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silvergoose posted:Have you read Harrow No, but it looks like it could be good
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Sep 26, 2023 01:19
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The Fifties by David Halberstam presents a broad view of the decade in America, with biographical portraits of figures as different as Nixon, Martin Luther King, Kerouac, and Betty Friedan. The cultural history was more interesting to learn about than the political events because they were less well-trodden ground for me. The accounts of the auto industry and the Korean War probably overlap a lot with the author's books on those topics. As for reading about later periods, Rick Perlstein's work sounds like it will serve me well for the sixties and seventies, but I haven't been able to find any books about the American eighties that aren't predominantly political.
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Sep 27, 2023 07:14
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FPyat posted:The Fifties by David Halberstam presents a broad view of the decade in America, with biographical portraits of figures as different as Nixon, Martin Luther King, Kerouac, and Betty Friedan. The cultural history was more interesting to learn about than the political events because they were less well-trodden ground for me. The accounts of the auto industry and the Korean War probably overlap a lot with the author's books on those topics. As for reading about later periods, Rick Perlstein's work sounds like it will serve me well for the sixties and seventies, but I haven't been able to find any books about the American eighties that aren't predominantly political. My favorite book about the eighties (as someone who grew up during them) is a humor book: Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor. It's a day-by-day summary of what was going on in the news from 1981 through 1988. You can get it as a pay-what-you-want ebook here.
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Sep 27, 2023 12:59
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Finished The Hero of Ages. This one was much better than the 2nd book, I think. The ending was solid. I am kind of disappointed that there's no continuation of the series to hear what happens immediately after the events with the world and characters. Does Secret History address this or is it just a retelling of the history which already happened with added bits?
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Sep 27, 2023 13:00
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McSpankWich posted:Finished The Hero of Ages. This one was much better than the 2nd book, I think. The ending was solid. I am kind of disappointed that there's no continuation of the series to hear what happens immediately after the events with the world and characters. Does Secret History address this or is it just a retelling of the history which already happened with added bits? Come join us in the Brando Sando thread and all your questions will be answered, with extreme spoiler tags. 
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Sep 27, 2023 15:32
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Selachian posted:My favorite book about the eighties (as someone who grew up during them) is a humor book: Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor. It's a day-by-day summary of what was going on in the news from 1981 through 1988. You can get it as a pay-what-you-want ebook here. Thanks a lot.
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Sep 28, 2023 01:15
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The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley: It's an okay mystery/thriller told in two time periods. Both perspectives of the story revolve around a bank and the rampant corruption happening at it and its mysterious closure. The 1970's portion of the book follows Beatrice who is a 16yo-posing-as-a-19yo secretary at the bank who starts to uncover corruption until its sudden closure. The 1990's portion of the book follows Iris who is an alcoholic, chain-smoking, recent college grad adjusting to life at a big architectural firm. She's assigned to survey the bank and discovers many mysteries during her time inside. I would've liked the book if it didn't careen off the tracks in the last quarter. Intros to last-minute, significantly important characters; plot points coming out of left field; and a lackluster ending all had me disappointed when I closed the book.
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Sep 29, 2023 19:24
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Not Forever, But For Now by Chuck Palahniuk His latest satire is set in Wales and Palahniuk tries to make it as British as possible. It's full of English turns of phrase, cuisine and countryside descriptions, grand mansions and then there are countless murders and constant gay sex. It's a bizarre, sometimes funny book, that also weaves in a conspiracy theory that plastics industry invented gay pride. Not his best but quite enjoyable.
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Oct 1, 2023 08:59
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett left me cold. Interesting ending, but it wasn't worth getting bored the first three-quarters of the book, with solutions to obstacles just falling into Sam Spade's hands. I'll probably like Raymond Chandler more.
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Oct 1, 2023 10:07
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Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands tells of the creator of Hark! A Vagrant 's time working out in the Alberta boonies, in camps and tank farms and refineries. The contrast between the dreariness of the work and daily sexual harassment and the awe-inspiring qualities of the massive industrial equipment and surrounding forest is palpable. It gets heartbreakingly candid about sexual violence, but at the same time has enough moments of positivity and kindness not to be totally depressing.
