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Not a dig against Jordan, but every time someone says they read that, I briefly get excited to hear their thoughts about the second Dying Earth book by Jack Vance.
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Jun 6, 2023 06:45
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The Primitive by Stephen Amidon (1995) I enjoy this, odd, thought experiment where I consume media as if it was part of another franchise. I.e. I read this book as if it was a season of True Detective. And as so, it was rather good! Setting: wet, rain, mountainous, embankments and slopes, fallen trees and derelict neighborhoods. A town that boomed in the 1980s , tobacco and cocaine. Now it's a ghost town, a leftover smoking ember smoulding under 1990s rainstorms. Characters: two leads, very different, good chemistry. Mystery and the refusal to answer questions. Conspiracy: why did the money leave the town, really? Why are the empty homes being set on fire? Who/what is the woman lead hiding from? When do we stick to the original design of our lives, and which version of our lives is the authentic version? Is it just following the bliss? The gut? The vibes? Is there hope for the town? Is there hope for the small lives of those who are weathering the severe economic downturn? What will happen to community radio as the 1990s roll on? Yeah I loved it! No spoilers (for a 28 year old thriller with no Goodreads reviews lol). Lots of 😭 and twisty bits, some really dumb decisions by the protags and I couldn't tell if the author was trying to portray gen x/yuppie dumbness or if he was unaware that he himself was part of the dumbness haha. Not a perfect novel by any means but I have idiosyncratic taste and would rather an average very flawed thriller than a 'good' one sometimes. Also, very obscure trivia, the author's latest novel is called Locust Lane... Which is the name of an important street in this book, so deep cut for the fans I guess!
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Jun 6, 2023 15:29
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Another sucker for American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I picked up the annotated edition at a surplus store a couple of years back, and when I took it to the checkout the born-again cashier saw the title and started witnessing to me. The only thing I walked away with from that experience is "Well poo poo, now I have to read it, don't I?" It took some time to get around to it, but I definitely did enjoy it, and now I want to learn how to do coin tricks, too.
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Jun 6, 2023 22:49
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American Gods is pretty good. Definitely my favorite Neil Gaiman. If you liked it I recommend Kraken by China Memeville and Last Call by Tim Powers.
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Jun 7, 2023 00:06
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The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop (2001) Goodreads / Amazon Interesting and well-researched account of how the theories of computer touching and the ideas from a number of brilliant people all coalesced (primarily thanks to the efforts of "Lick") to give us personal computers, networks and the internet, artificial intelligence, etc. There's a lot of fascinating stuff in the book and it makes you appreciate where we are at today with computers and just how narrowly we stayed on the path that got us here. And it really amplifies the irony in coming full-circle with remote work and "the cloud" and the internet as a public utility. Focuses more on the people and the ideas than the technology but provides enough background info about the evolution of key technologies that you understand just how amazing all of it was. Recommended if you're a nerd who likes tech, history, and computer-touching.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:05
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Ascension, by Nicholas Binge. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a brilliant scientist disappears and leaves behind a log of a mysterious expedition into an anomaly that shouldn't exist that's deeply intertwined with his past of personal tragedy and regret as the dwindling expedition goes insane and meets hostile but intelligent alien life and maybe learns the origin of the human race. Ascension has the somewhat novel twist on the formula that the book is told in second person, framed as letters the protagonist was writing as he accounted his experiences on the expedition, but my main feeling when I finished this book is that I've read better tellings of this story before.
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Jun 9, 2023 01:22
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Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Hard to know what to think of this one. I suspect if I'd read it at a different point in my life it would have blown me away. As it is I've read a lot that was probably inspired by this (The Road, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Hunger Games off the top of my head) so it hits differently. It's gripping, for sure, and devastating. But I must say for the narrator being a hyperempath (a "sharer") I didn't feel all that compelled by her voice or by what she feels. And I wasn't really convinced by the concept of hyperempathy, either; why is she only affected by intense pain and pleasure, and not *everything* that everyone feels, all around her, all the time? Hard to imagine in her world it wouldn't be a wholly crippling condition, even more so than what's described. The world-building is weird too. It seems like total apocalypse but then it turns out there is still a (nominal, at least) government and some infrastructure; it left me with a kind of incomplete sense of the world they inhabit. Didn't love the religious stuff either but I guess it was a good thread throughout. It's well written and I'm glad I've read this feminist classic finally but just didn't love it.
