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The White Gold Score by Craig Schaefer (Daniel Faust Series 1.5) Very Parker influenced heist story. Schaefer uses this novella to flesh out the character of Faust, almost as if he wanted to show just how much he isn't like Dresden. I enjoyed it.
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Aug 21, 2017 00:36
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce I was challenged in the Shameful! thread to read Ulysses and I decided to reread this as a warm up. I last read it many years ago perhaps late high school or early university age. Now much older, it made a greater impression on me. How the prose and thinking changes as Stephen gets older is just brilliant. At the end its at the edge but still easily understandable. Gives me some hope that this time Ulysses will not be so foreign (as Gravity's Rainbow was finally readable, and gloriously so, to me recently) this time around.
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Aug 21, 2017 06:10
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Starbound By Joe Haldeman Shame I didn't have the time to finish Earthbound in the same day.
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Aug 21, 2017 15:38
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Way of the King by Brandon Sanderson Really enjoyed the first book of this series. Very cool world that the book hints is only just being introduced. I like the little vignettes in between the longer chapters. More people have already discussed this, so I won't say much more than to add my voice to those that have enjoyed it. I have already started on the second book and should finish it in plenty of time to be impatient about the third book not yet being released.
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Aug 21, 2017 18:37
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Abyss posted:Starbound By Joe Haldeman Finished Earthbound tonight. A great way to end the series, and it certainly ended better than Forever Peace.
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Aug 22, 2017 04:17
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Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee - Somewhat confusing far-future MilSci with a lot of spy novel subterfuge. Still feel a bit like I missed something, but I think the book is purposefully dense. Would recommend.
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Aug 22, 2017 14:50
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Guards, Guards by Terry Pratchett. What a good book. Hilarious, up until it's chilling. Humans are terrifying.
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Aug 23, 2017 01:28
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StrixNebulosa posted:Guards, Guards by Terry Pratchett. What a good book. Hilarious, up until it's chilling. Humans are terrifying. sounds like it has some striking parallels with the contemporary political climate
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Aug 23, 2017 05:53
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Tore through The Broken Earth trilogy, by N. K. Jemisin, while traveling over the past few days. I started The Fifth Season months ago and stopped halfway through for some reason, but I picked it back up for airplane/airport and downtime between touristy things and ended up blazing through the rest of the trilogy. Real good poo poo. I think The Fifth Season is the strongest individual book of the three, but all of them are good. Her prose is great throughout, and I appreciated just how... complicated the characters' (and the setting's) morality was. I'm not used to reading fantasy epics that end up not really having a villain at all, or even any individual major characters I would call evil. There are plenty of characters pushed, or made, to do bad things by the world they live in, plenty of characters who make catastrophic mistakes, who do unforgivable things for what might end up being good reasons, but nobody who's really a bad person. Or a good person. Anyway, definitely recommend it. If you're not into fantasy, I think it's still worth it because of the strength of the writing and characters, though the second and third books definitely dive much deeper into full-on magic and fantasy than the first book does.
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Aug 23, 2017 15:31
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Against the Day by Thomas PynchonSolitair posted:Finally loving finished my first reading of Against the Day. It's fantastic in places, especially the ending passage, but I often found myself lost in a sea of historical detail, wondering if I forgot details from earlier in the book that would have made me better understand the chain of events that led to significant moments. I doubt it, though; it seems like a very long, historical version of one of those loosely plotted indy movies where life happens without regard to narrative, if life included stuff like being almost drowned by mayonnaise on a transforming ship or avatars of the Major Arcana. I'll be on the Pynchon wiki, just to make sure.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:17
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The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker I think this is the first fantasy novel I've read where I disliked 99 percent of the characters but just kept reading to see where it ended up.
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Aug 28, 2017 00:14
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Dr. Pangloss posted:Way of the King by Brandon Sanderson Finished Words of Radiance. Not as good as the first book, imo, but still good. The story drags in places and the vignettes don't fit quite as tightly, but I'm still excited about the third book.
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Aug 28, 2017 01:26
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Writing a journal review for this book, so I had to finish it. Shooting for the Record: Adolph Toepperwein, Tom Frye, and Sharpshooting's Forgotten Controversy by Tim Price. Decent historical book about competitive shooting. The beginning suffers from too much detail and has split narration that sometimes can confuse the reader, states one/two line facts that end abruptly without further explanation, and displays pictures and captions that spoil future chapters. It did, however, inform me more than I ever knew about the world of competitive shooting; how gun companies in the early 1900s and into the 1950s used exhibition shooters to further their sales; and eventually really dug deep into the emotional states of the people that the author focused on the most.
