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I've been (slowly) reading the Animorphs series with my daughter. We hit a plot point last night in the fifth book that I was anticipating my daughter's reaction to When it's revealed that Marco's mom is alive and is Visser One. Her reaction was perfect and exactly as I'd hoped - jaw-dropped, speechless, sheer and utter astonishment. Books are good, y'all.
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Jan 22, 2024 19:51
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Yesterday I read Star, by Mishima, in translation by Sam Bett. That's my first Mishima and it left a wonderful impression on me. I think I'm going back for more.
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Jan 22, 2024 21:33
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Armauk posted:He was stuck in a hotel... And that prevented him from being touched by history by sheer virtue of the "thou-shalt-not-disturb-longtime-residents-of-hotels" cosmic forces?
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Jan 23, 2024 00:23
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Ohtori Akio posted:Yesterday I read Star, by Mishima, in translation by Sam Bett. That's my first Mishima and it left a wonderful impression on me. I think I'm going back for more. I've not read Star but every other work of his I've read has been either great, as in actually awe inspiring, or at least a lot of fun. Sailor and Temple of the Golden Pavilion get a lot of love but don't skip his Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. He finished the last right before his suicide so you can tell the whole series meant a lot to him. It's the most incisive and damning account I've seen of Japan from the Taisho to Showa eras i've seen put down to paper. A series haunted in bloodstained beauty. The fourth novel falls off a bit, but the ending is absolutely incredible. One of those works you put down with the spine still cracked because you can't quite grasp the immensity of what you've just read.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:07
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Gaius Marius posted:I've not read Star but every other work of his I've read has been either great, as in actually awe inspiring, or at least a lot of fun. Sailor and Temple of the Golden Pavilion get a lot of love but don't skip his Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. He finished the last right before his suicide so you can tell the whole series meant a lot to him. It's the most incisive and damning account I've seen of Japan from the Taisho to Showa eras i've seen put down to paper. A series haunted in bloodstained beauty. The fourth novel falls off a bit, but the ending is absolutely incredible. One of those works you put down with the spine still cracked because you can't quite grasp the immensity of what you've just read. I picked up Confessions of a Mask and Thirst For Love recently. I might hit the tetralogy after those.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:09
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I've finished Shakespeare's Storytelling, by Nate Eastman. This is intended as an introductory undergraduate text that focuses on Shakespearean literary techniques to illustrate his profound influence on how stories are told in all media (with a bunch of contemporaneous book and film examples). This makes the book a significant divergence from most of the intro texts I've read, which spend way more time on historical contextualization. I'm a complete ignoramus on literary theory and Shakespeare, so the book was pretty illuminating- but was definitely written for an even more basic audience, as some relatively simple concepts are explained multiple times. It's still an excellent choice if, like me, you haven't read the bard's plays in years and never got a good contextualization of his influence other than "hey look he invented the word eyeball!" and jokes about thumb-biting and keeping the cheap seats entertained. Also some of the examples are incredibly goony. There is a katana duel. The author also runs an A/T thread here. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 03:03
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was my second David Mitchell after Cloud Atlas. The plot ended up a bit disorganized and muddy, but the conjuring up of Shogunate Japan and the foreigners who visited it was marvelous. On to Ghostwritten, his first book.
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Jan 24, 2024 07:55
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FPyat posted:The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was my second David Mitchell after Cloud Atlas. The plot ended up a bit disorganized and muddy, but the conjuring up of Shogunate Japan and the foreigners who visited it was marvelous. On to Ghostwritten, his first book. Ghostwritten is great, and I also recommend Black Swan Green, which is my favorite of his. His more recent stuff is more hit or miss for me.
