knowledge of Shakespeare before starting this book, and apparently the world knows about him as well. I needed a biography and I’ve liked other books by the author so I picked this to read. I guess this is not a run of the mill biography, first we know little of Shakespeare from written accounts, even the picture we know as him, may not actually be him! So this book took almost more of a sketch of what he should have been like based on what we know of where he was and the social history of the time. I thought the first bits were really good along with some of the reasons why other scholars are wrong about what we know. One it gets to his popular times, I kind of glazed over a bit because it started analyzing what he may or may not have written, patterns in play, etc… It ended well talking about his death, what we can extrapolate from his will, what happened with his plays after he died and why we have so many of his plays(and why there are many different versions of the same plays). It was good, short and I learned quite a lot about someone and a time period I knew little of. The Dead Lands was recommended several times here. I liked it while reading, but after some thought, I like it less. The good, post apocalyptic travel story(retelling of the Lewis and Clark expedition). It had action, was relatively fast paced, ended okay. The bad, I did not like the whole evolution with powers, magic, whatever you want to call it. It felt really shoehorned in and nearly every instance that the powers were used, there could have been a better non-power way to accomplish the same thing. Even in the acknowledgements the author mentions the clunky magic system, and that is really what it seemed like. I think it would have been better dropping that storyline, using the two missing rangers briefly mentioned as a hook to travel and expand a bit on the experience traveling a wild world. Finally caught up to the most recent Expanse book, Nemesis Games. I liked #3, #4 was okay, but this one was great. I liked that the alien stuff was not front and center like in previous books. It was a plot point in the book but not much new information at all. It was nice to get some backstory and time away from Holden for Alex, Amos and Naomi. Even with their connections to now all three rulers of the major factions, I thought it still felt small scale. Each character had their own problems and were not solved by calling in a favor and everything is fixed. Looking forward to #6 sometime next year I guess. The Warrior’s Apprentice. Just Great! Will read more very soon, but a few other books to get through first. My wildcard was Black Sun Rising. It was okay, I felt like it could have been about 1/3 shorter and been a tighter, better story. I also had some issues with the basics of why these people went on this journey. The priest meets an “adept” who he falls in love with in a matter of days. Said adept loses her powers so he and others(for equally odd reasons) go off on a journey to restore her powers. Reminded me of the goon with the printer story. The reveal of who Tarrant was did not surprise me at all. Once they got to the Rahklands, I liked it better with them overcoming problems during their travels. The way they beat the big bad guy was just so so. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was good. Got a little confusing in the second half of the book with all the names of different dukes and duchesses, but it was good overall. Finished up The Remaining series with The Remaining: Extinction. It was pretty solid all around. Some gripes abut the last book though. The final book does not wrap everything up, just the story of the horde of creatures coming down from the north. Would have been nice to have more closure on the story of the western states and their “President” vs the abandoned eastern states. Also the epilogue was pretty cringeworthy. I know these kinds of books cater to more politically conservative people, but this series had gone a long way without blatant politics. Then the end bit about not supporting the “president” and supporting the idea of America did not really flow with the rest of the book. I would still recommend it for post-apocalyptic series, just stop at the epilogue in book 6. Booklord Challenge 1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year. 44/52 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A collection of poetry 8. 9. 10. The Blind Owl (Free translation if your ok with reading on a screen or cant find a copy!) 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:48
|
|
|
ulvir posted:September update: Please suggest a biography to read, otherwise I'll land on something lulzy like Morrissey's autobiography or whatever Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 18:29
|
|
|
I've reached the 3/4 mark in my reading (90/120) so I figured I should update to there. #84: Ms. Marvel, vol. 2: Generation Why - G. Willow Wilson: The follow-up to Ms. Marvel vol. 1. Less focused on Kamila Khan's family life, more on her superheroics against villainy, etc. Still a good read. 4/5. #85: The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz - Hector Berlioz (duh): The memoirs by the aforementioned 19th-century French composer. Details his love life, his music, his difficulties against the musical establishment at the time (especially with the Paris Opéra) and his travels (to Germany and Russia, in particular). I'm doing a paper on 19th-century opera at the moment, so the parts about music were fun to read. The writing style is very much what you'd expect from a 19th-century Frenchman (i.e. florid), and he spent a bit too much time talking about his romantic relationships for my taste, but if you're interested in the man and his music, it's worth a look. 3/5. #86: The Anti-Christ Handbook: The Horror and Hilarity of Left Behind - Fred Clark: A book collating a series of blog posts reviewing in excessive detail the first 200 pages of the first book of the Left Behind series, written by an evangelical Christian. If you want to find out just how much Left Behind sucks without actually reading it, then it's relatively cheap on Amazon. A minor note: He mentions both Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden during the book, which I found amusing due to recent science-fiction-related stupidity. 4/5. #87: The Shambling Guide to New York City - Mur Lafferty: An urban fantasy book about a human who takes a publishing job in New York City with supernatural beings (e.g. vampires, zombies). Commence weird poo poo. Read if you like urban fantasy with good world building. 4/5. #88: My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing In The Rain - Patricio Pron: I decided to read this book because I was searching for something on the library website and it suggested this. It was OK - I read it in English, so I don't know if it would have been better in Spanish. 3/5. #89: Native Tongue - Suzette Haden Elgin (RIP): Holy crap. If you want to read a book that will make you *angry*, read this. It's set in the future where misogynists took over the United States government and forced them to send women's rights back to the 19th-century (complete with quasi-scientific bullshit). The story details children and learning languages and communicating with aliens, but the attitudes of the male characters will make you want to punch people (or at least that's what I felt). BTW: if you read this and think that the behaviour of the men is unrealistic, just go read 'Escape' by Carolyn Jessop, which is about her life as a fundie Mormon. Some of the comparisons between this book and the FLDS are chillingly similar. 4/5. #90: Black Hole - Charles Burns: A graphic novel, drawn in chiaroscuro style, set in the '70s about high school kids and STDs. I wasn't a huge fan of the book. Decent artwork, but the story wasn't terribly exciting to me. 3/5.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 22:01
|
|
|
