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We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. I spent 80% of this book enjoying its style (beautiful descriptions of pain, use of stories within a story to frequently redefine what was going on, etc.) but thinking its plot was boring and its characters were realistic but unlikable. Then the last 20% happened, and it turned into a genuinely excellent book. Gone by Michael Grant. Before passing judgement on this book, I looked up the author. If this book had been written by an actual teenager, I would have called it passable. It wasn't, so I don't feel bad about saying that this was probably the most painfully-cliche book I read this year. I don't ask a lot of YA books, but this was a glorified x-men fanfic filled with buckets of uninspired, one-dimensional characters. Fat, stupid bullies? Triple check. Heroic, admired, but "average guy" protagonist? Check. Gorgeous blonde-girl love interest who's totally not cliche because she's also really smart? Check. Ethnic kid who is good at all forms of manual labor? Check. The list goes on. Some of the dialogue was kind of amusing, but that's the best I can say about this book.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 04:08 |
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# ? May 31, 2024 00:51 |
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Just finished A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. It's a book about a girl who may or may not be possessed by a demon, and her family who, for financial reasons, decide to allow their daughter's affliction and subsequent 'exorcism' to be turned into a reality TV show. The story is told from the point of view of the younger sister, who is now grown up and recounting the experience to a reporter writing a book about the whole thing. Along with this is a series of blog entries about the television show... it's pretty meta. I quite enjoyed most of the book--the blogging parts got a little annoying due to the blogger's writing style, but I suppose it was pretty realistic since most bloggers write that way... What surprised me the most was how sad the entire thing ended up being. It's a quick read, so I'd recommend it if you're looking for something a little different from your typical 'horror' fare. tonytheshoes fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Dec 22, 2015 |
# ? Dec 22, 2015 17:07 |
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tonytheshoes posted:Just finished A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. It's a book about a girl who may or may not be possessed by a demon, and her family who, for financial reasons, decide to allow their daughter's affliction and subsequent 'exorcism' to be turned into a reality TV show. The story is told from the point of view of the younger sister, who is now grown up and recounting the experience to a reporter writing a book about the whole thing. Along with this is a series of blog entries about the television show... it's pretty meta. I quite enjoyed the mind-gently caress that is his novel The Little Sleep, which is about a detective who suffers from extreme narcolepsy. It goes into weird dark places, and I've been meaning to read more of his books.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 17:52 |
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Franchescanado posted:I quite enjoyed the mind-gently caress that is his novel The Little Sleep, which is about a detective who suffers from extreme narcolepsy. It goes into weird dark places, and I've been meaning to read more of his books. Oh cool, that sounds interesting--adding it to the queue!
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 20:22 |
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Bone Dance, by Emma Bull. I was recommended this by a close friend, and from the title and the time it was written I was expecting some urban dystopia with spiritualism and cyberpunk flavours. I was wrong about the cyberpunk, but right about everything else: the story technicolour urban fantasy in a Gibsonian style, with a twisting, sometimes confusing plot and a cast of memorable and not wholly trustworthy characters. I particularly liked the protagonist, Sparrow, an androgynous waif who survives by selling old pre-collapse media and starts the book with a large memory-hole. The book surprised me in the way it treated things like gender and personal boundaries, and the aftermath of one particularly traumatic episode was both moving and really welcome. The book is a little hard to follow at times, especially during a couple of loa-infused dream sequences, but it was always engaging, and the end was really satisfying. Between The World And Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A book-length essay about race and power in the USA, told as a letter to his son. It's part-memoir, part-history and part-warning, with Coates describing America's and his own history of racial awareness. It's sad and it's frustrating, as I sort of expected - the way he describes both institutional and personal violence is really quite upsetting. I don't feel fully qualified to talk about his experiences, given how far they are from my own sheltered white British upbringing. But this is a book I'm very glad I've read, and I can see why it was such a huge success. Videogames For Humans, edited by merritt kopas. It's a big, meaty collection of Twine games (independent text-based games) being played through by an array of game developers, writers and critics. Since Twine games are mostly text, they're published in full with commentary - the book is kind of a large collection of Let's Plays in that sense. It's a really cool idea, and I learned a lot about both the games and the players. Some focus on use of language, some on the structure of the game itself, and some on their own personal relationship with the ingame events. If you're even tangentially interested in "indie" or alt-gaming at all, or want a nice snapshot of a small but vibrant part of the gaming scene, it's worth picking up.