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Oct 2, 2023 13:52
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Dracula by Bram Stoker Man now I really want to read some 19th century travelogues! The first act was great, I loved the description of the trip. Second act was a bit of a slog, Third was kind of confusing but fun. Otherwise, I was struck by how much manliness there is going on. And untainted femininity! Such fairness. I realized that Ive likely only read Russians and women from the 19th century, so the tone was really jarring and absurd.
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Oct 3, 2023 03:14
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Just finished rereading Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. Finally. It's not a slow book, but I've become a rather sporadic and distractible reader when I've not got a time limit bearing down on me. Anyway. Science fantasy space opera, where the main character is an infantry captain in the armies of the Hexarchate, an empire that runs on maintaining a very carefully-constructed calendar as proper observance influences the laws of physics. Effectively the empire has space magic as long as they maintain control of the rhythms of the empire's culture. This includes things like amputation guns, where you fire it at someone and their limbs violently pop off. Cheris, the captain, is plucked from her position and made a brevet general to suppress a calendrical rebellion in one of the Hexarchate's most important space stations, both because she has a gift for the mathematics that the space magic runs on. And also because she's otherwise disposable, as she gets the soul of a brilliant but unstable actual general from 400 years ago stapled to her, and he'll have to be put back in "storage" eventually. I enjoyed it a lot back when I first read it several years ago, and then promptly lost track of the sequels because at the time my library didn't have them and I also didn't have an ebook reader of any sort. (Pretty sure there was already a Kindle app for PC, but I didn't think of it. Anyway.) Picked it back up again recently with an eye toward finally reading the sequels, but also I've got some other books on my to-be-read pile demanding attention, too... Hmmm...
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Oct 3, 2023 23:43
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The island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells Wow this one had some problems, but overall a neat little adventure. I can see why it’s so influential. I wouldn’t recommend it though. It’s not really asking interesting questions unless you already believe a bunch of bullshit and race science, imo.
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Oct 4, 2023 02:05
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Pouring one out for the dog man
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Oct 4, 2023 02:07
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tuyop posted:The island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells I think pretty much everything else by him is better, yeah.
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Oct 4, 2023 02:16
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I may come back to Wells soon, maybe The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine. I’m on a big public domain reading spree and Librivox audiobooks, though I think I can’t handle the random reader format they go with sometimes, the transitions are jarring.
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Oct 4, 2023 02:40
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disposablewords posted:Just finished rereading Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. Finally. It's not a slow book, but I've become a rather sporadic and distractible reader when I've not got a time limit bearing down on me. Anyway. I absolutely loved the bullshit-space-magic they have in the first book, and I generally appreciate awesome sounding stuff even when its dumb as hell. But something about the sequel crossed a line into word salad, I did not finish. I think it tried to lean too hard on showing the character was brilliant at space-bullshit, which just doesn't work.
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Oct 4, 2023 15:40
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tuyop posted:I may come back to Wells soon, maybe The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine. I’m on a big public domain reading spree and Librivox audiobooks, though I think I can’t handle the random reader format they go with sometimes, the transitions are jarring. A few summers ago I read War of the Worlds, Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine and thought they were all pretty good but Moreau was definitely the worst of the bunch, followed by The Time Machine I think. I like The Invisible Man a lot more than I thought I would as well. Definitely check the others out.
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Oct 5, 2023 02:28
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Naw Time Machine is goated scifi.