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Jan 27, 2024 00:26
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Just finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant. I'm not much of a fantasy fan so I'm not really the target market, but I found myself wanting to see what happened next, I looked forward to my next opportunity to read it, and enjoyed it well enough to probably read the rest of the trilogy. One thing that struck me while reading it was that everything was written from Baru's perspective. There were, to my memory, no scenes of other characters interacting with one another with Baru off screen, which meant that you could not see how forces were being levied against her. So, this robbed the book of suspense--everything happened as she saw it. However, there were actions being done "off screen" that she knew that we didn't and just had to wait to see the results. Especially earlier on, there were a number of instances where the chapter would end with something along the lines of "Baru knew what she would have to do", and then you would see what that was in the next. This gave me the sense that things were kind of on rails, and gave me, the reader, precious little to speculate on to make my guesses as to what would happen next. Without that investment, I felt there were no real stakes at play--there would be a sequel, there would be treason. I wonder if this is a literary effect of the fact she is still young and new at her craft, and that the books will grow in complexity as they go on, or if it is a feature of the genre, which, fair enough. tl;dr it was entertaining and a fun read, and is a fine way to spend a few hours. I look forward to seeing how the world will grow in size with the following volumes.
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Jan 28, 2024 05:56
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Bilirubin posted:I wonder if this is a literary effect of the fact she is still young and new at her craft, and that the books will grow in complexity as they go on, or if it is a feature of the genre, which, fair enough. The other books open up a lot and have a good amount of chapters that follow other characters and are not focused on Baru's POV at all. They are stylistically different for sure - I'd definitely say at least give the next one a shot! I would also say most fantasy (that I've read at least) rarely focuses on just a single character. Multiple POV characters is pretty common these days, especially after Game of Thrones did it and popped off (or at least that's the explanation I hear a lot).
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Jan 28, 2024 14:56
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DurianGray posted:The other books open up a lot and have a good amount of chapters that follow other characters and are not focused on Baru's POV at all. They are stylistically different for sure - I'd definitely say at least give the next one a shot! I suspected, thanks for the encouragement to get a little "monstrous"
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Jan 28, 2024 17:29
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I finally for sure have read The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I had read a good chunk of them in my youth but was never sure I had got all 60 stories and forgot half of what I did read because it's been so long. Book's still good and feels surprisingly modern in it's writing style though I think that's do to my having read too many classic romance novels from the earlier half of the 1800s and their flowery language. The only thing that really sucked was me noticing half a dozen typos and formatting errors in the edition I have which is the 2009 Barnes and Nobles one with the fancy binding (remember when they did those editions of classic books and sold them for $20 a pop?). Usually it was a missing letter, and one of the last stories had words with hyphens randomly in the middle; evidently they were originally words that fell at the end of a line. And the strangest error was "exact!y." Christ, glad I never bought any other of those fancy editions from B&N if that's the kind of quality in proof reading they had. TL;DR: read some Holmes especially if you haven't before, and it's worth powering through the Mormons r evil! back story explanation in a Study in Scarlet to get to the good poo poo later.
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Jan 28, 2024 20:18
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All of the novellas that aren't Hound of the Baskervilles are bad. Doyle had a nasty habit of padding out a standard Holmes mystery and then stapling on a completely different story at the end. It's like he had some other ideas in a desk drawer that weren't fit for publication, and the novellas allowed him to print them anyway. IMO Study in Scarlet isn't even the worst. The second half of Valley of Fear reads like straight-up Pinkerton propaganda.
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Jan 28, 2024 21:10
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NGDBSS posted:All of the novellas that aren't Hound of the Baskervilles are bad. Doyle had a nasty habit of padding out a standard Holmes mystery and then stapling on a completely different story at the end. It's like he had some other ideas in a desk drawer that weren't fit for publication, and the novellas allowed him to print them anyway. Yeah I was not thrilled about having to do the back story poo poo again with Valley of Fear. I'll admit the twist there got me but it was so out of the blue it felt like a convenient out for Doyle. The short stories are definetly better if a little tired by the end of the run. You can feel that Doyle is scraping for ideas at that point. My favorite for whatever reason is still The Speckled Band and that's pretty early on.
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Jan 28, 2024 21:25
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Yeah the short stories are much better than the novellas. I can't remember ever having the urge to reread any of them.
