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Just finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks and Slade House. I can't remember why, but Slade House has been in my to-read list for a while, so I grabbed it from the local library. I didn't know anything about David Mitchell beforehand, or that I probably should have read them in the opposite order. Even though it's more pulpy and has less to "say," I enjoyed SH more. I found the creepy vignettes and a tiny slice of all the weird fantasy stuff more compelling than TBC's mostly-traditional plot and huge fully explained war between immortal factions. SH makes you feel like a detective, piecing everything together; in TBC, you're just along for the ride, until you get an infodump 2/3rd of the way through. All of the weird fantasy stuff feels more appropriate among SH's little Halloween stories as opposed to TBC's stories about real problems that real people have. Which isn't to say I didn't like The Bone Clocks; I couldn't put it down. I'll probably pick up Cloud Atlas this week too.
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Aug 1, 2018 00:49
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Lester Shy posted:Just finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks and Slade House. I can't remember why, but Slade House has been in my to-read list for a while, so I grabbed it from the local library. I didn't know anything about David Mitchell beforehand, or that I probably should have read them in the opposite order. One advantage of reading TBC first is you can anticipate just how badly the ghosts hosed up when the name "Marinus" gets dropped. And while I agree that TBC's info-dump section is a bit clumsy, there are also some very nicely handled reveals, especially in Hugo's section. I think the slow revelation that Hugo isn't just a trouble-making student, but a murderous sociopath, is well handled. If you liked that bit as well, you should check Black Swan Green too.
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Aug 1, 2018 01:08
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Before they are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, read by Steven Pacey. Second book of the "first law" trilogy In this one the things take more shape, we finally learn what the heroes are doing and why, which was one of my grievances about the first book. It also helps that the story is mostly split into 3 areas so there isn't as much jumping around as the previous book. It felt like more of a complete story on its own, perhaps not wrapping up the stories but at least stopping at points where it felt good and natural. All in all a better book than its predecesor. The narration is still top notch, easily one of the best I've ever heard. Now I'm on to read the conclusion.
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Aug 1, 2018 02:17
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Just finished China Mieville's This Census-Taker. I really liked it--it was moody and mysterious, a world told through the understanding of a child. There is no resolution to this novelette, so if you need certainty, give it a pass.
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Aug 1, 2018 04:39
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Borne by Jeff Vandermeer. It was excellent, I think I liked it more than Annihilation (haven't read the other Southern Reach books yet)
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Aug 1, 2018 19:14
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Just finished Chevengur by Andrei Platonov. Easily one of the best novels I've read if not the best. It's a kind of satirical-philosophical take on the Russian revolution. I'm not smart so I won't attempt any analysis but the language, characters and everything is just mesmerizing.
Grevling fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Aug 2, 2018 |
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Aug 2, 2018 18:23
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I just finished Jo Nesbo's The Snowman, part of his awfully named Detective Harry Hole series. It wasn't groundbreaking, but a pretty decent thriller.
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Aug 3, 2018 15:11
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My library just had a book sale, and I bought a whole bag of cozy mysteries about cats. I finished Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (Stormlight Archive #2), on Thursday and it was one of my favorite epic fantasy books I've ever read. I think Sanderson might be my favorite fantasy author right now, I really like the Mistborne series as well. He does an amazing job keeping things internally consistent and creating worlds that seem fully realized. Then I read Murder Past Due by Miranda James (Cat in the Stacks Mystery #1) the next day. It's a pretty standard cozy, but I appreciated the slow pace (the book is very southern and talks a lot about the importance of proper manners), and related to it as a cat fan / librarian who previously worked in a special collections university library. I don't know that I'd really recommend it if you don't have an affinity for cats and libraries, but it was a light entertaining 3 hours. A decent palate cleanser before jumping back into 1000+ more dense pages. Starting Oathbringer by Sanderson this weekend.
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Aug 4, 2018 16:21
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I just finished Joe Lansdale’s Lost Echoes. It was a very quick and entertaining read. I quite like his books and this one was no exception.
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Aug 4, 2018 20:49
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Red Notice - Bill Browder After reading Stalin - The Court of the Red Tsar and other books about the Soviet Empire, holy gently caress. Russia is basically evil incarnate
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Aug 6, 2018 04:09
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geeves posted:After reading Stalin - The Court of the Red Tsar and other books about the Soviet Empire, holy gently caress. Welcome to the Democratic Party
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Aug 6, 2018 05:20
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geeves posted:Red Notice - Bill Browder Just wait til you hear about America
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Aug 6, 2018 06:06
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I recently finished Farewell, My Lovely which I didn't enjoy as much as The Big Sleep. It was still good, though.
