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Taeke posted:Use of Weapons lol To be fair to the novel, I read it right as I was leaving the military (  ) and it was a weird time in my life to be thinking about the themes it wanted to explore. Actually that’s gotten worse and worse and now I can’t even really read uncritical or “glorious” military fiction. I even put the last expanse book down because there are way too many noble warrior types justifying violence and power all over the place there. I made it like halfway through Armor. I think the genre is just ruined for me maybe.
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Aug 10, 2023 01:40
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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 feel like starting with Consider Phlebas / trying to read in publication order is a common mistake. I did that too, and I didn't finish Consider Phlebas, but picked up and enjoyed Player of Games some years later. I think I just don't particularly care for the Culture novels, though. Part of it, I'm sure, is my relatively unfair feeling of disgust-by-association with Musk and his techbro cultists adopting and severely misinterpreting them. But I picked up one of the military/Special Circumstances ones, either Excession or Use of Weapons, I forget which, and also didn't finish it. My hometown library had Matter on the shelf, which is one of the later ones, right? I didn't bother to check it out before I moved last year, but maybe I should give it a try at some point. Charles Stross' Accelerando is still my benchmark for post-scarcity / AI / uploaded-mind stuff, though. And he's expressed similar sentiments about techbros getting all excited about it while also misinterpreting what he was trying to say.
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Aug 10, 2023 04:42
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On a similar vein, I've talked to folks who hated Player of Games because they saw it as a power fantasy where a person who's good at games just goes out and changes the universe. I can see where that comes from but I think it's a bad interpretation because I see the book as the Minds manipulating this one weirdo who's super into games into doing what they want. There is a lot in the Culture books that is subtly done, and I haven't read it recently so maybe I'm making it up, but the books are not about beneficent AI and rational people beating the irrational. There are a few morals (which I tend to agree with) like cooperation tends to lead to success, but those morals are far from absolute, and nobody is really good or rational, the Minds are just better at appearing that way. Having said all that, Consider Phlebas is mediocre pulp. Mainly worth reading for the adrenaline rush of "They mentioned that thing I like", although I do still remember the scene at the end where the Culture ambassador spits out a tooth that becomes a gun
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Aug 10, 2023 05:37
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istewart posted:Charles Stross' Accelerando is still my benchmark for post-scarcity / AI / uploaded-mind stuff, though. And he's expressed similar sentiments about techbros getting all excited about it while also misinterpreting what he was trying to say. I’ll add that to my list! Greg Egan’s Diaspora is my go-to in that sub genre. I loving love that book and how bleak and dark it is.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:22
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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Catherine Webb (as Claire North) - I really enjoyed this book. It introduces us to a world where there exists a secret society of century-spanning time loopers (when they die, they start their lives over remembering their previous lives) and follows the story of Harry August in his journey as he discovers and comes to terms with what he is, finds the society, and attempts to stop another of his kind that is causing the end of the world much earlier than it should. The author jumps around Harry's lives in each chapter, but each chapter is short and purposeful. I was sucked in and couldn't put the book down. I know there has been some negative reception over the years, which is valid. Harry is an anomaly of an anomaly in that he has perfect memory, where most of his kinds' memories become fuzzy as their lives progress. He is very much in the right place at the right time making nearly perfect decisions or simply getting lucky as the story progresses. His goal is essentially to stop progress in order to maintain the status quo, but the "progress" is causing mass future murder by ending the world centuries before it should. But I can put those things aside for a page-turner like this book was for me.
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Aug 10, 2023 16:43
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I finished Memories of Ice. I want to check out the Malazan thread, but I'm afraid of spoilers. It's going to take a long time before I can open that thread.
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Aug 16, 2023 17:28
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Dirac Fourier posted:I finished Memories of Ice. I want to check out the Malazan thread, but I'm afraid of spoilers. It's going to take a long time before I can open that thread.