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Jan 29, 2024 00:36
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A Thousand Ships - this was such a great Greek myth novel! I loved how it took Homers epic poem, and put a brand new twist on them, focusing on the women of Greece, and Troy, and the Goddesses. Adding new lore to these epic poems from different perspectives, both characters that existed, and new characters. It was really well done, but could have been very tedious as it jumps back and forth between a lot of different characters. It helped I think that the longer chapters were broken up with shorter chapters. I liked all of it, but I think I enjoyed Penelopes chapters the least, as the writing was done as letters or journal entries, and they just didn't feel as good to read as the rest of the book was. They also added the least new material, so if you are already very familiar with Homers the Odyssey, then there is really nothing new here. The rest of the book was great though and paced very well.
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Jan 29, 2024 00:46
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NGDBSS posted:All of the novellas that aren't Hound of the Baskervilles are bad. Doyle had a nasty habit of padding out a standard Holmes mystery and then stapling on a completely different story at the end. It's like he had some other ideas in a desk drawer that weren't fit for publication, and the novellas allowed him to print them anyway. Agreed 100%. The Sherlock Holmes stories are old favorites of mine which I've revisited many times... but I usually find myself skipping over the big non-Holmes "back story" sections of A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear, and even The Sign of Four.
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Jan 29, 2024 05:18
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As someone who has read a lot of crime fiction and is insufferable I can say that if one finds any Sherlock Holmes story good, it's just because they have never read any actually good crime stories. I've read them all probably three times in my life but the last time I powered through completely by the force of nostalgia. Now the Jeremy Brett TV series on the other hand...
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Jan 29, 2024 13:08
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It could be worse, I could be in here talking up some Holmes fanfic. I don't think I've read a single one of those that was good and most are forgettable, although I don't think I will forget the one that ended with a transforming mech train because that was hilariously stupid even for a steampunked Victorian setting. And yet I am still foolishly drawn to post Doyle Holmes junk like a moth to a flame even though I know it will be garbage.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:20
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Turbinosamente posted:It could be worse, I could be in here talking up some Holmes fanfic. The Seven-per-cent Solution isn't a horrible novel. I can't say it's very good, either.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:28
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3D Megadoodoo posted:The Seven-per-cent Solution isn't a horrible novel. I can't say it's very good, either. Yeah I've been sitting here trying to remember the plot of it because I know I read it a long time ago and disliked it. Is that the one where it's implied that all the Moriarty poo poo was a coke fueled delusion on the part of Holmes and that Watson wrote the "official" version of the death at Reichenbach Falls as cover for Holmes being out for the count doing rehab? It gets talked up as being "one of the good ones" once in a while and I failed to see how.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:39
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Turbinosamente posted:Yeah I've been sitting here trying to remember the plot of it because I know I read it a long time ago and disliked it. Is that the one where it's implied that all the Moriarty poo poo was a coke fueled delusion on the part of Holmes and that Watson wrote the "official" version of the death at Reichenbach Falls as cover for Holmes being out for the count doing rehab? It gets talked up as being "one of the good ones" once in a while and I failed to see how. I'll be honest with you here: I don't remember lmao. Could've been. I just remember Sigmund Freud beating Hermann Göring in a swordfight.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:41
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I'll be honest with you here: I don't remember lmao. Could've been. I just remember Sigmund Freud beating Hermann Göring in a swordfight. Lol wut, I don't remember that, though I think Holmes may have visited Freud for addiction help. poo poo, maybe we should have a competition to find the dumbest piece of published Holmes fan fiction ever written.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:48
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https://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf Neil Gaiman's Lovecraftian Holmes pastiche is quite good and has a neat twist. I also finished it recently, making it on-topic for the thread.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:54
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Turbinosamente posted:It could be worse, I could be in here talking up some Holmes fanfic. I don't think I've read a single one of those that was good and most are forgettable, although I don't think I will forget the one that ended with a transforming mech train because that was hilariously stupid even for a steampunked Victorian setting. And yet I am still foolishly drawn to post Doyle Holmes junk like a moth to a flame even though I know it will be garbage.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:19