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Jun 13, 2023 12:02
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I finished Parable snd its sequel last month too and felt the same way in that if I had read it long ago I think it would’ve been incredibly impactful, yet now it just seems too topical, which isn’t necessarily the book’s fault. My take on the semi-functional government part is that the government has effectively lost a lot of its means to enforce laws and in turn most everything is like the wild west, in a way. There’s so much poverty, devastation and lack of resources that law enforcement and the government almost come off as local militias. It’s an interesting concept and I think it works well. For the hyperempathy thing, I’m pretty sure Lauren only feels those heightened emotions when she sees them directly, which is why she often looks away when something happens.. It becomes a bit more believable that way but it’s still an odd thing in general.
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Jun 13, 2023 15:15
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Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield. The best way I can describe this book, I think, is a sci-fi horror story told mostly from the point of view of an outsider, a witness to part of the goings-on that they can't explain and have no context for. A woman's wife is a marine biologist working for a mysterious organization and goes on a research trip that's supposed to take three weeks. Her wife goes missing for six months, and returns... different. Something happened down there that her wife can't or won't explain, and her employers have stonewalled every attempt to find out what's going on as she tries to pick up the pieces and reconnect with the love of her life. It's a melancholy emotional piece, more than a horror story per se. Less creepy or scary than eerie and disconcerting. As a melancholy love story, it worked very well for me, but if you go in expecting answers, this isn't that kind of story.
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Jun 14, 2023 01:42
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Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk Delirious novel about a surviving cultist finding love then becoming a famous religious leader and finally hijacking an airplane. Funniest part was him setting up a fake suicide hotline and telling callers to kill themselves. The cult is about member families having lots of children, educating them about housekeeping and sending everyone who isn't a firstborn in exile to make money for the church as caretakers until they croak. It's a parable, it's all of us in the modern society who are the slave workers.
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Jun 14, 2023 05:54
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I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman One of the more original dystopian books I’ve read lately. Forty women are imprisoned in a bunker; our narrator is the youngest, a teenager, and the only one who doesn’t remember anything except the bunker. The other women tell her about their past lives, about relationships, sex, families, reading, math, anatomy. None of them remember why they’re in the bunker. They have male guards who do not speak to them and only crack whips when the women do anything they don’t like. One day they manage to escape the bunker and they find themselves in a barren prairie-type environment. They go searching for answers and other people. They find nothing but other prisons in which every group of forty prisoners is dead. They may well be the last survivors on earth, if indeed they are even still on earth. Years pass. The women begin to die until only our narrator is left. She never meets another living soul. It’s incredibly bleak but also weirdly hopeful about the human spirit, what can be joyful about living, what it means to exist. Philosophical and original, also very short. I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
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Jun 14, 2023 18:51
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No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy The Coen brothers adaptation is very straightforward, often word for word with dialogue. However I enjoyed the book more because of Cormac's prose and I understood it more. I was definitely pissed off in the film version when Llewellyn and Anton never have a face off but it made a hell of a lot more sense in the book.
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Jun 15, 2023 00:45
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RIP
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Jun 15, 2023 00:45
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I read Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Heck of a change in level of detail from covering more than 200 years of history in 1,200 pages to covering 21 in almost the same pagecount. From the subway to vaudeville to the human exhibits at the Bronx Zoo and anarchist bombs, just an incredible period to cover. Only now, after all this immersion in what New York was as a place, will I get started with The Power Broker. At some later time, because I'm not too keen on doorstoppers right now. I just hope the next volume in this series covering the city up to the early 40s will be released in the next few years.