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# ? Dec 24, 2015 06:31 |
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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. Why yes, I would like to read a version of X-men that involves time travel, invisible monsters, and mildly unsettling black-and-white photographs. The pacing was excellent as well; even by YA standards, this flew by. The only complaint I have was that the romantic subplot was on the creepy side. Overall an excellent bit of fun, and I'm putting the subsequent books on the list. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. This was a good book, but not a particularly fun book. I did an excellent job of being realistic, exploring mental illness, and examining complex relationships of all kinds. If you like realistic fiction, this would be an excellent choice, but for the most part I don't. Really the only fault here is that I wasn't the target audience, and it isn't what I read Atwood for. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood. This is what I read Atwood for. It was a great example of well-wrought speculative fiction. The world was terrifying but believable, and the characters fit into it beautifully. Everyone involved has their own baggage from living in the economic collapse that's set up, and it makes even the incidental characters that would otherwise be shallow surprisingly complex. It also manages to deal with a wide variety of social issues (the prison system, marriage and adultery, prostitution, the list goes on) without offering an easy stance or lesson on any of it. And in spite of the fact that you might class this as a dystopia novel, it's surprisingly fun. Incredibly dark things are happening, but there's enough absurdity that it's frightening and sharply challenging without actually becoming depressing.
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# ? Dec 26, 2015 16:30 |
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games Trilogy #1) I was amazed at how breathlessly paced the story is. The movies don't do the pacing of this thing justice. It's ridiculous how brazenly this goes from Point A to B to C and beyond. All the fat is ripped from every page, and it's a lean killer of a book. Until the third act, when it shudders to a halt and nearly craps out. There's an emotional gut punch to the ending that works well, but it's almost completely undermined by how weak things are just preceding it. It's saved by the voice and character of Katniss Everdeen. She arrives completely fully formed on the page, and feels as authentic as she possibly can. Her journey and realizations at the end of the book are heartbreaking and feel like they come from reality rather than some false, convenient YA setup. Looking forward to the rest.
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# ? Dec 29, 2015 04:26 |
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Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith. This was a fantastic history read. I knew nothing about South Africa's late 1800s to early 1900s history and this carefully broke down the roles of the British and Boers in shaping the nation. The narrative is divided between the roles of the two major figures of Cecil Rhodes on the British side and Paul Kruger on the Boer side. With Rhodes recently in the news over his controversial legacy, this made learning about his life extra relevant. I learned so much, I hadn't known that South Africa was divided between the Cape Colony, Transvaal, Orange Free State, and Natal, or the titanic role played by diamond and gold mining. The author keeps the story going at a brisk pace and doesn't get bogged down in political tedium. I especially liked the cameos of Gandhi and Churchill. The reader comes away with an understanding of the history of the Afrikaners and how the cruel foundations of apartheid were set up after the Second Boer War. One minor quibble is I was having trouble tracking the geography of events, as about 10% of the two page map near the front of the book is lost in the binding. But some quick Googling solves that issue. Overall fantastic, this is the fourth book by Meredith that I've read and they've all been stellar.
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# ? Dec 29, 2015 05:27 |
Captain Hotbutt posted:The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games Trilogy #1) Maybe we were reading different books, but basically everything you said I got the opposite of.
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# ? Dec 29, 2015 07:25 |
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Captain Hotbutt posted:The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games Trilogy #1)
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# ? Dec 29, 2015 11:31 |
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I just finished The Troop by Nick Cutter It is a bad book. His second book, The Deep, is a lot better but suffers from the same major problem as the Troop: the characters just wander around with no plan. In the Deep, Luke goes back and forth from the same three or four locations for the entire novel. It's bafflingly bad plotting. In the Troop, a few of the boys wander off from the cabin, then shrug their shoulders and decide they might as well go back. Both books feel like they were first drafts that went through no major revisions.