September. 51. The Prefect. Alastair Reynolds. The story was great and even if some mysteries were obvious, they work fine. 52. Thud!. Terry Pratchett. The Watch is the best and this confirms it. 53. Burning Chrome. William Gibson. A good collection of short stories, some good, some great. 54. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Weirdly philosophical. I think I need a guide to understand some of the images, but everything was very interesting. 55. Timeline. Michael Crichton. Regular, I actually think the movie was a little bit better. The story has more hard science in the book, but some of the plot holes were pretty ridiculous. 56. Wintersmith. Terry Pratchett. Good, but kind of slow. The antagonist wasn't that good. 57. Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. Karen Armstrong. An excellent biography full of facts and opposing views of one of history's most famous prophets. 1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year: 57/60 2. Read a female author: Jojo Moyes and others. 3. The non-white author: Khaled Hosseini and others. 4. Philosophy: Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 5. History: Monsters and Demons, Charlotte Montague. 6. An essay: Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing, Roger Rosenblatt. 7. A collection of poetry 8. Something post-modern 9. Something absurdist 10. The Blind Owl (Free translation if your ok with reading on a screen or cant find a copy!) 11. Something on either hate or love: We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver. 12. Something dealing with space: Transition, Iain M. Banks. 13. Something dealing with the unreal: Los mentales, Pgarcía. 14. Wildcard (Some one else taking the challenge will tell you what to read) (Amberville by Tim Davys) 15. Something published this year or the past three months 16. That one book that has been sitting on your desk waiting for a long time: Harry Potter and the Magician's Stone,J.K. Rowling. 17. A play 18. Biography: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet 19. The color red: Red 1-2-3, John Katzenbach. 20. Something banned or censored: Burmese Days, George Orwell. 21. Short story(s): Burning Chrome, William Gibson. 22. A mystery: The Prefect. Alastair Reynolds. Discworld challenge 35/41
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 00:46
|
|
|
Only one reread this month, and knocked down a whole bunch of challenges.Booklord Challenge Update posted:1. 84/96 books read; 15 nonfiction (18%), 26 rereads (31%) 76. Homes and Other Black Holes by Dave Barry (reread) Found this while doing some cleaning and read it in passing -- it's quite short, and like all Barry goes by very quickly. Still funny, and especially relevant right now with my mom moving into a new house. I prefer his columns to his books in general, though. 77. The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen The frame story here is that Dracula -- having survived his supposed death at the end of the novel -- has tracked down the descendants of the Harkers in an attempt to tell his side of the story and set the record straight. This book does a pretty excellent job of showing how a lot of Dracula's actions in the original novel can be explained as genuine misunderstandings or mistakes (such as might be made, for example, by a centuries-old nobleman used to living in isolation trying to reintegrate into society), inflated by fear and superstition in the retelling, and portraying Van Helsing as a murderous lunatic, while at the same time showing Dracula himself as someone who, while thinking of himself as a genuinely good guy, can't quite bring himself to view ordinary humans as people rather than livestock or, at best, favoured pets. Apparently he teams up with Sherlock Holmes in later books, which sounds just crazy enough to be awesome. 78. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller A black comedy about WW2 where everyone is insane. Funny, but gets increasingly dark towards the end. Reminded me a lot of Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, actually. 79. The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, tr. Iraj Bashiri  Taken at face value, as a novella about a destitute painter's opium-fuelled descent into madness, this is a difficult and not particularly rewarding read. According to the commentary, it is actually a brilliantly constructed allegory for Buddhist philosophy and beliefs, but one that requires years of study of said philosophy, the author's history and reading habits, and the text itself in order to unravel. Since I do not have the time or the inclination for such a study, and my understanding of the work in light of this is based entirely on blind acceptance of Bashiri's analysis with no way of verifying or refuting it, it remains unrewarding. 80. The Martian by Andy Weir I haven't read a proper castaway story in years.  As usual, you can see the hand of the author setting things up for the protagonist -- the potatoes here, the crates full of suspiciously useful supplies in The Swiss Family Robinson, and so forth -- but that doesn't detract from the fun. You've never in any doubt that he'll survive, but the enjoyment is in finding out how.81. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard What do minor characters do when off stage? Have existential crises, apparently. It was funny, but I think I'd have gotten more out of it if I'd read or seen Hamlet recently -- I kept having to context switch to look up characters and plot points I'd forgotten. 82. Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey. It's not bad, it just completely failed to take or hold my interest at any point. It doesn't help that I don't like any of the characters. A book from 1904 about hazardous working conditions, especially occupational diseases (as opposed to hazards). Weird to think that as little as recently as a hundred years ago things like "should children spend all day in the factory, or should they spend half the day in school" were still being debated. This book is the result of contributions from many experts in their various fields, and in the preface Oliver notes that he has not imposed any editorial "voice" on the contributors, as the book is meant to be informative rather than opinionated -- but is also quite open about the fact that his personal opinion is that worker protections do not go nearly far enough. Unfortunately, the copy I was reading is a very bad OCR. I had to read it "in software", consciously correcting mis-scanned words, which makes for a slow and unpleasant reading experience. I gave up when it started consistently rendering "if" as "\{". 83. Germline by T.C. McCarthy You know, I think a lot of interesting stuff could be done with the idea of a "subterrene war" (as the trilogy is called). Strategic manouvers in three dimensions, limited by the speed of a boring machine and impossible to hide from seismometers. Cramped firefights that either side can retreat from with impunity by collapsing the tunnel. A surface patrolled by drones and automated defences that no human can escape. The constant psychological weight of never seeing the sky. This is the picture painted by the first few chapters. Unfortunately, after that, McCarthy completely forgets about the original premise, everything moves on to the surface and what we get is boilerplate MilSF from its plasma artillery to its vat-grown supersoldiers. Meh. 84. Sled Driver: Piloting the World's Fastest Jet by Brian Shul You won't find any details about the Blackbird's capabilities or specific missions in this book, but it does a good job of getting across what it felt like to fly it. Short, though. I think the main draw of the book is meant to be the pictures, which are amazing and take up about a third of the book. At some point I'd like to read something more detailed about the Blackbird's design and operational history, though. Next up is Neal Asher's Owner trilogy, and by the time I'm done that Ancillary Mercy should hopefully be out and I can finally read those as well.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2015 20:28
|
|
|
I decided to write up some of my book lord challenge picks, my reasons for choosing them and my thoughts etc. Here are the first two: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson I came upon this accidentally; I was looking for poetry and had seen Carson’s name tossed around as a good modern poet. This was the first book that popped up in an Amazon search and it intrigued me immediately because of the color red challenge. It’s a verse novel, definitely something I wouldn’t normally seek out so perfect for the challenge. The story is based loosely on the myth of Geryon, a red monster who Hercules kills in one of his trials. In the retelling, Geryon is a young boy who falls in love with an older boy named Herakles. The color red is used throughout symbolically, and the language is beautiful in general. The Best of the Best American Poetry A selection of poems to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Best American Poetry series. I had no idea where to start with poetry and the Best American series are generally pretty solid, so this seemed like an all around good primer on modern poetry. I enjoyed it a lot and made a list of about 20 poems I especially liked to check out other works by those poets. My favorite was A Happy Thought by Franz Wright: quote:Assuming this is the last day of my life
