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Just finished "Horns" by Joe Hill and loved it. The character building was pretty great and there was some nice little turns in there. The book ended a bit vague, but the journey through was good stuff, so I can forgive him that.
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Nov 22, 2011 20:22
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My flight into Amsterdam yesterday was delayed for several hours by fog, so instead of working I sepnt the day reading the Godfather by Mario Puzo. I last picked it up when I was 12 or so and didn't enjoy it too much, but this time round I found it gripping enough that I finished it in just over 8 hours, and really enjoyed the ride. Ser Pounce fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Nov 23, 2011 |
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Nov 23, 2011 00:01
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dokmo posted:Excellent. Picked up a Bruen standalone just now for my kobo to check him out. Cool - hope you'll dig it. I'm not as big of a fan of his stand-alone stuff myself but it's still generally good.
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Nov 23, 2011 04:53
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Poopinstein posted:Just finished "Horns" by Joe Hill and loved it. The character building was pretty great and there was some nice little turns in there. The book ended a bit vague, but the journey through was good stuff, so I can forgive him that. Today I read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, which turned out to have a surprising amount of depth to it. If high society romances are a guilty pleasure of mine, I guess I have to love a well-written satirical look at high society romance. If you're feeling guilty about not reading more "classic" literature it's a great choice 
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Nov 23, 2011 05:19
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SgtSanity posted:Just finished Augustus by John Williams, a novel about the public and private life of the first Roman emperor. It's told in the epistolary style, which helps keep it from feeling too period (and the dangers of aping the dramatic forms of the time). His endings are the best I've ever read, because each one nails this sense of reflective intimacy with the main character. I think I still like Stoner the best out of all his books, but all three are pretty amazing in their own way. I,Claudius by Robert Graves touches on Augustus quite a bit, you might want to give it a spin if you're interested on getting a second perspective on the guy. (but make sure to get an edition with a family tree, otherwise it'll get really confusing)
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Nov 23, 2011 13:26
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I started Misery about three days ago and finished it up yesterday afternoon. Say what you want about Stephen King now, but the man can write psychological horror like nobody's business. It seriously made me want to vomit at times, not because of the more gruesome parts, but because I feel he managed to capture the inner workings of a paranoid, schizophrenic psychopath so well. I was tearing through this novel on my ereader and nearly cried when the battery ran out right before the climax. The gotta, indeed.
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Nov 24, 2011 18:01
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I just finished City of Bones by Cassandra Clare. Nothing inspiring, but an entertaining series so far.
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Nov 24, 2011 23:56
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11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour (Joseph E. Persico): A starter book on World War I. I found myself hurrying to finish it, not because I was enthralled by it, but because I wanted to move on to something else. Nothing wrong with the book, but nothing particularly alluring, either. Each chapter starts with a small snippet of what was going on after the armistice was signed, but before the war ended, then a look at events earlier in the war. Not much detail on anything.
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Nov 26, 2011 04:09
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Just finished a few books: Jose Saramago's Cain: Saramago imagines a Cain who, after killing Abel, wanders back and forth through the Old Testament witnessing major events like the Tower of Babel, the battle at Jericho, etc. The beginning especially is hilarious, but Saramago was an atheist and by the end of the novella his commentary had grown predictable. The only other work of his I've read is Blindness, which blew me away, but Cain was a completely different ball game. Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot: I'll echo what at least one other poster said -- it was disappointing, but only because he set his bar so high with Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides. Madeleine was neither compelling nor particularly believable. That aside it was a very nice read, and Eugenides is really a master of the sentence -- on the smallest levels his writing is beautiful, but The Marriage Plot failed in the bigger elements. Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending: Picked up a copy of this after it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and man is it good. An aging man, sixty or so, gets some unexpected news that forces him to reconsider the suicide of a boyhood friend and deals with some pretty heavy guilt and remorse. It creeps up on you over 160 pages before landing a loving punch near the end. I had a couple friends who found it weirder than sad, but I was devastated by it. I also finally finished up Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, so apparently I've just got a thing for first names that start with J.