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# ? Dec 29, 2015 16:21 |
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The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch) - if you're the sort of person who can't stand long descriptions of what the protagonist ate for dinner that day, skip this one. I actually enjoyed this far more than I thought I would; I guess I really like books with rear end in a top hat protagonists. Basically, retired actor bloke finds his childhood sweetheart in a small coastal village, and undertakes to, like, stalk her and ruin her life in the name of love, at the same time as loving over all his old theatre friends and leading on multiple other women. Fun stuff. The Family Crucible (Napier, Whitaker) - this is a semi-fictional family therapy case study; the events are supposedly real but amalgamated from several different actual families. It's in an engaging narrative style interspersed with chapters of theory, but I'm not sure how I feel about the outcome (seemed to me like the mom just got everything she wanted), the fairly authoritarian attitudes towards parent/child relationships, and some of the events seemed p hosed up - OK, I'm no psychology expert, and it was published in the 70s, but is it seriously acceptable for a therapist to loving tackle and hold down a teenage boy? Probably didn't need to know about him ogling the teenage daughter's 'well-formed breasts' either tbh, thanks, though that's nothing compared to the sort of stuff Yalom writes. It's a good read but the content did leave me a little uneasy at the end.
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# ? Dec 30, 2015 12:18 |
A human heart posted:Nice book report, did your teacher give you a good mark? I guess it really is time to Quit Being a loving Child and Read Some Real Literature
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# ? Dec 30, 2015 14:47 |
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Captain Hotbutt posted:I guess it really is time to Quit Being a loving Child and Read Some Real Literature Have you read any Vonnegut? You like sci-fi, fast paced stuff, but he has more working under the surface, and his worse books are still great. Also, heartaches and laughter on the same page! It could help you Quit Being a loving Child.
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# ? Dec 30, 2015 21:25 |
Franchescanado posted:Have you read any Vonnegut? You like sci-fi, fast paced stuff, but he has more working under the surface, and his worse books are still great. Also, heartaches and laughter on the same page! It could help you Quit Being a loving Child. I've read "Mother Night" and "Slaughter-House Five" and I loved them. Decided to go to with Don DeLillo and "The Names". I haven't read him since university and I really liked him back then. "Libra", "Mao II", and "White Noise" were all excellent, and even some of his lesser novels ("Point Omega", "Body Artist") were at least interesting.
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# ? Dec 31, 2015 04:50 |
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It's very boring, good luck. None of the humor or excitement of the books you named. I'd choose a different one.
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# ? Dec 31, 2015 05:41 |
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Franchescanado posted:Have you read any Philip K Dick? You like sci-fi, fast paced stuff, but he has more working under the surface Fixed that for you.
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# ? Dec 31, 2015 06:40 |
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Spook Country, by William Gibson. The second in the Blue Ant trilogy, after Pattern Recognition. It's a tangle of surveillance and subterfuge, told from the POV of an ex-musician turned journalist, a young Cuban-Chinese man and a translator being held captive. They're all under the employ of mysterious characters, have a diverse set of skills, but none of them ever know the full story of what they're involved in. It definitely feels like a worthy successor to Pattern Recognition, and Gibson delights in making the modern zeitgeist feel alien and bewildering. The characters aren't as fleshed out as they could be, and the final reveal of what the McGuffin contains was a bit disappointing to me. But it's fun, it's engrossing, and it made me eager to read the last in the trilogy. Saga, vol. 5, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughn. Saga is still really good. There's more world-building, some really nice character moments, and Ghüs is pretty much the best. It all moves along at breakneck speed, and I almost wish it would slow down a little to flesh out some of the snippets we get, but there's so much going on that I'm not sure how it would work. But yeah, it's still really rad.
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# ? Dec 31, 2015 14:06 |
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. This one took me a while, it's like 900 pages. I liked it a lot though. I bought it thinking it would be mostly about the Manhattan Project with some background information but it goes into serious detail from the early work on the nucleus through to Nagasaki and the backstories of all the people involved. As someone who's read a lot of non-fiction on physics I was constantly finding out about new things like the espionage surrounding nuclear weapons during WWII, the exile of Jewish scientists leading up to the war, physicists who predicted the Cold War and were dismissed by Churchill, etc.