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2015 21:23
|
|
|
Also since I haven't done this yet, here is a Big rear end Stat Dump: Thru September: Personal Challenges Woman authors - 16/12 non-American/European authos - 13/12 Nonfic - 13/12 Gravity's Rainbow - 0/1 Booklord Challenges 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. History 6. An essay 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Something on either hate or love 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. That one book that has been sitting on your desk waiting for a long time 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. A mystery List of stuff read 1. The Secret History by Donna Tartt 2. Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson 3. Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler 4. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor 5. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 6. The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima 7. This Perfect Day by Ira Levin 8. Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan 9. Get in Trouble by Kelly Link 10. Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig 11. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 12. Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku 13. Flash Boys by Michael Lewis 14. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe 15. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks 16. Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino 17. The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy 18. Bad Feminist Roxane Gay 19. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer 20. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen J. Fowler 21. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson 22. Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic 23. The Complete Stories by David Malouf 24. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood 25. Black Boy by Richard Wright 26. The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson 27. Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 28. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson 29. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis 30. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh 31. The Best American Short Stories 2013 32. The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino 33. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach 34. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges 35. Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour 36. The Sports Gene by David Epstein 37. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton 38. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates 39. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi 40. In the Realms of the Unreal: Insane Writings 41. The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan 42. The Best of the Best American Poetry 43. The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk 44. The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer 45. The Day the Leader was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz 46. Tibetan Book of the Dead 47. The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein 48. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard 49. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat 50. Embassytown by China Mieville 51. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller 52. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh 53. Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball 1973 by Haruki Murakami 54. Number9Dream by David Mitchell 55. Operation Dark Heart by Anthony Shaffer 56. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard 57. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2015 21:47
|
|
|
September - 8: The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) American Rust (Philipp Meyer) I did good this month. I neaaarly finished a book about Tamerlane as well but didn't quite manage it in September. Oh well. The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam are the second and third books in the MaddAddam trilogy. I read Oryx & Crake about this time last year and then never got around to following it up, but I bought both recently and dived right in. I really liked Year of the Flood, which did really well at telling the other side of the story in Oryx & Crake and the non-Compound part of the world. MaddAddam a friend once described to me as "sort of unnecessary" and I can absolutely see her point, since the story told in O&C/Flood gets wrapped up in those two books and MaddAddam doesn't really advance it very much. It was fun and put a nice cap on the whole thing, though. Sourcery and Wyrd Sisters were Discworld Novels and that's about all that needs to be said about them. I don't really like Sourcery that much but I want to read in order at least once in my life, so there you go. I don't think I'd read Wyrd Sisters before, or if I did it was so long ago I don't remember doing it. I liked it and it's firming up the style that Pratchett was known for. The House of the Spirits was great. It reminded me a lot of Love in the Time of Cholera in terms of the richness of its style and the level of magical realism involved. The arc through Chilean politics of the late nineteenth century through to Pinochet is well described by the actions and views of the characters. I think the thing it does best is the way the story of the family is strongly character-driven, with individuals acting based on their own motivations, but at the same time those actions are swallowed up by forces beyond their control i.e. the larger narrative of the social and political change taking place in the country. After reading Spirits A Personal Matter was a very different animal. Instead of the sweeping multi-generational saga, it's short and spare and very tightly focused on maybe three truly important characters, that is Bird, his mistress and his wife, with the spectre of the "monster baby" a constant, oppressive background force. It's my first encounter with Oe and if it's all as good as this I'm going to be seeking out a lot more. 3 Novels I picked up in a bookshop as the only remotely appealling thing on the shelf (seriously everything else looked terrible apart from some classics I wasn't really in the mood for). The three in question are Ghosts, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, and The Literary Conference. Of the three I liked "An Episode" best; frankly I don't think I really got either Ghosts or The Literary Conference. Maybe if I knew more about Argentina or the specific ideas Aira was trying to get across I would have understood them better, but as it stands but they both left me a little cold. American Rust was a stunning book. Meyer is absolutely amazing at communicating a sense of a time and a place, and like with House of the Spirits the characters really drive things forwards instead of "plot happens, characters respond as necessary to advance to next set piece." The portrayal of the Valley as a place left to die by interests more powerful than the people who live there, and the same people's inability to escape the trap closing around them, is deeply poignant. I'm long past the 40 I declared as a goal. I'm not going to add to it; instead I'm just going to carry on and see how far I get by the end of the year (and in any case I still have some of the booklord categories to finish - I've been trying to work up to reading some Shakespeare for the play, but I'm very tempted to read something classical instead). Year to Date: 45 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 38. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) 39. MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) 40. Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) 41. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) 42. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) 43. Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 44. 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) 45. American Rust (Philipp Meyer) Booklord categories: 1 - 11, 13 - 15, 18 - 22.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2015 10:54
|
|
|
Guy A. Person posted:
What did u think of these 2? I think I'm the one that recommended them at the start of this thread for philosophy and it's cool to read that people have picked them up, even if the one guy who read Fear and Trembling that I saw earlier seemed to sort of miss the point imo.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2015 20:35
