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chernobyl kinsman posted:if you're very stupid perhaps Hello!
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Oct 1, 2017 11:20
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I finally got around to finishing The Club Dumas. It's really quite up my alley, I'm not sure why it didn't gel with me.
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Oct 1, 2017 22:26
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Dr. Pangloss posted:I too waited too long to read Devil in the White City, but it was fantastic. It's been a few years since I read it, so it might be time for another read. What did you think of it? I think jesus Pangloss get a fukkin av my broheim
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Oct 2, 2017 05:39
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Bilirubin posted:I think jesus Pangloss get a fukkin av my broheim This one already has my picture in it, so I figured I was good to go.
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Oct 2, 2017 19:38
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tetrapyloctomy posted:I finally got around to finishing The Club Dumas. It's really quite up my alley, I'm not sure why it didn't gel with me. I read that a few years ago when I was still working at my last library since we had it in our collection and I'm an unashamed fan of The Ninth Gate. I really enjoyed it for like 3/4 of the way through and then it just sort of lost my interest. I finished it cause I was almost done, but it was almost like I hit a brick wall where it stopped being quite as fun as it used to be.
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Oct 3, 2017 13:50
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Xmaspast posted:I read that a few years ago when I was still working at my last library since we had it in our collection and I'm an unashamed fan of The Ninth Gate. I really enjoyed it for like 3/4 of the way through and then it just sort of lost my interest. I finished it cause I was almost done, but it was almost like I hit a brick wall where it stopped being quite as fun as it used to be. There's something that just disappoints me about stories that collapse down into mundane explanations. Oh, so the huge plot to hide the instructions to summon Lucifer is not only left blandly ambiguous at the end, but actually has nothing to do with everyone else you've been chasing? Those people are literally just arranging a super-secret party? MEHHHHH. I felt similarly about Night Film, which I thought had a phenomenal hook that the rest of the story just couldn't live up to. I guess what I'm saying is: I want The Exorcist, where Pazuzu is real. I don't want someone to wipe of Regan's makeup and then show us how she faked it.
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Oct 4, 2017 13:41
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Just finished The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. I'm not very experienced with Pratchett's work, having only read the Bromeliad, but I quite liked it! Reminded me of Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton, where it's more a discussion of human nature and exploration than adventure or conflict.
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Oct 4, 2017 14:00
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Ayem posted:I'm not very experienced with Pratchett's work, having only read the Bromeliad, Dude you should read more of his books!
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Oct 4, 2017 16:33
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nah you shouldn't
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Oct 4, 2017 22:41
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Because I write airport fiction myself and so need to keep track of the competition, and because I'm a masochist, I read Dan Brown's Origin. "At least it's not as bad as Inferno" is about the best I can say. Robert Langdon spends a night running around a European country (Spain this time) in the company of a brilliant-but-still-needs-him-to-explain-everything woman, being chased by baddies as he tries to crack codes hidden in art and literature in a race against time. You know, the usual. The biggest problem I had was that anyone would consider the great secret Langdon is trying to reveal to the world worth killing for; maybe I'm just cynical, but the idea that totally not Steve Jobs/Elon Musk running a computer simulation that says life is merely a by-product of natural processes and we're eventually all going to become cyborgs, no gods required would have all organised religions quaking in their boots isn't exactly believable. A single "Mmmm... nah" from the Pope would take care of it for 99% of people who were actually worried about it. I would have thought they'd be more concerned about the bad guy winning in the last book and condemning most of humanity to sterility, but that didn't even get a mention. Not Elon Jobs challenges John Galt for expositional monologuing/author tracting towards the end. I half-expected him to say that "A equals A". Also, one of the main characters is a Turing Test-smashing AI, and the King of Spain is secretly gay.
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Oct 7, 2017 10:27
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I've never read Stephen King so my friend recommended that I read The Stand. Finished it today. I feel like the middle 50% of the book could've been removed with no loss to the story. A bit underwhelmed by my first taste of his work.
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Oct 9, 2017 00:57
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Nohearum posted:I've never read Stephen King so my friend recommended that I read The Stand. Finished it today. I feel like the middle 50% of the book could've been removed with no loss to the story. A bit underwhelmed by my first taste of his work. The Dark Tower series is fantastic. Needful Things is probably my favorite Stephen King book outside of that series.
