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The Scar, by China Miéville. I really love Bas-Lag. As a setting, as a world Miéville has built, it's both a breath of fresh air from your regular fantasy-steampunk-urban-magic gubbins and a proper classic SF-style thumb-biting at modern life. The best parts of his previous book, Perdido Street Station, were when he was talking about the city of New Crobuzon itself. So I was a little worried when I realised that this sequel would be set at sea, because I've never been a fan of boats/life-at-sea stuff in fiction. But Armada (the floating pirate city where the events mostly take place), while not as engrossing and visceral as New Crobuzon, has some great little touches and mysteries about it. The problems from the first book - the rushed ending, the tangle of motives and the slightly excessive gross-out grotesque - have disappeared, and The Scar feels tight and satisfying, even at 800 pages. The worldbuilding is solid, the plot and its twists are fun, the shocks are shocking. I enjoyed the hell out of this book, and I hope Iron Council is as good when I get round to reading that too.
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Dec 8, 2014 13:21
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Gertrude Perkins posted:The Scar, by China Miéville. I really love Bas-Lag. As a setting, as a world Miéville has built, it's both a breath of fresh air from your regular fantasy-steampunk-urban-magic gubbins and a proper classic SF-style thumb-biting at modern life. The best parts of his previous book, Perdido Street Station, were when he was talking about the city of New Crobuzon itself. So I was a little worried when I realised that this sequel would be set at sea, because I've never been a fan of boats/life-at-sea stuff in fiction. But Armada (the floating pirate city where the events mostly take place), while not as engrossing and visceral as New Crobuzon, has some great little touches and mysteries about it. Oh man, glad you liked it, it's one of my favourite books of all time ... and definitely my #1 favourite SF/F work of all time. Iron Council is a very different beast to PSS and The Scar, and yes it's really good, but try not to have any expectations. It's China Miéville channeling Cormac McCarthy, and not everyone can get into it. Dense, literary, rambling... and it has a 150-page flashback bang in the middle (which turns out to be the best part of the book, but when it suddenly starts most people are like "what the gently caress is this??"). It's also WAY more political than the other books, and if you don't like socialist stuff then you may not have a fun time. HOWEVER, keep this in mind if his politics ever gets on your nerves: China Miéville posted:I'm not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters. Also check out Railsea, which is a massively fun adventure that, of any of Miéville's later books, feels the most like The Scar. Only set on land. A literal sea of rails. It's nuts, and you'll love it. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Dec 8, 2014 |
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Dec 8, 2014 15:07
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2001 a space odyssey. Epic. Phenomenal book. Reading the sequel now.
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Dec 8, 2014 15:26
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Got my fresh copy of Vandermeer's Authority and finished it this weekend. I found it kind of frustrating because you know there are answers coming, but you're forced to bumble around and towards them with the goofball of a protagonist. Well-written, funnier than the first book, and entertaining in its own way, but ultimately it felt like a placeholder on the road to Acceptance.
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Dec 8, 2014 19:08
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Hedrigall posted:Iron Council is a very different beast to PSS...It's also WAY more political than the other books, and if you don't like socialist stuff then you may not have a fun time. Oh, I'm a filthy pinko socialist, so I am totally on board with his politics (The Scar reads as one huge allegory for the modern world's commodification and destruction of natural resources). I have copies of his London's Overthrow (which is an excellent short travelogue through the desolation of modern London) and the Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction collection he co-edited with Mark Bould! Looking forward to picking up IC, most definitely. Then I'll start on his stand-alones. As for me, I just finished two books that could not be more different. 24/7, by Jonathan Crary. Sleep is anathema to capitalism, as it represents the only as-yet commodified period of human existence. This is a blistering polemic on how neoliberalism has made us all eager collaborators with capitalism's agenda to systematically control and own our mental labour. Crary writes with flourish and anger, and I found my own resolve weakening the more I read. It's hardly an upbeat book - even the parts of life I had optimisms about were pretty powerfully shut down. Speaking out agaist the "24/7 world" - the new status quo of universal time and thought commodification - Crary is pretty much right on the money. I'm sure once I've had time to digest this more, I'll be able to formulate a more in-depth critique, but right now I'm still reeling. and Thor: First Thunder, which was kind of a boring, hurried mess. The artwork is awful, Liefeld-esque gubbins with too many lines everywhere, missing eyes and weird anatomical warps. At least they can draw feet. I guess they rushed it out to coincide with the first Thor movie back in '011, but as an origin story retelling it seems very rushed, with details and interesting moments getting lost in relentless pacing. Pretty bad.