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Oct 5, 2023 02:59
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I do think Moreau is interesting and it stuck with me a lot more than Time Machine. Though it's largely because of the (thankfully) mostly lost chunk of context that he wrote it in large part to just say "Hey, Vivisection is Kinda hosed Up." For my most recent finish, it was The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Akatsuji. This is written in the vein of the sort of 'golden age' of detective fiction where the main goal is that it's technically possible for the reader to figure out the solution to the crime-puzzle with the clues given in the text. In Japan, there's a pretty rich tradition of this style of puzzle-box story and the genre gets called Honkaku or Shin Honkaku. They've only just started being translated to English fairly recently, apparently, and I'm interested to check out some more of them! The story itself is a kind of locked-room mystery explicitly mirroring Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None." A group of college mystery book club students goes on a retreat to a desolate island where a quadruple murder--suicide happened only six months earlier. And they start getting murdered of course. There are also a few characters back on the mainland who are trying to figure out some mysteries tied in to the island. I haven't read a ton of this style of detective fiction myself (mostly just some Christie and a couple Sherlock Holmes stories I guess?) but I had fun trying to figure out the puzzle and kept second-guessing what the red herrings were. Some aspects might come off a little twee (all the mystery club kids use nicknames based on famous European mystery writers, for example) and the characters are constantly referencing the fact that they read mystery books, but overall I think it's worth checking out if you like classic detective fiction.
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Oct 5, 2023 03:17
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On the topic of crime fiction I've just finished The Running Grave, the new Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling Cormoran Strike novel. I'm a latecomer to Rowling's books - for all that it is a massive cultural phenomenon I've never actually read a single thing of Harry Potter (I was a bit too old for it when it started getting popular, and if I'm being honest I became a bit of a tedious teenage hipster at the time by refusing to read it precisely because it was popular) and I only started following her Strike books after watching the TV adaptations when holed up with the folks during lockdown. Troubled Blood was genuinely excellent, but The Ink Black Heart was very underwhelming, particularly down to an awful rushed ending and insultingly nonsensical killer reveal. The Running Grave however I enjoyed much more with continuous forward motion and some particularly high-tension sections. Reading reviews, the Strike books are often criticised for being too long but I personally feel that just comes from professional critics irritated that they have a lot to hack through when they're rushing to file on a deadline. Troubled Blood's length actively suited it as it was ruminating over all the lost leads of a cold case; and in the case of the other books I appreciate the unsparing verisimilitude of the private-eye grunt work: Strike's running a business, and sometimes that involves long boring evenings living off McDonalds waiting to get a photo of a cheating husband, it's not all car chases and kidnappings. I think it also helps to change your perspective on the books and approach them less as capital-D Detective genre books and more a family sage (soap opera, if you're less charitable) of the daily lives of Strike's agency where we drop in with their cases in the meantime. Charoclere fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Oct 8, 2023 |
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Oct 8, 2023 18:41
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I've just finished Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe by Verena Krebs. This fantastic, well-cited and well-written text provides a detailed description the history of correspondence and emissarial missions between the Ethiopian imperial Christian kingdom and European courts, a topic I knew nothing about. This book also resoundingly corrects longstanding false historical beliefs about the basis for these missions; historians, driven in part by racist assumptions, assumed that the Ethiopian kings were sending missions to Europe to seek superior European technology, particularly in the realm of warfare. Krebs convincingly demonstrates with extensive citation to available records that these missions were driven by domestic Ethiopian political and eschatological forces, and were principally in pursuit of religious goods, relics, and cultural materials, which the Solomonic court used to expand and cement its cultural and political hold over its territories through the construction of lavish religious sites. These missions were also a reflection of the practice of imitating perceived features of the Solomonic kingdom, and were in part ceremonial in nature. In correcting the record, Krebs describes fascinating details about how these missions were misconstrued, first by European powers, then by historians, in a discussion of claims and context that touches everything from the Pazzi conspiracy to the Nazis. I very strongly recommend this book, especially for anyone who, like me, is ignorant about the subject- It's remarkably approachable even if you don't know the subject. I barely knew