|
|
|
CestMoi posted:What did u think of these 2? I think I'm the one that recommended them at the start of this thread for philosophy and it's cool to read that people have picked them up, even if the one guy who read Fear and Trembling that I saw earlier seemed to sort of miss the point imo. Yeah I did get those recs from you! I credit you earlier in my post. I actually am only a bit into Tractatus Logico Philosophicus but finished Fear and Trembling last week. Fear and Trembling was...rigorous. I probably didn't do it justice since I mostly read it on the bus which was not the most conducive place to digest Kierkegaard's language, so I found myself needing to reread stuff a few times to get an idea of the argument he was making. Even then a bunch probably went over my head, but I feel like I got the key points. Some parts that stuck out to me: I liked the hypothetical about a dude hearing a preacher telling the story of Abraham and going home and deciding to do the same since his son is his most precious possession, and then the preacher who didn't really understand the story himself would be horrified at the man's misunderstanding. I also liked the story of Agnes and the merman and how the merman feels guilt at her falling in love with him, and it causes a cycle of them being miserable (the whole third problema in general was easier to relate to than the first two). And how the problemas all ended with the line "if this is the case, Abraham is done for and faith doesn't exist". I've been reading some essays/the wiki article to get a better handle on some of the stuff I didn't get (like the suspension of the ethical and the Hegelian stuff) but I have since returned the book to the library. I am taking my time with TLP so that I can get more out of it. It probably helps that it is 80 years closer to my own time. I am enjoying it so far tho and will write something more substantial once I am done. These are my first strict philosophy texts and I am glad I went for both, I will probably get Thus Spake Zarathustra at some point too.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2015 07:47
|
|
|
would In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities qualify as a philosophical text? Or is this strictly sociology.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2015 10:41
|
|
|
Progress: 17 of 25 books 1. The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell. 5/5. 2. The Martian, Andy Weir. 2/5. Booklord Challenge 1 completed: Read a book about space. 3. The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat. 0/5. Booklord Challenge 2 completed: Read this lovely book. 4. Atlas of Remote Islands - Fifty Islands I have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, Judith Schalansky. 5/5 Booklord Challenge 3 completed: Read a female author. 5. The Golem and The Djinni, Helene Wecker. 4/5 Booklord Challenge 4 completed: Read a book about the unreal. 6. The Magicians, Lev Grossman. 5/5 7. The Magician King, Lev Grossman. 5/5 8. The Magician's Land, Lev Grossman. 5/5 9. Wolf In White Van, John Darnielle. 5/5 10. The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi. 3.5/5 Booklord Challenge 5 completed: Read a book published in the last three months to a year. 11. Anathem, Neal Stephenson. 4/5 12. The Woman In the Dunes, Kobo Abe. 4/5 Booklord Challenge 6 completed: Read a book written by a non-cracker. 13ish - Drabin In Love, from City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff Vandermeer. 1 out of 5 stars. Booklord Challenge 7 completed: Read a short story. 14. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. 5 out of 5 stars. 15. Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes. 4 out of 5 stars. 16. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert. 3 out of 5 stars/ Booklord Challenge 8 completed: Read a book about hate. Came across another dud that was a real downer - Baba Yaga, by Toby Barlow. I loved his debut, the longform prose poem Sharp Teeth. Baba Yaga is his attempt at a first standard novel, and it just didn't do anything for me. In fact the beginning at least came off like a mediocre The Master and Magarita set in Paris. Then on to... 17. Walking On Glass, Iain Banks. Very slow build-up to a strange, almost over-the-top ending. You read seeds of other books here, particularly Player of Games. Interesting to see Banks' development in this pre-sci fi stage. Probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone but Banks completionists though. Not bad, but not terribly good either. 3.5 out of 5 stars. Booklord Challenge 9 complete: Read a book about love. (Albeit a really depressing take on that, to be sure. Poor Graham.)
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2015 13:54
|
|
|
Oh yeah, reading Dawn now by Octavia Butler and it's pretty good, nerds.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2015 13:56
|
|
|
thespaceinvader posted:1: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson I'm moving on to my long-awaited Pratchett retrospective (it took me a while to pick up my books from my parents') with Night Watch. E: finished it (I started it a few days ago so) Night Watch was hard for me. It's the first full-length Pratchett novel I've read since his death, and IMO his best single novel across his entire writing history. It's a fine bit of writing, a fine bit of parody, satire and pastiche, and Vimes is such a human character in it, stripped of his titles and shinies, but retaining all of his nous and skill. There are a few really emotional moments that tugged my heartstrings as well. I was sad reading it, but glad to have read it. I'm moving on to the Tiffany Aching books. Some are rereads, some are new, but it's been a long wile since I read the first ones so I want to remind myself of them first. E: Finished Wee Free Men. It was as enjoyable as I remembered it, but also I found as with many YA novels that the protagonist felt a LOT older than she was put about as. The voice I was reading really didn't feel like the voice of an eight year old. I continue to like the Tiffany Aching books, but this has been a hard set of rereads, especially as I've gotten further into the series and hit books I've not yet read. It hurts, knowing this is the last time I'll laugh at a Discworld novel for the first time  A Hat Full of Sky was pretty good, but I wasn't 100% set on the Hiver as a villain, and Wintersmith was a nice coming-of-summer myth story, but I can't help but feel overall that Tiffany is just a tiny bit too competent and too world-beatingly powerful. Things go badly for her, sure, but the things she's taken down are... pretty high powered.I really love the Feegles though. Especially when they do things like nut Death. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Oct 16, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 10, 2015 23:23
|
|
|
Lots of things got in the way of reading - I lost the book I was reading, I decided to read some really, really boring political books by some chap by the name of Milliband and life. Two books off the pile are Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing. Life as a woman, c. 1960, as well as documenting communism, practical psychoanalysis and colonialism. I loved this book so much. Count Zero, William Gibson. This was on my kindle and I fancied something a bit light. I vaguely remember liking Gibson 20 years ago. How did I not realise that he is terrible? lovely characterisation, cliche as brand, and weirdly nostalgic rather than futuristic. Inherent Vice next. 1. 9 Books. Wind up bird chronicle, Murukami Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky Mindset: how you can fulfil your potential, Carol Dweck Book of Strange New Things, Michael Faber Chavs, Owen Jones Skills-based Learning for Caring for a Loved One with an Eating Disorder: The New Maudsley Method, Treasure, Smith, Crane Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing Count Zero, William Gibson 2. Female author - Dweck, Treasure et al., Atwood
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2015 08:24
|
|
|
thespaceinvader posted:1: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson The Shepherd's Crown is next, then I'll probably read some non-Pratchett stuff for a while. It's good so far, but it's tough going for entirely non-plot reasons.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2015 22:18
|
|
|