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Oct 9, 2017 03:44
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Nohearum posted:I've never read Stephen King so my friend recommended that I read The Stand. Finished it today. I feel like the middle 50% of the book could've been removed with no loss to the story. A bit underwhelmed by my first taste of his work. Dr. Pangloss posted:The Dark Tower series is fantastic. Needful Things is probably my favorite Stephen King book outside of that series. Hmmm, yeah, if OP feels like The Stand could have used some editing, I doubt The Dark Tower should be next on the list. Read Skeleton Crew, OP.
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Oct 9, 2017 11:29
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funkybottoms posted:Hmmm, yeah, if OP feels like The Stand could have used some editing, I doubt The Dark Tower should be next on the list. Read Skeleton Crew, OP. I should have clarified that was mainly meant to say that if he was underwhelmed, not all of Kings works are underwhelming. Skeleton Crew is also v good.
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Oct 9, 2017 13:39
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funkybottoms posted:Hmmm, yeah, if OP feels like The Stand could have used some editing, I doubt The Dark Tower should be next on the list. Read Skeleton Crew, OP. Yeah, the Stand is a weird first pick. It seems like his friend was familiar with King, liked the Stand, so thought it would be a good place to start. I'd argue some of his more stand-alone stuff is the better place to start with King. Personally, I like 11/22/63 more than most of his horror work but for a more traditional King story I think Gerald's Game is my favorite.
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Oct 9, 2017 17:57
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I think IT is a not-terrible starting place for King given ITs standing in the world right now. I re-read it over the summer and remembered how much certain scenes hosed with me on the first read ten or twelve years ago. I re-read Ender's Game recently and just finished Speaker for the Dead last night- should I keep reading through this universe? It seems a lot of people are split on the whole series In the spirit of Halloween I also read through Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness recently and loved it. Debating Dunwich Horror vs Call of Cthulhu (but will inevitably read both before Halloween). edit - ooh and I read through Crichton's Pirate Latitudes on vacation in late September. That was an interesting take on piracy. Could have done with more tortureporn via the crazy Spaniard captain Omnikin fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Oct 9, 2017 |
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Oct 9, 2017 18:28
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Omnikin posted:I re-read Ender's Game recently and just finished Speaker for the Dead last night- should I keep reading through this universe? It seems a lot of people are split on the whole series Books 3 and 4 primarily take place on the piggies' planet with many of the same characters from SftD. If you liked SftD's setting and characters or want to know more about the piggies and their culture/biology, keep going. If you were more about Ender's Game, it's probably best to get off the train now (and maybe check out the Bean series).
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Oct 9, 2017 19:18
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Ben Nerevarine posted:Books 3 and 4 primarily take place on the piggies' planet with many of the same characters from SftD. If you liked SftD's setting and characters or want to know more about the piggies and their culture/biology, keep going. If you were more about Ender's Game, it's probably best to get off the train now (and maybe check out the Bean series). Agree with this. 3 and 4 really fell off for me, and I really loved Ender's Game. The Bean series is a better place to go, although I'd say it's still a step down from the first two. Just noticed the new non-Av-haver Av. That's pretty disgusting to do to someone. My first thought was "who the hell bought that for me?".
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Oct 9, 2017 19:49
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Dr. Pangloss posted:Agree with this. 3 and 4 really fell off for me, and I really loved Ender's Game. The Bean series is a better place to go, although I'd say it's still a step down from the first two. There have been worse ones in the past.
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Oct 9, 2017 19:51
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Definitely backing up what others are saying. 3 and 4 aren't great books but I think the Bean series is a pretty worthy successor. It's nothing incredible, but it's a fun story. Ender's Shadow in particular.
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Oct 10, 2017 11:26
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Xmaspast posted:I think the Bean series is a pretty worthy successor. It's not. It completely shits all over Bean's character in support of the most hackneyed plot in the known universe.
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Oct 10, 2017 15:57
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Just finished 'The Monk' by M.G. Lewis. I definitely enjoyed that the plot had a few threads about it. Quite a few characters are introduced in the beginning, and I had to make a little diagram when I started reading it to keep track of all of them and their relations. Kind of forced me to think a bit about what was going on and where things were going to go from the first chapters and on. Overall a pretty good read though. Colonel Taint fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 11, 2017 20:45
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Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. I've been dipping into a few UF book series over the last year and finally made it around to McGuire's October Daye series. As an introductory novel, I thought McGuire succeeded in showcasing her particular take on the whole supernatural world being hidden from our normal world without causing me to roll my eyes. Daye herself is a very likable character--perpetually broke, perhaps permanently broken, but still cursed with empathy and endurance--and McGuire isn't afraid to put her through hell. I'd put this book up alongside the first Kate Daniels in terms of personal enjoyment.
