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Clublife by Rob the Bouncer All about the life of a bouncer at the best and then the worst NYC nightclubs. And guidos, which seems passé now. It's my first time rereading this since the author died. He really didn't like this book, and I can kinda see why now. It could use another pass or two to be really good. Still, it's a firsthand look into a world I'll never be a part of.
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Oct 19, 2014 04:52
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OilSlick posted:Everyone knew that the reclusive people up there were pretty hosed up, but one day in 1984 a girl from a prominent Mountain family called the Golers told her teachers and the police that her father was using her as a wife. Why was she even in school? I thought hillbillies avoided such things.
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Oct 19, 2014 16:02
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I'd recommend Quarantine by Egan. It has two or three incredible scifi ideas in it, each one of which could've been used for a whole book by a lesser author. Wikipedia categorizes it as hard-scifi, but the ideas are more high concept than gritty engineering. It reads like Philip K Dick with a physics background.
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Nov 17, 2014 13:49
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I only just read Catch-22 recently, and I guess the reason I loved it so much is how funny it is. Genuine laugh out loud humor, which is so rare. And how all the absurdities just kept layering and interlocking in on each other, until the most ridiculous conclusions were also the most inescapably logical. It also does a non-linear narrative correctly, which I always love, in that it only makes sense in its current order; it can't be "unraveled." Now that I think about it, it reminds me a lot of Pulp Fiction.
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Nov 26, 2014 05:01
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The Game is the story of Orpheus. He descends into this alien world, populated by broken and damned souls, eventually reaches his goal, and slowly extracts himself and returns.
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Nov 27, 2014 21:38
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House Louse posted:Without the girl. He finds a girl at the depth of his hell and then escapes because-ish of her and... yeah it's not a great metaphor.
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Nov 29, 2014 07:18
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White Coke posted:Finished The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated by R. H. Fuller with revisions by Irmgard Booth. It was an interesting read. I'll be discussing it more in the religion thread. I don't know if anyone who isn't already interested in theology would be interested in reading it, but if you are then I'd say definitely give it a read. Where’s the religion thread?
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Feb 8, 2021 15:56
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The second book, Speaker For The Dead, is very good. I consider it simply act two of the story.
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May 30, 2021 14:20
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City is one of my favorites. Most of it was written immediately after WWII, after the Holocaust and nuclear bombs, when people weren’t sure that humanity was worth it, and weren’t sure we heading in a worthwhile direction. So Simak wrote about humanity collectively giving up being human.
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Jun 21, 2021 14:43
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Want by Lynn Steger Strong, and Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood. These two books were published around the same timed and share a nearly identical subject, and they've been turned into a matched set by a dozen or so essays that noticed those two facts. (FWIW, Adjunct Hell is my favorite of that micro-genre.) They're both about about women working as adjuncts, dealing with children and money, and managing a life where they have achieved much of their over-educated dreams but still lack an ounce of professional success or stability. I read Want first. It's a depressing story about an extremely privileged woman wrestling with her personal demons while her financial stability slip away, even as her and her husband refused to make choices to improve it. But compared to Life of the Mind it was a goddamn beach read. Life of the Mind is about Dorothy experiencing the long effects of an abortion after a miscarriage, and she spends a lot of the book thinking about the bloody waste coming out of her body while she passively (so passively) struggles with her professional failings. Life of the Mind is more depressing than Want but also funnier. My favorite part of books on academia is the skewering of their field. In White Noise it was "Hitler studies", and in Life of the Mind it's "the politics of doors." Want never goes after it's own field, Lynn Steger Strong treats it with a sad amount of respect, and her protagonist spends her time reading and discussing legitimately good books. Both are good. Want is easier, Life of the Mind is better.
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Sep 9, 2021 18:16
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White Coke posted:The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching Which fake was your fav?
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Oct 15, 2021 03:56
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Vita Nostra, by Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey A teenager, Sasha, is recruited to do strange and awkward tasks, and then she goes to a metaphysical college where she is taught the secrets of herself and the world. It's hard not to compare this to Harry Potter, so I'll say that it's like Harry Potter meets Steppenwolf. The goal of the school isn't to teach kids to do magic, it's to teach kids what they really are. Reading Vita Nostra is reading 400 pages of a teenage girl being mentally torn apart and reconstructed. I don't want to spoil too much, but I want to talk about one small aspect. In this college there are tests that the students are ferociously studying for, under threats. But Vita Nostra is clear that Sasha is exceptional at her studies The driving force of the novel then isn't if she will pass, it's what it will cost her, and what she will become next. There is no enemy to conquer and no great spell to cast to prove herself. It's just her fighting her own will. I just swept through this book in a few days, and it is already on my shelf of favorites. I'm off to read some Gnosticism now.
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Dec 6, 2021 02:24
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tuyop posted:There’s this snarky precocious style that I can’t stand. Like, Connie Willis (in Doomsday Book), Martha Wells (A long trip to an angry red planet), John Scalzi (everything), and sometimes Andy Weir, for instance, all have this real tongue in cheek tone that rubs me completely the wrong way. A Deadly Education has that tone as well. It’s definitely a matter of taste because people rave about all of those authors. The endlessly snarky hero is my least favorite character in modern light scifi, but I’ll defend a Connie Willis to death, her books are too good.
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Jan 16, 2022 01:40
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Dobbs_Head posted:Giddeon the Ninth very worth the read. Sometimes the characters see-saw in opinion or action in ways that don’t make sense, but its a solid murder-mystery with ftfw
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Jan 18, 2022 23:47
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bowmore posted:The American Psycho movie is one of the rare cases where it is better than the book I think Also Starship Troopers.