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Turbinosamente posted:It could be worse, I could be in here talking up some Holmes fanfic. I don't think I've read a single one of those that was good and most are forgettable, although I don't think I will forget the one that ended with a transforming mech train because that was hilariously stupid even for a steampunked Victorian setting. And yet I am still foolishly drawn to post Doyle Holmes junk like a moth to a flame even though I know it will be garbage. I've recommended them before, but August Derleth's Solar Pons books are decent. They're Holmes pastiche rather than fanfic, though. I also enjoyed The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:45
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Okay I am compiling the recommended Holmes pastiches for later use once I winnow down my to read stack some more. I'll even try that Neil Gaiman Lovecraftian one because Neil Gaiman. I've been purposely avoiding the Lovecraft/Holmes crossovers because of this:anilEhilated posted:The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove. Boy did I not know what I was signing up for when picking that one. He also wrote three Lovecraftian Holmes novels that somehow manage to be even stupider; the mecha train made me laugh, those felt like straight-up insulting the reader's intelligence. Everybody loves to pitch ultimate logical science detective man against the ultimate illogical paranormal horror and there are way, way, too many takes on Holmes versus the Elder Gods as a result. And because there are so many I expect the majority of them to be pretty badly written. It's practically a cliché in and of itself at this point and I'm left wishing that authors would explore something else as a source of conflict for Holmes. The only bit of paranormal Holmes I have read was a graphic novel that crossed over with Dracula which I remember being pretty alright, but didn't endear me to this weird subgenre.
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Jan 30, 2024 01:51
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I remember reading a post-Doyle Holmes story where Watson had to solve the case because Sherlock was allergic to cats and thus couldn't access the crime scene. Who wrote that one?
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Jan 30, 2024 02:06
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Turbinosamente posted:Everybody loves to pitch ultimate logical science detective man against the ultimate illogical paranormal horror and there are way, way, too many takes on Holmes versus the Elder Gods as a result. And because there are so many I expect the majority of them to be pretty badly written. It's practically a cliché in and of itself at this point and I'm left wishing that authors would explore something else as a source of conflict for Holmes. The Gaiman story is great precisely because it avoids this issue by making the characters solve a normal mystery in a Lovecraftian alt-history horror universe rather than the other way around. Without spoiling too much because this is revealed right at the beginning, the victim is an Eldritch horror. SimonChris fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 14:17
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Solitair posted:I remember reading a post-Doyle Holmes story where Watson had to solve the case because Sherlock was allergic to cats and thus couldn't access the crime scene. Who wrote that one? Stephen King. And it's actually pretty good.
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Jan 30, 2024 14:34
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Spanish Short Stories for Beginners by Claudia Orea: I found this recommendation on a random blog post for Spanish learners, and it was good. The structure was great, with new vocabulary highlighted, a short quiz checking comprehension, and then a side-by-side of the full story to dig into specifics. As for the content of the short stories, they were basic but enjoyable. My favorite was the short horror story that ended with the house maid discovering that the little boy had murdered his parents. Personally, I've been using Duolingo to learn Spanish extremely casually for several years, and I'm feeling good about my learning. I certainly wouldn't be able to hold a conversation in real life, but I was around 80% comprehension on this book without needing to look things up.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:39
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I just finished reading The Sympathizer which overall I feel was a fantastic read but it was not really what I was expecting. I decided to grab the book based on the trailer for the miniseries HBO is releasing this year and it made it seem like this intense spy thriller and while it does have some of that, it's really about leaving Vietnam and the struggle to not really belong to America, western society and not really belonging to Vietnam any more. Of course it covers a lot more duality like that of the narrator not fitting in Vietnam either because his father is french as well as the whole undercover spy from the north. I really enjoyed the author's take on platoon and the sad reality of representation. A lot of the little jokes got me, like the famous professor and author of Asian Communism and the Oriental Method of Destruction being Richard Hedd. Some strange stuff too, especially stuff like the paragraph talking about the greatest western invention, women's cleavage. I get the narrator is meant to be chauvinist or maybe it's meant to reflect the times but it still feels weird the author needed to spend so much words on it. Guess it kinda felt like Ernest Clines creepy rant. I think I need to read something a little lighter next but yeah I think I'll be pondering on this book for the next few days
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Feb 1, 2024 15:53
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Ghostwritten by David Mitchell is somewhat like Cloud Atlas in telling many stories, though this time there are nine POVs and they do not range out over centuries of history. Feels like it was a thousand pages long, it goes to so many places and ideas. I liked it more than Atlas overall, and think that that the Wachowskis would have done better to adapt this into a miniseries.