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Oct 12, 2017 00:37
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ulmont posted:It's not. It completely shits all over Bean's character in support of the most hackneyed plot in the known universe. Well I mean hey it's a good thing everyone gets an opinion.
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Oct 12, 2017 03:31
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Working Stiff - Judy Melinek Non-fiction account of 2 years working as forensic pathologist. Well written and very engaging. There's chapters on murder, suicide, death of children, etc. I learned more from this book than any other non-fiction I read in recent memory. The author was a forensic pathologist doing autopsies for NYC when 911 happened. So there is a chapter about the behind the scenes of processing the massive amount of bodies and body parts from immediately after the collapse to months afterwards during the cleanup. Real strong recommendation from me.
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Oct 12, 2017 04:11
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Pocket Billiards posted:Working Stiff - Judy Melinek that sounds overwhelmingly depressing.
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Oct 13, 2017 17:54
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I just finished Tuf Voyaging by GRRM, I really enjoyed the disjointed format felt like an adventure a week kind of TV show. The last part was a little preachy but I really like Tuf as a character.
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Oct 13, 2017 19:54
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I just finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I love PKD but I was surprised by how much more straightforward it was than I'm used to from him, and I can see it's the typical high school fare as opposed to something totally off the rails like Ubik, or something that would get a lot of complaints from parents like A Scanner Darkly. I very much enjoy his characters as ever, who are never really good or really evil but are rather just people doing what they need to do to survive. Same thing I like so much about Vonnegut. I think a big unsaid theme I picked up on that was super depressing is that it seems very much like androids certainly are capable of developing empathy, but that they're so hard-wired to believe no android has any loyalty to any other android, that empathy in them will never be allowed to sprout. Their lives mirror those of the Specials and what Mercer teaches them to embrace, except they are even more brutal and short and isolated, and all of them must begin with murder. Now apparently I still have to watch Blade Runner before seeing br2049 this weekend because they changed so much in the adaptation, GAH. Maybe that's the reason there's such a strong undercurrent of people who believe Decker is an android. I definitely didn't see much, even by PKD standards, to support that. I hope this is also a discussion thread, because I just discussed stuff. fake edit - also I read this as an illustrated novel to see how those are and they're fine I guess. My favorite part is all the bad reviews from traditional comic readers bitching about all the text real edit - also I would like to register a complaint about Hieronymus spoiling the ending to Romeo and Juliet for me in the rules thread Epic High Five fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 23:43
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I read "Penric and the Fox", a novella by Lois McMaster Bujold (#3 in the series). Lovely novella! It is the most recent one published, but falls as the third in the series (of 5, I believe, so far). I've been enjoying Ms. Bujold's forays into self published novellas a great deal, though I wish they were longer (of course!). This novella builds off the one immediately before it (Penric and the Shaman), and we see a bit more of the Wealdian society and culture. I very much enjoy that these novellas flirt around in the different cultures and countries that we see in some of the other books in her 5 Gods Universe of which they are a part. Can't wait for more!
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Oct 14, 2017 05:39
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Finished Tigerman by Nick Harkaway a couple days ago. I'd read one of his other novels, Angelmaker, first, and was really impressed by its almost surreal pulpiness. I've still got images from Angelmaker stuck in my head. Tigerman on the other hand is a bit more grounded, a bit more about a personal relationship than Tigerman was. And it wasn't bad, but in a way it was a little disappointing. I think Angelmaker was so dedicated to its weirdness that there was always something left that could impress me, while Tigerman, even though it's still got some of that pulpy strangeness, didn't pop as much. Which isn't to say that it was bad--the author's got a way both with action scenes and with bureaucratic competence that make both compelling to read, and the characters had more nuance to them than in Angelmaker, it just didn't engage me quite as much.
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Oct 15, 2017 03:10
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Finally finished Cibola Burn the fourth one of the Expanse novels. I didn't hate it. The plot kind of meanders along lazily but it picks up towards the end, which is good, but I felt it was the weakest of the four novels I've finished so far.
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Oct 17, 2017 01:05
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I just finished Wolves of the Calla, part of the dark tower series by Stephen King. I started this series probably... oh 15 years ago, and got terribly distracted by puberty and then the Black Library but have since returned to it. I never made it to this book in the series previously and man did I miss out. I loved it.
