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thespaceinvader posted:1: Chimera by Mira Grant I needed some mindless filler for lunch breaks and long journeys and hey, there's ten books in this series. It's good fun, each book lasts me about 2 hours; the only thing that bugs me is that there are apparently still more to come in the series, probably a lot more. Well, that and the aforementioned copy-editing/proofing errors, which abound. Still, worth the twenty quid for the series so far.
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Jun 2, 2016 09:39
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quote:1 - Daft Wee Stories, by Limmy (Brian Limond) I only read four books in May. 23 - How To Build A Girl, by Caitlin Moran. The first novel by writer and pop-feminist critic Caitlin Moran, this is a standard coming-of-age tale turned into something special by the wit, intimacy and humanity of her prose. It follows Johanna, a frustrated teen girl in a dead-end town, who decides to reinvent herself as a pop music writer to save her family from poverty. It's a nice book, if a little by-the-numbers. 24 - Sex, Drugs, and Cartoon Violence: My Decade as a Video Game Journalist, by Russ Pitts. A tell-all autobiography from one of the integral members of The Escapist and Polygon. It's an interesting and candid insider look at the excesses, idiosyncracies and weird foibles of the games industry, and much of it is told in anecdotes about specific promotional events. It's pretty good, though I had some frustration with it. 25 - Memoirs of a Spacewoman, by Naomi Mitchison. Early 60s sci-fi, this reads like a zoologist's field notes from different expeditions and studies of alien races. The protagonist is a gifted communcator (she can even talk to dogs, due to future understandings of animal psychology), and we get an intimate, if detached, look into the mindset and life impacts of both long-haul space travel and the relativistic passage of time. Lots of meaty allegory to read into this, I'm sure. 26 - Superpatriotism, by Michael Parenti. Written in 2004, this short and impassioned polemic rages against the rise in right-wing narratives of nationalism, strength and prosperity that had come to a head by the eve of Bush II's re-election. Parenti is in full choir-preaching mode, sure, but it's immensely satisfying to have a 160-page laundry list of "patriotic" crimes, failures, fallacies and hypocrisy. There are some frustrating parts - he fails to connect the dots between, say, the Christian narratives of American superiority and the burgeoning "prosperity gospel" of right-wing evagelism. But overall it's a short, fun and empowering book, written for an audience who at the time would have been in dire need of the catharsis. Fuller reviews up on my GoodReads, as always. 1) 52+ books - 26 2) At least 40% (21) by a woman - 12 - Supervillainz, AM/PM, New World, Bad Feminist, Dept. Of Speculation, Empire Of The Senseless, Oryx & Crake, I Love Dick, Ghost House, Pig Tales, How To Build A Girl, Memoirs of a Spacewoman 4) Something written in the 1800s - 13) Read Something YA - 14) Wildcard! (City of Stairs) 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, etc.) or from the Beat Generation - 20) Read a banned book - 22) It’s a Mystery. -
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Jun 2, 2016 14:41
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I haven`t posted since this challenge started, because Goodread keeps track of all that poo poo for me. The internet makes me lazy. Here`s a quick and dirty rundown of the 29. 1-2. Veiled and Burned by Benedict Jacka were enjoyable, but nothing special. Burned was better. 3.Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey was the same, but less fun. 4. [Short Stories] Three Moments of an Explosions by China Mieville was, overall, pretty great. SS collections are usually a bit of a mixed bag. 5. [Female Author] The Cipher by Kathe Koja was interesting. I think I enjoyed it, but I never felt much of anything for any of the characters, and her writing style didn't impress. Spooky concept. 6-7. [YA] Half a War and Half the World were better than the first book, and pretty good reads. Maybe my least favorite Abercrombies. 8. [Essays] The Horrors by Charlie Demers was a pretty good collection of comedic, semi-autobiographical essays. Fun read, super Canadian. 9. [Historical?] The Anubis Gates by Time Powers was great and weird in a Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett kinda way. 10. [Recent] City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennet was a great followup novel. 11. [First in a Series] Armageddon The Musical by Robert Rankin was unpleasant and weird in a Robert Rankin way. I like quite a number of his other books, but I'm not sure about this one. 12. [1800s] The Picture of Dorian Gray was very good. 13. [Musician] How Music Works by David Byrne alternated between incredibly interesting and loving tedious. Byrne is a smart guy, with pretty bland anecdotes. 14. [Autobiographical] Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt was humourous and well written, but left me with a strong feeling of apathy. 15. [Mystery!] The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler was a great novel about an old-timey shithead who solves drinking crimes. 16. The White Gold Score by Craig Schaefer was a fun side-story. 17. [Talking Animals] Animal Farm by George Orwell was great! I wish I'd read that one back in high-school like everyone else. 18. [Airport Fiction] The Parner by John Grisham was listed in numerous places as one of his best novels. If this is his best, then gently caress the rest. Pages and pages of "Here is a conflict, how will we solve this problem" immediately followed by "I'm a super genius I solved that problem before the book even began." 19. Knight's Shadow by Sebastien de Castell, like the first novel, was fun but trite. The author clearly thinks his characters are much more likable than I think they are. 20. The Werewolf and the Wormlord by Hugh Cook was a great twist on a legendary hero story. 21. The Worshippers and the Way by Hugh Cook was odd, but not unpleasant. 22. [Lost Generation] The Sun also Rises by Earnest Hemingway was another book that left me torn. I've waffled quite a bit on this one. Maybe I'm just not a fan of his writing style. (Or maybe it's the perfect style to demonstrate the unhappy aimlessness of his characters. Waffle Waffle) Pretty good? 23. [Set in NYC] The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammet made my eyes glaze over a little bit. If I go back to the hardboiled well, it will be to Chandler's instead. 24-25. Harmony Black and Red Knight Falling were fun and trashy. They remind me of a tv show that forces characters to meet and explain their backstories and hopes and dreams as fast as possible so we can get to an action scene. (Or emotionally impactless betrayal). 26. [Nonwhite] The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin was loving fantastic. It's great, go read it. (I was reminded at times of Sanderson's "Mistborn", only less Player's Handbook and more well crafted written words about societal troubles and the human condition) 27. [Banned] The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood was also great, and a real goddamn bummer. 28. [Sci-Fi] The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi was the weakest of the trilogy, but still a great read, and a decent finale. 29. [Wildcard] The War with the Newts by Karel Capek was an excellent satire, and was much funnier and sillier than I expected. I assume that was the author's original intent, and not some goofy joke by Ewald Osers, the motley jester of translation. All I have left is to finish my goal of 52, to read a a dusty book from my shelf I've been meaning to get to, and to read a long rear end >500 page tome.
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Jun 4, 2016 06:17
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May: Selected Essays by Borges. Borges is a damb genius. Read these essays or die! Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. A masterwork. The story of Yuri Zhivago, who lives thru the Bolshevik Revolution and endures extreme privation + cheats on his wifey. This is an extraordinarily beautiful book and is a worthy successor to the long novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. A really funny satire of late cold war-era spy culture, which has been ramped up to xtreme levels. Lem rules baby.
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Jun 4, 2016 13:31
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May - 7: 30. The Mark and the Void (Paul Murray) 31. The Iliad (Homer) 32. Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea) 33. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Yukio Mishima) 34. Steampunk! (Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant) 35. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) 36. The Chimes (Anna Smaill) A Good Month. The Mark and the Void was bloody hilarious and I whipped through it in the space of a couple of train journeys. Paul Murray has this amazing eye for finding the comedy in a situation and drawing it out without making it forced, and you really do sympathise with the central characters even as they gently caress each other over pointlessly. The novel takes aim at the banking crisis and scores some good hits, though probably not anything that will surprise anyone familiar with the lunacy of it all. The Iliad was one of those things I felt like I should read rather than having any great desire to actually read it. Imo the Odyssey is the better of the two Homeric epics, although it's been years since I read that. The Iliad was interesting to read though - both to find out the things that are and aren't in it compared to what "general knowledge" suggests, but also as a kind of historical document of a style of storytelling that doesn't exist in the modern world. The actual text is pretty repetitive and the way the gods dominate the narrative is alien to how a modern audience expects these things to go, but I still found it getting the blood pumping from time to time. Girls of Riyadh was interesting mostly for what it is rather than the actual story, which is fairly generic chick lit - girls chase boys, boys let girls down, girls get over it by chasing other boys. It's the Saudi context and the fact the kingdom banned it which made it interesting, and the little insights into a culture which is completely different to the way the West operates. I saw a lot of criticism of it online saying that it only represents a tiny sliver of Saudi women (the velvet class, aka rich girls), which seemed weird to me because the book was pretty upfront about that. Maybe that was added in the translation afterwards.  The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was the BoTM which worked well since I'd been meaning to read it for a while anyway. I liked it and thought Mishima managed to do a bunch of interesting things on a few different levels, and his barely-concealed crazy shone through as it always does. Steampunk! was a collection of short stories I picked up in a charity shop for 99p, which is probably the ideal price point for it. I didn't realise when I bought it but it was entirely written by YA authors, so I'm counting it for that challenge. It was hit and miss in places - one or two were really awful, a few were mediocre, and one or two were approaching good. I don't hate that I read it but I doubt I'll be rushing back; on the plus side, it ticks the YA box for the challenge. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I doubt I have anything to say about that hasn't already been said. I liked it. Joyce is bloody good. The philosophical treatise that is the last 60 pages maybe went over my head a little. I was in Ireland just after and managed to pick up a copy of Dubliners while I was in Dublin, so I'll read that at some point soon. The Chimes was pretty disappointing. It has a clever idea - a post-apocalypse where music has become the weapon of a self-selected elite - but I feel like the author was more enamoured with the cleverness of it than actually writing a novel that makes use of it. The pacing in particular is bad; the opening building is looong and then the last 60-70 pages whips through the rest of the story in short order. My girlfriend mentioned she'd read somewhere that it was originally written with a YA audience in mind and the publisher decided to pitch it as adult fiction instead, and you can definitely tell the YA origins - the entire principal cast is of indeterminate-but-probably-teen-age and there is a lot of made-up language. Some of this was cool and made in-universe sense. Some of it is musical terms adapted to a non-musical context, which is a good idea but sometimes wasn't shown well enough to be understandable if you don't have a musical background. And then some of it was super dumb, like spelling "metal" as "mettle" throughout - for one thing, mettle is already a real word with its own meaning, and for another, none of the characters can read or write so misspelling a common word throughout doesn't make any drat sense. This was something that annoyed me throughout, actually - the point is repeatedly made that no-one understands "code" (writing) and definitely not the viewpoint character. But every so often, he'll tell you what was written on something, while again telling you he can't read it. The book isn't framed as a diary or anything, it's a standard I-novel - so if the viewpoint character is 100% illiterate he should not be telling us what is written on something. Ugh. In booklord terms further progress has been made. Girls of Riydah was banned, Steampunk! was YA and The Chimes was written by a musician, which takes care of categories 9, 13 and 20. Year to Date - 36: Booklord: 2-6, 8-13, 15-20 01. Death and the Penguin (Andrey Kurkov) 6 02. Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto) 2 03. Sky Burial (Xinran) 3 04. The Shining (Stephen King) 16 05. Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Michael Azerrad) 18 06. A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Mohammed Hanif) 12 07. A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) 11 08. King of the World (David Remnick) 09. Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami) 10. Ubik (Philip K. Dick) 8 11. The Vegetarian (Han Kang) 15 12. Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee) 13. John Crow's Devil (Marlon James) 14. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) 4 15. The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Olga Grushin) 16. Farewell, Cowboy (Olja Savicevic) 17. A History of Sparta 950-192BC (W.G. Forrest) 5 18. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) 19. The Guest Cat (Takashi Hiraida) 20. The Book of Memory (Petina Gappah) 21. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) 19 22. Fury (Salman Rushdie) 23. Ninja (John Man) 24. Concrete Island (JG Ballard) 25. A God in Ruins (Kate Atkinson) 10 26. Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol) 27. Perdido Street Station (China Mieville) 17 28. A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) 29. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 30. The Mark and the Void (Paul Murray) 31. The Iliad (Homer) 32. Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea) 33. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Yukio Mishima) 34. Steampunk! (Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant) 35. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) 36. The Chimes (Anna Smaill)