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Dec 9, 2014 15:36
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Hedrigall posted:Oh man, glad you liked it, it's one of my favourite books of all time ... and definitely my #1 favourite SF/F work of all time. I love how mentioning Mieville summons the Hedrigall. Read Embassytown this year and really liked it. Definitely felt like a book only Mieville could write. Read the first 6 books of The Dresden Files. Fun, trashy reads.
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Dec 10, 2014 03:53
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I just finished reading the poem part of Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur and I wish he'd finished it. I'm moving on to reading his son's commentary on it, but drat if the alliteration and inversion and repetition of lines isn't powerful and better than anything else from him I've read so far (I know basically nothing about poetry so this is the best I can explain it). Not knowing anything about poetry, or that particular kind of poetry, what else should I look at picking up in a similar style and form as it?
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Dec 10, 2014 20:54
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Console Wars It's a book about the 16 bit era of video games. I was very interested in the subject matter, it covers a lot of history and politics. The rise of Sega after the dominance of the NES, the antagonism between Sega of Japan and Sega of America (how that gave rise to the 32X and killed partnerships with SGI and Sony), the controversy over violence and game ratings, failed partnerships that lead to the Playstation, Rare and the revival of the SNES late into its life cycle, marketing and change of perception from consoles being toys to multimedia devices, etc. But it's presented like a TV mini-series or show. With descriptions about locations and scenes and all the information presented by fictional recreations of conversations between people. Really detracts from the whole experience and is something that has to be suffered through to get all this great information that come from interviews with the people that were involved. Like there's a chapter about the success of the SNES in 1992 with the release of Legend of Zelda, marketing and exclusive Street Fighter II release. But to get that information you have to read all this fluff about employees not wanting to swim in the pool at a barbecue and 'juicy burgers grilled to perfection'.
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Dec 11, 2014 02:55
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Pocket Billiards posted:Console Wars
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Dec 11, 2014 13:03
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Payndz posted:Is that the one where there's a chapter playing out the innermost thoughts of two people as they met on a beach or somewhere that the author couldn't possibly have gleaned from interviews unless they literally told him "at that moment, I was thinking this"? I read an extract and found the underlying story interesting (I worked in the industry during that period), but god drat it was a chore to pick it out from the horrible fictionalised text. That's the first chapter. It's a great hook for a documentary or non-fiction book, you have a market entirely dominated by Nintendo with absolute control over suppliers, software developers and retailers. The USA outpost of a Japanese company takes a gamble on the man responsible for some of the biggest successes in the toy industry to challenge Nintendo. Told by a fictional third-person recount of a two men talking to each other on a beach, with his preschool aged daughters appearing to give 'wise beyond their years' insight.
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Dec 12, 2014 02:21
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Hello Friends So i've got to say first off SUPER COOL thread here. I am very interested in Ancient Aliens and am a BIG believer in the "Ancient Alien theory". That being said I have purchased All of Zecharia Stichins books. Currently i just got done with Zecharia Stichin Earth Chronicles III "The Wars of Gods and Men". I found most of it very interesting. Like when he talks about the tunneling through the Great Pyramid. Pretty cool. Any Ancient theorist out there?
