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He strikes me as rather progressive...for his time. He got his start as an author by hopping around the South Pacific during and after WWII and being genuinely curious about people and places and customs he was not familiar with. "If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home." I heard his book The Drifters is a sympathetic look at the anchorless post-war generation searching for meaning. But I haven't read it. His worst take, as far as I can tell, is that he assumes the Great Man of History as a default. Everybody should have their place and time, and it is just a matter of seizing your destiny? I dunno. Honestly he's a really hard fellow to pin down. (Maybe because a lot of his later books fell into a formula that worked, and one of those formulas was having research assistants do a lot of the history heavy lifting; so there is not so much of a message being told, but a readable recount of popular history.) I applaud him for exposing middle America of the late-20th century to the wonders of history and other cultures, but it's also a very acceptable-in-polite-society view of multiculturalism.
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Jul 31, 2023 08:26
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malnourish posted:I wish the world had been further explored and the mystery more developed.
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Jul 31, 2023 21:56
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White Coke posted:Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was by Barry Hughart. I read this because I kept seeing people say that it was one of their favorite books and I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of the first two Discworld books, which I liked the most out of the ones I've read (the first ten) which I've been told puts me at odds with most people who've read the books. Like those books there's an overarching plot that connects relatively self contained smaller stories. One of things I liked the most is that while supernatural forces exist in the world there're also lots of instances of people faking the supernatural or misunderstanding what is happening on which created uncertainty about what was going on and added to the mysteries of the plot. A big-up for this. The Master Li and Number Ten Ox books are huge fun. They are contrived (there's a many a scene with "Now how can we enter the palace? If only we had a cart of fish, fireworks, and a horse costume ..." "But master, I saw a cart ...") but it's part of the humour. More of a dry farce than the slapstick of Discworld. I think you can get an omnibus version now. I once read an article from Hughart who was disappointed the books hadn't done better but there's clearly a small fandom out there.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:15
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Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. Took me two months to finish this. It's a short story collection tied together with a Big Brother-like reality show satire. But the connecting plot felt dumb and unnecessary, just people torturing each other for no reason. A few stories were good but Make Something Up is definitely the better story collection.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:39
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mellonbread posted:This was exactly why I loved Piranesi. [...] Better to be left wanting more than infodumped to death. I agree with the latter half. While I'd have preferred exploration of the character via exploration of the labyrinth, at least the story wrapped up instead of dragged out
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Aug 1, 2023 03:26
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mellonbread posted:This was exactly why I loved Piranesi. It built a very compact yet evocative setting without larding things down through needless exposition. When it ran out of things for the reader to discover, it ended gracefully rather than dragging things out. Better to be left wanting more than infodumped to death. Complete 50/50 on whether you've read House of Leaves or not.
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Aug 1, 2023 04:16
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FPyat posted:Complete 50/50 on whether you've read House of Leaves or not.
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Aug 1, 2023 17:14
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Two books I recently read; Fatherland by Robert Harris. A thriller set in an alternate 1964, were the Germans won World War II. The book follows Xavier March, a member of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei (criminal investigations), as he investigates the death of high-ranking Nazi official Josef Bühler. I stayed up all night reading the book, which should indicate how much I enjoyed it. I had a little trouble following the real-life personalities in the book, but Harris does explain who’s who when they’re introduced as well as having a brief description in the afterword. The Way Home: Two Novellas from the World of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle – As the title suggests, this book contains two stories set in Beagle’s popular novel; the previously published Two Hearts and a new story, Sooz. Two Hearts, which I had previously read, follows a young girl, Sooz, as she seeks help for her village, which is being menaced by a griffin. I remember reading a forward to this story, where Beagle said he was hesitant to write a sequel to The Last Unicorn. His publisher told him he did have to write a sequel, just another story set in the same world. Of course, Beagle ended up bringing back several characters from Last Unicorn for this story. I have always enjoyed this story and felt it was worth the price of the book. I can’t say that I enjoyed the story Sooz, which follows the protagonist of Two Hearts about ten years later, on a quest to find her long-lost sister. I can’t really say why, but this story had trouble holding my attention. I feel like I’m being unfair to it, so I might try reading it again. The_Other fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 22:40
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The Devil in the White City left me with the feeling that I hadn't learned very much, though that may be a problem of me being too familiar with the 1890s than the fault of the book. Larson could at the least have told me a bit more about how the Ferris Wheel was erected.