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Jun 5, 2016 13:04
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MAY!!! 36. Ship of Destiny (Liveship Traders #3) - Robin Hobb In my year-long project to read more Hobb, this has been a fun one to revisit. While the Farseer Trilogy tended to be a little melancholy - and had a pretty weak ending - this remained fun throughout, and wrapped up well. It’s not your usual fantasy - there’s dragons and talking ships and pirates and the like - and worth a read. 37. The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels #4) - Elena Ferrante I didn’t dig too deep into these books in my previous reviews, so let me just say now - I loved them. Granted, I finished this one near the beginning of the month, so it’s not as fresh in my mind, but it ended the series on a high note, being my favorite of the four. I can’t say I expected a series about the lifelong friendship/hateship of two women to be so compelling, but man, it so very much was. Fantastic. 38. Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie An interesting sci-fi political thriller of sorts; while I can see why people might love it, I merely ended up liking it. The premise was pretty interesting, but I just couldn’t get invested in the characters or the plot. Still, kinda glad this won the Hugo, for all it must have pissed off certain puppies to have a winner that refers to all of its protagonists as “she” regardless of gender. 39. A Distant Mirror - Barbara Tuchman Whoo, this one took me a bit. I started it back in March and have been inching my way through it ever since. It’s a combination biography/history sort of deal, describing the 14th century as it related to the life of one of its more notable noblemen, Enguarrand de Coucy. It was loaded with historical detail, and could occasionally be very interesting - as when it talked about the Black Plague or the Papal Schism - and occasionally very dull. (Not to mention occasionally hard to follow - there were about 4 Philips and 7 Charleses to keep track of!) An impressive book, somewhat outside my reading comfort zone, so I’m glad I persisted through. 40. The City & The City - China Mieville Mieville is a good writer, and with this book he’s cut back on his signature bloat - it checks in at a mere 300 pages - but it still falls under that “have a REALLY COOL idea, come up with a compelling plot about halfway through” curse that I see in most of his books. Still, as someone who has taken up reading mysteries a little more often, it was fun to see a surreal version of one as done by a guy with cool ideas. 41. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie When he’s on his game, Salman Rushdie is a goddamn literary genius. Like, sentence-for-sentence, I can’t think of a writer I enjoy more. It’s a magic realist sort of book, with its narrator Saleem Sinai as a symbol of his country of India. After all, he was born at midnight on the first day of India’s independence, as were a thousand others, and all of them have been granted mysterious powers. (Saleem’s has to do with his nose.) There are domestic dramas alongside political struggles and sectarian wars, yet it all seems to twine together perfectly together. It certainly owes a debt to other great magical realist books - The Tin Drum and 100 Years of Solitude for sure - but manages, in my mind, to establish itself in their lofty company. 42. The Land Breakers - John Ehle Definitely the Best Book of the Month. (At least, among the books I read for the first time.) This follows a group of settlers in an isolated valley in the Appalachian mountains circa 1779, and their attempts to make a life of it on the very edges of civilization. Though it’s heavily loaded with a lot of set-up (here’s how they made their houses, planted their crops, started their herds of livestock, etc.) the characters are vibrant and sympathetic, and their struggles to create a community makes simple things like the hunting of a bear or the driving of cattle over the mountains truly epic. 43. Carrion Comfort - Dan Simmons I like Dan Simmons. I like vampires (even psychic ones). I like globetrotting adventure. But somehow, this just didn’t grip me like I thought it would. See, there are psychic creatures that feed off of others’ suffering, and they control people like pawns, and one of them was a lieutenant-oberst in the Third Reich, and there’s a Holocaust survivor out to get his tormentor… it all sounds really good. But the book was easily twice as long as it had to be, and by the end I was just hoping it would wrap up soon. Shame, because I like a lot of Simmons’s other stuff. 44. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling Something like my 6th or 7th time through this? Still pretty good. 45. The Fireman - Joe Hill Okay, so Joe’s dad Stephen King obviously had a huge influence on him; this is the younger King generation’s take on The Stand, and Joe Hill acquits himself well in writing his own end-of-the-world plague crisis. (The culprit this time is no superflu, but a skin condition called Dragonscale that causes people to spontaneously combust.) You’ve got your band of survivors - in this case, a community who’s learned to live with the infection, but has to keep a low profile to keep from being killed by cremation squads trying to wipe out those who are sick. 46. Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad #4) - Tana French Recently I’ve been reading quite a few mysteries, and Tana French’s are near the top of the heap. They’re well-written and the detectives themselves are often as interesting as the cases they investigate. Book 4, Broken Harbor is… pretty good! I’m still feeling like the second book, The Likeness, is the best of the lot - even if it took a lot from The Secret History. But this one, about a happy family found dead or dying in a near-deserted housing complex, is solid. 1) Vanilla Number (46/52) 2) Something written by a woman (Hobb, Rowling, Ferrante, Leckie, French, Tuchman) 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author (Rushdie) 4) 5) Something History Related: A Distant Mirror 6) 7) 8) A work of Science Fiction - Ancillary Justice 9) 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - Ship of Destiny, Half-Blood Prince, A Distant Mirror, The Fireman, Midnight's Children, Carrion Comfort 11) 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 13) Read Something YA : Harry Potter 14) Wildcard! 15) Something recently published: The Fireman 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now: A Distant Mirror 17) The First book in a series: Ancillary Justice 18) 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Generation 20) 21) 22) It’s a Mystery. - Broken Harbor Chamberk fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 21:30
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I'm a bit behind my challenge still, but I'm reading more regularly than I have done in a long time thanks to trying to keep up with this challenge. I'm also reading a much greater variety of things than I have in a long time and really enjoying it. 9. Instructions for Living Someone Else's Life by Mil Millington This was my goon wildcard book, and I really must thank whoever gave me this wildcard back in January because it was the best and most enjoyable book I've read in a long time. I was sad when I finished it and will likely read it again at some point. It was really quite profound but so funny that I loved how skilfully it presented some of the subjects and managed to balance humour with serious problems many people face in life. The basic premise is that the main character goes to sleep one night in 1988 as a 25 year old full of big dreams and plans for his life. He wakes up the next morning having time travelled to 2006 only to discover that he's an alcoholic deadbeat working the same terrible job and in a failing marriage to a stranger he's never met. It is the kind of plot that could easily be a horror story, horribly depressing, or unbearably smug and sentimental, but somehow it manages to be incredibly funny, witty, and deeply moving all at once. There were lots of times I couldn't stop laughing while reading this, even though in many ways the subject matter was quite serious. 10. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser I was very ill and spent awhile curled up on the couch watching documentaries awhile back. I watched Food Inc and The Corporation, which made me curious to start reading some literature on the topics presented in the documentaries. I had previously ignored this book as I thought it was going to be another "Fast food is bad for you and makes you fat" book of mostly common sense, but this had very little to do with that. It was a pretty shocking and disturbing read to learn how corporations have changed the landscape of agriculture, the food industry, health and safety, animal welfare, and low income jobs. It made me quite glad that I don't live in the US but also start to turn a questioning eye to the globalisation of issues presented here and pay a lot more attention to the things like the much contested TTIP and its possible influence on things like food safety, animal welfare, protection of farmers and low income workers, etc. I suppose it's not often that a book influences my daily life, but this one has stuck with me and is causing a ripple effect. 11. The Business by Martina Cole This is the worst book I have ever read, and that isn't hyperbole. I was looking for a mystery book to read for the challenge, but this isn't a mystery...I suppose it's sort of a crime novel (though novels generally have a plot) about gangs around London, but mostly it's just a voyeuristic miseryporn so upper-middle class people can rubberneck and tut tut the lower classes. I read it after someone recommended the author to me, though I already had a hint of how bad it might be when I saw her author bio says "She is the only author who tells it like it really is." And oh does she tell. Then tell you again and again and again for 500 pages. She heard the idea of "show don't tell", but she decided that instead of doing that, or even having a plot, that she would just take a few characters and tell you her trite armchair psychologist analysis of them ad nauseam, often repeating entire paragraphs almost word for word a few pages after you read them. All the two dimensional characters are completely unlikable, awful people with awful lives, so it isn't even interesting to read for the 200th time how Imelda has no emotions and uses people without thought in the "abortion of her life" (a phrase used endlessly). It is the most repetitive book I have ever read. The author also despises social workers and government in general. Really, really hates them. Social workers are regularly blamed for blithely allowing the physical, sexual, and mental abuse of the children in this book. She repeatedly goes on rants about how stupid, useless, and even harmful they are, along with any other government care workers, doctors, etc. She really seems to feel the criminal gangs would do a lot better job of policing themselves if pesky government workers quit getting in the way and enabling their harmful behaviour. This and other parts of the book make it read like some kind of horribly written neo-conservative libertarian-esque propaganda. It starts with one of the main characters sleeping with guys before marriage (because, the author emphasises over and over again, everyone knows she is a WHORE) and getting pregnant. She falsely accuses her boyfriend of raping her, leading to various murders because a central theme of this book is "bitches be crazy". Women are just all loving nuts and ruin everything. Men are stupid, but they are really only stupid because crazy bitches drive them to be stupid. Then the author plays up the Welfare Queen idea because the idiot government makes it profitable for sluts to have children. Social workers then allow the evil character to abuse and neglect her children because social workers are terrible and government is stupid. In the end, her horribly abused daughter turns to religion and finds peace in going to mass 3 times a day and praying all the time because Christianity wins I guess. 12. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy I had heard this book was violent and disturbing, but I really didn't anticipate just how awful it would become. It was a really amazing read but a distressing one. I feel like I'd need to read it again as I know there was a lot I missed during a first reading, especially given the writing style, but I don't really want to spend any more time with the judge right now. The writing style was amazing and suited the story so well. I am uncomfortable with the conclusions the book seems to offer and am happy to put this one away for awhile. 13. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson A very strange book, but I'm glad I read it. Sometimes incredibly funny, sometimes bizarre, sometimes horrifying, but often depressing and bleak. There were passages that felt like a punch to the gut, and I wanted to simultaneously forget and sear them into my memory.