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Aug 6, 2018 08:48
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Wheat Loaf posted:I recently finished Farewell, My Lovely which I didn't enjoy as much as The Big Sleep. It was still good, though. Chandler is one of those I wish I could go back and read again the first time.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:11
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I just finished Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down and Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants yesterday, one after the other. I read them both on my phone while I pushed Tet Jr. in his stroller around the first floor of the house, which is sometimes the only thing that will console him. I think it was just me fulfilling some deep desire either to be crushed in rubble or spectacularly immolated, which are probably preferable to listening to an infant whine for a few hours straight.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:20
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Found Audio by N.J. Campbell. The book is set around the transcripts of a couple of audiotapes brought to an acoustic scientist by a mysterious individual for analysis. The tapes are of an interview with a reporter that specializes in extreme individual activities--mountain climbing, back-country jungle exploration, etc.--who has an attraction for the unusual. This leads him to a series of extraordinary events that leave the definition between "reality" and "dream" in tatters. Added to this, there are forces about that are set to prevent knowledge of these tapes from becoming of broader knowledge. Its a weird little book, but is captivating and worth the few hours it will take to complete it. I really enjoyed it.
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Aug 7, 2018 02:47
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The Star King by Jack Vance. It's the first of his Demon Princes revenge novels, which I have in an omnibus. It's also my first exposure to Jack Vance as a writer. So far it's not blowing me away, but I can appreciate the aesthetic he brings to pulp sci-fi, and the amount of setting detail he puts into the text. One thing about this book that annoys me is the way that Vance handles the mystery he introduces into the plot. See, Gersen's first target is living a double life, and he's narrowed down the target's secret identity to three people. After meeting them, the narration makes it seem like he's completely stumped as to how to expose the target without giving him the chance to escape. However, once Gersen springs his trap, he explains in monologue that he noticed several clues to the target's identity that the reader was never privy to, but apparently weren't conclusive enough for him to act on without more confirmation. It's not a deal-breaking lie, but it's kind of an artificial tension-raiser. Still looking forward to the other four books, though! Also, Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer. I like this book the best out of the Southern Reach trilogy, because it has multiple perspectives and timeline jumping and uses both well. That said, this is still a frustrating series where I'm always positive that I missed some detail in the text as I'm reading it. It's an unnerving effect that might be intentional, which I'm not sure I've seen before. I saw someone in another thread complaining that the movie version of Annihilation doesn't sufficiently explain anything compared to the books, and I'd like to emphatically disagree with them now that I've finished both. Still, I really like the note this book ends on, and I wouldn't mind rereading the trilogy to get a better picture of it. I liked it well enough, just not as much as I thought I would. Or as much as the movie. Or The Sick Land.
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Aug 7, 2018 02:50
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Solitair posted:Also, Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer. I like this book the best out of the Southern Reach trilogy, because it has multiple perspectives and timeline jumping and uses both well. That said, this is still a frustrating series where I'm always positive that I missed some detail in the text as I'm reading it. It's an unnerving effect that might be intentional, which I'm not sure I've seen before. I saw someone in another thread complaining that the movie version of Annihilation doesn't sufficiently explain anything compared to the books, and I'd like to emphatically disagree with them now that I've finished both. Still, I really like the note this book ends on, and I wouldn't mind rereading the trilogy to get a better picture of it. I liked it well enough, just not as much as I thought I would. Or as much as the movie. Or The Sick Land. Having finished the trilogy, would you recommend waiting to watch Annihilation until I've read all three books? I've heard the movie takes some elements from the other two books and I've only just started reading Authority.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:21
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Pablo Nergigante posted:Having finished the trilogy, would you recommend waiting to watch Annihilation until I've read all three books? I've heard the movie takes some elements from the other two books and I've only just started reading Authority. I would, yeah. But they’re quite different.
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Aug 7, 2018 23:35
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Pablo Nergigante posted:Having finished the trilogy, would you recommend waiting to watch Annihilation until I've read all three books? I've heard the movie takes some elements from the other two books and I've only just started reading Authority. If you're going to read them all anyway, I don't see why not. I don't remember anything from the movie echoing Authority or Acceptance, though.
