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Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak. Was a bog standard biography of the two women primarily doing the ghostwriting behind the Carolyn Keene pen name. Started at childhood for both of them and includes the usual quibbles about money, deals, rights, and who gets credit as the books rise in popularity. Naturally there's a lot of discussion of Nancy Drew's cultural significance in regard to women in America too. Still feel as though I could have saved time by just reading the Wikipedia article instead. Though this book is well researched and quotes a lot from first hand accounts and letters: the bulk of the narrative is built around this.
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Apr 2, 2019 04:45
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:All of the original five (or so) books of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ending with Mostly Harmless. They were all contained in a single volume I bought from Barnes and Noble a month ago. Though not set in the Hitchhiker's universe there is Starship Titanic which was written by Terry Jones based on Douglas Adam's idea/PC game/outline/whatever. It is extremely similar in tone and sci-fi shenanigans faced by a group of people, some alien some from Earth. If Jones' name wasn't on the cover I would have thought it was straight Douglas Adams.
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Apr 10, 2019 01:14
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Thanks for the suggestions; I'll check them out! Is the Hitchhiker's movie worth watching? It's okay, makes some interesting differences from the books. I think many people are more nostalgic for the old BBC miniseries which you could also look into. And as some one else mentioned there is the Dirk Gently series as well. I personally didn't really get into them but iirc the first book is a rewrite of the Doctor Who episode "Shada" that Adams wrote and got shafted during filming because of some strike and was never finished. Content: Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto. Nicely woven mystery/crime book that begins with a unidentified murdered man found under a train in the railyard in 1950s Japan. Definetly comes down on the police procedural side of things, lots of leg and paperwork are completed. It felt like the titular inspector was only able to piece things together from coincidences and gut feelings that all these corpses piling up are connected though (because you can't just have one mysterious dead body in your book). But even so I enjoyed reading how it all played out even if it felt like lucky coincidence. First time reading a Japanese author and it was a nice change of pace. I don't know if the economical story telling is a product of the author or of the translation, place descriptions were bare bones and repetitive for example.
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Apr 13, 2019 17:14
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Jerry Cotton posted:An after-market Sherlock Holmes novel called The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. So that's what the plot was. like all Sherlock Holmes fan fiction books (let's call them what they are) I forget about it when I'm done reading. Probably the only one I remember some of was The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove because lol the villain has a transforming train mecha. It's one where the author went full steampunk.
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Apr 14, 2019 22:19
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Jerry Cotton posted:I don't really subscribe to the notion that Only Originals are True - whether it be in literature or any other form of art. But the book is ultimately forgettable. Going to read an Ellery Queen novel next, which was neither written by Ellery Queen nor features Ellery Queen. It's not so much that I subscribe to that what Doyle wrote is the one true Holmes, it's that I have yet to run across any post Doyle Holmes that measures up to it. Plus the character has been through the wringer so much over the past 100 years, up against everyone and everything from Arsene Lupin to frigging Cthulhu. I'm complaining about there being way too much chaff and not much wheat. Makes a lot of it feel rather fan fiction-y.
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Apr 14, 2019 22:46
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Tales from the Arabian Nights translated by Richard Burton. To get more specific the edition I have is from 1978 and edited by David Shumaker. Like all fairy tales the stories in Arabian Nights have magical beings, good triumphs over evil, the poor become rich, and evil is punished severely. Also apparently being able to spin a good yarn will get you out of almost anything, including murder charges or your own execution. Once I got used to the 19th century style of writing (though it is rather frankly written/translated) it was refreshing to read some folklore from a different culture than the usual western oriented stuff such as Greek/Roman mythology or Grimm's fairy tales. Burton's footnotes were also surprisingly helpful at times. I can see why his translation seems to be the one that has stuck around. Though I was beginning to tire of it at the end, overall I enjoyed the read.
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May 31, 2019 02:51
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Finally finished Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari. Really only recommended if you are off the deep end into High Renaissance art and want to read a contemporary source. Had it left over from my Art History days in college and the occasional anecdotes in between the wall to wall descriptions of the artwork was what kept me plodding through it. Spoiler alert: Michelangelo is best artist ever. (Vasari apparently met, knew, and respected the man greatly so that why he gets top honor and the longest section.) Also read Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner which was a massive disappointment. I was hoping for a more in depth deconstruction of comics by one of the masters of the medium, but it reads like the college 101 textbook it is. Meaning that the professor compiled his examples into a published book so he can make you buy it for the course he's teaching you. It really feels like I would've had to attend one of Eisner's lectures at the School of Visual Arts to get any information beyond the basics presented here. Not going to bother with the other two books of the series.