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# ? Jan 4, 2016 05:07 |
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I recently finished The Case of the General's Thumb by Andrey Kurkov. The author is Ukrainian but the book was written in Russian (I read it in English), it's a story about the layers of intrigue and greed in 90's Ukraine and Russia using the basic frame of a detective novel but still following a Soviet tradition in which every actor is doubled by an agent from "higher up". in a way the book is about remnants of the KGB attempting to maintain some sort of supremacy or control in the chaos of USSR's breakup, and the individuals who try to make their living from the system and escape from it imo the most interesting thing about the book is that it was written in the late 90's, so looking back on it after the events of 2014-2015 is fascinating
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# ? Jan 4, 2016 19:27 |
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Managed to slip one final book in for 2015--Joyland by Stephen King. Ehhh... This book was a weird choice for a 'Hard Case Crime' novel--the 'case' itself had all the depth of a Scooby-Doo episode, and the rest of the story wasn't particularly 'hard' or 'crime-y.' I did find the ultimate ending more satisfying than most King endings, but honestly, that's not the highest bar. At least it was a short, quick read to beef up my 'books read in 2015' total...
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# ? Jan 4, 2016 19:32 |
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tonytheshoes posted:Managed to slip one final book in for 2015--Joyland by Stephen King. Ehhh... This book was a weird choice for a 'Hard Case Crime' novel--the 'case' itself had all the depth of a Scooby-Doo episode, and the rest of the story wasn't particularly 'hard' or 'crime-y.' those Stephen King books are how Hard Case Crime is able to stay in business
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# ? Jan 4, 2016 19:35 |
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Angry White Pyjamas. No bad.
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# ? Jan 4, 2016 19:41 |
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Earwicker posted:those Stephen King books are how Hard Case Crime is able to stay in business Makes sense--can't sell books based on awesome cover art alone!
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# ? Jan 4, 2016 19:48 |
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House of Leaves. I think all the internet hype I remember from like 2006ish about this being the scariest book ever kinda ruined it for me. Maybe my brains broken, but I've never found horror novels especially effective. I thought its gimmick was neat but I ended up disappointed because, I don't know, it could've gone so much further with it. Perfidia by James Ellroy. It was good, although I thought the main reveal was really lame, by the point the novel wrapped that up I was so disinterested in finding out who the purple-sweatered man was that I kind of hoped they wouldn't find him. I liked that unlike other prequels there was never a point that Dudley Smith wasn't a corrupt shitbag.
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# ? Jan 5, 2016 03:19 |
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0 rows returned posted:House of Leaves. I think all the internet hype I remember from like 2006ish about this being the scariest book ever kinda ruined it for me. Maybe my brains broken, but I've never found horror novels especially effective. I thought its gimmick was neat but I ended up disappointed because, I don't know, it could've gone so much further with it. I keep meaning to read this, but the public library will never let me get it out for more than a few weeks, which isn't really enough time to consume it. Same with the Gormenghast novels; they're good, but you have to read them so slowly and methodically that it's hard to be done with them in such a short span of time More on topic, I just finished Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, and it was really fantastic. Could not recommend it highly enough to sci-fi fans; the world-building is interesting and very un-clichd, the characters are believable and compelling, and the author manages superbly at what seems like a very difficult task - that is, convincingly writing from the first-person perspective of a main character who spends much of the story as a single artificial intelligence controlling hundreds of different bodies. This latter aspect provokes a lot of philosophical issues about individuality and hive-mind identity, self-deception and conflict within oneself, and the instability, incoherence, and loss/shift of identity brought on by the separation of one's bodies from the main consciousness, or the development of preferences and relationships that occur when one's bodies are all doing different things in different places with different people, and how that affects the identity of the mind as a whole when those different pieces are brought back together. These are all issues that would never really have occurred to me regarding the philosophy of a hive mind, and the book handles them very well; the perspective of Justice of Toren/One Esk/Breq, the hive-mind main character, is always handled in a believable and thought-provoking way. Overall it's a book that manages to be both compelling and intellectually-stimulating. Without delving too much into the specifics, there's a lot of intrigue and mystery that arises from the issues of fractured identity and self-contradiction, with the power-struggles within one's own mind playing out on an interplanetary scale. Very much looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of the sequel.