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Dec 14, 2014 04:12
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You poor bastard. EDIT: Anyway, I've just finished a self-help book called The Tools that I've heard about on some podcast. It's a book from a Hollywood psychotherapist who was allegedly becoming frustrated with some shortcomings of psychotherapy like the focus on exploring the past rather than directly working on present issues and then he met this wondrous square-chinned he-god of a psychotherapist, who's technically a co-author on this book, who from scratch developed some therapeutic exercises that was so great they basically changed his career. There is a lot of borderline (and perhaps regular) dick-sucking and hero worship going on here. The tools themselves are a bunch of exercises that I vaguely or directly remember reading about before (cultivating loving kindness, negative visualization, embracing the Jungian Shadow) mixed with a llllllot of New Age bullshit in the form of Higher Forces of the Universe that are behind everything that you need to learn to surrender to and channel. The final chapter directly addresses this - tl;dr imagine the I'm Not Saying It's Aliens meme and replace Aliens with God. Buy a book about Stoicism instead. Megazver fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 19:20
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Anunnaki posted:Hello Friends I just finished At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft which has some of these ideas here but its fiction, of course.
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Dec 15, 2014 11:24
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Anunnaki posted:Hello Friends I haven't read them but you might be interested in the many books written for the Stargate Universe. Or if you want a sillier, less serious recommendation you can't go wrong with David Icke! I mean, the guy wrote a book about how The Matrix was real!
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Dec 15, 2014 16:52
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Just finishing up Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstien. He was a crime reporter for a big newspaper in Japan covering the Yakuza in the Saitama prefecture and Vice in general in Tokyo. It's a great read and it's fascinating what the relationship between detectives and reporters was like, as well as people's general reaction to a foreign reporter working for a Japanese paper.
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Dec 16, 2014 07:09
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A. Beaverhausen posted:Just finishing up Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstien. He was a crime reporter for a big newspaper in Japan covering the Yakuza in the Saitama prefecture and Vice in general in Tokyo. It's a great read and it's fascinating what the relationship between detectives and reporters was like, as well as people's general reaction to a foreign reporter working for a Japanese paper. I'm like 90% sure the guy is full of poo poo.
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Dec 16, 2014 11:09
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I picked up "This Is Where I Leave You" by Jonathon Tropper. Super entertaining, first book in a long time that I read in a day. Got me in the mood for the holidays and visiting my dysfunctional family.
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Dec 16, 2014 21:04
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Just finished Attempting Normal by Marc Maron. Starts off promising, there's some insight into his failed marriages, family, addiction, life in stand up comedy, etc. If you're familiar with his podcast and stand up his writing has the same 'voice' and is pretty well done for the most part. But it burns through the interesting topics pretty quickly and the rest of the book is the kind of storytelling his does on stage about small episodes in his life. Some of these are related to episodes from his IFC show and things he's talked about on stage, but they aren't transcripts of his standup like other books by comedians (George Carlin). If you enjoy what he does on stage, storytelling from the point of view of a fussy and neurotic middle aged man, you probably won't regret reading it. If it was more focused on his life, career and addiction and didn't randomly jump around between topics it would have been a much stronger book.
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Dec 19, 2014 01:37
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Just finished "Infinite Jest" by David F. Wallace. It took me an entire year (the first half took me 11 months and I just binged the last half in about a month). The book, at the very least, is impressive. Even DFW's biggest critics can't deny that. I loved it, personally. Like holy poo poo. It's dense and difficult and everything (it probably could have been shorter and equally impactful), but so emotionally accessible. It's loving tragic, is what it is. Addiction takes many forms, and it will deprive you of your humanity. Wallace, in a way that only he can, whether that be good or bad, illustrates how one (along with an entire society) falls into addiction, what it's like to escape it, and the abject horror of ultimately succumbing to it. I haven't been affected by a book like this since Brothers Karamazov, and I'll be chewing on it for some time to come.