there was an Ethiopian Christian kingdom! I also want to strongly recommend the thread that directed me to this and several other books. This is Cats with Cannons: Let's Play Pentiment, an LP of the recently released adventure game released by Obsidian Entertainment. A branching murder mystery narrative taking place in early 16th-century Bavaria, Pentiment is all about the ways that historical facts can be altered, purged or be covered over, told in a highly entertaining and responsive setting. It's a glorious work of artistry, engaging design and authenticity, directed by Josh Sawyer, history major and goon who I believe has specialized education in the era. JSawyer is also participating in the thread by sharing details about some of the extensive historical research that went into the game. If you want to learn about different kinds of medieval script, see a dialogue between Saint Grobian and Socrates in a mind palace, or get a whole swathe of other wonderful book recommendations in this vein, this is the thread for you. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Oct 9, 2023 |
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Oct 8, 2023 19:21
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John Scalzi's The Dispatcher. It was thoroughly Okay and went by quickly, which is pretty much what I wanted when I picked up it and a heavier book (in subject and page count) from the library the other day. To summarize: one day ten years ago people suddenly stopped dying normally when murdered. If there was another person's intent behind it, 999 times out of 1000 being killed causes a person to evaporate and then reappear in their home with the past half day or so's effects on their body completely undone, but with full memory of the experience. Tony Valdez is a dispatcher, licensed and empowered to perform legal murder to save people from accidental or lingering deaths that wouldn't otherwise trigger the resurrection. And with the disappearance of one of his fellows, he helps a cop investigate the extremely shady poo poo that has cropped up around this changed state of affairs. As it's a novella, the book focuses in on explaining the "rules" of dispatching and resurrection more than anything else, wrapping up the mystery of the missing dispatcher but without touching the larger mystery of why this is happening at all.
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Oct 9, 2023 03:41
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The answer being football of course
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Oct 9, 2023 03:52
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Finished Chinua Achebe's Africa Trilogy, consisting of Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease. Each book takes place in the Igbo region of what is now Nigeria at different phases of the British colonialism, and focuses on the tragic downfall of an Igbo man who doesn't successfully adapt to his changing society.. I can see why Things Fall Apart is the only one that's been taught in schools; I found Okonkwo, someone completely afflicted with what we now call toxic masculinity, a more compelling tragic hero than his grandson from No Longer at Ease or Ezeulu from Arrow of God. Ezeulu is an authority figure who tries to make power plays against the colonizers and gets lucky once, only to overplay his hand and lose the clout he gained, while Obi struggles to live up to the expectations of the colonizers he works for and is punished for taking the easy, illegal way out. The books as a whole do a good job of illustrating what it was like to live in Igbo society during the times covered, and how the colonizers took advantage of existing inequalities and resentment to establish a foothold. What struck me most about second and third books was the difference between the way Igbo people talk in their native language and the pidgin they have to adopt to talk to the British, who have no interest in meeting them halfway. Otherwise, they're plainly written and not very long at all. Definitely worth checking out.
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Oct 9, 2023 17:32
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Finished The Mysteries by Bill Watterson (yes, that one) and John Kascht. It's very short and extremely good. A sort of adult fable with cool black and white art.
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Oct 12, 2023 13:21
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Sarern posted:Finished The Mysteries by Bill Watterson (yes, that one) and John Kascht. It's very short and extremely good. A sort of adult fable with cool black and white art. It’s a picture book that I will be reading to my kid. It’s good though.
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Oct 12, 2023 14:48
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Got done with Call of Cthulhu and holy tits how is this recognized as a horror masterpiece it is garbage stinky poo poo bad. its cluttered with boring rear end details and poo poo no one cares about. somehow lovecraft managed to make a story about a kickass demon the most boring poo poo on the planet
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Oct 12, 2023 19:46
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That's Lovecraft for you. Great monster ideas, horrible (and racist) execution.
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Oct 12, 2023 22:19
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The Colour Out of Space and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are his longform stories that work. The Outsider, I think, is his masterpiece, partly because it’s wholly unburdened by racism.