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Jun 6, 2016 11:54
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McCarthy is such a ray of sunshine; I made the mistake of reading The Road right around the time my first son was born and I guess that's probably the best book I'm never going to reread as long as I live. Edit: me spel gud Groke fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 18:17
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Chamberk posted:45. The Fireman - Joe Hill What's up book buddy, these are two of the books I am currently reading. Wait, are you me, from an alternate timeline one month in the future?!
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Jun 6, 2016 19:33
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Bit of a delayed post for May. I read a ton this month with a solid 10 books finished, spanning all the way from some of the best books of the year to complete garbage. That brings me up to 32 books on the year, well ahead of my goal to read 60 which is nice. Total of 3283 pages read for an average of 105 pages/day and 82.6 pages/day YTD. 1) Vanilla Number: 2) Something written by a woman - The Handmaids Tale 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author - Thousand Splendid Suns 4) Something written in the 1800s - Wuthering Heights 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) - A Travelers history of Southeast Asia 6) A book about or narrated by an animal 7) A collection of essays. - Alien Hand Syndrome 8) A work of Science Fiction - Player of Games 9) Something written by a musician 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - Gone with the Wind 11) Read something about or set in NYC 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 13) Read Something YA - Guards, Guards, Guards! 14) Wildcard! 15) Something recently published (up to a year. The year will be the day you start this challenge) - Stress Test 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. - The Odyssey 17) The First book in a series - Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 18) A biography or autobiography 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Generation 20) Read a banned book 21) A Short Story collection 22) It’s a Mystery. The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen - 3/5 - This book frustrated me because it was good, but it was so close to being great. The story follows a South Vietnamese general who is in reality a North Vietnamese spy through his time as an expat to America after the war. It's a fascinating take on cultures, looking primarily at how people assimilate into cultures and struggle to retain a sense of their native culture despite that. The book is also written beautifully, if a bit vulgar, with many turns of phrases that are worthy of being independent quotes. The downside is the book never comes together. It makes 100 interesting points and thoughts, but I felt like they all stand alone and never came together to leave me with an overarching lesson or thought. It's possible that was intentional, but it wasn't satisfying. The ending also was lacking in my mind, though it was one of those endings where you have to question if maybe you aren't smart enough or if it was just poorly done. I think the latter, but who knows. Overall a decent book that is a good read, but I wouldn't jump it to the top of your list. Into Thin Air, by John Krakeur - 4/5 - The story of Jon Krakeurs ill fated expedition up to the top of Mt. Everest, where a huge portion of his team died. A very quick but interesting read, where Krakeur manages to make every step of the way, every bit of backstory, and every failure draw you in. The actual story I had heard before, having seen the Everest film covering it last year, but despite that I was never bored. Not a book that I felt like I learned much from that I didn't already know, but it was fun and I was left with a stunning awe of nature's power and a crippling fear of hypoxia. Some adventure books leave you wanting to go undertake it, but after reading this you couldn't get me within 1000 miles of Everest. The descriptions of the climb are that terrifying. Cambodias Curse, by Joel Brinkley - 3/5 - Much has been written about Cambodia during the days of the Khmer Rogue, but very little has been written about it since. This book does just that, starting roughly when the Khmer Rogue leave the country and continuing until (almost) modern day. While doing that, the book discusses the insane amount of corruption and poor leadership that has hindered the countries development in comparison to many of the neighboring countries. It's extremely sad and accurate as compared to what I've seen and does a good job informing about the major players and events, but the novel also tends a lot towards generalizations that I think are unfounded and dangerous. For example, a lot is made of the fact that Cambodians are naturally "lazy and unmotivated", which, while politically Cambodians are extremely apathetic, it borders on outright racism at times that I'm not comfortable with. Overall a good history book that's a pretty interesting read, though it's important to take a few points with a grain of salt. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates - 4/5 - A beautiful quick read where Coates tries to take his life lessons about race and people and impart them on the reader. Reading the novel as a white person, the novel did a great job of making me realize the security that I take for granted that people of other races and backgrounds don't necessarily have, as well as the consequences of that lack of security to others. Coates has a beautiful line that hit me where he explains the missed opportunities in his life that he turned down out fear, because he was raised in fear, and I think that's so important for anyone born into privilege to realize. I know there's a lot more in this book to unpack and I've spent quite a bit of time since reading it thinking about the novel. I would recommend this book to everyone, regardless of interests. It's quick and easy to read, and I think it's so important to attempt to look at the world through another persons perspective. The Clean Tech Revolution, by Ron Perick and Clint Wilder - 2/5 - The authors highlight 8 areas for major improvements and innovations in the clean tech world. The book is an interesting primer on the industry, but unfortunately falls somewhat flat for a few reasons. The first and most notable is that the book was written 9 years ago, so much of it is now out of date. This is more my fault than theirs, but still significantly hurts the book. The second is that the book feels like it was written as a guide for an investor - there is very little about the underlying 'how' the tech works and is being improved, and far more about the various companies that are at play to do it. If you're interested in learning about clean tech its not an awful read, there's better books out there. The Vital Question, by Nick Lane - 5/5 - The author looks at the beginnings of life and the development of the eukaryotic cell from first principles. Starting from the most basic needs of life, Lane explains a plausible path for cellular life to have developed and grown throughout millions of years. While most everything he writes is theoretical at this point, it still paints a fascinating tale that logically is sound and teaches a lot about cellular biology. It becomes even more impressive as Lane develops the cell and shows a logical argument that from these first principles you can predict universal traits such as aging and sexual reproduction in animals. The best part is how brutally honest he is - every step along the way he is completely open to the fact that what he claims is very possibly wrong, and outlines experiments that he intends to run to either prove his ideas right or wrong. It feels like a pop science book as it should be done, and as a whole the novel feels like an important prescient text. The one downside of the book is that it does get pretty technical at times, though I think technical language is necessary and Lane for the most part does a good job of explaining. If you have any interest in science or more specifically biology, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Goat Mountain, by David Vann - 4/5 - Picked up this book on the suggestions of the literature thread, and wasn't disappointed. The novel is short with a simple premise; a boy, his father, his grandfather, and a family friend are hunting when the boy without thinking shoots a poacher. The book uses that basis to explore the relationships of people and the dividing line between humans and animals, looking at where instinct is valid and where it should be thrown to the wind. Beyond that though, the book is terrifying. I read it over 24 hours and at multiple points was shivering from how good of a job Vann does at describing the situation and settings. The book isn't a traditional horror tale, but purely on the basis of Vann's prose it becomes one. It feels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road in some ways, but better. A very good book. The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert - 3/5 - An overview of the development of biodiversity over eons, highlighting the major extinction events, and then going into detail about how we are already going into the next major one. Personally, I thought the book was fairly basic, but I love that the fact that it exists. It's a quick easy read for the layman that has already gotten enough publicity to make it an influential voice in conservation efforts. Probably my favorite part is Kolbert's efforts to highlight how science is actually done. It's so common to hear that studies say something, but Kolbert makes the studies into stories and shows the people involved and describes the studies and motivations. Best of all, she does it without being hokey while still keeping the focus on the science. If I had to compare this to anything, it would be a modern Silent Spring. If you don't know much about conservation (or don't think you care about it), this is a good read to get you thinking. If you're already versed in it, this will be a lot of repeating. Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari - 5/5 - Sapiens looks to cover the development of the human species from the beginning of the human genus until modern day, and does a stunningly good job at doing it. Half history book and half psuedo philosophy, Harari looks at the trends that allowed humans to conquer their natural environment and become distinct among species, but also looks internally at the qualities of humans that have shaped our society. The highlight to the book for me (though all of it was fairly strong) was a section in the middle where Harari describes how three factors - Empires, Commerce, and Religion - have not only shaped human society, but also stem from our purely human nature. One of the most interesting points to me was his argument that human society grows by trying to reconcile two contradictory ideals, and that currently society is trying to reconcile the differences that are born by trying to have both Equality and Freedom at the same time. Overall, a very strong book that made me think about humans as both an individual species as well as a society. The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell - 2/5 - Gladwell takes a lot of studies and attempts to shoehorn them into his "one size fits all" theory for epidemics. His tipping point theory itself is extremely reasonable and unobjectionable, but he tries to fill it out by making it extremely specific, which is where it becomes a bit silly. Moreover, the studies feel extremely cherry picked so that they will tie into this - at no point did he give an example that made me realize that I had seen similar behavior hundreds of times prior. Not necessarily a bad read, but I remained skeptical pretty much the entire through that he had caught on to anything that was important.