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Jun 15, 2023 10:12
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Got a couple of children's books from the library because I was curious what the hell kind of kids' books Kurt Vonnegut and James Joyce would produce. Sun Moon Star by Vonnegut is basically a Christmas book--about the fuzzy and abstract visual sensations Jesus experiences as a newborn and what's happening to cause them. The Cat and the Devil by Joyce is about a medieval town's mayor making a deal with the devil to get a much-needed bridge built in a single night, then tricking him when the bill comes due. The latter book is shorter and a little more mischievous, and honestly the one I prefer. Practice your French pronunciation first if you want to read it aloud to an actual kid. They pick up on these things, you know. Also read a couple of books by Terry Pratchett. Strata is a pre-Discworld sci-fi book about a planetary designer/engineer being lured to...a disc-shaped replica of Earth's eastern hemisphere. Pretty weak in comparison with his later work. It's not terribly funny (though to be fair he's not really going for laughs here) and it feels like Pratchett is trying to cram too much into too little space. Nothing gets resolved until the last 10-15 pages and neither the resolution or the journey up to that point are terribly rewarding. Soul Music, by contrast, is a lot of fun. A bard traveling to Ankh-Morpork finds an enchanted guitar that works musical miracles, meanwhile Death has another of his existential crises and his granddaughter Susan finds herself having to fill in. Lots of musical puns and the (un)usual shenanigans from the UU faculty. I've heard a lot of people say that Children of Dune by Frank Herbert is the weakest of the original Dune novels, and after reading it I'm inclined to agree. Things on Arrakis have gone to poo poo since Paul Atreides disappeared into the desert at the end of the previous book, largely due to his sister's corrupt mismanagement. Their mother Jessica returns to the planet to see what the hell is going on, maybe see if she can get a mulligan on the whole theocratic empire thing using her grandchildren. All the returning characters seem to have gotten hit with the idiot stick since the previous novel (which to Frank's credit seems to be in keeping with this book's themes), presumably to let the twin siblings Leto II and Ghanima shine. What I was left with was the impression that these people could have been outsmarted by any pair of regular 9-year olds, let alone these two psychic wunderkinds.
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Jun 15, 2023 21:55
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The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa, by Jonathan B. Losos. Losos is an evolutionary biologist, and he seeks to understand the question: what makes the domestic cat the domestic cat? And relatedly, how did wild animals turn into this, and where might they be going? It's an easy read for the layman, covering both history and surveying the current and ongoing research into cat genetics, evolutionary history, and behavior, of which there's surprisingly little. As much a part of human civilization as cats are, there's surprisingly little serious research about how they came about and how and why they do what they do. As a cat lover myself, I came away learning a lot about cats I didn't know before and enjoyed the read.
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Jun 15, 2023 23:52
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The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman: I have mixed feelings about this book. There were parts that were genuinely enjoyable, parts that were boring, and parts that made me question what was going on. We follow Egon Loeser, a Holden Caulfield type, in his journey through the Berlin theater scene in the years leading up to WWII. He travels from Berlin to Paris to Los Angeles through the course of the book and each chapter skips a few years of his life. The entire time, he's fixated on his (lack of) sex life and desperately wants one specific woman, which is why he travels to the cities mentioned. He is an irredeemable prick and treats everyone like poo poo. The thing that I really enjoyed about the book is that Egon cares very little about the politics of the world, so while we see all the makings of the impending war, it's always in the periphery and Egon seems oblivious to it all. He is thrust into situations where he's out of his element and clueless to what's actually going on, and it's the characters and events surrounding Egon that I enjoyed the most - and not so much Egon himself. The last few chapters try to wrap things up, but they get a bit bonkers. The writing is full of tangents upon tangents, and you can forget where you are in the story when it gets back to the main path. The author has a good way with words, though, that kept me engaged even if I ultimately am still mixed on it.
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Jun 16, 2023 15:26
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East of Eden, John Steinbeck I mostly (80%) really enjoyed it. The only thing was I felt like I couldn't get fully immersed in the characters, as they didn't feel quite real. They were nearly there, but it's almost like he created the characters to fit into the themes and allegory, rather than it being a character-driven work. I would have preferred that the narratives around the Hamiltons continued a bit more, rather than the focus on the Joe tangent, and Aron. The Joe stuff seemed a bit superfluous and dull, and Aron was quite a shallow character and also quite predictable as to how things would go for him. But overall, I'm really glad I picked it up.
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Jun 17, 2023 21:46
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Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World-from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief is more or less what he sounds like. He takes train journeys in various countries from China to Peru, gets to know the people he rides with, and learns a little something about the history, economy, and social systems of the places he's passing through. His Trans-Siberian journey was interrupted by a dog bite with attendant rabies risk, so I'll have to look to Paul Theroux to see a more thorough account of that.