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Aug 3, 2023 06:17
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I went to a dinner with a friend and his friends a few years ago and one of them had just read that book and went into exhaustive and enthusiastic detail about all the traps in the killer's murder house. He seemed to really enjoy it, but, nah, I'll pass.
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Aug 3, 2023 06:36
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FPyat posted:What would you say are Michener's best and worst opinions about politics/humanity/society/culture/history? Oh yeah, I should probably point out that there are a few too many passages about underage sex. Usually an older guy being treated to the Tahitian "hospitality" of a 15-year-old related to the local chief or whatever. I think I see perhaps why Michener fell for the South Pacific when he was sent there by the military, but won't just come out and say it. It could have its place as a narrative device, but, nah, I think it's mostly there to perk up the dudes reading these bricks while on long plane and train journeys.
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Aug 3, 2023 08:54
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Few fictional works Ive read recently The Quiet American by Graham Greene - Excellent, tight, prose and a shocking amount of foresight considering it was written and published in the early 50s. A classic that may be is forgotten, about a british journalist in vietnam during the collapsing french occupation and his story about an american sort-of friend he made who is found murdered. A quick read and just plain fantastic up until the last line. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati - A book about a long forgotten fort in northern Italy and the story of a new soldier who gets assigned to it. It slowly morphs into a deeply pessimistic book about the failure of living ones live to the fullest because they prefer to "wait and see" for the next thing that probably never comes. Prose is light, some beautiful passages in it nevertheless, but I found it to be a downer. A well made downer but nevertheless. You might find it a good kick in the rear end to get you to live your life. Or it may just bum you out. V. by Thomas Pynchon - Well I can say I finally grew out of my fascination with post-modernist lit. Maybe I'm getting older or maybe this was some heavily masturbatory bullshit but there you go. I appreciated the characters he came up with and the personalities that went along with it. I can see what he was trying to do but it became a chore to read halfway through. Some parts were wonderfully made, but as a whole it was rendered incoherent. Probably worked better if it was a bunch of short stories but that would certainly detract from what he was attempting to do. I dont even know, plot wise, what really happened. Its definitely a vibes book that you just let wash over you. If youre into that sort of thing.
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Aug 6, 2023 02:47
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I just finished Nine Princes in Amber. Did not like. The first part where he has no memory was ok, but the writing quickly became mechanical and lazy, like someone describing their D&D games but without any interesting characters. Maybe I'm just too old for this type of fantasy book? Before that, I read Never Let Me Go. Very complicated feelings about it, lots to like and unpack. It deals with some interesting ideas, but the most interesting part to me is just the writing of the book. I thought it was compelling without ever being very mysterious or exciting. I just liked the main character and wanted to see things turn out ok for her.
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Aug 6, 2023 04:32
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Translation State, by Ann Leckie. Literally just finished. A follow-up to her "Imperial Radch" trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Sword, and Mercy), set outside the Radch a few years on. I've really enjoyed Leckie's stuff so far, but this was a weird mix of really engaging and yet... kind of underwhelming to me. It doesn't have the same meditative yet angry and blunt mood the Radch trilogy has through its protagonist Breq, and so lacks some of the more evocative imagery we'd get through Breq's recollections and her fiercely opinionated views. A lot of its issues also, I think, come from having three rotating perspective characters. None of them really feels like they get quite enough time to really develop properly, meaning what development we do get is a bit disjointed. One of them really could have just been demoted to a secondary character, allowing things to focus more on the other two. I still really enjoyed it, and the book never left my side until I finished it just now. But it's just not Leckie's strongest work.