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Jun 9, 2016 16:57
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So I kinda just didn't post in this thread since February, but I have been reading. That means a big post which you should probably just scroll past, thanks. March - fiction goal met 19. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad If all you know about Heart of Darkness is the cultural baggage piled around it, like Apocalypse Now, Spec Ops: The Line, and Tropic Thunder, you owe it to yourself to get in this book. It’s a fairly short read, and you’ll be immersed in a slow transition from one way of seeing the world to a vastly different one. It’s enriching, suspenseful and chilling. I will recommend Chinua Achebe’s essay about racism in this book to get you thinking about it, as well. 20. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle What an odd book. This was basically foisted upon me by my SO when I mentioned my fiction goal, and I couldn’t very well say no. It’s basically the story of children who meet kindly old aliens disguised as women, who learn to teleport with their mind, and who use love to defeat crushing modernity. The whole thing is weird and intriguing; I wonder what my childhood would have been like if I had read this series instead of Narnia? 21. Bad Feminist, by Roxanne Gay Roxanne Gay is a great writer, very personable and funny. This extensive collection of essays is organized loosely by subject, with the most general in the front of the book. The story of her Scrabble tournament experience is particularly fun to imagine. I found my interest petering off towards the end, especially in the reviews of TV shows I hadn’t seen, but the front was good enough to still recommend this. 22. The Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison This is a very tightly-themed collection of essays, written in a variety of styles from scientific to lyrical. The title comes from a job Jamison had roleplaying as a sufferer of illness for medical trainees, and the other essays describe a plethora of other experiences. It’s a fascinating journey through the processes of learning to feel what another person feels, to understand not just their pains and sufferings but their unique position in life. Jamison makes a good case that empathy in its various manifestations is the way forward. 23. Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace This reads kind of like a memoir of Pixar’s genesis and earlier years, and kind of like a management skills book. It, surprisingly, is better at the second than the first. Catmull makes sure to insert lessons that he learned from most of the stories he tells, and he has a lot of good ones. Strong recommend. 24. The Second Amendment: A Biography, by Michael Waldman Waldman has written a very gun-control-centric (and pro gun control) history of the 2nd amendment, from its genesis through key points in gun history up to the modern NRA. This is certainly a good first book to read on the subject, even if it’s far outside the Overton window at the moment. 25. Reel Bad Arabs, by Jack Sheehan This book has two main sections: the first is a lengthy introductory essay where Sheehan explores the sordid history of Hollywood’s portrayal of Arabs and its effect in society, and the second is a alphabetical listing of each feature film with Arab characters in a 100-year period, each with a description of how that film portrays Arabs well or badly. As you might guess, the first is much more interesting than most of the second, though in that second part the movies you would already want to look up have a good amount of interesting details to them. Good to read a bit of, good as a resource, though it won’t find room on myself because of the cruft. 26. After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, by Alan Blinder This is a fairly detailed, almost blow-by-blow, account of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, especially the efforts of regulators to mitigate the damage. Blinder uses his economist’s eye to focus very neatly on these decisions and their ramifications, and then to give suggestions on how to avoid ever having these kinds of problems again. Unfortunately we are still far away from a “safe” financial system, so only read those suggestions if you’re willing to get a little mad. 27. @ Play: Exploring Roguelike Games, by John Harris Harris really could have used an editor, but it may have defeated the purpose. He’s packaged up selections from years of blog posts, some with relevant updates from 2016, as an ebook. There’s a good 200 page book hiding in this 1000 page pdf as many of those are skippable, but it would be a task to whittle it down. I read this when I wanted to take a “break” from my Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge so it passed the time well, but could’ve passed it better. April - fiction goal met 28. Democracy, by Abraham Kawa, Annie Di Donna, Alecos Papadatos This was a pretty enjoyable graphic novel; the art was fine, consistent and grounded, and the writing was nice as well though sometimes denser than I’d like in this medium. The story basically is the coming of age of a young man during a time of political turmoil, and though some of the problems are solved with violence, political machinations take up most the plot points. Overall a fine read especially since I didn’t have the will to read a different fiction this month. 29. The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide for Thinking and Talking Democratic, by George Lakoff Take this book to heart if you want to sound like a twerp when you talk politics. Many of Lakoff’s advice and observations are good: progressives do seem to have problems establishing their own framing for an issue, and a lot of that probably does come from the unconscious acceptance of conservative terminology, narrative, solution-space, etc. But the way he packages this “strategy guide” seems like it was designed by someone with not a lot of people skills. Which is a shame, because many of these alternate ideas for framing are well thought out and it’s probably worth grabbing just for that. Make sure to run everything through your personal filter first though. 30. Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, by Blake Snyder If you are not familiar with Save the Cat!, Snyder’s idea is that successful Hollywood movies tend to follow one of just a few basic storylines, and that neophyte scriptwriters can get their bearings by keeping this in mind. In this book, he goes scene by scene through a good many hit movies, showing how each of them fall into their more generic story structure once you pick apart and label their elements. It’s effective, I’ll admit: Snyder makes sure to use a variety of genres for each story archetype, seeming to enjoy applying the idea to less obvious works. It is definitely a book that should be thought of more as a guided study, though; read actively it would be more rewarding, so if there’s a lot of films he covers that you aren’t familiar with, use that as an excuse to get watching. 31. Even This I Get to Experience, by Norman Lear Lear’s memoir is simply a great read. He gives roughly equal amounts of attention to each stage of his life, treats topics with humor or somberness as the situation dictates, and shows a kind of humility that surprised me for someone with so much success. A must-read if you’re a fan of any of his mega-hit TV shows, and probably quite enjoyable even if you aren’t. 32. Walking With the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy I enjoy reading Arundhati Roy’s political writings because of the vast distance, both physically and in knowledge, between me and India. That distance, combined with the intimacy of her writing, help keep me from becoming too America-centric or generalizing the rest of the world too much. In this book, she describes travels with the paramilitary groups from the marginalized people of India’s eastern forested regions, and discusses the political dynamics of power and the industrial, corporate, cosmopolitan, rulers of India. Very interesting. 33. Boomerang, by Michael Lewis Lewis presents here a series of portraits of players in the global economy through interviews with them. He examines the consequences of large amounts of financing and leverage available to sometimes unqualified large borrowers until 2008. It’s a fairly Euro-centric book, but at least I haven’t seen much of the ideas he covers before. The Greek monks who used real estate to build a financial empire were particularly intriguing. May - fiction goal met 34. The Political Mind, by George Lakoff I read this because I only liked the theoretical half of the previous Lakoff book I read, and this one seemed to promise an expanded view of that. Lakoff proposes that we are not beings of pure reason when it comes to political thinking, and instead owe as much or more of our opinion to biases, emotions, and appeals to as much. He further divides ways of thinking into conservative modes and progressive modes, and argues that convincing others comes from which of those modes is activated more (rather than strength of arguments in vacuum). It’s this second argument that I find more novel and intriguing; I’ll keep it in mind as I read further into these areas. 35. Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie This was quite the fascinating book; I came into it knowing the two premises (destroyed part of a ship wants REVENGE, also the main character doesn’t natively speak a gendered language so everyone is described as “she”) but not much else. I was pleasantly surprised by the world-building, especially how incredibly hosed up it is, and the political tension. A really gripping read, and the sequel’s on my list for next month. I should start a drat glossary, though, my mind can’t keep up with sci-fi words as well as it could back in the day. 36. Nova, by Samuel Delany This is a strange novel; on the back cover, it’s the story of a crew that comes together from various parts of the galaxy to trek into a nascent nova to collect rare super elements. But inside, it’s a blend of space opera and surrealist art. The structure is jumbled, many characters seem to be explicitly symbolic and referential, and the science is like a projection of standard hard sci-fi into chaos. It’s fascinating, exciting, and well worth the time. 37. State of the Art 38. Inversions 39. Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks I’ll do all these at once because Ancillary Justice put me on a scifi kick that I decided had to at least continue with the next Banks Culture series book I read, and I stormed through the three of these in just a few days because unfortunately none of them quite scratched the itch I had though Look to Windward came much closer than the other two. If you’re unfamiliar with the Culture Series, it’s a fascinating scifi series where this human spacefaring civilization has completely mastered biology and economics and basically just fucks around, guided by their hyper-intelligent spaceships and stations. Maybe a bit weird of a pitch, but the first few books in the series (which could each stand alone) are really tense and intriguing. Anyway, State of the Art is a short story collection, some of which are more explicitly about the Culture than others, some of which aren’t scifi at all. Plenty of predictable story arcs, unfortunately, though some experimental writing stands out. The title story involves Culture agents visiting 20th century Earth and feels far too much like fan service. I tried to get over this disappointment with Inversions but perhaps this was a wrong strategy. In this book, Banks attempted to write a Culture story that wasn’t; that is, some representatives from them feature in the book but the narrator, a low-tech doctor, cannot distinguish their doings from magic, Clarke style. I should reread this at some point, because there were some good parts, especially in characterization, but I wanted spaceships. Sue me. Look to Windward was a fine book, though it had a plot structure that I found relatively unsatisfying. It felt like more a philosophical debate than Banks’s previous works, and was interesting on that level. It’s got a hell of a lot more spaceships than the others I just read, too. If you read one of these three books, this would be my choice. 40. Galaga, by Michael Kimball This is part of a series of books on individual video games, some of them more important than others in the medium’s history. This one is presented as 255 fragments, some of which trace the author’s personal experience playing Galaga as an arcade junkie, some of which share facts and factoids about the game and its cultural influence. Can’t recommend reading this because so many of these fragments are “Hey remember that thing I wrote three pages ago? It was a lie!” Really poor choice. 41. Spelunky, by Derek Yu This is from that same series and is infinitely better. Yu is the maker of Spelunky, and this book is the story of the game’s making straight from the horse’s mouth. Lots of good details, especially in the nitty gritty of design choices. 42. Bitcoin for the Befuddled, by Conrad Barski and Chris Wilmer While I don’t expect to be buying Bitcoins and getting involved in that scene, the idea has intrigued me. This book was a great explainer of the ideas behind and technicalities of Bitcoin (though it helps if you’re already at least partially familiar with cryptography), and it helped me transition from someone with an uninformed reluctance to participate in the currency to someone with an informed reluctance. 43. A Woman in Charge, by Carl Bernstein This is a bio of Hillary Clinton, covering her life up until basically 2000. I had kinda expected coverage of her time in the Senate since this was published in 2007 but I suppose Bernstein had his focus. I appreciated it a lot; the book seems to be neither a hack job nor a puff piece but a fairly evenhanded accompaniment to her life. At times Bernstein seems consumed with covering the state of popular rumor and opinion as it changes, but that is to be expected I suppose. 1) Vanilla Number - 43/80 2) Something written by a woman - The Language Police 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author - My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me 4) Something written in the 1800s - Dracula 7) A collection of essays. - Men Explain Things to Me 8) A work of Science Fiction - Nova 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - The Sea and Civilization 13) Read Something YA - A Wrinkle in Time 15) Something recently published - The Chimp and the River 17) The First book in a series - Ancillary Justice 18) A biography or autobiography - Even This I Get to Experience 21) A Short Story collection - Dubliners 5/12 months with fiction in them Also, if someone has a good WILDCARD that they've been wanting to post hit me with it!
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Jun 10, 2016 04:26
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thatdarnedbob posted:Also, if someone has a good WILDCARD that they've been wanting to post hit me with it! Loath Letters by Christy Leigh Stewart.
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Jun 10, 2016 05:52
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thespaceinvader posted:1: Chimera by Mira Grant A reread; I was out of ideas and it was on my shelf. Elantris is not Sanderson's best, it's an early novel, and it shows. It's still good, but it's not his best. Especially all the made up titles in the Derethi church, ugh. Enjoyable nonetheless.
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Jun 10, 2016 22:54
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thespaceinvader posted:A reread; I was out of ideas and it was on my shelf. Elantris is not Sanderson's best, it's an early novel, and it shows. It's still good, but it's not his best. Especially all the made up titles in the Derethi church, ugh. Since you're out of ideas and retreading stuff, do you want a wildcard my dude?
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Jun 11, 2016 13:15
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thespaceinvader posted:1: Chimera by Mira Grant david crosby posted:Since you're out of ideas and retreading stuff, do you want a wildcard my dude?
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Jun 15, 2016 17:56
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thespaceinvader posted:Sadly, I missed the speaking event and signing for this, but a friend went down and picked me up a signed copy anyway. A very nice little book, full of words of wisdom and advice from someone who's made a huge success of himself over the course of his life - and it was interesting, funny and enjoyable to read. Well recommended. Try 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's way diff from what it looks like you usually read, but there's some clear fantasy/fantastic stuff in there so u shouldn't be completely lost at sea.
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Jun 15, 2016 21:21
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since you're also reading a bunch of sci-fi I'll just trow Blindness by José Saramago into the suggestion pile as well. he mixes literary fiction with post-apocalyptic themes and makes it not bad, and contrary to The Road, the prose/dialogues are actually well written
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Jun 16, 2016 17:04
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What's the worst that could happen!