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Dec 19, 2014 08:06
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Last Tango In Aberystwyth, by Malcolm Pryce. After the great fun that the first Aberystwyth noir novel was, this was pretty disappointing. I think after the initial novelty has worn off, I'm not that big a fan of Pryce's writing, or perhaps it was just that the characters and mystery in this one never really grabbed me. There are a handful of great gags, and a couple of scenes (such as when Louie walks in on Jubal faking his suicide attempt) stuck with me, but for the most part I was underwhelmed. The Female Man, by Joanna Russ. A short but engrossing ride through the psychosocial inner worlds of three similar but different women, from different times and worlds. A classic of feminist SF, and it earns that legacy; I was really entertained, and for better or worse it still resonates forty years on. Some of the references and language are a little dated, and I found myself bewildered at times, but it ties together nicely at the end. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in classic SF, feminist writing or just a good and weird tale of self-discovery.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:56
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After lacking time to read anything other than university books I eventually finishing 'Cockroaches - Jo Nesbo'. It was probably my least favorite out of all of his books. Rating: 6/10
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Dec 21, 2014 21:12
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Just finished "The Quick" by Lauren Owen and I have mixed feelings. Pros: This book manages to make vampires horrifying again as we get to follow two different characters through their transformation. The characters are flawed, interesting, and have good motivations for their actions with two glaring exceptions. Cons: The author seems to be incapable of giving any character a satisfying ending besides killing them. Almost the entire cast from the first half of the book are never heard from again. The ending relies on a character forgetting she chained her vampire up in a secret passage while she searched for a cure and owls being capable of teleportation since there's no trace of James' escape. ;tldr Read up through Christopher's death and it makes a decent horror novel. The rest is just another author obsessed with torturing her main character and least interesting characters loving around aimlessly for decades after main vampire battle.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:28
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Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon always wages a war on my attention span, and I'm assaulted by characters that reoccur in the book, but not in my head. Lots of going back to make sure I'm thinking of the right character when they're referred to. What always sticks, though (just without names), is a character's, well, character. Pynchon's talent for description is timeless and just loving great. His chaotically controlled prose served the noir storyline really well, keeping me on my toes throughout, confident he wouldn't adhere to the tropes of the genre. A lot of the 60s pop culture references were lost on me, which is a shame, as the book is filled with them, and I'm sure were meant to serve Pynchon's commentary on the fleeting nature of the era, though I still would like to think it didn't go over my head. Excited to see what PTA does with this one.
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Dec 25, 2014 20:42
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Just finished the Southern Reach Trilogy, blazed through all of it in 2 days. Which I kind of regret and wish I had less binge-read and taken more breaks to think in-between, but having the big volume with all 3 books in one made it too easy to just move on to the next. Although I felt constantly frustrated during reading, I definitely enjoyed them - the series strikes a great balance between explicit explanation and letting the reader figure out what's going on. Liked a lot how each book has a very different feel to it, that goes beyond just the differences in perspective and how they're told. Spoilers below for all three books so avoid if you haven't finished the trilogy - The suggestion of terrifyingly alien cosmic horror accidentally encroaching on human space, and the inability of any of the characters to comprehend what's going on while still retaining their humanity, hit all the right notes for me. Didn't like at first how the "big reveal" of what made Area X was so nebulous and unclear, but I've warmed to the way the author initially shoves it in your face - yes, it's aliens, or at least that's the best guess the characters have - and then slowly unravels the thread of that until the Ghost Bird & Crawler scene, where we learn that the thing that created Area X was a manufactured remnant of a dead alien civilization, that had no "purpose" recognizable to human perception. And that all the questions most of the characters have been asking about Area X (and the reader) don't have satisfactory answers because they are not the right questions.