I thought I would have a lot of downtime this year, but I was wrong. I don't think I'm going to reach my 25 books for the year, but I want to see how many challenges I can meet regardless. Currently working on some Banana Yoshimoto because her name is repeatedly mentioned in TBB. These fit into various Booklord categories so I will sort them out in the end of the year. May I also have a wildcard? Fedelm posted:
5. An Irish literature reader - edited by Maureen O'Rourke Murphy. A sampling of everything. Probably the best bit was a poem a medieval monk wrote about his beloved cat. 6. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I thought I read this before but I must have been too young or didn't know much English or something, wow did it fly over my head as a child. Now I feel like too much of a grown-up. 7. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories - Leo Tolstoy. I'm lucky this book came across my desk. Very intelligent stories about social class in nineteenth century Russia. (The other stories are The Two Old Men, How Much Land Does a Man Need?, The Forged Coupon, Master and Workman, and Alyosha Pot). I think it's the only solid 5/5 for this year so far. (Translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater) 8. Quicksand - Nella Larsen's first novel about race, this is one about a young woman in the 1920s who had a white mother and black father and due largely to this keeps rejecting or being rejected in every community in which she tries to find a place. 9. Passing - Larsen's next, about African American women who can "pass" for white in various situations. Weirdly amusing when a woman who passes only occasionally, for example so she can get into in an upscale hotel restaurant on a hot day, is shocked when she comes across another person who passes as a way of life. These two novels help drive home the absurdity of racism but also made clear how little I know about it. 10. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - by Harlan Ellison. I read this short story because of TV tropes. Yikes! 11. The Book of Margery Kempe: I wanted to read a medieval primary source, and the story The Two Old Men by Leo Tolstoy got me interested in reading about some real-life pilgrimages. This book delivered. It was sort of fun trying to figure out if Margery was just crazy but it was more fun taking her seriously. Also, reading about a woman finding solace from dealing with persistent difficult emotions was sort of what I needed at the time. Working on a Goodreads review for this crazy book. (Translation by Anthony Bale) Fedelm fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Oct 19, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2015 19:04
|
|
|
I read Peace On Earth by Stanislaw Lem and The One-Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out A Window And Disappeared. Both real good. I'll write more up about them in a bit, but I've been super busy and almost forgot I read them.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2015 06:57
|
|
|
thespaceinvader posted:1: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson I finished The Shepherd's Crown. Yeah, so, that happened. I've read Terry Pratchett's last book. I'm not quite sure what to say, so I'll write from the heart. I... feel lighter because of it. Somehow. Pratchett has been part of my life since more or less as soon as I could read, and I've read more of his words than any other person's. By quite some margin. I've had my ups and my downs with him, I've been entertained and educated in equal measure. And I think I'd echo Brandon Sanderson's eulogy to him shortly after his death - I don't think there's a current author as important as him. His work will go down in history as a shining example of modern satire. I'll be disappointed if children in 100 years aren't reading Pratchett at school. And you could feel the ending there; Granny's story really felt like Pratchett's own, and looking back you can see Granny as the closest thing to a self-insert he had, I think, though he was a good enough writer not to need that crutch. I'll miss him. It feels like a friend has gone, and reading the last of his work has been a chance to finish the journey I've been on with him. I miss the books he'll never write, I miss the autobiography I would have dearly loved to read. I already miss seeing a new hardcover on the shelves. The Shepherd's Crown was a fitting sendoff, in all respects, I think. You can see a new age of stories unfolding in front of Tiffany as the goblins ride the rails, the clacks keeps men's names alive after they're gone, men become witches, women become wizards, golems solve crimes, and goats become ambassadors. It's just a tremendous shame no-one will write them. (so sue me, I'm crossposting my review on this one.) E: Firefight is one I've been meaning to read for a good while. It was pretty decent, I like the end that's being built to, but I can't help but feel like the plot is fairly similar to Worm, but it suffers for being a bit too tame. And oh, god, the fake swears. They're normally not so bad, and I can see Calamity being a genuine swearword in the situation, but 'sparks' and 'slontze' just stick out like sore thumbs. You're talking about a team of people who go around assassinating superheros, but they don't swear like normal people? Come on, Brandon. I know it's supposed to be YA, but it really doesn't feel that way in terms of content, but they still don't swear? Arg. I enjoyed the culmination of it, but overall, I just found it a little... light? E: again: Thud was much as I remembered it - good, but a little heavy-handed with its satire via the deep-downer Dwarf religious extremists. I enjoy the plot, I enjoy Mr Shine (Him Diamond) but the Dwarfs were a bit too transparently jihadist analogues (something which continued in later books) for my taste. Solid but not the best of Pratchett. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Oct 25, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2015 21:44
|
|
|
October update. And the month was kicked off with the most season-appropriate book 4. Philosophy - 5. History - 6. An essay - 1. Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Murakami 2. Pinball 1974, Haruki Murakami 3. On The Beach, Neil Shute 4. Collected Poems by Per Sivle 5. History of the Siege of Lisbon, José Saramago 6. Wayfarers, Knut Hamsun 7. The Seed, Tarjei Vesaas 8. Morning and Evening, Jon Fosse 9. The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa 10. Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann 11. Collection of poems, Gabriela Mistral 12. Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg 13. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez 14. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino 15. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon 16. Road to the Worl'd End, Sigurd Hoel 17. The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem 18. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 19. The Clown, Heinrich Böll 20. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Lev Tolstoy 21. Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev 22. A Theatrical Novel, Mikhail Bulgakov 23. Sleepless, Jon Fosse 24. Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard 25. Confusion of Feelings, Stefan Zweig 26. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Böll 27. The Elephant's Jurney, José Saramago 28. Shyness and Dignity, Dag Solstad 29. Krysantemum, Rune Christiansen 30. The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa 31. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 32. The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan 33. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera 34. Homo Faber, Max Frisch 35. Not Art, Péter Esterházy 36. Faust, Ivan Turgenev 37. Selected Poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley 38. The Russian Master and Other Stories, Anton Chekhov 39. Vinternoveller, Ingvild H. Rishøi 40. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector 41. Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor 42. Om høsten, Karl Ove Knausgård 43. Three Women, Sylvia Plath 44. Furuset, Linn Strømsborg 45. Thomas F's Last Notes to the Public, Kjell Askildsen 46. Rue des Boutiques obscures, Patrick Modiano 47. Herztier, Herta Müller 48. On Overgrown Paths, Knut Hamsun 49. Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett 49/40 A really mixed bag this month, with a heavy bias towards literature from my own place of birth. Om høsten, lit. translated to In the Autumn or just Autumn or something, is the first in a new serial project by renowned the author Knausgård. There's gonna be one book per season, and the next one, Om vinteren (Winter), will be out within the next couple of weeks or so. The premise for these books is that he's writing a letter to his unborn daughter, and wanted to write about something in the material world. So he made a list of around 400 or so names of things, and tried to write something about all of them (not unlike part of Georges Perec's approach in Life a User's Manual (which I'm halfway through now)). What he writes about are the most mundane things around us, like tin cans, plastic bags, or the concept of pissing. He even has a chapter dedicated to the humble Labia majora. Even if he tries to look outward, the book still tends to get inside Knausgård's own life, as he often draws from his own memories and experiences with the different things he writes about. And in some cases he even draws upon philosophy and literary science. There's a chapter called Expreicenes where he starts to reflect on his own understanding of Heidegger, and in one of the "Letters to an unborn child" chapters, he even reflects on the definitions of poetry and what it's about. Definitely worth a read if/when it gets translated. And if you can read Norweigan, why aren't you already hauling rear end towards the book store? Three Women. I assume this one doesn't need an introduction, since most of you are yanks. I really liked the way the different voices appeared in the poems, and you just kind of slowly realise what these birthing women were going through, physically and mentally, and how their experiences differed. Furuset is named after a neighbourhood/borough in Oslo, and where most of it takes place. I read this one after someone suggested it, when I asked for contemporary Norwegian novels by female authors. I didn't really have a clue what I was going into, other than the summary which mentioned it was about a woman who had just finished her masters degree, and was struggling with the uncertainty of what to do next. It quickly became apparent that this was a YA novel though, both in style and conten, which really disappointed me. She gets back in touch with her childhood friends, and ofcourse they start hanging out in their old favourite spot from when they were 13. And ofcourse you get these heartfelt, clichéd platitudes about how friends "stick together god drat it!". And ofcourse everything turns out fine in the end, and ofcourse that one kid she starts talking to while working in the movie rental shop is in the gang that's creating mayhem in the parking lots, which she ofcourse manages to talk him out of just by acting like a archetype big sister. It's probably a good book if all you read is John Green or whatever, but I disliked this intensely. A "Verwirrung der Gefühle" or "Ansichten eines Clowns" this is not. Thomas F's Last Notes to the Public is a collection of two short stories. The first one is about a man who starts questioning not only his identity, but his very existence, when a policeman asks him a few questions regarding his investigation of a sexual assault. I won't go into any greater detail than that, because it would probably spoil some of the fun in reading it. The second short story, and the one the title of the book is about, is about a very old man who feels more and more distant and enstranged by society as his age starts catching up with him. It kind of reminded me of The Death of Ivan Illyich in some ways, at least with how the protagonist acts and thinks. Rue des Boutiques obscures (or Missing Person) is an interesting twist on the detective genre. Instead of trying to peice together a murder and who the real suspect is, it's about a bloke who had amnesia 10 or 20 years before the novel takes place. He worked as a private investigator, and when the agency he works for is about to close down due to retirement, he goes on to try to figure out who he, himself is. The first half of the book is really interesting, and probably even the strongest part, where interviews with different people raises various red herrings and dead-ends which becomes apparent after the story goes on. Herztier (or The Land of Green Plums) is set under the Ceauşescu regime in cold-war Romania. It follows a group of German-Romanian friends under the totalitarian regime, but the characterization is neither the point nor the strength of the novel. I believe it was more about coping with the oppression and constant surveilance. The novel conveys this by blurring the lines between reality and dreams/fantasies. Very often it shifts between a typically narrative paragraph with longer poetic, almost stream-of-conciousness-like passages. It was quite good indeed. On Overgrown Paths, Knut Hamsun's autobiographical and final work, consists of a series of thoughts and dated letters as he awaits his trial for treason right after the war. It's written very much like his regular fiction, but with a more deliberate and direct tone. One thing that's very noticeably absent, and for which it's been criticised, is that he doesn't really reflect too much over his sympathies with Nazi-Germany, other than very adamantly trying to press the point that it was a concious decision, and that he's not insane nor demented. It also includes a letter he sent to the chief of police, and an excerpt from his trial documents. It might not be his best work by any means, but I'd say it's just as important, as it at least gives you a bit of an insight, albeit a deliberately vague one, into who he was. ulvir fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Oct 31, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2015 13:04
|
|
|
PREVIOUSLY ON MAHLERCOCK'S READING CHALLENGE:Mahlertov Cocktail posted:1. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (reread) TODAY ON THE SHOW: quote:27. The Android's Dream by John Scalzi The Android's Dream, like Agent to the Stars earlier this year (man I read a lot of Scalzi), was fun but fluffy, though it did have more of the ethical dilemmas that mark a lot of Scalzi's other work. Malcolm X was a hell of an interesting read for the historical perspective, and he is definitely super articulate and intelligent in many ways, but I was mostly shocked at his persistent anti-Semitism and misogyny. Also, the Nation of Islam is kiiinda insane, so it was a relief when he moved from it to "normal" Islam, though he stayed adamant about his stance on Jewish people. I wonder if that could have changed too, had he not been murdered. Guess we'll never know. The Name of the Rose was loving fantastic. It took me a little bit to get into because it's super dense and the style is pretty particular, but I loved all the digressions about philosophy, theology, and logic (which weren't really digressions since all of those are central, both to the themes and plot). William of Baskerville is one of the best characters I've encountered in a book recently. Finally, cross-posted from the "what did you just finish" thread: I loved The End of All Things. I really appreciate how far the series has moved since Old Man's War - neverending war, particularly under a fascist regime like the CU/CDF (I enjoyed Powell's call-out of the CD's fascism immensely, particularly since up until that point it had simply been an assumed background element of the setting that even the characters took for granted) is unsustainable, thus the ever-increasing emphasis on diplomacy and cooperation (however reluctant) with previous/traditional enemies. Also, that the various actors only act rationally to a certain extent makes the conflicts that much more believable. On one hand, humanity as a whole doesn't want to get wiped out and will do whatever it takes to avoid that conclusion. On the other, the CU has been disingenuous and bellicose for so long that it barely even knows how to navigate conflicts without resorting to military duplicity.[/spoiler] Similar faults are just as clear on the Conclave's part. In short, Scalzi is great at subtly getting into difficult problems of state, existence, and survival while still writing what boils down to a fast-paced space opera. A VERY SPECIAL BOOKLORD CHALLENGE: quote:1. The vanilla read a set number of books (45) in a year - 30 so far! Hella behind schedule but whatever! COMING UP NEXT: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (one of the best book titles I've ever seen and the book stands up to it as of the halfway mark) and Stelle di Cannella by Helga Schneider(Italian book set in a little German town shortly before WWII - my Italian is halfway-decent if I'm being generous, but since this is written for middle-school-ish age readers it's going pretty well anyway)!