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Aug 29, 2017 23:03
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robotsinmyhead posted:Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee - Somewhat confusing far-future MilSci with a lot of spy novel subterfuge. Still feel a bit like I missed something, but I think the book is purposefully dense. Would recommend. Read the sequel as it owns. Picks up on the tension/quality level Ninefox left off at, keeps going up.
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Aug 30, 2017 00:30
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C-Euro posted:Finished Dune for the fifth or sixth time. Still perhaps my favorite book ever, though I never noticed until now that the pacing loses a step after the first third or so. 8/8 now that I've finished One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). It was...alright? Someone in another thread said it was "arguably the most important book written after 1950" but I must be uncultured because I lost the thread of it somewhere along the way. Definitely going it give it another try someday though, I think I need to read it in longer chunks so I can keep track of who's who.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:12
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C-Euro posted:I must be uncultured because I lost the thread of it somewhere along the way. yeah
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Aug 30, 2017 03:14
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Just finished reading the Bobiverse series; surprisingly good space opera and something resembling reasonable science. The thing that I really liked is that, even though the main character(s) is/are a computer program cloned from a socially inept computer programmer, they still get emotional, they still get attached to friends and family, they still break down weeping at a friend's funeral, they are still fundamentally human. That's a pleasant change of pace from the usual SF stuff, where even the flesh and blood protagonists aren't that sensitive.
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Aug 30, 2017 06:18
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I finished Jerusalem by Alan Moore, it's my first time reading his work and I really enjoyed it. Rambling is supposed to be one of Moore's problems but I found the things that were being rambled about to be interesting in themselves enough. The book is really more of a collection of short stories that center around one big story, each part being connected to another. There's chapters in the first and third parts that I felt like didn't really need to be there (which is a pretty big flaw considering most chapters took an hour and a half to finish) but then there are chapters that I felt were really loving good. The first chapter on Henry George is the first time I felt like the book was really onto something and the second part of the book was an amazing read. There's a chapter in the third part that is written in the style of James Joyce that was really good as well, at least to how much I could comprehend it on my first reading of it. Overall if you're looking for something that is really dense and kind of a puzzle to piece together than Jerusalem is a good choice. I really liked the Joyce chapter I'm looking forward to reading Ulysses next but I'm reading The Mist by Stephen King in the mean time.
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Sep 1, 2017 19:59
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I read The Ballad of Black Tom two days ago, and because I enjoyed it immensely I jumped right into The Changeling. I didn't dislike The Changeling, but it had pacing issues and just overall felt not as well thought-out. I'm going to read The Devil in Silver as a tie-breaker.
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Sep 5, 2017 02:45
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Just finished The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria, a contemporary and friend of Umberto Eco. Imagine H. P. Lovecraft meets Eco, but not as spine chilling as the former nor as convoluted as the latter. Decent weird story, interesting elements, but it didn't completely connect with me. It's well translated, but the writing lacks a certain gravity. I never felt shocked with any reveal, and only a couple scenes were creepy to me. Still, fun enough for a hot summers night with smoke in the air.
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Sep 8, 2017 03:18
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tetrapyloctomy posted:I read The Ballad of Black Tom two days ago, and because I enjoyed it immensely I jumped right into The Changeling. I didn't dislike The Changeling, but it had pacing issues and just overall felt not as well thought-out. I'm going to read The Devil in Silver as a tie-breaker. LaValle very much touches a lot of social issues in the larger books, so Devil in Silver is a critique of the mental health system along with the horror aspect. I've read those 3 and enjoyed them all. I feel like The Changeling may hit harder for a recent parent, but I did find there to be some slack in there. I still really liked that one. I'll be curious to hear what you think of Devil in Silver.