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Dec 26, 2014 10:34
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I just finished The Forge of God by Greg Bear. I tried reading it when it was new, but I was a teenager and the near future setting (1996) wasn't interesting enough to me. I recently gave it another shot and tore through it in a day and a half. I have some questions about The Guest that were left ambiguous and that I am assuming are addressed in the sequel. I know it seems obvious that it was created by the planet-killers as some kind of distraction, that it was supposed to create confusion in humanity, but it seems really counterproductive to do so by giving up details of their plans. I'm thinking that the purpose was to either A) have the more powerful nation ready to suppress the truth for when the other aliens made contact and gauge how humanity will react when they do or B) a way to test the offensive capabilities of the humans by inciting them to attack the sites in Death Valley or Australia. One of the characters has an internal thought about realizing what the aliens were doing when he found out that humanity was getting conflicting stories, and connected it to some reference I did not recognize. If anyone can explain this to me I would appreciate it.
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Dec 27, 2014 06:39
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Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation, by Blake J. Harris. I grew up a hardcore Nintendo kid. I started with an N64, and when it came time for partisanship it was Nintendo versus Sony - those battle lines had already been drawn, with Sega touted by a handful of passionate friends who'd grown up with a Megadrive. Add to that being from England, and I never really understood the grip of Sonic or Blast Processing. As such, this was much more of a learning experience for me than I had expected. This book is a pretty loose but dense retelling of Tom Kalinske's tenure as CEO of Sega of America, from 1990-96. It's a grand underdog story, told from the POV of Kalinske and SOA, daring to go toe-to-toe with the all-powerful corporate monolith that was Nintendo. There are a lot of great moments, coincidences, schemes, gossip and everything you'd want from a semi-serious nostalgia trip. What this book doesn't have, though, is a decent writer. Harris flies along when simply expositing Sega's plans or talking about the history of the PlayStation's designer. But when it comes to dialogue, character description or anything else, and he devolves into awkward thesaurus-clutching turns of phrase that ironically remind me of the kinetic trying-too-hard tone of 90s gaming magazines. It's lucky for Harris that the subject matter is so interesting! With only a vague idea of the timeline of things, release dates, key players and the like, I was always excited to see what would happen next. I hear this is being made into a film by (with?) Seth Rogen, and I am crossing my fingers for it. In Real Life, by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang. Got this for Xmas and read it in one sitting on the train. It's a short but sweet story of a nerdy girl who signs up to an MMO with the task of helping deal with gold farmers. On getting to know one of them, she sympathises with his plight and tries to help. It's a warm, feel-good story, and Wang's artwork really fits the mood, with gorgeous colours and a flair for the adorable.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:24
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Bone clocks for christmas and enjoyed it thoroughly. The first 4 chapters were fantastic, liked the different styles (though I don't think there was that much of difference between them for it to be striking), with the Holly & Hershey chapters particularly captivating. The book broke down at chapter 5, mostly because of the long winded exposition. I know that it is part satire, and good on him if he was satirising the often tedious world building in fantasy/sci fi realism (hey, China Mieville, I'm guessing that's you), but it needs a certain panache to satirise something boring and actually make it readable.
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Dec 29, 2014 16:45
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I finally got around to reading Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan. I had read about Yan on the Book Barn and always wanted to pick up one of his books. I really enjoyed this novel because of the unique perspectives of China's Cultural Revolution. I think some of the nuances were lost on me, though, due to the fact that I'm not overly family with Chinese culture and the book was a translation from its original Chinese.
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Dec 30, 2014 08:24
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Just finished Dear Leader by Jang Jin-Sung, which has the lurid subtitle "North Korea's senior propagandist exposes shocking truths behind the regime". Except, he wasn't and your mileage may vary on the "shock" factor. Jang was a rising but junior member in one of the propaganda offices, responsible for writing epic poems praising the leader and forging positive commentary from South Koreans. So, while he wasn't as senior or singular as the title makes out, it is very much an insiders look at the regime, a contrast with Nothing to Envy. Is it good? Well, it's a solid bit of misery-porn, albeit a well-written one. I have some doubts about the veracity of some parts - the final section in particular reads like an adventure novel. But it's very readable and as said presents a different view on North Korea. I'm no expert, but particularly interesting was his statements that the cult of personality and security apparatus was built up by Kim Jong-il while he was out of favour and his brother was earmarked for the leadership. The un-questioning need for loyalty and security allowed him to infiltrate all sectors of government, eventually isolating his father Kim Il-Sung and edging out any rivals.