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Oct 13, 2023 01:57
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The Tatami Galaxy One of the few times an adaption outshines it's source, see also The Shining. The novel is a humorous tale of a young college junior who feels he's wasted his school life, joined the wrong clubs, failed to find a partner, is nearly failing all his classes, and his only friend is wretch who looks like a yokai. The novel goes over the four different paths he could've taken through school, with all of them ending with him in mostly the same spot before he finally grasps his chance to escape the hamster wheel he is on. It's a rather short and easy read, and the repetition that seems annoying at first manages to hit at the end when it's turned on its head. That said, the anime adaption is directed by Yuasa, the most interesting and talented man in Japanese Animation. And as far as I'm concerned is not only superior to the novel, it is also a must watch for anyone who is in the least interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ax2FIa_cM
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Oct 13, 2023 02:09
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I feel like stories in all media have been consistently speeding up the pace over time, and the slower pace doesn't really draw you in unless you really try. The idea that there is a spooky history to Earth that is cool and doesn't even involve humanity is pretty cool. But Lovecraft's stories are pretty much 50 pages of someone reading about something spooky, then something maybe spooky happens in italics. It was the son who looked more like his father than his brother did! ~Fin~ His depictions of weird, inbred New England towns, and non-Euclidian Boston geography are spot on.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:12
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"Whisperer in Darkness" captured the feeling of being in backwoods Vermont pretty perfectly for me, even up to this day, including references to places I'd been to see family. And I mean, my extended family and I all live in very rural areas that nobody ever mentions so it was surreal in and of itself to have him center things in an area I'd visit once or twice a year for most of my life, and still get the atmosphere of it down in a way that resonates today. Sometimes his writing was legitimately pretty good, or at least effective.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:43
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Debbie go Home, a collection of short stories by Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country. Excellent, remarkably clear prose from a very interesting figure I knew little about, capturing the hosed up racial dynamics of pre-apartheid SA from the perspective of about as good a paternalistic figure as was possible for the period (dude ran a reform school for black boys for a lot of his career taking a much more progressive approach than was the norm, before helping found an antiapartheid party that ultimately got squelched by the NP). That said about half the book is very paternalistic, literally, as it's fictionalized anecdotes from his time as a schoolmaster regarding specific black students. I read this 150 page short story collection in 2 days after taking several months juggling multiple 300 page nonfiction books, and it was the only fiction text in my current backlog. I'm giving myself whiplash! Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 07:56
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Finally finished Swann's Way by Proust, a BotM from ages ago. Very well written but I struggled with the class aspect of the middle portion of the book.
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Oct 14, 2023 22:42
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Finished Piranesi and the first half is so bad, and the last half so good that I really do think the entire concept could have been a much better book by another author. Like, wtf, if this were a novella that the first half was condensed into a single chapter or two it would be exceptional.
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Oct 16, 2023 04:41
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Shammypants posted:Finished Piranesi and the first half is so bad, and the last half so good that I really do think the entire concept could have been a much better book by another author. Like, wtf, if this were a novella that the first half was condensed into a single chapter or two it would be exceptional.
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Oct 16, 2023 16:55
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I loved the first half, what about it makes you say it's bad rather than just not to your taste?
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Oct 16, 2023 17:15
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silvergoose posted:I loved the first half, what about it makes you say it's bad rather than just not to your taste? The first half was a means to show scale, which we get quickly, and that we have unreliable narrator, which we also get quickly and which the length isn't necessary. The conversations with birds and introduction of statues and space have unclear meaning and are all, with the exception of one statue, entirely fictional. Going through them in such depth and frequency wasn't enjoyable as the interpretations are still debated and when something is that up for interpretation I lose interest. The pacing of the second half was quick, and the pacing of the first half was much too slow- in a nutshell, but it didn't have to be. This book gave me This is How You Lose the Time War vibes but the sense of enjoyment I got in Time War is what I only got in the second half of Piranesi. Shammypants fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Oct 16, 2023 |
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Oct 16, 2023 17:36
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I liked it all, but the vibes in the first half of the book are my favourite. The more expository second half didn't have the same feel, though it was still interesting.
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Oct 16, 2023 18:16
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