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Sep 8, 2017 15:52
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Ben Nevis posted:LaValle very much touches a lot of social issues in the larger books, so Devil in Silver is a critique of the mental health system along with the horror aspect. I've read those 3 and enjoyed them all. I feel like The Changeling may hit harder for a recent parent, but I did find there to be some slack in there. I still really liked that one. I'll be curious to hear what you think of Devil in Silver. I liked it. The actual identity of the creature was a bit of a let down since I was really in the mood for supernatural horror, but it needed to work out as it did to stay true to the theme. I can't blame a book for not exactly being the genre that I wanted! There are also some weird inconsistencies in his tone, like when he steps out of the narrative and addresses you directly, author to reader, but it generally wan't too jarring. Overall, I think I would rank The Changeling < The Devil in Silver << The Ballad of Black Tom. It might be a bit unfair to compare them directly like that, as the last is a novella and naturally is going to be tighter, but The Changeling in particular just was too inconsistent in tone and did kind of a clumsy job tying everything together. After finishing The Devil in Silver, I read Ania Ahlborn's The Devil Crept In. Meh. The protagonist of the story is a kid with mental issues -- which is sort of necessary in order to make him more unreliable to everyone he's trying to convince -- but he also has echolalia, and it gets old really quickly. Wasn't bad, wan't great. I'm not going to actively hunt down any more of her books. Next up: Emma Files' Experimental Film and/or John Langan's The Fisherman. I don't even quite remember what led me to pick these two, but here they are among my recent purchases, so why the hell not.
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Sep 8, 2017 18:26
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tetrapyloctomy posted:I liked it. The actual identity of the creature was a bit of a let down since I was really in the mood for supernatural horror, but it needed to work out as it did to stay true to the theme. I can't blame a book for not exactly being the genre that I wanted! There are also some weird inconsistencies in his tone, like when he steps out of the narrative and addresses you directly, author to reader, but it generally wan't too jarring. I've next queued Gemma Files' We Will All Go Down Together, lent me by my friend who also lent 20 Days of Turin. I'm relatively new to horror so I'm looking forward to it!
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Sep 8, 2017 21:17
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I just finished reading The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. I'd not had to read it in high school or college. I only knew that it was "about the meat packing industry." It isn't, not really. That's just used as an example of the horrors of capitalism. Seems every time America produces or embraces a socialist writer, the fact of their socialism gets omitted in discussions of them and their work. Imagine that. What's frigging hilarious is how the author parodies Horatio Alger, both in the structure of the story and the matter-of-fact this-happened-then-that-happened language he tells it with (only with about a million times the emotional weight). And he takes two completely different approaches to this parody, too. First, Jurgis tries to get by with the virtues of an Alger protagonist and is stomped down. Then he achieves the same kinds of success as an Alger protagonist, but only by ignoring those virtues. In the transition between those phases, there is one moment that resembles the lucky break of a Horatio Alger story, but it only ends up dumping Jurgis someplace that's fundamentally as awful as where he started. The last part is a bit preachy, beating you over the head with the book's message, but somehow even that wasn't enough.
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Sep 9, 2017 13:18
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Just finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. Gotta put that one on the recommendation list. Low-Fantasy Renaissance-ish political subterfuge, like some of the better parts of ASOIAF with some really novel and interesting concepts thrown in. The Qualms were some of my favorite parts. The guy writes action in a very matter-of-fact way that's refreshing instead of drawn-out attempts to describe it in detail. Important figures die, sometimes two or three, in a single sentence. It's marvelous.
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Sep 11, 2017 20:16
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Dr. Pangloss posted:Finished Words of Radiance. Not as good as the first book, imo, but still good. The story drags in places and the vignettes don't fit quite as tightly, but I'm still excited about the third book. I also just did Words, and I have to say I'm disappointed. The writing is less engaging than Kings and I found myself losing interest. I think that Sanderson is not a bad writer, but maybe this being a "ten book series" is a tad indulgent. This would be awesome as a tighter three book arc, imo.
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Sep 11, 2017 23:12
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Experimental Film wasn't half-bad. I was hoping that it wouldn't wuss out and come up with a lame non-paranormal etiology and to my relief it did not. I'll probably pick up more Files (and not misspell her first name next time).
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Sep 12, 2017 02:47
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areyoucontagious posted:I also just did Words, and I have to say I'm disappointed. The writing is less engaging than Kings and I found myself losing interest. I think that Sanderson is not a bad writer, but maybe this being a "ten book series" is a tad indulgent. This would be awesome as a tighter three book arc, imo. Totally agree with you. I was definitely working at keeping focused on finishing it for most of the second half. I've been re-reading The Dark Tower series, blown through the first three books and halfway through the fourth. That's a series I wish had gone 10 plus books, but are probably better because he edited it down.