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Nov 26, 2011 19:05
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Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is definitely one of my favorite books this year. While a lot of his other stuff is experimental, this is just a coming-of-age story of a kid in 1980s Britain - Margaret Thatcher, Falkland Islands, and all. It was fantastic. He captured the cruel politics of 13-years-old popularity PERFECTLY. Mitchell impresses me more and more - I liked Jacob de Zoet and am gonna reread Cloud Atlas soon....
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Nov 27, 2011 04:31
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missmomo posted:The last book I finished was 'Blood Meridian' by Cormac McCarthy. I thought it was brilliant, if extremely heavy-going at times, not necessarily because of the sheer amount of violence, more the dense writing style. The fact that the ending makes 'The Road' look positively cheery says a lot. this has got to be my all time favorite book. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 27, 2011 06:41
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scumble posted:Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot I was also disappointed, especially with the trite as hell college setting. I just finished Wide Sargasso Sea and it was just fantastic - I didn't realize until halfway through that it was a prequel to Jane Eyre from the perspective of the mad wife. The writing is beautiful: quote:Then there was another saint, said Mother St Justine, she lived later on but still in Italy, or was it Spain. Italy is white pillars and green water. Spain is hot sun on stones, France is a lady with black hair wearing a white dress because Louise was both in France fifteen years ago, and my mother, whom I must forget and pray for as though she were dead, though she is living, liked to dress in white. Anyway, I really really enjoyed the story, and the ending gave me chills. I highly recommend reading it unless of course you haven't read Blood Meridian, then you should definitely read that first 
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Nov 27, 2011 07:06
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I finished John Ortved's oral history of The Simpsons the other day. It's an okay read and there's a good amount of information on how the show got off the ground and became such a giant success. There's a great chapter about John Swartzwelder and Geroge Meyer, too. But it's hampered by a lack of new information; most of the quotes in the book come from other sources, like The New Yorker, The Believer and etc. And later in the book, it moves from being a history to Ortved complaining about how bad the show is now and trying to figure out what it's legacy will be. I don't know if I'd recommend it to anybody who's not a fan of the show, but I'm not sure if the book really adds anything they wouldn't already know either.
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Nov 27, 2011 21:13
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I finished The Outfit. I really, really enjoyed this book. It's about the Chicago Outfit and how they got their hands into everything. You wouldn't believe how many politicians they had in their pockets and the industries they were involved in. Everything from jukebox promotion to the obvious Las Vegas and even had their hand in Hollywood. I would highly recommend this if you're interested in the mob and how they work.
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Nov 28, 2011 02:47
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I just finished To Kill a Mockingbird which I somehow never encountered through high school or college. I can see how this book gained it's reputation. Pity there will never be another Atticus Finch 
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Nov 28, 2011 05:17
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Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut): I had never attempted Vonnegut before and did so out of a mix of curiosity and an attempt to make up for the shoddy literary education I received in school. The book just didn't work for me. The first 130 pages were OK, even a little above average. Then it died. It didn't work as a story and I didn't get into the style.
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Nov 28, 2011 07:33
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I put down Skyrim enough to finish three books recently: Zack Parsons - Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon: I really dig Zack's style of writing and humour, so I was on board from the start. The internet is a fascinating and terrible place, and i was interested to see what weird types Zack would profile. Each character is vivid, multi-layered and compelling. However, I do have to admit that a small part of me was bummed out when the main, fictional, narrative took over. However, the book remained so consistently observant and funny that I didn't end up caring. I eagerly await his next book. Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises: so good. God, he can write dialogue like nobody's business, with each line being full of wit and substance. This is my second reading of the book, and it was fun to visit theses characters again. On one hand, I am jealous that the characters can sit around Parisian cafeteria all day getting plastered. On the other, at least I have direction and can be proud of my hard work. Ernest Hemmingway- For Whom the Bell Tolls a great book that I have a few issues with. I don't like how Hemingway has approached dialogue here. I get what he was trying to do, but the type of language he uses tends to make some very serious moments appear a bit silly. The best parts of the book is where the protagonist considers the nature of war, and what it is like to be a lone soldier that will never see the scope of the entire conflict. The last few chapters really pulled it all together, especially when it criticizes the inefficiency of bureaucracy.