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2015 14:36
|
|
|
Prolonged Shame posted:1) The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory October: 81) The Virgin's Lover - Philippa Gregory: I don't know why I keep reading these as they are getting progressively worse. 82) Club Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #3) - Charlaine Harris: These, on the other hand, I am still enjoying immensely. 83) Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President - Robert Dallek: I opted to read the condensed 1 volume bio of LBJ rather than the multivolume set the author wrote, and I made the right decision. This wasn't bad, but it suffered from the same problems as his Kennedy bio, mainly that as soon as LBJ becomes president, the book becomes a list of his public accomplishments/failures rather than a portrait of the man himself. I may as well have read his Wikipedia entry. 84) The Black Moth - Georgette Heyer: This seems pretty cliched for it's genre, but it's pretty good considering the author was 17 when she wrote it in 1921. Parts of it were funnier than I expected. 85) Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn: Awful, awful, awful. I picked this up to see what all the Gillian Flynn hype was about. I still don't know, because this was terrible. Loathsome characters, a weak plot with a stupid ending, and terrible, cringe-worthy writing. Avoid. 86) Hell House - Richard Matheson: A good Halloween read. Very good and extremely creepy, though a little bit dated. 87) Empire of Ivory (Temeraire #4) - Naomi Novik: This one picked up a bit from the last couple. It was both an enjoyable self-contained story and an advancement of the overarching plot, so that was nice. 88) My Life in France - Julia Child: I picked this up on a whim and loved it. You get a great sense of her and her husband's personalities, and they seem like fun people to be around. She's also a good, evocative writer. Highly recommended. 89) The Crucible - Arthur Miller: A play about the Salem witch trials. This was a little difficult to get into at first, but the last scene was gut-wrenching. As is usually the case with plays, it is probably better when performed than when read. 90) A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett: I loved 'The Secret Garden' as a child and thought I would love this one as well, but it never quite got me. I don't know if I'm just too old for it, but the main character was annoyingly perfect and not overly sympathetic. It is also definitely dated in it's treatment of non-white characters ("orientals") 91) The Sunne in Splendour - Sharon Kay Penman: Historical fiction detailing the life of Richard III from his childhood to his death. Fantastic. Probably the best book I read this month. Total: 91/100 Presidential bios: 10/12 Non Fiction barring prez bios: 20/25
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2015 16:45
|
|
|
Update through October. Previously: 1. Menneskefluene by Hans Olav Lahlum. 2. Teckla by Steven Brust. 3. Ultima by Stephen Baxter. 4. Satellittmenneskene by Hans Olav Lahlum. 5. REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. 6. Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky 7. Annihilation by Jeff VanDermeer. 8. The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov. 9. Njålssoga (aka Njåls saga, the Saga of Burnt Niall, etc. in various translations) by unknown author. 10. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. 11. Katalysatormordet by Hans Olav Lahlum. 12. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. 13. De Fem Fyrstikkene by Hans Olav Lahlum. 14. Pastoralia by George Saunders. 15. Kameleonmenneskene by Hans Olav Lahlum. 16. Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker. 17. Straits of Hell by Taylor Anderson. 18. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. 19. My Real Children by Jo Walton. 20. Forrådt ("Betrayed") by Amalie Skram. 21. Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey. 22. On the Steel Breeze by Alastair Reynolds. 23. Landfall by Stephen Baxter. 24. The March North by Graydon Saunders. 25. The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett and (probably mostly) Stephen Baxter. 26. Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. 27. Castaway Planet by Ryk Spoor and Eric Flint. 28. Ørnens Sønn by Olaf Havnes. 29. The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross. 30. The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. New: 31. Spring's Awakening by Frank Wedekind. A late 19th-century play, frequently banned and censored. Ignorant teenagers stumble into sexuality, there is no sex ed and these things are really not talked about at all, almost everyone dies or suffers horribly. Not really enjoyable but not really supposed to be either. 32. Poseidon's Wake by Alastair Reynolds. #3 in the series started with Blue Remembered Earth. Slower-than-light interstellar exploration, weird aliens, cosmological questions. Good stuff. 33. Extinction Game by Gary Gibson. Pretty quick little book about alternate-earth travel where the main characters are all survivors from various different post-apocalyptic scenarios, rescued and then used as field agents by a rather shadowy agency. Not bad but not all that good either, I've read some other books by the same author before and liked them better. 34. The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (a goon). Now this was loving great. Epic geopolitical fantasy, mean and spiteful. All you other goons, go and read this. 35. Havlandet by Olaf Havnes. #2 in that obscure Norwegian fantasy trilogy which started with Ørnens Sønn. Just as concise and sweetly badass as #1, this shows the influence of Norse sagas and involves a geographical/cultural area clearly inspired by same. 36. Svart Storm by Olaf Havnes. #3 in same and holy gently caress, this was good stuff and it's an awful shame the author died so soon. The whole trilogy was more epic than most other stuff I've read and it all clocked in at about 750 pages altogether. The cost and price of ultimate victory is shown, as well as bits and pieces of the world's history far removed from the main plot -- the goddamn framing prologue/epilogue could have spawned a whole trilogy of its own, for example. 37. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer. #2 in the Southern Reach trilogy, about a geographical area which just isn't right and human beings' attempts to understand this. Again, what the actual gently caress. So far: 37/40 overall goal, of which 1/5 allowed rereads 9/10 Norwegian books 4/5 nonfiction Booklord challenge points met: 2 (Forrådt; technically met earlier but saved for a book where the gender of the author was the POINT rather than an accident) 3 (Three-Body Problem) 5 (Njålssoga), 8 (Pastoralia) 11 (My Real Children) 12 (Ultima) 13 (Teckla; teleporting sorceror-assassins aren't particularly real) 14 (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) 15 (Ultima again, published November 2014) 16 (Njålssoga) 17 (Spring's Awakening) 19 (Three-Body Problem) 20 (Spring's Awakening) 21 (De Fem Fyrstikkene) 22 (Menneskefluene). Nicely on track to meet and exceed my main goal, have to pick a few particular selections to fill out the last few challenge points.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2015 18:32
|
|
|
quote:1. The Forge of God by Greg Bear 46. Red Rising by Pierce Brown 47. The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allen Poe 48. The End of The World As We Knew It by Nick Cole 49. The Spirit Eater (Eli Monpress #3) by Rachel Aaron 50. The End has Come edited by John Joseph Adams October update! The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was really good. A small group of people on a tunneling(wormhole) ship get hired to travel to a planet to connect it to the rest of the galaxy. Character driven story, not a lot of fighting action, stuff happens related to members of the ship at each stop along the way. Some human/alien and human/AI romance stuff, but doesn’t get graphic. Looking forward to the sequel whenever it is finished I have seen The Hunger Games, but never read any of the books or similar stories so Red Rising was new for me. Again this was really good. The protagonist makes mistakes along the way seems to learn from them and grows. The story is all from the viewpoint of Darrow, and sometimes I think his train of thought was to foreshadowing in some ways but it was still enjoyable. I guess the second book switches up to space opera so looking forward to it. My poetry selection was The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe. I don’t know why I picked it, but I did. Except for some of his more famous work, it was quite difficult to get through. I think some of that comes down to my lack of knowledge about poetry and how old the writing is so I feel I did not get a lot out of it. I should have picked something more contemporary, but what is done is done. I really like reading stuff by Nick Cole. It’s not too heavy reading, it’s just solid writing about end of world stuff so I picked up his newest, The End of the World As We Knew It. This was another good one. It’s a historical