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Aug 6, 2023 05:21
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StumblyWumbly posted:I just finished Nine Princes in Amber. Did not like. The first part where he has no memory was ok, but the writing quickly became mechanical and lazy, like someone describing their D&D games but without any interesting characters. Maybe I'm just too old for this type of fantasy book? As someone who finished the first half of the series I can assure you the quality only gets worse. All the allusions the backstabbing and secret alliances gets flattened into a nonsense apocalypse Story filled with characters who only flatten the more you see them in the narrative. The second half of the series trues to regain some of that lost momentum from the Bourne adjacent parts of the first but ends up quickly becoming comical; no less than three people from our world reveal that they know the protagonist is secretly a wizard from amber before either dying or loving off without actually revealing anything to him except that he's in danger. A fact he is already well aware of. Also he's a wizard hacker who does computers so hard he invents an ai that can control shadows. Just absolute nonsense.
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Aug 6, 2023 15:28
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Tsitsikovas posted:V. by Thomas Pynchon - Well I can say I finally grew out of my fascination with post-modernist lit. Maybe I'm getting older or maybe this was some heavily masturbatory bullshit but there you go. I appreciated the characters he came up with and the personalities that went along with it. I can see what he was trying to do but it became a chore to read halfway through. Some parts were wonderfully made, but as a whole it was rendered incoherent. Probably worked better if it was a bunch of short stories but that would certainly detract from what he was attempting to do. I dont even know, plot wise, what really happened. Its definitely a vibes book that you just let wash over you. If youre into that sort of thing. FYI, we read this as a BotM a few years back, the thread in case you were interested: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3883803 I personally loved V. but if we all liked the same thing books would not be anywhere as diverse as they are!
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Aug 6, 2023 18:53
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disposablewords posted:Translation State, by Ann Leckie. Literally just finished. A follow-up to her "Imperial Radch" trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Sword, and Mercy), set outside the Radch a few years on. I've really enjoyed Leckie's stuff so far, but this was a weird mix of really engaging and yet... kind of underwhelming to me. It doesn't have the same meditative yet angry and blunt mood the Radch trilogy has through its protagonist Breq, and so lacks some of the more evocative imagery we'd get through Breq's recollections and her fiercely opinionated views. A lot of its issues also, I think, come from having three rotating perspective characters. None of them really feels like they get quite enough time to really develop properly, meaning what development we do get is a bit disjointed. One of them really could have just been demoted to a secondary character, allowing things to focus more on the other two. I still really enjoyed it, and the book never left my side until I finished it just now. But it's just not Leckie's strongest work. I also just finished it! I do agree with a lot of this. I thought the middle third especially dragged until the surprising thing happened that kicked off the last act--that middle bit at least could have probably been a bit shorter or quicker to get to the big setpiece finale. I don't know if you also read Provenance (which was the Radch spinoff before this), but it also felt a lot different from the first three books (though more similar to Translation State than not) and focused a lot more on individuals and politics and only zoomed out to bigger problems/action sequences at the end, but I did end up still enjoying it, too. The way that Provenance and Translation State seem to be working together as spinoffs/sequels (specifically with having some crossover characters/referenced past events that all impact the Treaty), I'm starting to think (and hope) that Leckie is setting up something really big to happen with the Presger and all the other civilizations we've seen so far in another book or two. She seems really interested in exploring sort of "what happens next." Like you could almost take Ancillary Justice by itself and not read anything else and be satisfied with the revenge ending it has, but the following four books have all been going further and further into the ramifications of what happened in AJ, and just how many ways past events (including ones outside the Radch) impact future ones. I'm definitely interested to see where it goes.
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Aug 6, 2023 20:41
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Should we make a companion thread, "What did you just DNF?" so I can write about all the books I gave up on
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Aug 6, 2023 23:13
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escape artist posted:Should we make a companion thread, "What did you just DNF?" so I can write about all the books I gave up on we used to have a thread like that IIRC but it was a while ago. I'm fine with warning folks off terrible books but other folks might like those books or authors and I'd hate for folks to become upset seeing someone trash a fav and lead to conflict that might require my having to learn what these buttons I now have do. OTOH, if folks can put in terms of why they personally could not finish it that would work.