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Jun 16, 2016 18:30
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Hi thread. I have been away for a while since my last post (35 books and booklord challenge), had a lot of personal stuff go down this year and I've only just started getting back into reading. In the interim I have read, but it's been mainly rereads of old familiar stuff to make me feel better, mostly without actually finishing anything. So, in terms of actual finished books, here we go. Some of mine can fit in multiple categories, but I'm going to aim to have something different in each, even if I go over my 35 books. ) Vanilla Number - 13 of 35 done! 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author 4) Something written in the 1800s 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) 6) A book about or narrated by an animal 7) A collection of essays. 8) A work of Science Fiction 9) Something written by a musician 11) Read something about or set in NYC 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 14) Wildcard! 15) Something recently published (up to a year. The year will be the day you start this challenge) 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. 17) The First book in a series 18) A biography or autobiography 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Genneration 20) Read a banned book 21) A Short Story collection Also read, but not appearing on this list: 1. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer 2. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 3. Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult 4. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'engle 5. Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie In terms of reviews, I didn't really like the Casual Vacancy and I don't know why. I really liked Rowlings' mystery books as Galbraith, but the characters in this one had no redeeming features and felt like caricatures. However, Into the Wild I really liked, and gave me a whole different perspective on what had happened. Currently reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (for the book I've been meaning to read for a while) Dietland by Sarai Walker (this will actually work for the NYC category)
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Jun 18, 2016 03:21
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thespaceinvader posted:1: Chimera by Mira Grant Who Killed Sherlock Holmes was decent, albeit I finished it before the flight even took off on the way; it was not long. The twists in it are fun and the worldbuilding is getting interesting - though I wish some of the questions would get answered in a bit more detail, particularly about whether there are any cities other than London which have this sort of magic. The Hydrogen Sonata was great, as Culture books are wont to be. I had a really great time with it, but it's always sad reading a deceased author's last work. I get on so well with Culture books where the Minds are the main characters, and I gleefully anticipated the sudden but inevitable reveal of the Mistake not...'s full name. It did not disappoint. Great book. River of Gods i picked up on an offhanded mention in the sff thread, and it was really, really good. Strong characters, interesting plotlines, and well-told action for the most part, albeit I was a little disappointed in the conclusion which felt kind of a bit of a cop-out from what the action felt like it was building towards. One Hundred Years of Solitude... I just didn't get this. It was boring and had no plot and fairly interchangeable characters whose lives I just didn't care about. I felt much the same about it as I did about White Teeth a couple of years back - it has huge critical praise and is made out to be this amazing work of literature but after 6 hours reading time I just... didn't have a clue what I was supposed to have gleaned from it other than that existence is pointless and everything sucks. Which I guess is appropriate given what happened the day I finished it. I'm currently on Blindness, which aside from the irritating lack of punctuation around the speech is pretty good so far.
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Jun 25, 2016 14:07
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As mom always said, "You loving late-bloomer!" So, here I am! After a 1.5 year hiatus from SA book-challenges and reading all together: 14 books before EOY & Book Lord Challenge:
2. The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente - Valente uses brilliantly calculating language without sacrificing her creativity for it. The mixed elements of sci-fi and Japanese folklore gave me a hankering to re-watch some Miazaki while syncing it up to the Back to the Future soundtrack. I THINK IT'S A GOOD IDEA OKAY. Book Lord Challenge: The Melancholy of Mechagirl -
8. A work of Science Fiction 16. One I've wanted to read for awhile
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Jun 27, 2016 23:18
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thespaceinvader posted:
Well, I tried. 26. Dispatches by Michael Herr. A very good book about the Vietnam war by a guy who was a Rolling Stone reporter over there, in Vietnam, during the war. 27. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. A great comic novel by the great American. This dude is super bitter about how lovely the middle ages were, and how bad a class system is, which is an appropriate reaction, IMO. There isn't much of a through story, which is the novel's biggest weakness, but this book is still heck of good. 28. Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley. Future dystopia about how bad the world will be after nuclear war. It's a little hysterical, tone-wise, which prolly accounts for why it has been forgotten. 29. Selected Poems by W. H. Auden. Love this dude! 30. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. A very cool series. it's a set of 3 short detective novels, but, get this, each one breaks down at the end and becomes 'metaphysical'. I thought these were very good, they have the structure of a detective novel, which keeps u turnin pages, but there is a little something extra in there for all the bros who like Beckett 31. Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov. The best in the original trilogy, but basically just a fun idea. 32. Stories by John Cheever. These stories are very good, with the caveat that they're thematically all extremely similar. If u can handle 700 pages of unhappy spouses, then this is absolutely recommended. 33. Missing Person by Patrick Modiano. An extraordinary novel. It follows an amnesiac man who works for a detective agency. When the agency closes down, he decides that he'll use his detective skills to find out about his past. A very powerful book that gives me an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia, please read this. 34. New & Collected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz. A Polish poet who wrote about WW2, how being old is bad but also good, how nice it is to enjoy things like sunlight and birds, and that Polish intellectuals are cowards. He translated many of these poems himself, so ppl will probably think that they're 'definitive', but, as you know, nothing in translation is ever definitive. I'm interested to see if his star ascends posthumously or if he's forgotten.
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Jun 28, 2016 17:07
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david crosby posted:33. Missing Person by Patrick Modiano. An extraordinary novel. It follows an amnesiac man who works for a detective agency. When the agency closes down, he decides that he'll use his detective skills to find out about his past. A very powerful book that gives me an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia, please read this. This sounds really interesting. I'd read Paris Nocturne by Modiano though and wasn't particularly blown away.
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Jun 28, 2016 21:11
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Ben Nevis posted:This sounds really interesting. I'd read Paris Nocturne by Modiano though and wasn't particularly blown away. This was my second time to read it, and I wasn't blown away the first time. He has such a weird dreamy style that I think you have to let his works brew & stew in your brain for a bit.
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Jun 29, 2016 00:33
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thespaceinvader posted:One Hundred Years of Solitude... I just didn't get this. It was boring and had no plot and fairly interchangeable characters whose lives I just didn't care about. I felt much the same about it as I did about White Teeth a couple of years back - it has huge critical praise and is made out to be this amazing work of literature but after 6 hours reading time I just... didn't have a clue what I was supposed to have gleaned from it other than that existence is pointless and everything sucks. Which I guess is appropriate given what happened the day I finished it. Plot is unimportant
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Jun 29, 2016 01:48
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Mr. Squishy posted:1 The Ministery of Fear by Graham Greene. Another thriller where the most interesting thing is the setting, this time London under the blitz. I considered including him as part of the lost generation (born 5 years after Hemmingway) but gently caress it. 40 The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth as translated by Michael Hoffman. This is really good. Traditional European novel structure that I really like but Roth's ability to conjure an apropos image. I had left it for a while as it seemed a little beefy but this read really fast. 41 The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. A full novel of James is too much James for me. 16 42 The Nether World by George Gissing. Completing this mostly to free up the bookmark. I just found Gissing's prose here not great. 43 JR by William Gaddis. Finally completed my re-read of this. I had last given up just before the really great bits in the novel so this went by a lot quicker. 44 Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Love that Conrad 45 And We Sold the Rain: Contemporary Fiction from Central America edited by Rosario Santos. 1989 collection of short (really short!) stories meant to show Central America is more than the land of coups and death squads. The stories are mostly about coups and death squads. The eponymous story about IMF intervention is A+. 46 Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Colour by Richard Misek. I went for this hoping it'd have more detail on the technical aspects of colour film and, while there was a little of that, it's mostly about the artistic uses. Included a chapter in the middle, moving from notable "colouration used to denote a change in time", discussing where chronologically offset scenes do not make any special use of colour. And a lot of discussion of the Van Sant Psycho, glad to see that film found an audience in FilmCrit. 46/60 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 [/quote]
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Jun 29, 2016 11:31
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This is actually my update for May; I've continued reading books through June but have been lazy about doing writeups and catching up on 50+ posts in this thread. June post hopefully coming soon. In the meantime, can someone  wildcard me? Recommendations for airplane fiction would also be welcome as I'm not really sure where to start looking there.Booklord Challenge Update posted:Count: 49/96 books, 5 nonfiction (10%), 2 rereads (4%) 41. Eric by Terry Pratchett (reread) The only Discworld book I hadn't reread before. It's better than I remember, but definitely not one of my favourites. It seems to exist mainly to explain how Rincewind gets from the end of Sourcery to the start of Interesting Times. 42. Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone 43. Last First Snow by Max Gladstone I think Full Fathom Five is my favourite Craft novel; it's definitely a tossup between that and Three Parts Dead. Last First Snow was not particularly enjoyable, in large part because, having read Two Serpents Rise, I knew just how hosed everything was going to be and spent the entire book just waiting for the inevitable trainwreck. 44. When Someone You Love Is Polyamorous by Elizabeth Sheff This is really too small to be a book, but it's too large to be a pamphlet, and since it's nonfiction it can't be a novella. I'm not sure what it is. A booklet? Anyways, it's a short, friendly "poly 101" intro aimed at people whose family or friends have just come out as poly. This seems like it could be pretty handy when people are exhibiting well-meaning confusion, but it's unlikely to do much for outright hostility because you have to get them to read the thing in the first place. Which means it's probably not going to be useful for dealing with the in-laws.  45. Stealing Light by Gary Gibson 46. Nova War by Gary Gibson 47. Empire of Light by Gary Gibson  The first two books were basically about everyone manipulating and backstabbing everyone else constantly and the main characters spending an awful lot of time being captured and horribly tortured, both of which get old fast. Despite that, they were interesting enough to keep me reading through to the third book, in which they find ancient, open-to-interpretation alien writings which they interpret as "go here for an artifact of immense power that will solve your problems", so they go there and find an artifact of immense power that solves their problems. While not quite as egregious as in, say, Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, this is an idiotic trope that I am completely sick of and the author should be ashamed of using it. Also, I'm not sure if this was what was intended, but I interpreted the ending as Dakota getting constantly resurrected throughout the centuries so that the Magi Fleet could use her as an unwitting weapon with which to destroy the caches, systematically cutting everyone off from FTL travel which is pretty loving bleak even by the standards of this trilogy. 48. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers It's The Goblin Emperor in space!  Like TGE, not a lot actually happens in the course of this book; instead you basically spend the whole time chilling out with a bunch of hoopy froods and learning their life stories. I'm ok with this. Probably one of my favourite books of the year; definitely my favourite of the month. 49. The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross I'm probably not going to be re-reading this one. Originally I was really excited to see how Bob deals with Angleton's death and his new role as the Eater of Souls; then when I heard it would be from Mo's point of view, I was just as excited to see what her day job is like. Instead we got superhero bureacracy with a really predictable twist at the end. I do like that we finally got answers about (and some closure on) the Zahn violins, and props to Stross for not doing the cliché of having Mo, Ramona, and Mhari constantly at each other's throats. Basically, I like everything about the book except the main plot.