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# ? Jan 5, 2016 04:34 |
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Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari (audiobook version). This is my first real foray into audiobooks. I wouldn't really trust Aziz to narrate any other book, but he's charming and fun in this. There are audiobook-only jokes directed to the listener about how lazy we are that we can't even read to ourselves, Aziz's challenge describing graphs, and even breaks the 4th wall for jokes about the recording process. It's more than just date jokes. Aziz seems genuinely interested, and is happy with the research, and seems to want to share that we're not alone in feeling alone, and what we can do about it. The information itself is fun, interesting. It's reassuring to know that everyone goes through similar issues and confusion in dating in the modern era. There are qonderful sections comparing US dating culture to other parts of the world, or the history and necessity of marriage to older generations vs. the modern idea of marriage for True Love. Great book, great recording.
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# ? Jan 5, 2016 14:53 |
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Kraken - China Meiville - Thoguht this was pretty solid, didn't take long at all to get into the british English. I liked the presentation of the characters with 'magic', some powers that I hadn't run across before, like Wati bouncing between figurines, it really gave the sense of following him along I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus - Browne - Real quick one, Zombie story told from the zombies POV. Of the few that I've read like this I like it the best, others seem so hack trying to place you as the undead. Definitely a different take having the Z's be thinking and more of a disease that can be maintained through eating human flesh. I'll probably grab the other one, Breathers and see if it holds on its own or how repetitive they seem Rant - Palahunik - Typhoid mary turned time traveler? Sure why not. Written as an interview/history so the narrative is all over. Made me kinda itchy reading it, so mission accomplished?
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# ? Jan 5, 2016 15:29 |
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Just finished S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. I enjoyed most of it, and the marginalia and inserts were well done. I thought things resolved too neatly for Jen and Eric in the end, though. That said, I didn't really mind the way things ended within Ship of Theseus since that was obviously Filomena (my favorite character in the book -- wish there had been more of her!) writing the ending she wished she and Strava could have had. Would generally recommend.
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# ? Jan 7, 2016 17:50 |
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The Broom of the System: This one stretched out over a couple of weeks, but once I hit the back half of the book I couldn't put it down. It left a few unfinished plot threads here and there and some of the stylistic choices seemed kind of purposely dense, but the meat of the book was excellent. I can definitely see myself coming back to this one at some point in the future. Ready Player One: "Listen," I said. "We can take things as slow as you like. I'm really a nice guy, once you get to know me. I swear." A friend of mine recommended this to me and I figured I could use a palate cleanser after finishing up Broom of the System. What an absolute cringe-fest. The best-friend tokenism, the fetishization of glorious Nippon, the constant references to the 80's that go absolutely nowhere...I admit, I was sucked into the book for the duration, but I'm trying really hard not to think less of the friend who recommended this to me.
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# ? Jan 7, 2016 22:22 |
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nerdpony posted:Just finished S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. I enjoyed most of it, and the marginalia and inserts were well done. I thought things resolved too neatly for Jen and Eric in the end, though. That said, I didn't really mind the way things ended within Ship of Theseus since that was obviously Filomena (my favorite character in the book -- wish there had been more of her!) writing the ending she wished she and Strava could have had. Would generally recommend. Regarding the ending: Did it resolve so nicely? The "OK" is crossed out; is that because they're going to just spend time with one anther without the book as a buffer, or did something happen to them? On top of that, if the set up is that we are reading "their" book -- why don't they have it anymore?
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# ? Jan 7, 2016 23:48 |
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I also just finished The Broom of the System by Dee Eff Dubs. Absolutely fantastic. For me, the philosophical tangents started getting overly long near the end, but I get that he's showing different aspects of the ideas through different characters. The dialogue is the best part of the book. Whole chapters of nothing but conversation, and yet you can infer setting, characters, situation, absolutely everything. The scene that introduces Norman Bombardini is easily one of the greatest and funniest moments I have read. (Again, all dialogue.) The ideas on reality, identity, communication (or lack thereof), fate, miracles, coincidence...Fascinating, beautiful, depressing, and paranoid. Go read it now.
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# ? Jan 8, 2016 02:18 |
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Just finished Gone Girl. Totally was fooled by the unreliable narrator at the beginning so that set up for what happened in the middle of the book. The writing really drew me in and I was satisfied with the end.