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Aug 16, 2023 18:05
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Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. I am probably going to read the manga soon, too. It was hard to get into at first but once I did I couldn't put it down. It's not written in a style I usually enjoy, and the author over-explains a ton, pointing out plot twists or character motivations multiple times. Sometimes this builds tension, as you wait for the description to end and someone else to die horribly, but sometimes it was tedious. I did like the story and especially the ending. There's a dreamy quality to the ending that gives some ambiguity as to what you are seeing. Some critiques I have heard in the past were mostly plot-related, like how 15 year old kids could manage to shoot guns and hack computers so excellently, and while I have my own thoughts on that in the end I didn't really care about the suspension of disbelief. I cared more about the moral questions and motifs the book brings up, and not all of them are "when should you murder?" All-in-all I think it was really enjoyable and I look forward to seeing if the manga handles some of the agonized descriptions of character A looking at character B and smiling for the twentieth time better than the novel. Now I am working through The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating which I am not sure I will finish. I do like snails a lot, but something about the author's humanization of this animal is really rubbing me the wrong way.
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Aug 16, 2023 19:26
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don longjohns posted:I cared more about the moral questions and motifs the book brings up, and not all of them are "when should you murder?"  the movie is top ten films for me, and the ending has a dreamy quality too. the water gun, the boat trip away and then the city "let's go/run!" freeze frame, I love it dearly ^_^
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Aug 18, 2023 14:01
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Wrapped The Passenger. It's my least favorite McCarthy so far. It's like if No Country For Old Men was only the parts where the Sheriff ruminates on how his life didn't go the way he wanted, without the action sequences. The Thalidomide Kid was my favorite character. I'm still going to read Stella Maris for completionism. Sometimes the last novel an author writes will surprise you at the end, even if you didn't enjoy the rest. Interlibrary Loan was like that. A real slog until the very last page, which was an incredible ending to Wolfe's literary career.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:28
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don longjohns posted:Now I am working through The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating which I am not sure I will finish. I do like snails a lot, but something about the author's humanization of this animal is really rubbing me the wrong way. Aw, I loved that book! But yeah I can see how it might not be someone’s cup of tea.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:24
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tuyop posted:Aw, I loved that book! But yeah I can see how it might not be someone’s cup of tea. I very much enjoy the author's style so I am going to stick with it for a bit. And man I really do love snails 😍
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Aug 19, 2023 06:54
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Just (finally) finished this month's (and last's) BotM Suttree. Gorgeously written. Personal nobility rising above brutal squalor. Concluding you are the only you. Good stuff.
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Aug 21, 2023 05:46
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Got morbidly curious due to the Dilbert thread in GBS, so powered through the audio book version of Win Bigly by Scott Adams. I don't use this word ever, but Scott Adams is utterly deluded. From acting like he invented concepts like "People interpret reality differently based on their ideas and experiences" and giving it stupid names like "Filters", to being unable to shut up how he studied Hypnotism and how that gave him some kind of deep insight into the human mind (I swear he mentions it at least every 5 minutes of the audio book), and then going about how anti-Trump people have Confirmation bias while he post-hoc rationalizes everything Trump did and being completely unaware of his own bias. I'd almost say this was a waste of time, but it really provided me with a fascinating look at how a completely blind-to-his-own-faults narcisst perceives reality.
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Aug 21, 2023 11:06
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Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth, a sort of Western set in 19th century Australia. Definitely Cormac McCarthy influenced. Personally I loved it and found it gripping throughout. Very pleasantly surprised with this one.
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Aug 22, 2023 04:07
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The Oracle Year by Charles Soule: I enjoy Soule's comic book work - especially when he works with artist Ryan Browne - so I wanted to give his debut novel a go (he's written 2 more since this one was published). A pretty standard plot-driven thriller. I didn't love the characters or feel particularly invested in anything that was happening. The story is driven by the main character receiving predictions of the future in a dream that start coming true and what he does with this information. Government black ops, religious zealots, clandestine hackers, rogue journalists, and genius best friends all make an appearance as you'd expect from a by-the-numbers thriller. At the end, I'm left with a big question completely unanswered and a general feeling of "I should've read this next to a pool."