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Aug 7, 2018 23:50
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The Book of M by Peng Shepherd. Well, that was a weird one. The first half of this book is genuinely interesting and creepy, introducing a post-apocalyptic setting where the world's gone down to a very, very unusual apocalypse that's genuinely like nothing I've seen or read before. It might as well be introducing magic to the world, but the magic works like nothing I've seen before in fiction and there's a lot of really creepy bits that the book never deigns to explain - presumably it's the same effects that have destroyed the world, but just maybe not. Then the book starts getting into Hindu mythology and there's a guy with an elephant's shadow (it... makes a degree of sense in context) and any connection to the real world just seems to fly out the window. The Book of M wants to be a book about human identity and relationships, and our relationships with memories - the thin, fuzzy line between fact and fiction. But in my opinion, it gets so weird and out there that I think the intended bittersweet message falls flat.
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Aug 12, 2018 14:30
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I just finished Latchkey, which was excellent, but is best described as "the sequel to Archivist Wasp." Archivist Wasp, which I read immediately before, I think is best summed up as "A post-apocalyptic ghost-hunter girl and the ghost of a bioengineered super-solider go on a journey of self-discovery." It's a fascinating collision of genres, including YA, which I guess it is in the sense of the protagonist been a teenage girl, but nothing about it really strikes me as not general fantasy/sci-fi. The ghost bits and the sciencey bits of the pre-post-apocalyptic world don't directly explain each other, at least as of the end of the second book, they are just both things that exist in this world.
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Aug 12, 2018 17:51
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Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Really good. Takes place before and during the Nigerian Civil War. Love to read novels about the devastating effects of (de)colonisation.
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Aug 12, 2018 22:04
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I just finished The overstory by Richard Powers. It's a novel about trees and people who like them. I really enjoyed it, I learnt that I know nothing about trees and that they are pretty epic. It's a bit depressing though (we are cutting down a lot of trees with no end in sight) and you probably don't want to read it if you are a lumberjack.
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Aug 13, 2018 06:40
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Down and Out in Paris and London. It was probably the longest it’s taken me to read a 200 page book. It wasn’t complex by any means, just sort of monotonous and hard to read more than one chapter at a time. E: I liked Keep the Aspidistra Flying more. Rolo fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Aug 13, 2018 |
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Aug 13, 2018 15:51
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Finally picked up Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. The writing was good, but the plot left me underwhelmed, I was a bit disappointed. I think it's because I disagree with several of of the premises expressed by Crake so it kept pulling me out of the narrative. One of them was the idea that all the easily mined metal was gone. The deeper mines aren't gone, though, nor are sources of already-mined metal like iron and copper Another was the idea that the loss of one generation was enough to disrupt everything. I don't think that's true either. If a group of humans know something can be done, they will figure out how to do it, even if it takes years. While I did enjoy the book, for me it lacked the immediacy and sense of a possible reality that was present in The Handmaid's Tale.
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Aug 13, 2018 17:30
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Zola posted:Finally picked up Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. drat, sounds like she needed to spend more time world building
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Aug 13, 2018 19:07
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fridge corn posted:drat, sounds like she needed to spend more time world building I don't know. The world-building itself was pretty intricate, it was how the characters moved within it.
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Aug 13, 2018 23:46
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Zola posted:I don't know. The world-building itself was pretty intricate, it was how the characters moved within it. I actually enjoyed the world building enough to finish out the whole MaddAddam series, but I think your sense of disagreement with Crake to be kind of an ignored premise. The next two books take a much more naturalistic view on the same events, and after effects, but even then seemed to ignore a real counterpoint to Crake's actions. Honestly, the more I think about it, she probably did too much world building. Those books have such a fleshed out world it kind of ends up leaving many of the characters a bit one-dimensional. Many seem characterized by their relation to other, more central characters. Except Zeb and Adam though, I would have preferred the third book be entirely their perspectives.
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Aug 14, 2018 03:21
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Zola posted:I don't know. The world-building itself was pretty intricate, it was how the characters moved within it. it was a joke, worldbuilding sucks
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Aug 14, 2018 03:49
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Kramer: The world building was intricate Jerry. Jerry: The world building was intricate? What does that mean? Kramer: It was intricate Jerry. The characters were moving in it. Intricate, you know. Intricate.
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Aug 14, 2018 04:38
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KRAMER: I'm completely changing the configuration of the novel. You're not gonna believe it when you see it. A whole new style. JERRY: What are you doing? KRAMER: Levels. JERRY: Levels? KRAMER: Yeah, I'm getting rid of all my characters. All of it. And I'm going to build these different levels, with steps, and it'll all be carpeted with a lot of pillows. You know, like ancient Egypt. JERRY: You drew up plans for this? KRAMER: No, no. It's all in my head.