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Jun 29, 2016 13:54
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Prolonged Shame posted:1) The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion - Fannie Flagg June! 51) Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death, And Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years - Michael J. Collins: An account of the author's surgical residency at the Mayo clinic. The medical parts were very interesting and his musings on life/death, ethics, etc are good, but the book is hopelessly dated. There is a real boys club feel amongst the surgeons that feels very 70's/80's. Still, a good read, particularly for anyone in the medical field. 52) In the Cities of Coin and Spice (Orphans Tales 2) - Catherynne M. Valente: I loved this. It completes and ties together all the stories from the first book, as well as adding new narratives of its own. The ending is surprising and very satisfying, and it is beautifully written to boot. 53) Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard 2) - Scott Lynch: Not as good as the first but I still really liked this. I feel like he got bored with his first storyline so he decided to add a bunch of pirates out of nowhere, but it was fun. I'll read the next one. 54) Decision Points - George W. Bush: This wasn't bad; it was certainly better than his biography of his father. The autobiographical aspects were good, but a lot of the explanations for why he did what during his presidency border on whiny and petulant (lots of blaming the media for misinterpreting him and ignoring his achievements, and lots of blaming those rascally democrats for blocking his legislation etc. In fairness, the Bill Clinton book had a lot of the same thing, swapping republicans for democrats). 55) Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith: Not bad for a quick crime thriller. I could have done without the will they/won't they wedding drama, but it was a fun, quick read. 56)Venetia - Georgette Heyer: I enjoyed this a lot. The main characters were somewhat unusual for this type of book and in a very refreshing way, and there were a couple of unexpected plot twists that kept it interesting. 57) Dead Reckoning (Sookie Stackhouse 11)- Charlaine Harris: Not bad, but it is definitely time to wrap this series up. 58) All the Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld: Very atmospheric and creepy, but the payoff was a bit of a letdown. 59) The World According to Garp - John Irving: I believe this hits all the Irving touchstones (New England, prep school, Vienna, bears, etc). It was good but I didn't enjoy it as much as 'Owen Meany' or 'Cider House'. I think having seen the movie took away from it. 60) Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance - Barack Obama: An autobiographical account of his life written while he was a junior senator. Very interesting to see where he came from, and certainly the most well written of all the presidential autobiographies I have read. Also, my final presidential bio! Yay! 61) The Sound of Glass - Karen White: This starts off ok, but by the time the entirely predictable plot twists/surprises occur I loathed all of the characters too much to care. The very moment it lost me is when the character from Maine who has moved to South Carolina is about to eat watermelon with the locals and they have to instruct her on how to do so. She admits to having seen these rare and mysterious fruits in the store but has never tried them. Despite having been born and raised in contemporary America. Subchallenges! A-Z challenge:: A: The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion B: Book of a Thousand Days C: The Corinthian D: Definitely Dead E: Euphoria F: From Dead to Worse G: Gulp H: Hope I: In the Night Garden J: Julie and Julia K: Keeping the House L: The Left Hand of Darkness M: My Man Jeeves N: No Country for Old Men O: One of Us P: The Post Office Girl Q: The Quick and the Dead R: The Romanov Sisters S: Station Eleven T: Three Bags Full U: The Unknown Ajax V: Venetia W: The World According to Garp Booklord: Written by a woman: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Written by a non-white author: Emperor of All Maladies Written in the 1800's: Agnes Grey History related: Fire From heaven About or narrated by an animal: Three Bags Full[ Science fiction book: Beacon 23 Written by a musician: M Train Book over 500 pages: Keeping the House Book about/set in NYC: The Angel of Darkness Airplane Fiction: Career of Evil Young adult book: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Wildcard: The Confusions of Young Torless Published in the last year: Hope Book you've wanted to read for a while: The Left Hand of Darkness First book in a series: Outlander Biography or autobiography: Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter Written by lost or beat generation author: Tender is the Night Banned Book: The World According to Garp Short stories: Three-Ten to Yuma and other Stories Mystery book: The Girl on the Train Overall: Total: 61/100 A-Z Challenge: 23/26 Booklord Challenge: 20/22 Presidential Biographies: 6/6 Done! Hallelujah! I've been working on this challenge since 2012. It is daunting and time consuming, but I recommend attempting it to anyone interested in American history.
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Jun 29, 2016 19:47
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June 38.The Fireman by Joe Hill I wasn't particularly impressed by this book. It seems to leave out all the reasons to read King while including all the annoying things about King. I would like to say his writing stands on its own, but it's hard to separate him from King when he uses so many of King's writing habits. For example, he does the foreshadowing thing King does that is really annoying in that he straight up tells you in future chapters this thing will happen, or this person will be dead, or no longer around. Except Hill does this in every chapter. Similarly, he uses pop culture as a crutch and it's so excessive. He can't write characters like King, it's the main weakness of the book, it seems really flat and boring. 39.The Accidental by Ali Smith How to be Both was an awesome book and really unique so I bought another of Smith's books and while it had the same type of stream on conscience writing and writing variety, it wasn't much of a story. I don't have much more to say, it was short and not much really happened, which is okay, I just didn't connect with the family in this book. 40.The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante #4 By far the best of the four. I said last month I hoped the last book picked up and made more if an impact, and it did. This is the last of the series and takes place as the writer and main characters are in their thirties. It is really well written and comes back to what I liked so much about the first book. This makes it even more obvious as an auto-biography. In this "fiction" book she refers to the books themselves as she writes about Lina and their friendship. 41 End of Watch by Stephen King I really disliked this book, it was pretty bad, one of his worst and a huge disappointment in what kind of started as a good three book mystery or suspense series. The third book takes a turn in to the supernatural, which is fine, it's what King does, but it's just lame. A guy in the hospital with massive brain damage convinces people to commit suicide by using a portable game system. Stop at the first book, Mr. Mercedes. 42.His Master's Voice by Stannis Lem Law Really interesting, and really dense reading. I felt like I read a 700 page novel, not a couple hundred pages. I think this book was more about philosophy than the story behind it, but it was really enjoyable. A pattern is found in observations of neutrinos and a Manhattan type project is formed of scientist to try and decipher the message. It's told through first person of a mathematician and it brings up all sorts of interesting topics. I think the thing most interesting in this book is the theories formed about the signal since it can't be cracked (Lem is best at this stuff), everyone has a theory as to what it means, but I think he had bigger ideas in mind when he wrote this. There is some criticism of science, military, and other themes. It's like a hard science, or more complex Contact (by Sagan). I still think Solaris is better, but it's a much different book. 43.A Secret History by Donna Tartt I didn't really like The Goldfinch, but my friend had this book and he just finished it, and wanted me to read it. The thing I liked about The Goldfinch is present in this novel, without the stuff I didn't like. It's a long meandering story, and I had no idea what was going to happen page by page. Tartt has a weird writing style where things don't ever just blow up completely or reveal themselves all at once, but at the same time, you kind of keep trying to figure out what is going to happen and it always kept me interested until the last page. I loved it. 44. The Girls by Emma Cline This year's girl book. It is a fictional account of what is basically the story of the Manson murders told first person by the youngest member, a 14-year old girl. It really doesn't add anything to the Manson story in my opinion. It's really strange in that every character and event is kind of recognizable as a parallel to the Manson story, just with different names. It was an easy and quick read, but nothing ground breaking. I could use a suggestion for a collection of essays so I can finish the booklord. Vanilla Number 44/50 A collection of essays. A biography or autobiography
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Jul 1, 2016 00:52
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June update. Previously: 1. White Line Fever by Lemmy Kilmister. 2. Slåttekar i himmelen by Edvard Hoem. 3. Half the World by Joe Abercrombie. 4. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. 5. I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire. 6. Anabasis by Xenophon. 7.-9. The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, The End has Come edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. 10. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck. 11. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold. 12. Red Rising by Pierce Brown. 13. Demon Dentist by David Walliams. 14. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. 16. Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling. 17. Doktor Proktors Prompepulver by Jo Nesbø. 18. Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer. 19. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima. 20. Før jeg brenner ned by Gaute Heivoll. 21. Billionaire Boy by David Walliams. 22. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. New: 23. The Quiet Game by Greg Iles. First in a series of thrillers starring a former prosecutor-turned-author who moves back to his Mississippi hometown and begins digging into a thirty-year-old murder case heavily connected with the southern US race thing. Very fine example of its genre, will be reading more from this guy. 24. The Vegetarian by Han Kang. BOTM for June, a short but bitter treatment of (among other things) the role of women in modern Korean society. Interesting and worthwhile although far from a comfort read. 25. Maurtuemordene by Hans Olav Lahlum. #6 in this Norwegian near-history crime series (he's up to 1972 now). Again a pretty good read (I think I'd probably think the main protagonist/narrator was a bit of an unlikeable dick if I knew him in person, but this does not diminish my enjoyment of reading about him). 26. Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald. This was pretty great as well, anarchocapitalist moon colony dystopia with more backstabbing than Game of Thrones in fewer pages. I'd read the man's debut novel way back in the day (Desolation Road) and loved it a bunch but somehow never read anything else by him until now. A mistake to be rectified. Booklord challenge: 1) Vanilla Number - 26/40 2) Something written by a woman- I Don't, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, The Vegetarian 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author - Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Vegetarian 4) Something written in the 1800s - Three Men in a Boat, Plain Tales from the Hills 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) - Slåttekar i himmelen, Anabasis, The Name of the Rose 6) A book about or narrated by an animal 7) A collection of essays. 8) A work of Science Fiction - much of The Apocalypse Triptych, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Red Rising, Half a War, Acceptance, Children of Time, Luna: New Moon 9) Something written by a musician - White Line Fever 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - The Name of the Rose, The Quiet Game 11) Read something about or set in NYC 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 13) Read Something YA - Half the World, Red Rising, Half a War 14) Wildcard! - I Don't 15) Something recently published (up to a year. The year will be the day you start this challenge) - Half the World, Half a War, Children of Time, Luna: New Moon 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. - Three Men in a Boat 17) The First book in a series - Red Rising, The Quiet Game, Luna: New Moon 18) A biography or autobiography - White Line Fever, Før jeg brenner ned 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Genneration - Sweet Thursday 20) Read a banned book 21) A Short Story collection - all volumes of The Apocalypse Triptych 22) It’s a Mystery.- The Name of the Rose, The Quiet Game, Maurtuemordene Additional individual challenge: Norwegians: 4/10 Non-fiction: 3/5 Max re-reads: 2/5 BONUS INDIVIDUAL CHALLENGE: What the hell, I've followed the BOTM for both January and February; I'm going to keep doing that for the rest of the year. (Escape clause: Will reserve the option to skip books I've already read.) 6 for 6 on this.