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Jun 23, 2023 03:26
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The Kingkiller Chronicles, both of them. They were... ok but got kinda weird halfway through the 2nd book. Is it just me or does the main character feel like a weird self insert/YA Protagonist/Mary Sue? Hes a Wizard Leonardo Da Vinci that is only ever bad at managing money (and swordfighting I guess, but it feels like the author realized he needed to be bad at something). Like Ive pivoted to reading the first Wheel of Time book, Im about 1/3 through it and the three main-ish characters of that are about the same age and constantly loving over their traveling party with their immature jackassery. And I like them more even though they feel a bit flat. I liked some of the side characters in Kingkiller at least, especially the ex-priest that takes care of beggar children. And the physics/magic of the world is kinda cool I guess. Dyz fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 18:03
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Dyz posted:The Kingkiller Chronicles, both of them. They were... ok but got kinda weird halfway through the 2nd book. I’d recommend checking out the Earthsea books since that’s where Rothfuss cribbed the magic system from. And they’re some of the best fantasy there is, particularly book 2, imo. Otherwise, your critique is quite common and the kingkiller books are widely regarded as trash. I have absolutely no idea why people love it so much.
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Jun 23, 2023 19:14
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tuyop posted:Otherwise, your critique is quite common and the kingkiller books are widely regarded as trash. I have absolutely no idea why people love it so much. I've only read about half of the first book before I stopped reading it because I wasn''t enjoying it, so I'm speaking as someone who's not a fan, but this is not really true. The author is now widely disliked, but there is no consensus among the wider fantasy readership that it's bad.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:50
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tuyop posted:Otherwise, your critique is quite common and the kingkiller books are widely regarded as trash. I have absolutely no idea why people love it so much. Kvothe is a "gifted kid" power fantasy. The people who bought into being able to do anything because they had pretty good grades growing up, only Kvothe doesn't burn out as a kid and he always gets one over on his bullies. Maybe the second book changes that (hahahahaha) but that was my experience of the first and I felt no need to carry on. EDIT: Actual content: finished John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed: essays on a human-centered planet. It was a gift and not something I'd usually seek out, but decent enough. Green apparently started this as a podcast series and then polished them up for essay format. Everything is about some kind of element of the world that is created or changed by human intervention, from various technologies and products (like Dr Pepper) to things like the bacteria/antibiotics arms race, or how the modern lawn has benefited the Canadian goose. A lot of them are fairly heavy topics or turn into meandering reminiscences on his own life, though he tries to keep the tone from getting too bleak. Every essay also ends with a semi-serious, semi-joking rating of the thing in question on a scale of 5 stars. disposablewords fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 21:20
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disposablewords posted:Kvothe is a "gifted kid" power fantasy. The people who bought into being able to do anything because they had pretty good grades growing up, only Kvothe doesn't burn out as a kid and he always gets one over on his bullies. Maybe the second book changes that (hahahahaha) It does not, by the way. for those holding out for the third in the series to possibly resolve that, you are welcome to join those waiting for George R.R. Martin's The Winds of Winter in the 'Perpetually Delayed Sequels' club.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:11
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WoW is probably coming out first.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:37
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The Snow Leopard is the story of one man's profound and grueling two-month, 250-mile journey up his own rear end. Recovering from his wife's death, Peter Matthiessen leaves his grieving son with friends and goes to Nepal to engage in 300 pages of florid prose that alternates between hairshirtery, orientalism, pseudoscience, and casual racism. Matthiessen cannot resist interpreting his every mood swing for its profound significance. With those swings, he alternates between reading deep truths into the half-understood version of Buddhism he ascribes to local lamas, and referring to the residents of the steppe as either primitive or childish. In between there's plenty of time to endorse free energy theory, wax poetic with discredited racial theories about cultural commonalities and promote the existence of the yeti. The most remarkable thing is that he manages to make the high Himalayas so much about him, and, as a result, so goddamn boring. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 00:42
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Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh. I think the best way to describe this book would be that it's a YA dystopia novel, if the dystopia was the Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40k and the point of the book was showing just how profoundly hosed up and cruel that society is from the view of a young woman grown up in that society and thoroughly indoctrinated until a chance series of events leads her to escape and begin to understand just how terrible and dehumanizing her home society was (hint: the upbringing for human children in this book is flat out called the agoge). The whole thing felt to me like Emily Tesh was as frustrated with 40k and similar 'hard men making hard choices because it makes me the author hard' fascist space operas as I am. It's a more mature book than most YA fiction, covering weightier topics, and if you can get past the protagonist being intentionally written as a horrible person at the start and the book's total lack of nuance, I thought it was an enjoyable read, if hard to stomach at times because of the unflinching depictions of just how awful this space fascist society is.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:10
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Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015) I've been trying to get away from non-fiction/work-related books in my free time. In the past few months I read The Martian and Project Hail Mary back-to-back and then Ted Chiang's collection of short stories so I was looking for something in that vein. I wasn't really sure where to go next but someone on Discord suggested I start Tchaikovsky's series because the third book recently dropped. I loved it. It has a great spin on the whole "first contact" theme and good blend of interesting characters with different motivations and hard sci-fi aspects. It doesn't overwhelm you with walls of text explaining every detail and every plot device. It hops between chapters across vast timespans but still manages to allow you to stay mentally connected to what has already taken place. Even the "villains" at different points are complex enough that, once you get what they're trying to do, makes them less of a villain and more just an actor with a different set of priorities. A lot of fun, creative plot devices and a nice twist at the end. I am looking forward to starting the second book (Children of Ruin). Goodreads / Amazon
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Jun 26, 2023 19:01
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If you’re looking for something else that’s equally amazing check out Semiosis!