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Aug 14, 2018 15:40
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The Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie, read by Steven Pacey. I'm going to talk about the whole trilogy as one since the books by themselves are not really complete arcs. Likes: -The POV characters are mostly great with only a couple that seem to be there only to advance the story while the important ones are busy elsewhere. -Most of it feels realistic. Some things get resolved while others are still up in the air. No one is completely good or completely evil. -There is a healthy dose of cynicism to the whole thing. A character might try to do something and fail and that's that. -Pacey might be the best narrator I've ever heard. Dislikes: -The battles were good but maybe a bit too many and a few of them too long, some were definitely unnecessary. -Some catchphrases get a bit annoying after a while. There were also some regular phrases that were used too much, after a while I was tired of hearing about "boots crunching on the gravel." -the mcGuffin was somewhat deus ex machina This series is definitely a case where the journey is more important than the destination. If you read the first and like the characters I'd recommend you give the whole thing a go. I will take a break from the series and then read the rest of the stand alone books.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:24
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Just finished Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. I liked it but a difficult read it is definitely not. Fite me.
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Aug 16, 2018 03:28
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Zola posted:Finally picked up Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. There is a lot to both like and dislike in Oryx and Crake. But the character of Crake, especially, is a dislike from me. Not that he's a psychopathic genius bastard; that's fine (a less fine feature: the Watson-Crick Institute is nicknamed 'Aspergers U'. Hmm). The problem is, he's a brilliant genetic engineer who apparently reckons that he can (serious spoilers) create a utopian race of humans, devoid of aggression, sexism, racism, etc. ...and expect them to stay that way. And also that he can create a virus to which no pre-existing humans will have serendipitous (albeit, perhaps partial) immunity. He's a genius, right? He has to be aware that even if you genetically engineer you desired traits into an experimental population, then expose them to selection pressure, your desired traits may well just be selected right out? And if that population is very small, and there isn't enough genetic variation to respond robustly to selection, the likeliest outcome is extinction? And also, that upon its release, his super-virus will be up against the entire genetic variation present in his hated Homo sapiens sapiens? It's weird. I can believe that Margaret Atwood hasn't read 'On the Origin of Species'; not everyone wants to learn about the finer points of pigeon-breeding. But I find it had to believe that this intimidatingly well-read author does not know that the full title is 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life', and has failed to reflect on all the implications of that title. Currently reading Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman, the Most Notorious Double Agent of World War II, by Ben Macintyre. I'm an easy mark for his books, as they're such easy reads, but the WWII ones are the best by far. Carnival of Shrews fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 03:33
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Bilirubin posted:Just finished Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. I liked it but a difficult read it is definitely not. I know that there are a few pretentious people in this subforum who have hate boners for Gaiman but Norse Mythology is a very enjoyable read. It's written in a way that begs for it to be read aloud, which is fitting for a mythological system that was handed down orally for a dozen or more generations. It's not the definitive tome of Norse mythology but it's the most approachable, and I'm much more interested in reading Gaiman's take to my 9 year old niece than e.g. Addas.
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Aug 16, 2018 04:08
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To me, it doesn't seem pretentious to think that Neil Gaiman isn't a very good writer.
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Aug 16, 2018 05:00
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The Killing Machine and The Palace of Love by Jack Vance. These are parts 2 and 3 of The Demon Princes, and I enjoyed them more than the first part. Instead of the contrivance that annoyed me about The Star King, The Killing Machine has Interchange, a bank/prison that legitimizes kidnapping, which is one of those ideas that sticks with me and makes me wish I'd thought of it first. The Palace of Love doesn't surprise me in the same way, but it does get some jabs in about how pretentious artists can get, especially when they try to do creepy poo poo in pursuit of their myopic vision. I was glued to how unflattering and ridiculous the targets of Vance's ridicule acted throughout the book. Gersen remains a stock character, but he serves the books well as a vehicle to explore a bunch of interesting sci-fi planets and play out a variety of schemes to find and kill a bunch of grotesque supervillains. The books are mostly self-contained and episodic, which is a huge plus considering how long it took Vance to finish the series, but some things have changed and carried over between books, and I'm curious to see if any of them play a part in the finale.
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Aug 16, 2018 06:00
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A human heart posted:To me, it doesn't seem pretentious to think that Neil Gaiman isn't a very good writer. Looking back, I didn’t like American Gods. The concept was cool but it never hooked me and I didn’t care about any of the characters on either side. The ending fell flat then dragged on. I’m back on King for my fast food fiction.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:31
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American Gods was kind of a slog to read but I did enjoy it all in all.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:40
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