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Aug 7, 2023 00:10
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Oh come now. I think that goons are more than capable of having those type of conversations without resorting to rudeness or childish insults. Dummy
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Aug 7, 2023 01:07
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DurianGray posted:The way that Provenance and Translation State seem to be working together as spinoffs/sequels (specifically with having some crossover characters/referenced past events that all impact the Treaty), I'm starting to think (and hope) that Leckie is setting up something really big to happen with the Presger and all the other civilizations we've seen so far in another book or two. She seems really interested in exploring sort of "what happens next." Like you could almost take Ancillary Justice by itself and not read anything else and be satisfied with the revenge ending it has, but the following four books have all been going further and further into the ramifications of what happened in AJ, and just how many ways past events (including ones outside the Radch) impact future ones. I'm definitely interested to see where it goes. I haven't yet read Provenance, this was more of an opportunistic find in my library. (As were the original Ancillary trilogy.) But! I already had the same kinds of thoughts on where the setting seems to be going, just off of Ancillary and TS. It felt to me like Leckie is presenting what looks like a stable but repressive status quo, examining it for faults, and then slapping up the bombs. It's a slow detonation, but shrapnel is already flying.
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Aug 7, 2023 02:00
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StumblyWumbly posted:I just finished Nine Princes in Amber. Did not like. The first part where he has no memory was ok, but the writing quickly became mechanical and lazy, like someone describing their D&D games but without any interesting characters. Maybe I'm just too old for this type of fantasy book? The real value of the Amber book series was providing the setting for the Amber role-playing game, which (as you came close to suggesting) is really its best destiny. I read through the whole Amber series one time, 20-some-odd years ago. It was... okay. Quick read, got the job done. But I really only read it to get the full backstory for the tremendously entertaining Amber campaign my gaming group had taken up.
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Aug 7, 2023 02:36
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That game system sound dope as hell
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Aug 7, 2023 03:35
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Bilirubin posted:we used to have a thread like that IIRC but it was a while ago. I'm fine with warning folks off terrible books but other folks might like those books or authors and I'd hate for folks to become upset seeing someone trash a fav and lead to conflict that might require my having to learn what these buttons I now have do. OTOH, if folks can put in terms of why they personally could not finish it that would work. I've DNFed quite a few modern horror books and rather than keep making GBS threads up the horror thread with my negativity, I figured I could put it elsewhere 
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Aug 7, 2023 03:55
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Bilirubin posted:FYI, we read this as a BotM a few years back, the thread in case you were interested: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3883803 oh sick! I certainly have to read that thread then. Like you said/implied, different POVs are always good to have. Could recontextualize some things for me. My adoration for it varied by chapter. I think really, the entire Mondaugan chapter left a supremely bitter taste in my mouth. Very frustrating part of the book, and not in that tough-but-rewarding way for me. Just felt perverted.. Most of the other sagas within were engaging, but sadly I was just happy to be done with it when I got to the end lol. Maybe I'll revisit it in the future.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:32
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Powered Descent posted:The real value of the Amber book series was providing the setting for the Amber role-playing game, which (as you came close to suggesting) is really its best destiny.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:42
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Tsitsikovas posted:oh sick! I certainly have to read that thread then. Like you said/implied, different POVs are always good to have. Could recontextualize some things for me. Yeah, Pynchon is a supremely talented and dense writer but he also dives straight into some weird sex places. I should check out that thread. I read V a long time ago as part of a class and really liked it. I feel like its interpretation would change now because interaction with technology is such a big theme, and we're at a very different place now than when it came out in the 1963.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:48
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oldpainless posted:Oh come now. I think that goons are more than capable of having those type of conversations without resorting to rudeness or childish insults.  (seriously don't want to be judged for being a fan of the Thomas Covenant books back in the day  )
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Aug 7, 2023 05:01