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Jun 26, 2023 23:40
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luscious posted:If you’re looking for something else that’s equally amazing check out Semiosis! Will add that to my list - it sounds pretty similar. Thanks!
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Jun 27, 2023 12:33
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The last three books I’ve finished are Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man. I have never read main characters that drink so much. It was omnipresent, haha. Anyway, fun books. I saw the twist coming in the latter two but they were still worth it. The Thin Man was the best of the three.
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Jun 27, 2023 23:23
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pmchem posted:The last three books I’ve finished are Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man. You owe it to yourself to watch the film. Myrna Loy and William Powell together is possibly the best actor pairing of all time. https://youtu.be/ZSKHq1EjvL4
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Jun 28, 2023 02:01
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I just finished She Who Became the Sun and in the last few chapters out of nowhere I stumbled on the bit that inspired the quote: "And honestly the fisting scene is so romantic," without knowing it was from that book
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Jun 29, 2023 13:46
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pmchem posted:The last three books I’ve finished are Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man. Red Harvest was probably the first crime novel I read that wasn't like Poirot, Holmes, Lupin, or Detektivtvillingar. I really didn't get it until I re-read it when I was no longer ten. Then I read all the other Hammetts I could get my hands on.
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Jun 29, 2023 18:58
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Just finished Lords of Uncreation. I think Tchaikovsky stuck the landing on the trilogy although I sure liked the second half better than the first
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Jul 1, 2023 03:19
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I just finished The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette (under the pen name Katherine Addison) I liked it a lot. It's not your standard fantasy fare. There's no ancient evils or battles with huge consequences. It's a pretty low key fantasy about a good person being thrust into court intrigue and trying to navigate that while doing their best to not to be a piece of poo poo while doing it. It's heartening watching the protagonist win people over by being a good person.
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Jul 1, 2023 07:04
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Into the Drowning Deep by Seanan McGuire, under pen name Mira Grant. Honestly, I'm getting bored of scientific expeditions to the sea meeting sea monsters because almost every single one has been so formulaic. This is an excellent example of the breed in execution, and has just enough novelty with some of the characters (a queer love story, a scientist character who knows full well what the monsters are capable of and that's why she didn't want to go on the expedition to find them) to make it a pretty enjoyable read, but at the end of the day if you've read a book like this before this book has no surprises to speak of.
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Jul 1, 2023 15:58
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Ginette Reno posted:I just finished The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette (under the pen name Katherine Addison) I wondered why she needed a pen name and found this: quote:The pseudonym was created by author Sarah Monette to satisfy the demands of the publishing industry. As she explains in our interview, her real name had become a "deal-breaker" after sales of the four books of her Doctrine of Labyrinths series had fallen short of expectations.
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Jul 1, 2023 16:55
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Armauk posted:I wondered why she needed a pen name and found this: This happens a lot to print authors. The first book comes out and doesn't sell out, so the automated system that orders all the book orders slightly fewer copies of the second one, which doesn't sell out, so the system orders fewer copies of the third one, etc, until the author is unsellable.
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Jul 1, 2023 18:01
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Is it easy to know if an author is using a pen name? I'm worried now that I've been misattributing authorship if it's a common occurrence.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:11
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