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Dec 30, 2014 20:52
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Arthur C. Clarke's 2010. Utterly mesmerizing. Not really comparable to 2001 but still very absorbing. Choking to read the final two in the series.
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Dec 31, 2014 10:23
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Managed to finish another book over Christmas break - Michael Connelly - The burning room. The first book of his that I have read and I really enjoyed it, to the point where it took only four days to finish. Been thinking its time to read all of the Lord of the Ring books sometime during 2015.
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Jan 3, 2015 10:05
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I was going on a Jules Verne binge the last few weeks, I just finished Twenty Thousand Leagues. It's a fantastic novel, and I read it at a perfect time, on a cruise ship. It's funny, before reading the book, I assumed that Verne was simply erroneous in calculating the depth of the deepest sea, which is the six mile Mariana Trench. Should've realized he meant the sub travelled twenty thousand leagues in distance. Also nearly finished with The Mysterious Island, which I've been dying to read. It feels different in terms of writing, but it's still a great sequel to 20k leagues.
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Jan 6, 2015 03:03
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Last thing I finished was The Forge of God by Greg Bear. I kind of moved away from genre fiction for a while, but I've been giving SF another chance when I hear of something getting good reviews, with mixed results. I've liked almost everything I've read by Robert Charles Wilson, but a lot of what I've been told was genre-breaking and genuine "literature" doesn't seem much better stylistically than the old stuff I liked that I can't stand to read anymore, like Niven and Brin. I saw The Forge of God at a used book store, remembered that I attempted to read it as a teen and found it too boring and not sci-fi enough, so I figured I should give it another chance. I really enjoyed a lot of the ideas in the book, and the images of the world ending were evocative, but it still felt somehow incomplete or too light as an actual story. The characters were realistic enough, but mostly because they were barely characterized, not badly written when they were written but uninteresting and not very well developed.
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Jan 6, 2015 05:56
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I just finished Pandora's Star by Peter F Hamilton, which took me since October. It was pretty good; I need to digest it for a bit before I write a review (I'm going to start the new year by reviewing way more books for my blog) and start on the sequel, Judas Unchained. Won't start that for a few months, I want to get some shorter books under my belt. I seem to be in the vast minority of readers in that I loved the Ozzie segments of the book.
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Jan 10, 2015 15:26
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Hedrigall posted:I just finished Pandora's Star by Peter F Hamilton, which took me since October. It was pretty good; I need to digest it for a bit before I write a review I know the feeling. The story is so big that it needs some processing. I enjoyed the Ozzie parts, but they did confuse me a bit, especially at the end. I'm not completely sure where they ended up. I just finished Daemon by Daniel Suarez and The Blade Itself, the first in Joe Abercrombie's The First Law Trilogy. Daemon was all right, but the plot seemed really far-fetched, considering the author seemed to go out of his way to say that he was knowledgeable about computers/technology, which form the main basis for the plot. Dramatic license, I suppose. The Blade Itself was, as most people here are finding, great. Very little actually happens in the book, but it was still very enjoyable. I'm definitely going to buy the trilogy to read the next two; I'm excited to see where this leads.