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Mar 22, 2022 03:08
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Gaius Marius posted:Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote might be one of the most interesting, perplexing, and thought provoking short stories I've read. Gonna copy this text so I can paste it in for the rest of Borges work to I'm assuming. My favorite Borges story. “Tlön, Uqbar” may be more mind bending, and “Babel” May be more impactful, but I think about “Author of Don Quixote” the most.
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Jul 25, 2022 14:43
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Rolo posted:After a couple attempts when I was younger I finally finished Blood Meridian. Compared to Blood Meridian, something happy would be literally anything.
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Aug 11, 2022 00:18
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Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix is an action thriller novel about slasher movie tropes. It has a nice twisty plot and distinctive characters, which is impressive because there’s a lot of them for such a small book. Hendrix has a lot of small ideas about slasher movies and the culture around them, but they’re not fleshed out enough to call this book a deconstruction of the genre, it’s more like a cocktail conversation of the genre on top of a beach read plot. But a beach read is exactly what I needed.
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Aug 20, 2022 12:21
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On St Paddy’s Day you would wear the green tie. It was nice.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:53
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Is Rinder the one who was informed, while he was being sued, that he was the number 3 person in the Scientology, and that was the first he’d heard that?
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May 6, 2023 02:26
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landgrabber posted:i finished house of leaves last week and now my life is meaningless I like to walk garden labyrinths. It helps.
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May 11, 2023 13:24
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The Last Days of Jack Sparks is a horror novel that stars the worst person you know as he fucks around and finds out. It’s starts with him laughing aloud at an exorcism because he’s an internet atheist, and continues with him making bad choices at every turn. I loved it. It gets even better as when his selfish mask is slowly stripped away and he’s humanized and understood, and you start actually rooting for this dumb bastard, even knowing from the title what’s going to happen. If you read this, don’t skip out on the afterward and epilogue. It delivers a final, even sadder coda to this doomed man’s life.
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Jul 26, 2023 20:48
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That sounds like Qanon.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:46
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Ah, Paladin Press. I kinda miss them.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:28
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I like that there’s a nice, secret ending to that book that comic book fans will see: Joe bought Empire Comics right at the time that superhero comics is about explode in popularity.
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Nov 26, 2023 03:43
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What I like about Pratchett books is you really can read them in any old order, he does a good job of reintroducing the characters in each one. My first book was Small Gods, which was a nice stand alone novel, and my second was Soul Music, which was in the middle of the Death and Wizards lines, and I loved it.
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Nov 28, 2023 15:27
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slandergoose posted:Finished And On That Bombshell and it was a great read. I've been a Top Gear fans since the reboot and the book was great at answering all the questions I've had about the show. I didn’t know this existed. I always wanted to know how much of it was scripted. Like the episode where they drove lorries.
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Dec 5, 2023 16:16
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How To See by David Salle This is a book by a contemporary artist about contemporary art, and I think it's exactly what I've always wanted. I don't have any education in art history, and I'm slowly fixing that. It's always been easier for me to understand and appreciate older art, with its more traditional "form and structure". In fact I always thought I had to learn phrases like, I dunno, "removing the signifier", "killing the object", and every single artist's goddamn intentions to understand contemporary art, but now I think it's much more about "irony" and "quotation" and, still, "form and structure". "How to See" covers of a huge swath of the later half of the 20th century art world from the point of view of someone who was there. Salle was friends with the artists, he was at the parties, he saw who survived. In "The Petite Cinema of John Baldessari" he brings in everything from Godard to the (brief?) fall of welded metal art to talk about why Baldessari left painting behind. But nobody is reading this book. At least not many. Which is unfortunate because I think a lot of people are as confused about the art world as I am and could use a book like this, and I sure would love to read conversations about it. I felt the same way about New Sounds: A Listener's Guide to New Music by John Schaefer, which was an even more plain-spoken introduction to the world of strange, new music. (And if you want to see and hear something great, watch this youtube video of In C by Terry Riley) Now, I'm off to read the "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” essay.
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Dec 7, 2023 18:41
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Turbinosamente posted:Edit: Dumb question lifg, have you read Georgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists? That's the work pointed to as having begun the entire concept of art history and it covers all your high Renaissance favorites. If I recall it was written contemporaneously to the time period or not too far off and I think Oxford press is the most common English translation you'll find? It's been a while. I haven’t but I will. I really haven’t read much in this area.
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Dec 8, 2023 21:59
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landgrabber posted:last book i finished was My Dark Vanessa which i really enjoyed. now fittingly enough i'm reading lolita which like... i enjoyed the initial flowery prose parts but now it's just straight up horrifying. going to force myself to finish it so i can get it out of the way-- i am interested in other nabokov books, pale fire and glory mainly, so i figure it's worth finishing. the ornate prose is lovely when it's visual but like im already a person with ADHD i don't need the constant digressions. Constant Digressions may as well be the subtitle for Pale Fire.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:39
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escape artist posted:Someone on here suggested this as my first Discworld book, but after your review I am wondering if that is the best place to start... I always recommend Small Gods. It’s a standalone story.
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Mar 16, 2024 17:02
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Song of Achilles is fantastic. I’ve read a bunch of these Greek myths reinterpreted stories, and they mostly read like an author one day just read the Iliad and a few historical books and then wrote their own novel. Miller has lived and breathed these myths for decades, and it shows on every page. It’s not that her books are more accurate to the myths, it’s that she’s more able to bend and recolor the myths to suit her own needs and her own characters. The result is a story that feels more true to the old works than a more strictly accurate retelling could ever approach. Also, almost every other author will always decide to edit out the Gods, to make it “more realistic.” Miller doesn’t.
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May 8, 2024 22:40
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