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Jul 1, 2016 07:57
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June - 6: 37. The Art of Joy (Goliarda Sapienza) 38. Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby) 39. Fateless (Imre Kertesz) 40. Britannia: A History of Roman Britain (Sheppard Frere) 41. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami) 42. Candide, or Optimism (Voltaire) Some cool things, some not so cool things. Art of Joy was a cool thing. It's by a Sicilian actress turned author and was apparently refused publication for years because it was too racy. To modern eyes it's nothing particularly out there - the main character is a liberated woman who freely has relationships with women and men, raises a family effectively as a single mother, and becomes heavily involved in Italy's socialist movement both during and after the Fascist period. Whole chapters are composed of dialogue and a lot of them are only a couple of pages long despite the book itself being a bit of a chunk at 670 pages. I don't know exactly what I'd call it but it was an interesting read. Fever Pitch was fun but, despite being fairly famous, pretty niche. Nick Hornby is a deeply obsessive Arsenal fan and Fever Pitch is a confessional on that subject. I really enjoyed it and raced through it, but if you have no interest in football you might struggle to get much out of it. It's also super dated, being written a little before the Wenger era when Arsenal switched from the dour, joyless style Hornby laments as the reason everyone hates them, to playing fast-flowing attacking football with lots of glamorous Eurpoean players. Fateless I picked up cheap and am glad I did. Kertesz does the detached protagonist thing really well, and although Kafkaesque is overused it's appropriate here - Gyuri proceeds through the story with one eye on the absurdity of the whole thing. I felt the ending in particular, where he rails against the people who are trying to absolve themselves of responsibility for the camps (either by protesting that they suffered too, or by turning their faces away completely, or righteously crusading against the whole business long after the point where it would have helped) was particularly effective. Britannia was a long and somewhat boring slog. In its defence, it's intended as an introductory text for students and not as a piece of pop history in itself, and the long chapters where the author repeatedly lists of coin types and fort sizes are meant to be catalogues for the academic, not of interest to a general reader. It also assumes slightly more knowledge of the wider Roman Empire than I had - again, the sort of thing you'd expect from a student but which I struggled with. Great within its niche but probably not one to read for curiosity's sake. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki is the most recent Murakami and that's about all I can say about it. It sure was a Murakami book, though more similar to Norwegian Wood than his more fantastical stuff. Detached protagonist, check, problems both caused and solved by a woman, check, weirdly high number of references to Western things, check. About as middle of the road as it's possible to be. Candide I doubt I have anything clever to say about that hasn't been said in the preceding 3 centuries. I liked it and I think it holds up well, though the satire of optimism is a bit lost on a modern world where cynicism is the default mode. Booklord wise only one to report - Tsukuru Tazaki starts off with the protagonist being unceremoniously cut off by his four closest friends and the rest of the book is finding out why, so I'm placing it under mystery. Year to Date - 42: Booklord: 2-6, 8-13, 15-20, 22 01. Death and the Penguin (Andrey Kurkov) 6 02. Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto) 2 03. Sky Burial (Xinran) 3 04. The Shining (Stephen King) 16 05. Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Michael Azerrad) 18 06. A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Mohammed Hanif) 12 07. A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) 11 08. King of the World (David Remnick) 09. Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami) 10. Ubik (Philip K. Dick) 8 11. The Vegetarian (Han Kang) 15 12. Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee) 13. John Crow's Devil (Marlon James) 14. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) 4 15. The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Olga Grushin) 16. Farewell, Cowboy (Olja Savicevic) 17. A History of Sparta 950-192BC (W.G. Forrest) 5 18. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) 19. The Guest Cat (Takashi Hiraida) 20. The Book of Memory (Petina Gappah) 21. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) 19 22. Fury (Salman Rushdie) 23. Ninja (John Man) 24. Concrete Island (JG Ballard) 25. A God in Ruins (Kate Atkinson) 10 26. Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol) 27. Perdido Street Station (China Mieville) 17 28. A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) 29. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 30. The Mark and the Void (Paul Murray) 31. The Iliad (Homer) 32. Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea) 20 33. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Yukio Mishima) 34. Steampunk! (Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant) 13 35. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) 36. The Chimes (Anna Smaill) 9 37. The Art of Joy (Goliarda Sapienza) 38. Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby) 39. Fateless (Imre Kertesz) 40. Britannia: A History of Roman Britain (Sheppard Frere) 41. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami) 22 42. Candide, or Optimism (Voltaire)
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Jul 1, 2016 10:41
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Ben Nevis posted:1. My Dead Body by Charlie Huston. Halfway through the year, and I'm going to blow past the goal. I think I'd gotten out of the habit of reading quite so much in the last year or two, so I underestimated. Also, I've had a number of relatively short books. I chalk that up to going to the library more. If I see a book that's sorta borderline interesting looking, I'm far more likely to grab it if it's short than long. That way at least I don't spend too much time on it. Lots of short/quick reads this month so I got 9 in. 34. Stories by Dorothy Parker. For some reason Goodreads has this as Dorothy Parker Stories by Dorothy Parker. As much as these were all distinctly a product of their time and place, there's a timelessness to a lot of the stories here. I liked this. 35. The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North. Claire North is also Kate Griffin, for some reason. Hope is a woman who can't be remembered. Walk away and you've forgotten her before you cross the room. That makes it awfully hard to keep a job. A fantastic heist causes hope to cross paths with the people behind the hot new app Perfection, and she begins to dig into what it actually does. This was probably my favorite book this month. 36. A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson. It's a classic hardboiled tale as old as time. Boy meets Girl. Boy's wife leaves him. Boy decides to murder Girl's aunt and steal her money and leave town with Girl. Even such a simple plot is bound to have kinks, they weren't always what I expected though and there were some distinct surprises along the way. Short and quick and mean and sordid. Would recommend, if that's what you're in the mood for. 37. Something More than Night by Ian Tregillis. Someone has killed the Angel Gabriel and stolen his trumpet. A minor angel Bayliss and a recently dead mortal set out to find who did it. Billed as Chandler meets Aquinas there's a lot to like here. It amused me that angels often stuck to their biblical descriptions, with multiple wings, animal faces, wheels set with eyes, and so on. Needless to say it didn't quite hit the level of Chandler. At parts it felt like Tregillis was trying to hard, the pseudo-noir patter and technobabble were dialed up to 11, and really needed to be more at like 8 and 7 respectively. Still enjoyed the book and will likely read something else by him. 38. Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch. Peter Grant is a cadet policeman about to be assigned to a life of paperwork when he sees a ghost while guarding a crime scene. Suddenly he finds himself shuffled into the previously one man supernatural branch of the Metropolitan Police. Can find who or what is behind the supernatural crime wave? Can he save the city or at least the girl? This is the first in a series, and I'll keep reading them. 39. The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan. A car bomb goes off in a Delhi market place. It kills 13 and injures more, a modest success for the Kashmiri terrorists. The book opens with the bomb and then looks at how it changed the lives of the parents of two boys killed, their friend who was only injured, the bombers, and others associated with the blast. I found it really interesting, and enjoyed delving into some of the relationships as well as seeing some discussion of how Muslim's are treated in India. 40. The Deep Sea Divers Syndrome by Serge Brussolo. Recently translated from an older French novel. Some people have the rare ability to dive into their dreams and bring forth works of art created of ectoplasm. These best of organic looking, not quite living things are large and have the powers to stop wars and improve the lives of those who bathe in their emanations. Most are little more than tchotchkes that provide some peace of mind to their owner. David is medium working on the lower end of that spectrum. His production has dropped off, with fewer of his works even making it to the market. And each dive is longer as he spends time with Nadia and his heist team deep within his dreams. This novel remind me strongly of Phillip K Dick. There's a lot here that brings it to mind. I'd recommend this especially for people looking to scratch that PKD itch. 41. Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka. A series of mostly connected short stories, mostly about the narrator. I don't know what to think of this one. It lingers, and there are some good and interesting things strung through, but a lot of it just didn't hit for me. 42. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. Two outcast children, one a witch and one a supergenius, grow up, face life, and try and prevent the destruction of the world. There is a lot in here that's likable and some genuinely charming and humorous moments. There's also some problems that grate, including a self conscious nerdiness that detracts from the whole. The writing in a lot of this got in the way of what was going on and I feel like this could have been better with a more adept author. 1) Vanilla Number 42/45 2) Something written by a woman - 5, 7, 18, 17, 16, 21, 23, 26, 31, 32, 34, 35, 41, 42 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author - 5, 16, 19, 22, 24, 31, 33, 39 4) Something written in the 1800s - 14 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice)- 21, 31 6) A book about or narrated by an animal - 7, 12 7) A collection of essays. 8) A work of Science Fiction - 6, 16, 19 9) Something written by a musician 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - 2, 16 11) Read something about or set in NYC - 1, 33, 34 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 13) Read Something YA - 30 14) Wildcard! 15) Something recently published - 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23,24,25, 29, 35, 39 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now - 2, 6, 30 17) The First book in a series - 13, 17, 18, 21, 25, 38 18) A biography or autobiography - 28 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Generation 20) Read a banned book 21) A Short Story collection - 7, 11, 34, 41 22) It’s a Mystery - 15, 17, 24
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Jul 1, 2016 16:48
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quote:1 - Daft Wee Stories, by Limmy (Brian Limond) I read 4 books in June. 27 - This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, by Whitney Phillips. An academic study of trolling and the trolls who troll, this makes a good companion piece to Gabriella Coleman's 'Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy', an ethnograhpic history of Anonymous. Like Coleman (whom she references often), Phillips embeds with and reaches out to a number of members of trolling groups, mainly from Facebook and 4chan. It's a little dry, and there are some things missing that I thought would be covered, but for the most part it's an informative and interesting look at an often exhaustingly bleak subject. 28 - The Vegetarian, by Han Kang. My first time actually reading the BotM here! A short and vividly upsetting novel about a woman whose sudden decision to give up eating meat precipitates a grim sequence of personal struggle, harm and atrophy. It's clearly an allegory about the role of women in Korea's patriarchal society and cycles of abuse and consumption. Told from the perspective of three relatives (her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister), the detached nature of the prose helps cultivate an oppressive and isolating atmosphere. Without wanting to give too much away, there were several scenes that were beautiful, and several more that were shocking or difficult to get through. Definitely recommended, though for readers with a strong constitution. (I also realise that this is the only Korean novel I've read, so that's odd.) 29 - This Census Taker, by China Miéville. A novella about a young boy growing up on the outskirts of a small town in an indistinct time. It's a psychological mystery tale with family strife and hints at a grim and worrying outside world, but the hints were a little too vague for me. I never felt fully invested, even though Miéville's prose is gorgeous as always, and the trajectory of the story was satisfying enough. It felt like a pleasantly spooky side story to one of his more involved worlds, and while that isn't a bad thing by default, it left me wanting a little more. 30 - The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World , by Favell Lee Mortimer (introduced and annotated by Todd Pruzan). A collection of passages from the titular Mrs Mortimer's geography books, aimed at children, from the mid-19th Century. Famously (as the book's lengthy and interesting introduction tells us) she only left England twice in her life, and cobled together her opinions on the outside world from books, journals and popular hearsay. As a result, what the reader gets is a breezy tour of the globe through the eyes of a grouchy and virulently Protestant middle-aged English woman, with all the xenophobia, racism and bizarre assumptions that would entail. Two things in particular struck me while reading: first, her tone is warm but sterm, writing like a schoolmistress to probably very young children, which lends the book an extra layer of discomfort. Secondly, it's sad how many casual cultural stereotypes are still held today. Her passages on the evils of "Mohamedian belief" for instance could come straight out of a right-wing politician. Unfortunately, once the initial novelty wears off, the book itself is not really very fun to read. I learned a good few things about contemporary history and the like, sure, but Mrs Mortimer's style is very repetitive and ended up exhausting me. Definitely a bad idea to read this in only a couple of sittings. Fuller reviews up on my GoodReads, as always. 1) 52+ books - 30 2) At least 40% (23) by a woman - 15 - Supervillainz, AM/PM, New World, Bad Feminist, Dept. Of Speculation, Empire Of The Senseless, Oryx & Crake, I Love Dick, Ghost House, Pig Tales, How To Build A Girl, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, The Vegetarian, Clumsiest People in Europe 13) Read Something YA - 14) Wildcard! (City of Stairs) 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, etc.) or from the Beat Generation - 20) Read a banned book - 22) It’s a Mystery. -