view of a zombie apocalypse through three artifacts left over and analyzed much later, a voice recorder, a notebook and a newspaper article. His books are on the short side, but still wrapped up a good story without really leaving anything hanging. Finished up my Eli Monpress Omnibus with The Spirit Eater. Still fun reads, this one is a bit different, no heist just story and a lot of world building going on. In addition to the Bandit King focuse, the League of Storms, demons, and Benehime all get pages devoted to them and more information about who they are and what they do is presented. I don’t know if I’ll get to the last two in the series this year, but definitely early next year I will be finishing the series. The End has Come is the final book in a series of short stories. As it has been a long time since I read the first two in the series and we are looking at many short stories, I was lost on the background of many stories. Some of them I remembered(Nod, the mold stories, the Howey Wool connected ones, the child aliens) but others were not familiar. If I had either a quick 1 paragraph reminder before the story or read all three books back to back, I think it would have been better. There was enough good to make it a worthwhile read, but next time I attempt a series of short stories like this, I will approach it differently. Finishing up my challenge and the booklord challenge with The Three Body Problem and The Blind Owl in the next week or so! Booklord Challenge 1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year. 50/52 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. The Blind Owl (Free translation if your ok with reading on a screen or cant find a copy!) 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2015 02:00
|
|
|
October! 103. The Other Wind - Ursula K. Le Guin 104. In the Woods - Tana French 105. In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson 106. The Waste Land and Other Poems - T.S. Eliot 107. The BFG - Roald Dahl 108. Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights - Salman Rushdie 109. The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder 110. Talking at the Gates - James Campbell 111. The Blind Owl - Sadegh Hedayat 112. Planet of the Apes - Pierre Boulle 113. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway 114. Proven Guilty (Dresden #8) - Jim Butcher 115. The Gay Place - Billy Lee Brammer Overall, a good month, though nothing really stood out. In the Woods was a solid mystery, The Other Wind was a solid conclusion to the Earthsea Series, In the Garden of Beasts was a good nonfic about Hitler's rise to power, and Planet of the Apes was a good sci-fi novel (and interesting to see how the movie/movies developed from the books). I guess the biggest thing is that I completed the booklord challenge! Just in time, too, because I just had a kid, and I doubt I'll ever read again. At least not until he's over 3-4 months. He's cute tho. 1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year.: 115/100 2. Read a female author: 16 - Tana French, as well as another Le Guin book 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A collection of poetry: The Waste Land and Other Poems 8. 9. 10. The Blind Owl 11. 12. 13. 14. Wildcard: Planet of the Apes 15. 16. 17. 18. Biography: Talking at the Gates 19. 20. 21. 22.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2015 07:28
|
|
|
Female authors: 17/24 Non-fiction: 12/12 Goodreads. I've mostly been wasting my time playing The Sims this month, so I haven't read much. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits was a bit of a disappointment, but still a fun read. It just didn't work as well as John Dies at the End and a lot of it doesn't really make sense if you think about it at all. It also felt like it should have been serialised, because it's kind of broken up into episodes, little self-contained bits of the story, before it reaches the final, unsatisfying conclusion. The Cipher was pretty good though. It wasn't as scary or creepy as it seemed like it wanted to be, but the characters are pretty great.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2015 10:41
|
|
|
Chamberk posted:104. In the Woods - Tana French I read this a few months ago and loved it. I guess it's part of a series, where a non-POV from one book becomes the POV character of the next. I bought the 2nd and 3rd books but I haven't dived into them yet. Also congrats on the kid! October update: Stephen King and Peter Straub - The Talisman Michael Lewis - Moneyball Sarah Vowell - Assassination Vacation The Talisman is now one of my favorite King books, just a great adventure story. Moneyball was surprisingly interesting, I think I will watch the movie mostly because I'm curious how they're going to turn that into a movie. Assassination Vacation was kind of a dud. I still have one booklord challenge to finish, but I'm 2/3 through A Confederacy of Dunces so I will finish that in the next week or so. My work schedule combined with post-season baseball really sidetracked my reading in October. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Something absurdist 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. The Berzerker fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Nov 1, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2015 17:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 00:34 |
|
|
October - 5: Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi) Union Man (Jack Jones) The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind) Lord of the Flies (William Golding) Pyramids (Terry Pratchett) Some good stuff this month. Tamerlane was absolutely fascinating to read. Marozzi has clearly spent a lot of time on it and done some pretty extensive travelling to support the book research, and he tells the story in a compelling fashion. It's crazy to think how little traction Tamerlane gets in the West compared to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, but there you go. One thing that's done really well is to balance the clear admiration for his achievements (which are pretty incredible) with the absolutely horrifying human cost of that kind of grand conquest. Union Man was ok I guess. I learned a lot about the history of 20th century trade unionism, since Jack Jones was part of most of it up until the mid 70s, but there's a fair part of the book which is laying out union politics and this and that negotiation in mind-numbing detail. Despite being business journalism, The Smartest Guys in the Room was fascinating and pretty pacey. McLean & Elkind manage to make the various players in the Enron scandal great characters in and of themselves, and they're merciless in setting out exactly how the scam operated and the increasingly desperate lengths to which Enron senior management went to create the fiction of profit even as they haemoragged actual cash at an astonishing rate. The way this enormous company unravelled practically overnight is chilling, even moreso when you think that it was only another seven years before the whole thing happened again on an even grander scale. Lord of the Flies is a book I really should have read but never got around to. Golding was a teacher at my school ffs. I'm glad I did though. It's obviously dated now (I don't know that you'd have Piggy screaming about the kids being "painted up niggers" nowadays unless it was meant to be a character trait!) but the core is still effective. Golding is strong on showing, not telling, how the social dynamics at play are operating and telling the story of the loss of civilisation, and the way it all ties together at the end (and the sudden shift in viewpoint to see the whole thing through adult eyes, reducing the kids from these wild savages back to being naughty little boys) is done really well. Pyramids is another Pratchett. It doesn't have the best reputation among Discworld books but I've always rather liked it. It probably suffers from being early on and not taking place in Ankh Morpork (much) which is what most people seem to find interesting about the setting, but I enjoy the skewed look at ancient Egypt. 7 down now, only 34 (!) to go. I failed to booklord this month, but the next two I have lined up take care of all the categories except the play, which I really need to get on with. Year to Date: 50 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 38. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) 39. MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) 40. Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) 41. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) 42. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) 43. Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 44. 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) 45. American Rust (Philipp Meyer) 46. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi) 47. Union Man (Jack Jones) 48. The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind) 49. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) 50. Pyramids (Terry Pratchett) Booklord categories: 1 - 11, 13 - 15, 18 - 22.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2015 19:27
|
|