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Aug 24, 2023 14:57
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White Tears by Hari Kunzru Before this book I had read Kunzru's Red Pill and only had a vague idea that this is going to be about racism. The first third is about a weak-willed music nerd and his cool college friend obsessing about old blues records but then it takes a turn into horror which I didn't expect at all. Well written and a joy to read.
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Aug 25, 2023 15:02
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i was up until three in the morning last night finishing up Bone by Jeff Smith and i literally could not sleep because i couldn't get it out of my head. what an incredible page turner of a comic.
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Aug 25, 2023 17:51
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American Prison by Shane Bauer. A journalist gets a job as a prison guard, works there for a few months, writes a book about it. Very good, short read. Nonfiction
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Aug 26, 2023 19:55
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EightFlyingCars posted:i was up until three in the morning last night finishing up Bone by Jeff Smith and i literally could not sleep because i couldn't get it out of my head. what an incredible page turner of a comic. I haven’t read it in a few years and this post makes me want to read it again…
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Aug 26, 2023 22:06
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Jordan7hm posted:I haven’t read it in a few years and this post makes me want to read it again… i always knew it was supposed to be good, but i wasn't expecting it to be so good that it nearly physically hurt to close the back cover spinning out a very sunday funnies cartoon aesthetic into a surprisingly heavy fantasy story worked better than i ever could have expected. it's wizard poo poo
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Aug 26, 2023 23:17
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Just finished The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin. Really good book about the responsibility and corruption of power.
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Aug 28, 2023 06:19
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Animorphs: The Invasion by K.A. Applegate: My 7yo daughter saw this in our local library, was entranced by the cover and really wanted to get it. I told her I remembered reading it as a kid but I was a few years older than her at the time, and I couldn't remember if it was too mature. I promised I would read it and let her know. After doing that, I feel that she would probably be okay, but some of the descriptions of the aliens and the fight scene at the end may scare her. I may read it with her and see how she does. I saw there was a goldmined thread reading through the series, so I'll definitely check that thread out because re-reading the book really made me want to revisit it all.
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Aug 28, 2023 22:04
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Good-Natured Filth posted:Animorphs: The Invasion by K.A. Applegate: My 7yo daughter saw this in our local library, was entranced by the cover and really wanted to get it. I told her I remembered reading it as a kid but I was a few years older than her at the time, and I couldn't remember if it was too mature. I promised I would read it and let her know. After doing that, I feel that she would probably be okay, but some of the descriptions of the aliens and the fight scene at the end may scare her. I may read it with her and see how she does. reading with your kid is always the best move. my mom read books for my sister and i all through our childhoods and they're some of my fondest memories
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Aug 28, 2023 22:27
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Yeah my mom never restricted what I read, she just read it with me if she thought it was inappropriate. That way I didn't sneak behind her back and get hosed up reading scary poo poo My bio dad was the one just handing me books and sending me on my merry way, and since my mom didn't outright forbid me from reading anything, I read some... stuff...
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Aug 28, 2023 22:50
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I recently heard of the 1983 book Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors by the pseudonymous "Rex Feral". It purports to be just what the title says: how to set yourself up in the murder-for-hire business, as told by an actual successful hit man. The publisher apparently landed in legal hot water when people used the information in the book to commit actual murders, and their disclaimer at the beginning didn't hold up in court. (Though it seems the killers failed at the whole "not getting caught" part, which the book spends a good deal of time on.) Some of the book's advice seems obvious ("dispose of the weapon afterward"), some seems questionable ("here's how to make a silencer out of common household items, trust me, it works great") and some is just outdated ("airlines won't check your ID if you buy your ticket with cash"). The funny part, which I discovered after reading: it seems this book wasn't actually written by a hit man, it was the work of an aspiring author who originally wanted to do a really detailed crime novel, for which she had researched/invented a bunch of info about how the murderer would go about it. It was the publisher's idea to take all that and change it from a story into a "how-to" and pretend it came from reality, purely for the notoriety. And hey, it worked. 