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# ? Jan 9, 2016 17:08 |
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The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman I liked this book. The lives of a ex-Jewish photographer and a girl who is an exhibit in her father's museum of "living wonders" become entwined after the deadly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The setting and subject are great. I picked it up after learning the book dealt with the fire and that era of the labor movement. The prose felt a little lacking or overwrought at some points though.
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# ? Jan 9, 2016 17:35 |
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The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon. I find reading Chabon is like watching a David Fincher movie - whether you enjoy it or not you it feels like it's been made by a master craftsman, someone that absolutely understands the mechanics of their medium. As it is I thought this book was fantastic - the whole premise is so much fun, and I kept having to read lines twice because I'd just sailed straight over jokes the first time round. The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. I've been putting off reading this because I didn't want Discworld to be over. It's been a constant part of my life since I was 10 years old. I'm in no position to judge this book objectively - I guess it was (understandably) fairly disjointed but the essential Pratchett-ness shone through and I loved every minute of it, even though it made me very sad.
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# ? Jan 10, 2016 10:53 |
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Just finished One Rainy Day in May by Mark Danielewski. I really enjoyed House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, so I thought I'd give this a shot when I saw it hanging out on the shelf at my library. Once I learned it was part of a gigantic 27-volume series, the slow pacing made a lot more sense - I'm basically reading the pilot episode, so to speak. I eventually got used to the book's unusual style, and although I came pretty close to putting it down, I'm glad I didn't, because the ending was actually quite good. I definitely need a break from the guy before I jump into Volume 2, but I feel like the introductory novel was pretty solid, and I look forward to reading the next one later on.
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# ? Jan 10, 2016 21:34 |
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HereComesEverybody posted:Just finished One Rainy Day in May by Mark Danielewski. I really enjoyed House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, so I thought I'd give this a shot when I saw it hanging out on the shelf at my library. Once I learned it was part of a gigantic 27-volume series, the slow pacing made a lot more sense - I'm basically reading the pilot episode, so to speak. I eventually got used to the book's unusual style, and although I came pretty close to putting it down, I'm glad I didn't, because the ending was actually quite good. I definitely need a break from the guy before I jump into Volume 2, but I feel like the introductory novel was pretty solid, and I look forward to reading the next one later on. Volume 2 is much better.
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# ? Jan 11, 2016 03:34 |
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The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut I haven't read Vonnegut in a while, so I read one I missed. Started slow, but jumps into it. The defining characteristics are there. The story is more exciting than his others, which are more about execution and ideas than plot. Still, it was a wonderful read. It's not often I read a book in one day, and I'm glad I was able to with this one.
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# ? Jan 11, 2016 05:37 |
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Neuropath by R Scott Bakker. If you haven't read this book, don't, it's terrible. I was warned off R Scott Bakker's books because of the weirdly masturbatory fixation on rape and cuckolding that seem to be in all of his books, but kept seeing comparisons between Neuropath and Blindsight so I wanted to see how deep the comparisons went. Other than the basic central premise, not far. As a barebones airport thriller it sucks as well. It felt like nothing happened for like 90% of the book other than supposedly mind shattering revelations that shock, let me tell you, shock whoever hears them but basically boil down to "nihilism is the answer", there's no real investigation like in any other thriller, and then it just ends with a load of bullshit. Maybe at the end its the reader who is the cuck.
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# ? Jan 13, 2016 04:45 |
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# ? May 31, 2024 00:51 |
Zoo City - Lauren Beukes Neil Gaiman meets District 9 meets The Golden Compass. It was interesting enough: a brisk read with strong action and unique, creepy elements. It ends up squandering the premise on an unlikable protagonist, a third-act that almost enters aimlessness, and a villain you can see a mile away. If you're looking for a not-your-regular-sci-fi fix, you could do worse than this, but it didn't leave an impression. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories - Don DeLillo A chronological collection of DeLillo's short stories, ranging from 1979 - 2011. Fairly dull and repetitive. Only two of the nine stories ("Angel Esmeralda", "Hammer and Sickle") were able to capture my interest. I've loved DeLillo's work in the past, but seeing how similarly he presents his themes in the 1970s to how he does it in the 2000s is disheartening. Makes me think I was wrong about him. I've started reading The Names but nothing's happened 60 pages in. Did I fall for the Donny Dee hypetrain?
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# ? Jan 13, 2016 22:21 |