THE RAGGY fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Oct 18, 2017 |
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Oct 18, 2017 10:45
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THE RAGGY posted:I just finished Wolves of the Calla, part of the dark tower series by Stephen King. I started this series probably... oh 15 years ago, and got terribly distracted by puberty and then the Black Library but have since returned to it. I never made it to this book in the series previously and man did I miss out. I loved it. I'm currently re-reading the series and am halfway through Wizard and the Glass and my brain keeps screaming "Shut up, Roland, give me the tl;dr so I can get to Wolves!".
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Oct 18, 2017 14:40
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I know EXACTLY what you mean. Wizard and Glass isn't a bad read, but it felt a bit unnecessary at time to me, to cut away from the characters of present day and spend a whole book in the past when the gist of it could have been explained in a well crafted chapter or two
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Oct 18, 2017 18:42
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Payndz posted:Because I write airport fiction myself and so need to keep track of the competition, and because I'm a masochist, I read Dan Brown's Origin. "At least it's not as bad as Inferno" is about the best I can say. Robert Langdon spends a night running around a European country (Spain this time) in the company of a brilliant-but-still-needs-him-to-explain-everything woman, being chased by baddies as he tries to crack codes hidden in art and literature in a race against time. You know, the usual. Hell, the reason I was actually intrigued by this book at all was that the ending of Inferno actually gave me pause and I wanted to see how Brown was going to deal with it in this series moving forward. It's not dealt with. At all. You could skip Inferno entirely and it wouldn't make any difference. And then it turns out that the big shocking revelation teased throughout Origin is that a fake computer simulation told a fake scientist that life came about naturally and that...let me make sure I have this right...technology is gonna get better. Wow...? I miss the days when the secret was that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were totes boinking.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:22
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Sienkiewicz's Trilogy, translated into Russian. Quite possibly THE defining 19th century Polish literature series (even if Western audiences are more likely to be familiar with the Mount and Blade mod). It's a little formulaic and a lot nationalist. Being a Russian Jew, I'm not really opposed to With Fire and Sword casting Bogdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks as the unequivocal bad guys (because they were, obviously). The weird part is that even though the vast majority of Ukrainians and Cossacks were non-Catholic, WFaS doesn't really call attention to that, focusing more on the tragedy of a civil war between "brother-nations". Which is why it's so baffling when the second book in the trilogy deals with the Swedish invasion (the titular Deluge) and goes into all out rants about heretics, the sanctity of Catholic faith, Mary Mother of God personally leading the victorious Polish armies against the infidels... the gently caress is this garbage? Sienkiewicz is writing this poo poo at the tale end of the 19th century, in an ostensibly secular country. Also, the protagonist of the Deluge finds his redemption - after years of banditry, rape, marauding and betrayal - by raping, pillaging, and torturing a bunch of innocent civilians on the Protestant side. The. gently caress. By the time the trilogy ends, it's clear that the author is outright out of ideas. He can't even manage to get the protagonists to personally win the war du-jour with the actions.
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Oct 21, 2017 19:52
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Just finished The Fisherman by John Langan. This is a horror novel set in upstate New York and has touches of New England folklore and big swatches of Lovecraftian cosmic creep. The story is a meditation on loss, in this case the loss of wives, on middle aged men of different sorts who decide to escape via fishing. There is a nested story within the story that ties in nicely. Still not exactly sure what happens, or will happen, but it was a very entertaining read, fully appropriate for the season. I did find the narrative style a bit overly homey, like tries to hard to sound like a "normal guy" when the author doesn't have a good grounding in this himself, but that quickly faded into the background. Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 03:10
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C-Euro posted: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. 10/10 with American Pastoral (Philip Roth). The middle 1/3 of the book was really good and I empathized with the main character a lot, though it ended in kind of a weird way. Two more to go!
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Oct 22, 2017 05:15
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4/10. Just finished the first book of The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman. This felt like a chore to read and was lifting every single idea it could from classics that came before it. A couple people have said the next two books are better, but I don’t know if I can keep going if it's going to be so mediocre.
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Oct 22, 2017 10:04
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C-Euro posted:10/10 with American Pastoral (Philip Roth). The middle 1/3 of the book was really good and I empathized with the main character a lot, though it ended in kind of a weird way. Have you seen the film adaptation? I've never read American Pastoral, only Sabbath's Theater and Portnoy's Complaint by Roth, so when I saw the movie I was kind of surprised about the content, very political, not much weird masturbation. Just finished V. by Thomas Pynchon. Pretty rad, I don't know, 10/10 I guess. I really liked all of its pieces, but I didn't really get the big picture on this first go-around.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:06
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