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Aug 28, 2023 23:57
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Ah, Paladin Press. I kinda miss them.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:28
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EightFlyingCars posted:reading with your kid is always the best move. my mom read books for my sister and i all through our childhoods and they're some of my fondest memories For sure. We read to both kids at bedtime still, but my daughter devours books and doesn't always wanna wait for Mommy or Daddy to finish them. 
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Aug 29, 2023 00:50
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The Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Juan Gimenez; translated by Justin Kelly, Julia Solis, Kathleen Janice, Ken Grobe, & Natasha Ruck. This graphic novel is a spin off of Jodorowsky's The Incal series (of which I have only read the original part) born out of his failed attempt to adapt Dune. I enjoyed this although it feels like the kind of book you get a lot more out of on a reread. The art was great and the plot was straightforward and predictable but in the tragic sense of the word, where you can see the character's decisions coming back to bite them or their descendants in the rear end over and over.
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Aug 31, 2023 00:23
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escape artist posted:American Prison by Shane Bauer. A journalist gets a job as a prison guard, works there for a few months, writes a book about it. Very good, short read. Nonfiction Picked this up after seeing your post. Good read. Sad to see how these corporations mishandle the lives of the individuals they house.
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Aug 31, 2023 01:17
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Finished up the Southern Reach trilogy today. I think I may have just been happier reading Annihilation and letting it exist on its own, but the other two are still enjoyable reads. Annihilation is one of those stories where it's really great because it doesn't feed you every answer, but also you desperately want those answers, even if you know getting them is probably gonna be disappointing. The other two books do a pretty good job of threading that needle between fleshing things out but not over answering. Out of curiosity, what are everyone's reading habits? I ask because I feel like I read a reasonable amount (half an hourish a day), but I keep running up against the library's return date on every book I take out. I started wondering if I had slowed down over the past few years of very little reading, but some online reading tests suggest I still read pretty well over the average speed.
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Aug 31, 2023 02:31
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Unemployed, so I read a lot much of every day.
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Aug 31, 2023 03:26
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Slugworth posted:Out of curiosity, what are everyone's reading habits? I ask because I feel like I read a reasonable amount (half an hourish a day), but I keep running up against the library's return date on every book I take out. I started wondering if I had slowed down over the past few years of very little reading, but some online reading tests suggest I still read pretty well over the average speed. Looking at usage stats for just my Kindle app, I read between 1-2 hours with it a day on average, and as far as I can tell my reading speed is on the slightly slower side of average usually. Just spitballing and going off of memory, but it seems like a typical 300-400 page book can take between 7-10 hours for the average reader (I'm just going off of the kindle average stats it will display -- I know I usually read a little slower than that). So if you do have a 10-hour book and you're only putting in a half hour a day, you'd definitely run out your library loan if it's 2 weeks (I assume that's still typical?). I will also say, that 1-2+ hours is spread through the day usually. I'll maybe read a bit when I wake up or before work, some during lunch, some after work, and I'll squeeze in a bit during work too if it's a slow day. They might each be just 10-20 minute snatches, but they add up. (I typically have both a physical book and an audiobook going, too, that wouldn't be included in that kindle usage count (not necessarily reading those with the same regularity as the ebooks, though) and at least this year I've averaged about 10 books a month -- but I do read some shorter things like manga and novellas that are included in that number.)
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Aug 31, 2023 03:38
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Bomber by Len Deighton tells the story of a fictional English airbase, the bomber raid it sends out in mid-1943, the fictional German town it destroys, and the Luftwaffe trying to fight them. The dozens of characters' stories do a fair job of summarizing the diversity of the countless human tragedies that occurred during the bombing campaigns. The German characters in particular display a convincingly complex variety of attitudes towards the Nazi state. Trivia: Not only was the book said to be the first to be written with a primitive tape-memory IBM word processor, but I was also surprised to learn that the author is still alive.