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Sep 12, 2017 03:33
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Recently finished One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was enjoyable but it left me with that same sense you get when you watch an old movie or show; one that was groundbreaking for its time but doesn't really hold up. I appreciate its historicity, but its once-scandalous depictions of the gulag read as perfectly banal today. The most horrifying aspect was less the brutality of daily life in the camp, and more the capriciousness of the State and the indeterminacy of the sentence. On the other hand, it's impressive that as tame as it was, it was a groundbreaking indictment of the gulag system, and it leaves you wondering how much else went unsaid. It's also a pretty quick read. Would recommend.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:57
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The Gulag Archipelago is much better if you can find time for it. It's reportage put to paper by somebody who writes like a poet.
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Sep 14, 2017 19:13
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Just finished Unspeakable by Abbie Rushton. Was nice, but a little sadder than what I normally read nowadays. Debating whether to move on to Tower of Dawn (the Throne of Glass spinoff novella-turned-main-novel), since I absolutely do not care about the character it focuses on but it's apparently got a bunch of important information for the main plot of the series, or to read another one of the million books in my backlog.
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Sep 14, 2017 19:23
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cloudchamber posted:The Gulag Archipelago is much better if you can find time for it. It's reportage put to paper by somebody who writes like a poet. Totally agree. Gulag Archipelago is worth the time invested. It's probably been 20 years since I read it, might be time to read it again.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:05
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cloudchamber posted:The Gulag Archipelago is much better if you can find time for it. It's reportage put to paper by somebody who writes like a poet.
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Sep 15, 2017 03:50
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I just finished Jennifer Wapner's The Philadelphia Chromosome, which was about the discovery of the genetic mutation that causes chronic myelogenous leukemia, and the development of a targeted drug that cures it. i enjoyed it...it's a pretty amazing accomplishment. I've moved on to Ken Follett's novel A Column of Fire, the second sequel to Pillars of the Earth, this one taking place in Elizabethan times and focusing on the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion.
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Sep 16, 2017 03:34
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C-Euro posted:8/8 now that I've finished One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). It was...alright? Someone in another thread said it was "arguably the most important book written after 1950" but I must be uncultured because I lost the thread of it somewhere along the way. Definitely going it give it another try someday though, I think I need to read it in longer chunks so I can keep track of who's who. 9/9 now with Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert). Not as good as the original Dune but still worth reading. Dune got philosophical and existential at points but Messiah gets way more so, if you're into that sort of thing.
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Sep 17, 2017 22:24
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C-Euro posted:8/8 now that I've finished One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). It was...alright? Someone in another thread said it was "arguably the most important book written after 1950" but I must be uncultured because I lost the thread of it somewhere along the way. Definitely going it give it another try someday though, I think I need to read it in longer chunks so I can keep track of who's who. I don't think that assessment (which I stand by) and you losing the thread of it have much to do with each other I just finished Autumn of the Patriarch which was majestic
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Sep 17, 2017 22:36
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Small Gods by Terry Pratchett: Loved it and the coworker that borrowed Jam is already eyeing it as his next loaner. I'm currently sitting next to my Vonnegut shelf and will likely be moving on to one of the unread items there.
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Sep 18, 2017 01:50
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Epicurius posted:I've moved on to Ken Follett's novel A Column of Fire, the second sequel to Pillars of the Earth, this one taking place in Elizabethan times and focusing on the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion.
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Sep 18, 2017 20:11
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just another posted:How is it? Better or worse than World Without End? I completely forgot it was being released this month. Probably worse. It wasn't a bad book, but the characters tended towards the two-dimensional. I had another problem with the book, but that gets into spoilers, so I'll save that for a dedicated thread about it.
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Sep 19, 2017 15:22
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I finished The Game by Neil Strauss. I liked it. It's a really good look at broken men who have no idea how to socialize thinking Women will solve their problems. And then it turns into Fight Club except replace beating the poo poo out of each other with hitting on every women you see. And then I became horrified to find out that the dudes Neil use to hang out with are still around and still run their bullshit business.  Now i'm reading Crash Override by Zoe Quinn. Yeesh, It's a rough listen, even if you already know all the details of Gamergate. Especially when Comic artists im a fan of are still the targets of these assholes.
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Sep 20, 2017 19:13
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