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Nov 28, 2011 14:29
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Just finished Pynchon's Vineland. Fairly standard Pynchon; each chapter feels like a particularly zany thriller (eg: Godzilla crushes a lab for the insurance money), but with a digressive structure which rejects a thriller's overall plot, and a clear subtext fixed, in this case, on the war on drugs, the vice-grip of TV and the betrayal of the American dream, which can honestly be pretty corny at times though that might be another joke. Every individual paragraph is a real hoot to read, but I cannot shake the suspicion that the digressive structure is because Pynchon enjoys writing the set-up a lot more than the pay-off. The book's actual meaning didn't really grab me, and the structure did leave me a little cold, especially when I got the feeling that the final few pages would have been as fitting at the opening but the writing is so good that it powers through.
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Nov 28, 2011 15:38
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This morning I read All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. It's a scifi novella (around 200ish pages) about a future earth under siege by xenoforming alien automatons, centering around an inexperienced Japanese soldier going into his first battle, being killed... and then waking up 30 hours earlier, only to relive the same battle over and over. It also features a female American super-soldier known as the Full Metal Bitch, who may hold the key to breaking out of the time loop. The translation was really good, or perhaps "effective" might be the most apt term; "Full Metal Bitch" and a few odds and ends notwithstanding, I think it's one of the few things I've read translated from Japanese that didn't read... like it had been translated from Japanese, if that makes any sense. (This includes authors like Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami, who are noted by their translators as writing in a style that's reminiscent of something English that has been translated into Japanese). The imagery tended to be very visceral and immediate, without ranging into shocking-for-the-sake-of-it. One quirk of the protagonist/narrator was the need to describe every female character's breasts, or lack thereof. It was overall a quick and interesting read; I suppose it may disappoint military SF die-hards (the focus is more on the characters than the overall conflict with the aliens), or people looking for a full novel, but the story was well-told and didn't really need to be any longer than it was. Despite the doofy-looking anime cover, give it a chance. It's also been greenlit by Warner Brothers to become a movie, which I'd be interested in seeing.
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Nov 29, 2011 08:01
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The Passage by Justin Cronin. It's kinda like The Stand meets The Walking Dead. Militarized virus escapes from its testing facility while tests are being run on 12 death-row inmates. Fast-forward, a few times, by a jump of over a century, and you see the apocalyptic fallout from the virus. Caution: this bastard is huge. 75 chapters, 770 pages, 2 pound behemoth of a novel. The writer does get a bit wordy in sections that prompted a flyover, but overall, it kept my attention.
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Nov 29, 2011 21:12
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I kinda gave up on it a few pages after the breakout where they get the girl and go to the cabin, and then there's a nuke going off for some reason I might have to try it again though. I keep hearing good things, and maybe that was just a boring section?
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Nov 29, 2011 21:44
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I kinda gave up on it a few pages after the breakout where they get the girl and go to the cabin, and then there's a nuke going off for some reason No, actually- that was the good part. The rest, to me, felt like I was reading three or four other books thrown into a blender and glued together with a bunch of boring characters, cliche action set-pieces, and half-assed attempts at being "literary." I really, really hate that book.
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Nov 29, 2011 21:55
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The first part of that book was definitely the best.
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Nov 29, 2011 22:35
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Just lost a day oif my life I will never get back. Have been on a little bit of a genre splurge lately, reading alien invasion books set around modern time. Unfortunately this is the realm of authors like John Ringo, David Weber and the reast of the Baen crew. Enter "Out of the Dark" by David Weber. I never really read to much of the blurb, just enough that it seemed interesting if not same old story. It presented some cool ideas of an invader that was technically advanced but has had little war against skilled opponents so that weren't ready for a race that seems to be fighting a new war every year. Story dragged on and well no matter what the defenders were doing they never seemed to get anywhere, just make things difficult and annoying for the attackers - but the book was almost over and it was a standalone novel as far as I knew so something needed to change soon. Here comes Dracula.... It really felt like a typical "And then I woke up" plot where everything that happened becomes irrelevant. After half the entire population on earth is killed by unstoppable aliens it is all undone in a few chapters as the aliens are defeated by Vampires that were never mentioned before and weren't really even hinted at. I have read some dumb books and I wasn't really expecting much out of this but this has got to be by far one of the dumbest books ever.