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Jul 1, 2016 23:40
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May/June Shadow of the Colossus - Nick Suttner: A decently entertaining book about the game Shadow of the Colossus and what it means to the author. Ender's Shadow - Orson Scott Card: A book I've wanted to read since I was a teenager but never did, Ender's Shadow follows the side character Bean through his early childhood to the events of the first book. I really liked it, although it had moments where it almost seemed it was elbowing me in the side and asking "Remember when this happened?" Mr. Mercedes - Stephen King: I didn't really have any idea what this was before I read it and wasn't expecting a detective story at all. I thought it was pretty good. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell: I really enjoyed this but man did it depress the gently caress out of me.  Orwell describes poverty in this memoir about his experiences in the two cities in horrifying detail.Catch 22 - Joseph Heller: I really enjoyed this novel, although like Down and Out it really depressed me after finishing it. Funny and moving, it describes a soldier dealing with ridiculous circumstances in wartime. Casting Off, The Unraveling, and the Stranded - Hugh Howey: After reading the beginnings of the series I decided to finish out the rest. A satisfying ending, but I don't think I'll continue with the spin-offs. Chrono Trigger - Michael P Williams: I wanted to read this after the other two Boss Fight Books I read and boy was that a mistake. Other than the interviews I did not find much merit in the book. Kanye West Owes me $300: & Other True Stories From a White Rapper who Almost Made it Big - Jensen Karp: A memoir by obscure 2000's rapper Hot Karl, other than a regrettable intro the book was very entertaining. Booklord Challenge 1) 32/60 2) Something written by a woman - Go Set A Watchman 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author - Spelunky 4) Something written in the 1800s - The Brothers Karamazov 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) - Samurai! 6) A book about or narrated by an animal - The Art of Racing in the Rain 7) A collection of essays. - Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection of New Essays 8) A work of Science Fiction - Robot Dreams 9) Something written by a musician - Kanye West Owes Me $300... 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - The Brothers Karamazov 11) Read something about or set in NYC - Tom Clancy's The Division: New York Collapse 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 13) Read Something YA 14) Wildcard! - Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes - Tony Kushner 15) Something recently published (up to a year. The year will be the day you start this challenge) - Empires of Eve: A History of the Great Empires of Eve Online 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. - Ender's Shadow 17) The First book in a series - Wool 18) A biography or autobiography - Bossypants 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Generation 20) Read a banned book - Catch 22 21) A Short Story collection - About Time: 12 Short Stories 22) It’s a Mystery. - Murder on the Orient Express
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Jul 2, 2016 00:30
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quote:1. Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko 31. Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe and Tom Desavia 32. Brothers in Arms by Lois Bujold McMaster 33. Feed by Mira Grant 34. Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future by Mark Levin 35. The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon #5) by Sam Sisavath 36. Warship (Black Fleet Trilogy #1) by Joshua Dalzelle 37. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie 38. Call to Arms (Black Fleet #2) by Joshua Dalzelle 39. Counterstrike (Black Fleet #3) by Joshua Dalzelle 40. The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon #6) by Sam Sisavath June Update 40/52 I did not care for Wastelands. It is a collection of short stories and many of them were just not that good. Some of them barely seemed to be connected to the apocalypse or its aftermath. Compared to his Apocalypse Triptych collections, this one is really weak. Under The Big Black Sun was pretty good. It is a history of the early LA punk scene which ran from roughly 1977 to 1980. It was somewhat repetitive with guest authors from the scene going through their personal history of the time. So we hear about things like Darby Crash’s suicide, Excene’s sister’s death, etc… multiple times from different perspectives. But still worthwhile to read. I love the band X and the early punk history so it was great to read about it and understand how several events came together to cause the scene to break up in 1980/1981. I read a good amount of Zombie/post-apoc books, but had never read Feed until this month. It was pretty good. I liked the setting of zombies exist but are a minor nuisance unless you don’t follow the rules. The book is more thriller with a political slant than zombies(though they do play a strong role in the story). It took a little bit of time to get into it, but overall I liked it and sometime may return to read the others in the series. I had an agreement with a friend from high school to read a book from is political viewpoint and he reads one of mine. He chose Plunder and Deceit for me. Can I just say it’s bad and be done with it? Mark Levin has a clear political slant and picks the worst comparisons possible like comparing obamacare to health care in Bangladesh. Luckily it was 10 short chapters and I hope my friend gets severely depressed from reading The Shock Doctrine for making me read this. I saw someone recommend the Black Fleet Trilogy in the Space Opera thread. I really enjoyed the first book. The adventures of one ship out in galaxy is right up my alley. While it was a little rough around the edges, it was worth the read. The other two were also good, but I did not like how convenient some the story was. Wolfe being saved at the end of book 2 was awfully convenient and I saw one of the two twists at the end of book 3 very early on so it was not that surprising. It was nice to have a book series that actually ended and tied up most, if not all of the story. So I’ve been reading the Purge of Babylon series and the story quality is decreasing. A few books back, there were hints about the rest of the world through radio communication, that has been completely ignored. Book 6 is basically part of a side story and leaves more things hanging than answering anything. With three books left in the series, I hope something will move forward soon. Does anyone have a suggestion for a mystery? Last year I read Murder on the Orient Express and was hoping to find something more contemporary, but there is so much out there. quote:1) Vanilla Number 29/52
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Jul 2, 2016 01:30
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ltr posted:Does anyone have a suggestion for a mystery? Last year I read Murder on the Orient Express and was hoping to find something more contemporary, but there is so much out there. I liked Black by Russell Blake, and it has the advantage of being free on Kindle, so you can give it shot and just stop reading if it doesn't grab you.
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Jul 2, 2016 08:26
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Bandiet posted:1. The Stranger by Albert Camus 14. Hystopia by David Means. The author had a half-decent idea for an alt history novel but was afraid the straightforwardness of that would be too gauche for the literary world, so he threw in a few pages of weak postmodern shenanigans at the beginning & end. Lame. 15. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. The themes risk heavy-handedness, to say the least, but it's forgivable, because from a technical standpoint I thought it was very entertaining and frequently beautiful. 16. The Black Swans by Margaret Scott. These are poems about Hobart, mostly. Read it for the great nature imagery, stay for the subtle feminism (which I assume is typical of 80s confessional poetry). 17. L'Assommoir by Émile Zola. smh at this book. Even though it has such *shocking* descriptions of destitution (with less tact than a literal propaganda novel like The Jungle) it's still basically literary kitsch. 18. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. gently caress yeah. Really great character studies. Excited for the rest. Vanilla Number: 18/75 Something recently published: Hystopia The First book in a series: My Brilliant Friend
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Jul 2, 2016 09:40
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Previously read: 1. Exoskeleton by Shane Stadler 2. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien 3. The Serpent by Claire North 4. Dear Mr Kershaw: A Pensioner Writes by Derek Philpott 5. Bossypants] by Tina Fey 6. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski 7. The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman 8. The Raven Boys (Raven Cycle #1) by Maggie Steifvater 9. The Dream Thieves (Raven Cycle #2) by Maggie Steifvater 10. Blue Lily, Lily Blue (Raven Cycle #3) by Maggie Steifvater 11. Modern Romance by Aziz Anzari 12. Legend by Marie Lu 13. Sabriel by Garth Nix 14. Three men on a boat by Jerome K Jerome 15. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche 16. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 17. Touched by an Angel by Jonathan Morris 18. River of Ink by Paul M M Cooper 19. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling 20. Mr Mercedes by Steven King 21. I Remember You by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir 22. Unwanted by Kristina Ohlsson 23. Close Encounters of the Furred Kind by Tom Cox 24. I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki 25. The Girl You Lost by Kathryn Croft June update 26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling 27. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling These two don't really need a review/introduction - I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter world for a bit of light reading and entertainment, and haven't re-read them in a while so thought I'd make a start before the Cursed Child comes out. I definitely notice more plot holes reading them now than when I was a teenager, but they are still fun reads so I don't really mind. 28. The Infinite Wait and Other Stories by Julia Wertz: Found my way into a comic book shop on holiday and picked up a few graphic novels from their stand on female writers. This one was pretty different to my normal picks as it's a selected autobiography in graphic novel form. Very readable though, and it makes me want to read her other stuff - can't say no to fart jokes and masturbation right? 29. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann: This was my New York themed read and I really liked it. It tells the story of a few individuals living in 70s New York and how their lives intertwine. Pretty gritty stuff but very well told. 30. Spectacles by Sue Perkins: Ah gotta love Sue Perks. Not much more to say about this, I normally read comedian's autobiographies as they usually have a bit more to them than 'I went here and did this thing then I met that person', and this was no exception. Surprisingly touching in places too. Booklord Challenge Progress 1) Vanilla Number - 30/35 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) 7) A collection of essays. 9) Something written by a musician 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) 14) Wildcard! 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Genneration 20) Read a banned book 21) A Short Story collection
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Jul 2, 2016 11:49
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Groke posted:24. The Vegetarian by Han Kang. you're in norway right, where did you get a hold of this book? through amazon?
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Jul 2, 2016 15:02
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Robot Mil posted:28. The Infinite Wait and Other Stories by Julia Wertz: Found my way into a comic book shop on holiday and picked up a few graphic novels from their stand on female writers. This one was pretty different to my normal picks as it's a selected autobiography in graphic novel form. Very readable though, and it makes me want to read her other stuff - can't say no to fart jokes and masturbation right? I have one of her older ones, "Drinking at the Movies." It's similar. If you liked that one you'd like this one, I'd bet. Only three books this month. Thought I would read more after surgery but it turned out to be either sleeping, or feeling pretty normal, so here we are. Tana French - Broken Harbor (4th 'Dublin Murder Squad' book. They're just fun mystery books but I find them better in quality than the typical modern mysteries in the airport.) Gary Vaynerchuk - Jab Jab Jab Right Hook (This was a dumb and boring book about social media marketing, and I read it for a course.) Joe HIll - The FIreman (I liked this but he really leans heavily into references to his dad's works, and while it sometimes works, sometimes he's just adopting his dad's bad habits without the good ones. Characters feel a bit underdeveloped (except the ones that are analogous to characters in The Stand, but then is he really developing them?) and it feels like almost half the chapters end with King's "But he never would return to that home again" type of stuff.) Booklord Challenge progress: 1) Vanilla Number (currently at 25 of 40) 2) 15 books written by women (currently at 8 of 15) 4) Something written in the 1800s 13) Read Something YA 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. 19) Read something from the lost or beat generation 20) Read a banned book 21) A Short Story collection Currently reading "Just Kids" by Patti Smith which has been on my shelf for ages. The Berzerker fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jul 2, 2016 |
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Jul 2, 2016 16:20
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