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Aug 31, 2023 14:43
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FPyat posted:Bomber by Len Deighton tells the story of a fictional English airbase, the bomber raid it sends out in mid-1943, the fictional German town it destroys, and the Luftwaffe trying to fight them. The dozens of characters' stories do a fair job of summarizing the diversity of the countless human tragedies that occurred during the bombing campaigns. The German characters in particular display a convincingly complex variety of attitudes towards the Nazi state. Where are all the Snowdens of yesteryear?
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Sep 2, 2023 01:00
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Slugworth posted:Out of curiosity, what are everyone's reading habits? I ask because I feel like I read a reasonable amount (half an hourish a day), but I keep running up against the library's return date on every book I take out. I started wondering if I had slowed down over the past few years of very little reading, but some online reading tests suggest I still read pretty well over the average speed. I get in a reading routine until something else grabs my attention. Usually 1-2 hours before I start my day since I work afternoons. I like reading nonfiction during that. I also just constantly have audiobooks going. Usually whenever I do manual chores or things that don’t also involve reading. I have a nonfiction and fiction going at once there, just swap when I feel like it.
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Sep 2, 2023 20:33
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What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman. An enjoyable, easy to read for laymen book about current scholarship and research concerning owls, from conservation to biology to behavior to history and mythology. It's not focused on any one particular subject about owls, just a general overview by someone who really loves owls and wants to share that with others. A brisk, easy read that I enjoyed, if also rather depressing near the end when Ackerman starts talking about how owls are historically and presently seen in cultures around the world, and the state of owl species and conservation around the world today.
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Sep 4, 2023 00:03
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Scythe by Neal Shusterman I recently received the whole trilogy as a gift never having heard of it. It sucked me in right at the beginning like I haven’t been sucked into a book in a long time, so that was exciting. It’s a really fun premise — post-mortal “utopian” society has no war, no poverty, no disease, no aging but still needs the population culled by the mysterious scythes who can “glean”, or legally kill who they choose. Two teenagers are chosen to be scythes’ apprentices and we follow their journey. As you may suspect the society is not quite so utopian as it seems. I enjoyed the book a lot and will read the sequels but I do feel like the world-building fell a little flat. I have a lot of questions about this world that the first book didn’t answer; we’ll see if the world is more filled in in the next installment.
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Sep 4, 2023 19:21
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boquiabierta posted:Scythe by Neal Shusterman I've read some of Shusterman's early books (The Shadow Club, Speeding Bullet, The Schwa Was Here), and they were decent, but I haven't followed up any of his more recent work.
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Sep 5, 2023 01:38
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Finished this 2022 translation of a 2015 Romanian book called Solenoid, and honestly somewhat frustrated at not getting it. I saw that the book had praise heaped upon it in a lot of publications for being a synthesis of Borges's and Kafka's themes, but the entire time I was reading it, I was just questioning if and when a semblance of a plot would develop. So much potential with things that were introduced that went virtually nowhere. Ultimately, the ending left me very jaded, and while the book was very well written/translated poetically, I still feel like all the praise I saw of it being "the greatest novel of the 21st century so far" was overblown. I also finished another book I had withdrawn from the library titled When Crack Was King about the titular rise of crack cocaine as a street drug and its effects upon communities and people. It was interesting reading the two accounts of the former Baltimore mayor and a Newark drug dealer's lives during the crack era, but I felt it could have used something more. The other two people whose lives the book focused on got comparatively little attention compared to the first two, and I felt that it could have been shored up a little better in that aspect by drawing on more accounts. As to reading habits, I try to hit about 100 pages a day in whatever I'm reading. This regularly means 1-2 hours of reading during the weekdays and a lot longer when allowed for the weekends, but the form that this takes can vary. I typically will read in large chunks, take a break with something that doesn't involve reading or staring at a screen, and do some lighter reading if I still feel the itch to do so (poetry, short stories, etc.) after wrapping up my main reading target for the day.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:47
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