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Feb 2, 2024 04:13
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Greek Myths - Tanglewood Tales by Hawthorne. I just finished reading this collection to my son. Its got a bunch of great classics that I've heard of but never read before. The Gorgon's Head is the story of Medusa and how Quicksilver helps Pericles chop off her head. King Midas and his golden touch was crazy. He turned his daughter into a golden statue (she got better). The Chimera was a wild beast that the dude needed to catch Pegasus in order to slay. The Golden Apples was about Hercules holding the sky for Atlas. All were really fun stories and I was surprised that each one had a happy ending. Even Pandora's Box ended with Hope being the final fairy to leave the box. I love reading the classics and this was the perfect cross between lit and childrens book. Next up is the Once and Future King which I'm pretty stoked about.
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Feb 2, 2024 04:38
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Hollow by B. Catling Weird rear end book but good as hell really dunno what else to say
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Feb 2, 2024 06:54
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Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson Holy hell, what an amazing short story collection. I love his writing, his prose. Definitely has some Beat influence. The title is a reference to Heroin, the Velvet Underground classic. It's so short. I read the first story, and had to go back and read it again after I was done, before moving onto the second story... And it maintained it's quality all the way through (133 pages). Currently reading another of his collections now. Check this out!!
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Feb 3, 2024 01:30
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Bookshops and Bonedust, by Travis Baldree. A prequel to his previous Legends and Lattes, about a big gay orc adventurer lady having cozy times in mostly-peaceful communities between adventures. It starts with Viv, the orc lady in question, getting her leg sliced up bad during one of her first jobs and having to convalesce in a small port town, because for all the D&D-isms there isn't much instant healing magic here. She ends up befriending the proprietor of a dilapidated old bookstore, helping clean it out and turn it around in exchange for reading material to keep herself from going mad from boredom. And, of course, the adventure inevitably comes back to find her. It was alright. Very light reading, a bit predictable overall but fine. It takes a long while for the "adventure comes back to find her" bit to actually happen so the climax ends up feeling a little rushed. Baldree mentioned in the postscript that it came together after several other books failed to work out, but that he got to salvage chunks from those other books... and it kinda feels it, you can see it where for example a character obviously from one of those other books gets slotted in to the back third without much done to establish their sudden presence. It was on the library's new arrivals shelf and I just grabbed it while browsing. That's pretty much where Baldree's work so far belongs in my mental rankings, I think - I'll grab them at the library if I find them, but not inclined to seek them out otherwise.
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Feb 4, 2024 22:24
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Just finished Dark Matter for the first time. It was pretty good. I can see why they're making it into an Apple TV series. (USER WAS PERMABANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 5, 2024 01:01
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The Blue World by Jack Vance. It is a Jack Vance book, and a solid one. He had really hit his stride by the mid 1960s. Some fun technological nonsense comes into play, Vance is always great at coming up with absurd tech stuff. In this case it is smelting metal from human and animal blood on an ocean planet with no land. It's less overtly funny than a lot of his stuff but still pretty humorous at times.
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Feb 5, 2024 02:21
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I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko I love books that present things the way this did, with a series of observations and no attempt to force the reader to conclusions. Kostyuchekno's reporting is stark, awful, macabre, and extremely relatable. What you read makes you think not just about Russia but about your own country as well, or at least it did for me. It's a pretty easy read and the main drawback I think is there isn't more of it, and there isn't more of a focus towards the last few years before she had to leave, but at a certain point it just becomes an autobiography which was clearly not the goal here. I definitely recommend it.
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Feb 6, 2024 17:44
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