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Nov 30, 2011 10:15
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David Weber is the worst writer. He's the literary equivalent of mainlining industrial caulk.
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Nov 30, 2011 14:05
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Finished Game of Thrones, which was pretty good except for the explicit detail of underage sexuality. Then I read I Shall Wear Midnight, which was also good, but flawed. It felt...meandering? It's hard to say why. It was like the conflict occurred with little to no input from the main character.
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Nov 30, 2011 21:53
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Just finished "In Her Name" trilogy by Michal R.Hicks. Got the fist book for free from Amazon (they give out kindle edition for 0.00$), got hooked up and ended up finishing the books. Initially i liked the books immensely. Descriptions and concept of alien culture were awesome and appealing. The corruption and flaws of human nature were described nicely. And it was intriguing mix of sci-fi with sort of magic space samurai fantasy theme. But the ending was kinda weak and confusing. I would give 4/5 to the first 2 books, and 3/5 to the last one.
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Dec 1, 2011 10:44
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Just finished re-reading Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, by Kary Mullis. It's a great book about the invention of the pcr and drug-use. Crazy stories, mildly educational.
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Dec 2, 2011 00:47
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doublestakk posted:Just finished re-reading Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, by Kary Mullis. It's a great book about the invention of the pcr and drug-use. Crazy stories, mildly educational. Could you elaborate a bit? For my part, finished Bulgakov's classic The Master and Margarita; one of those books I picked up because I cute girl I chatted up mentioned it as her favorite, and I can see why. It's absurd in a sort of 'Disney-esque' way, how else do you describe a talking, Primus-fixing cat? But at the same time does a good job of subtly but throughouly laying bare the viscissitudes of Soviet society under Stalin (who's obviously never mentioned). It bugs me how good Russian writers are at describing love in desperate, heart-wrenching manners, and Bulgakov's yet another capable bard on that front. What was most striking about it though is how really unsubversive it was, it was more a commentary of the average Muscovite and not the state itself. But apparently the NKVD made no such distinction. Continuing my Slavophilic kick, I tried reading James Michener's "Poland" based on another Slavophile history buff friend's recommendation...I stopped after the first chapter. The writing style is very wooden, the characters are devoid of depth and exist merely to advance the plot, which consists of "Hey, you know that strike in Gdansk? Pretty momentous, don't you think?","Yeah, I bet that Lech Walesa will be somebody important one day..." etc. I really want to learn more about Poland though, and barring a decently written history book about it that isn't just a regurgitation of dates and battles like most I've seen, I'll probably give Michener's historic fiction another shot. Otherwise, reading through Pynchon's Against the Day and when I get sick of how holy loving goddamn phenomenal a writer he is, I reread Will Christopher Baer's Kiss Me, Judas, my all-time fav. Mr. Squishy posted:The book's actual meaning didn't really grab me, and the structure did leave me a little cold, especially when I got the feeling that the final few pages would have been as fitting at the opening but the writing is so good that it powers through. Pynchon could write the nutritional facts labels for Corn Nuts and it'd be amazing. A Fistful of Dicks fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Dec 2, 2011 |
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Dec 2, 2011 05:03
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Just finished Rachel B. Glaser's Pee on Water, a collection of short stories. Some of them were seemingly weird for the sake of weirdness, but a few were fantastic. Also, if re-reading counts, Salman Rushdie's Shame. So goddamn wordy, but so goddamn compelling.