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Jan 11, 2015 01:20
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Finished last week a book I'd looked forward to for a long time - Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben Rich, former Skunk Works director who oversaw the Stealth fighter project and was involved with everything that came out of that place basically during the Cold War and beyond, including the lord of all planes the SR-71 Blackbird. Its a quick read with some good insight into overcoming impressive technical and political challenges. Its also basically a love letter to the 'old boys club' where billion dollar deals were done over drinks and a handshake, and how that evolved (from the writers perspective, devolved) to the bureaucratic nightmare of modern government procurement. If you have any interest in that sort of stuff. The best parts of the book are short takes from military and political people, which have the fun bits, eg 'Holy poo poo that fucker was fast' or 'those bastards never saw us coming'. I was disappointed by the simple style but don't regret the read.Ayem posted:Joe Abercrombie's The First Law Trilogy Fun story, I love Abercrombie's action sequences.
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Jan 12, 2015 06:14
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Supreme Allah posted:Finished last week a book I'd looked forward to for a long time - Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben Rich, former Skunk Works director who oversaw the Stealth fighter project and was involved with everything that came out of that place basically during the Cold War and beyond, including the lord of all planes the SR-71 Blackbird. Its a quick read with some good insight into overcoming impressive technical and political challenges. Its also basically a love letter to the 'old boys club' where billion dollar deals were done over drinks and a handshake, and how that evolved (from the writers perspective, devolved) to the bureaucratic nightmare of modern government procurement. If you have any interest in that sort of stuff. The best parts of the book are short takes from military and political people, which have the fun bits, eg 'Holy poo poo that fucker was fast' or 'those bastards never saw us coming'. I was disappointed by the simple style but don't regret the read. We just started a Skunkworks team at my job based on the ideas from Lockheed one. Looking forward to checking this out, thanks for the post.
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Jan 12, 2015 07:57
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Gertrude Perkins posted:Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation, by Blake J. Harris. I grew up a hardcore Nintendo kid. I started with an N64, and when it came time for partisanship it was Nintendo versus Sony - those battle lines had already been drawn, with Sega touted by a handful of passionate friends who'd grown up with a Megadrive. Add to that being from England, and I never really understood the grip of Sonic or Blast Processing. As such, this was much more of a learning experience for me than I had expected. I read Console Wars back in August and I seem to have gotten the same things out of it as you. One component of the novel which you began to touch on, and a part of the novel that bothered me the most, was the faux-conversations within the book. Note to Harris- if you're going to write a book about these characters, don't write fluffy and unimaginable conversations between them. As much as I can appreciate the author attempting to liven up the tale, it was far too much for me at points- I suppose I would have preferred more of the book written from a factual standpoint. But hey, the book has stuck with me through it all- and it's bestowed upon me some interesting facts that can make for good conversation with my gamer friends. The most recent book I've completed is Molloy by Samuel Beckett, an Irish post-modernist. The book explores themes of mortality, of family and of illness in general, whether physical or mental. One thing I also enjoyed about this book is the fact that it explores the possibility of one of its narrators having fabricated most, if not all, of his contributions to the tale. And such a thought makes me think about how the integrity of a narrator affects the story she relays to me, and, I suppose, how much that should happen, if at all. Also: Beckett will make you appreciate longer sentences, because you will have to parse through a seemingly endless amount of them in order to get the true meaning of this book. Especially the first half, which is written from the perspective of a mentally disabled man. Very stream-of-consciousness, and very difficult to sift through without wholeheartedly diving into the novel.
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Jan 12, 2015 18:57
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Funny you mentioned Console Wars now, I'm about a quarter of the way through it and yes, the conversations are really getting on my nerves. The thing that makes the book very intriguing is nostalgia, firstly, and that it's a very interesting period of video gaming. I think it'd make a brilliant tv series, then they could include decent made up conversations. Another thing that occurs to me, again a quarter of the way through, is that I don't want Sega to win.
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Jan 12, 2015 20:18
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'Balcony in the Forest' by Julien Gracq. In 1939 a soldier is assigned to a post in the forest, where while waiting for the war he slips into a dreamy existence. Lovely.
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Jan 12, 2015 21:34
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