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Tsitsikovas posted:oh sick! I certainly have to read that thread then. Like you said/implied, different POVs are always good to have. Could recontextualize some things for me. escape artist posted:I've DNFed quite a few modern horror books and rather than keep making GBS threads up the horror thread with my negativity, I figured I could put it elsewhere I mean,  but horror is a particular niche so if most of what you are DNFing is that you're doing fine I think. But I think the larger topic is worth discussing for sure. I always love an opportunity to mention my one attempt with a David Eddings book 
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Aug 7, 2023 05:44
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Slow Horses and Dead Lions by Mick Herron, Slough House series books 1 and 2 I picked these up because I was curious if they would make me want to watch the Apple TV streaming adaptation with Gary Oldman. The series-entitling Slough House is an annex of England's MI5 counterintelligence service where underperforming agents (the "slow horses" that lend book 1 its title) are sent to perform drudge work in hopes that they will eventually resign on their own. This is in contrast to the gleaming MI5 headquarters at Regent's Park, where almost all the main characters desire to return, even though no "slow horse" assigned to Slough House ever has. This is all apparently made up for the books, as real-life MI5 headquarters doesn't appear to be anywhere near Regent's Park. The author admits, in his introduction to the 10th anniversary reprint of book 1, that he set out to write these books knowing far more about office politics than about intelligence services, so the contrivance works to set up the bifurcated social hierarchy in which the characters live. Being an American with a jaded perspective on the UK and its cultural influence, especially post-Brexit, these novels definitely feel distinctly British to me. All of the characters seem quite miserable and severely afflicted with status anxiety. Jackson Lamb, the boss of Slough House, is continually comically depicted as slovenly and rude, constantly scratching himself in inappropriate places and farting. He clearly feels entitled to terrify and abuse his employees, and since this is the last stop on the line out of MI5, they can either take it or quit. By contrast, the higher-ups at Regent's Park who have consigned the slow horses to their fate are willing to give Lamb this little fiefdom because he's a burnout Cold War veteran who had extensive experience operating in East Berlin, so he knows quite a lot of historical secrets, and literally where some bodies are buried. The plots of the books so far tend to revolve around Lamb coming back into his skills and abilities despite his repellent outward persona, the old soldier getting his mojo back. If you're a fan of that type of story, these books are not at all a bad implementation of the trope. The rest of the cast aren't so solidly developed as Lamb. The main point-of-view character is River Cartwright, a younger agent who was consigned to "slow horse" status after his rival at Regent's Park threw a wrench into a training exercise that resulted in River ordering the closure of the central Underground hub at King's Cross during peak commute hours. But Cartwright's most defining character trait is his relationship with his grandfather David, a former MI5 boss. Through the first two books, he doesn't seem to have much else going on in his life besides work and visiting his grandpa. Likewise, Lamb's veteran secretary Catherine Standish slots quite admirably into a second-in-command role during the climax of the first book, but otherwise, Herron leans a bit too heavily on her being a recovering alcoholic as her only defining characteristic. The good news is that the relative lack of character development is to make room for a packed ensemble cast, which Herron uses effectively, as not every character makes it out of each book alive. He's very good at stacking up and pacing a sequence of plot twists, including character deaths, although the big plot the characters are trying to unravel in each book tends to fall a bit flat by the end. The plot in the first book particularly ends up being driven by the vain PR obsession of the higher-ups at Regent's Park, which poked the tiniest of holes in my suspension of disbelief. Perhaps I still have too much optimism in thinking that real-life intelligence services wouldn't be so callously self-obsessed. Overall, I can see myself continuing with this series, although probably not right away. The series looks to be up to 8 books now, but the depressive status anxiety that suffuses them would surely wear away at me if I read them all at once. Reading the books hasn't pushed the TV series beyond a definite "maybe" for me, though. Seriously, book 2 dials up Lamb's constant farting so much that I halfway expect the TV show to have a fart track akin to a sitcom laugh track whenever Gary Oldman is on screen.
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Aug 7, 2023 08:26
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The Master and Margarita. I really loved it! It was funny and cute and kind of a perfect farce. Great book.
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Aug 7, 2023 13:01
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Choke by Chuck Palahniuk Compared to his other works this novel felt light and breezy. As usual there were gross things involving sex and human anatomy but that seemed quite mild in contrast. This was author's next book after the Fight Club movie came out, I suspect he might have written it with a larger audience in mind. For the full experience I saw the movie starring Sam Rockwell, too. It painstakingly depicts almost all the scenes from the book and slightly changes the narrative, but there really wasn't anything worth watching it for. 4/5 for the novel, 2/5 for the movie.