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Dec 2, 2011 06:04
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I finished Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery yesterday and I'm still wondering how I feel about it. The best I've come up with so far is that it's a beautifully written book about ugly things. Most of the story is told as a diary of the (fictional) guy who forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Eco does not try to make him, or anyone else, sympathetic or likable. Not that they should be, but spending so much mental time with a group of devious and hateful people gets tiring. These are ugly people, doing and saying ugly things, but as written by a master storyteller so it's also fascinating. The book also requires some intense concentration, more than any modern novel I've read recently. There are actually three narrators, with frequent flashbacks, and the characters in those flashbacks often give multi-page speeches(usually about how horrible Jewish people are). Even the author must've known it'd be confusing because he throws in a time line in the final chapter. I thought writing this up might help me clear my thoughts on the book, but I'm still confused. It's a "good book" in that it's well-written, intelligent, and captures the feel of late 1800's Europe, but it's hard to gush about it since it tells the story of the rise of anti-semitism and nearly every page is chock full of characters ranting about Jews. I haven't looked at any reviews of it yet, but now that I'm done I want to check them out and see how people are reacting to this. Next up is IQ84
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Dec 2, 2011 12:15
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I just acquired a Kindle and have begun working my way through the Baen free library. All of the stories I've read so far have been thoroughly enjoyable but the one I wanted to mention in particular is a collection of short stories by Mercedes Lackey. http://www.webscription.net/p-465-werehunter.aspx I've always been generally aware of Lackey as she has contributed to various anthologies I've read and co-wrote a very good trilogy with C J Cherryh but I hadn't really appreciated her as a writer in her own right. These short stories are superb, especially the ones about a space cat called SKitty (you may groan). Charming funny and light. It's as if Wodehouse wrote some military sci fi.
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Dec 2, 2011 14:45
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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. This is his longest novel, and it did drag a little bit in the first book. By the second and third, however, I was fully into it. Although I was disgusted when Tengo has sex with Fuka-Eri, and there is gratuitous description about her young vagina  . It's disconcerting how much of this stuff he writes. At least the other sex scenes were hilarious to read.It's not bad, by any means, just longer, and very definitely Murakami. Unreal worlds, western culture references, his very distinct style - all there. If you like him, feel free. If you already hate him, this will not change your mind.
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Dec 2, 2011 18:16
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After finishing the first book of the "Wheel of Time" series (The Eye of the World), I've been busy reading the others. I'm currently reading the fourth book - The Shadow Rising - and at this rate I'll be done with it soon. Sleep is not important, I need to know how this ends 
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Dec 2, 2011 19:22
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dorijan posted:After finishing the first book of the "Wheel of Time" series (The Eye of the World), I've been busy reading the others. Just to warn you: the fourth book is probably the best book, and there's a bad valley around books 8-10 where the series gets actively dull. It does pick up again in a big way around book 11, so it's worth plugging through, but if you sit up in the middle of book 9 or so go and go "what the gently caress did I just waste five hours reading," you aren't alone.
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Dec 2, 2011 23:20
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Finished The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers a little while ago. I haven't really had any time for reading books for fun since, but it's really stuck with me the past two months. Basically it's Power's usual gig of 1800's dudes facing off against magical stuff and heeeeere's Byron, but it's so incredibly flawed. It's like a broken mirror, just fascinating in how much wrongness is present while at the same time there's so much of interest. If you have any curiosity in you whatsoever wrt vampire mythology or early 19th century poets I'd honestly recommend you give it a read because the good bits are so incredibly engaging.
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Dec 3, 2011 02:13
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Finished Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder today. It's a collection of his minor stories, the ones that don't have Phillip Marlowe in them, plus an essay on the detective novel. On the whole, it's a solid collection with a couple stories, but not as good as his novels. You can tell he hadn't really found his voice some of these stories, especially the earlier ones, and in others it's like he's trying to write the opposite of Marlowe. I'd recommend it to anybody who's enjoyed his novels, but it's not the best book of his to start with.
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Dec 3, 2011 02:46
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Lullably by Chuck Palahniuk. Collecting his books on my bookshelf as I try to finish reading all of his work. His style of writing is engrossing.
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Dec 3, 2011 18:16
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Pleasant read, but it didn't really captivate me. Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson. Weekly newspaper columns from the mid to late 80's. Mostly about US politics with a few amusing personal tales sprinkled in. It's pretty funny to see how completely wrong that man was about pretty much anything but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're interested in American politics of the Reagan era.
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Dec 3, 2011 20:51
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Static Rook posted:I finished Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery yesterday Well, drat. I didn't know he had a new book out. Definitely one of the best living writers still working in my opinion. I'll have to check it out, though the subject matter sounds like it might be hard to take.
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Dec 4, 2011 15:56
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