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Aug 8, 2023 12:19
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Last book I DNFed was The Night Land. Cool setting but actually reading it was an absolute slog. It sat in my to-be-read pile for months at maybe 20% completion until I accepted defeat and tossed it in a little free library.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:08
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I spent like two months reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks expecting it to turn into... something, instead of the nothing that it petered out into. I get what the theme was, but when you have that as your theme you are then forced to be held to the strength of the basic story and there were just so many sequences that I found uninteresting populated with characters I didn't care about. Oh well. I'll still probably end up reading more Culture books in the future because I was interested in that part.
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Aug 8, 2023 21:08
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Boco_T posted:I spent like two months reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks expecting it to turn into... something, instead of the nothing that it petered out into. I get what the theme was, but when you have that as your theme you are then forced to be held to the strength of the basic story and there were just so many sequences that I found uninteresting populated with characters I didn't care about. Oh well. I'll still probably end up reading more Culture books in the future because I was interested in that part. Yeah the culture books are not all equally good. I think my favourite was probably player of games, but excision was also good! I didn’t like consider phlebas either, or use of weapons.
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Aug 8, 2023 21:54
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Day One by Nate Kenyon. It's a testament to how bored I was today that I finished this book, because this is some pure, uncut, mediocre schlock. We have a 'badass' reporter who once worked for the New York Times but was fired because he exposed a wealthy and politically influential pedophile and all the evidence he gathered was tossed out in court, with a backstory as an astoundingly skilled member of a profession with a strangely specific skill set that's critically relevant to the coming global catastrophe because he made an enemy of the CIA but they could never prove his involvement. We have extremely dated pop culture references and events. We have a government that gets taken over and everyone working for The Man is happy to follow their orders without question even when those orders are to start bombing New York City. We have a Wife for the main character who exists only to be pregnant and threatened with sexual violence by a random side character with no characterization beyond that he's a Bad Dude. It's like someone's script for a Sy-Fy Original Movie that couldn't get a director.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:08
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That sounds like Qanon.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:46
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lifg posted:That sounds like Qanon. Older than that. The evil AI is Terminator: Genisys. Skynet is in the internet! It's in the cloud! It can control anything with a microchip! The book explicitly takes place during Occupy Wall Street, and the protagonist used to be part of Anonymous, who the book assured me were super elite black hat hackers who went up against the CIA and won.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:56
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The King in Yellow I've read the yellow mythos connected stories separately before, It is however my first time reading the rest of the short stories. As hilarious as it is to see the back cover call it ten horrifying tales when a full half of them are melancholy at best and all of the back half are romantic, you shouldn't discount the back half. Chambers shows just as much talent in writing weird tales as he does in writing drama, The Street of the First Shell and Rue Barrée stand out as blending romantic interests with grounded dramatic events, whereas The Mask blends the romance with the weird in a satisfying way. The Demoiselle d'Ys is the most discordant of all the stories in tone but Is still suitably poignant, especially if you look at the stories less as a weird tale collection or romance collection and take it as an artist's lament at the perceived collapse of art in the wake of modernization during his lifetime, Chambers is nothing if not a classic Romanticist. Only The Court of the Dragon, aimless and not very scary although it has a great ending, and The Prophets' Paradise, too formless, fail to rank as entertainment.
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Aug 9, 2023 00:18
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tuyop posted:Yeah the culture books are not all equally good. I think my favourite was probably player of games, but excision was also good! I wrote my BA thesis on Use of Weapons lol Boco_T posted:I spent like two months reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks expecting it to turn into... something, instead of the nothing that it petered out into. I get what the theme was, but when you have that as your theme you are then forced to be held to the strength of the basic story and there were just so many sequences that I found uninteresting populated with characters I didn't care about. Oh well. I'll still probably end up reading more Culture books in the future because I was interested in that part. The Culture novels are all very different from one another and most recommend that even if Consider Phlebas doesn't click you should at least give Player of Games a shot because it's more like the rest of the novels. Consider Phlebas is kinda the odd one out because it's much more adventurous and the protagonist is from outside of the Culture, so if you're actually interested in the Culture you're in luck.
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Aug 9, 2023 16:10
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