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Aug 20, 2019 23:01
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Electric Guitars: The Illustrated Encyclopedia by Tony Bacon et al. I know coffee table books aren't meant to be great literature but goddamn at least put the picture of the guitar you're talking about on the same page as the text describing it. Also I'm pretty sure some guitar designs were discussed in the text as being important/influential with out an accompanying photograph, almost like they couldn't get an image for some reason. Plus you can tell which of the major companies are more loved by the authors than others. I remember the Gibson section being particularly rosy which is doubly hilarious as this book is way out of date now having been published in 2000, and that company has had some recent major gently caress ups. Not recommended as I'm sure you could find a better book to cover the history of the instrument or a better collection of pictures.
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Sep 2, 2019 21:46
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Thanks a Lot, Mr. Kibblewhite by Roger Daltrey. Normally I don't go for autobiographies or biographies in general but this was a great read and pretty well written although Daltrey plays a little loose with the timeline of events but I don't think it is a detriment to the story. And of course when you're in a band like The Who things are going to be absolutely loving nuts and it doesn't seem to me like he's shying away from discussing any of the bad poo poo either he or anyone else did. If nothing else the book is purely Roger Daltrey's recollections, opinions, and some justification of why things happened the way they did. Quite entertaining A++ would read again etc. etc. Also it feels good to buy a book and immediately get into it rather than to put it off for later as I have a bad habit of doing. I have a stack of books as a monument to "I'll read this later" and some of them have been around so long that I am no longer interested in reading them.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:02
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Solo by William Boyd. To my knowledge this is the latest author to write James Bond books and of the ones I have read the closest in tone to Fleming himself. The beginning of this book is rather rough with Bond being creepier than usual paranoidly stalking a girl and breaking and entering her flat for no real reason but once Bond is assigned to deal with a civil war over oil rights in a African country it's business as usual with ridiculous pulpy situations, character names, surviving grevious injuries, deformed henchmen, and allies dying. Also the book very sensibly takes place in 1969 rather than dragging Bond kicking and screaming into the modern era as other authors have done. Plus this is obviously a start to a new series of Bond books as classic characters are cycled out for younger versions, the Bentley is written off for a new car again, and a few plot threads are left open to presumably show up in later books. But it's not all new as there are small references to events in Fleming Bond sprinkled in. Overall it was a fun read and I'd maybe get more from the library, but I am not particularly compelled to reread it as I sometimes am with Ian Fleming and I suspect it's because there is no one that can exactly duplicate Fleming's unique voice and ability to rocket you past the silly bits.
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Feb 13, 2020 03:34
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rich thick and creamy posted:The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. It's a fun little Noir detective novel that twists itself into a pyschonaut caper. Charles Unwin (A little on the nose with the last name, Jed) is a clerk in a detective agency known simply as The Agency in an unnamed city. His job is to clean up and finalize reports for his assigned detective, Travis Sivart, the Agency's star. That is until Sivart goes missing and Unwin is thrust into the role of detective. Not only is Sivart missing but Sivart's handler turns up dead and Unwin is the prime suspect. Unwin must solve the caper while keeping ahead of both Agency detectives and an Underworld run by a crime boss so cunning he once stole a whole day. This sounds like Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency but slightly better maybe? Has anybody read both of these books and can make the direct comparison?
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Dec 2, 2021 04:49
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In an effort to cut out screens before bed I've been getting back into reading physical books at that time instead so here's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier. It was boring and felt like a fluff piece even though I'm the target audience of video game nerd and someone who likes behind the scenes how the sausage is made kinda stuff. The book covers the troubled and difficult development of 10 popular games around the year of 2017 when it was written, those games being Diablo 3, Destiny, The Witcher 3, Halo Wars, Uncharted 4, Shovel Knight, Star Wars 1313, Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Stardew Valley. Each is a chapter and it's a straightforward telling of the events leading up to the release of these games with a few exceptions. Diablo 3 and Destiny are here for the release disasters they were and how they were fixed after the fact and Star Wars 1313 is here as a game that was pretty far along before it died with LucasArts in the Disney buyout. The goal of this book is to showcase how hard it is to make video games but it's lacking that personal human aspect. Sure there's a line here or there about how much the overtime crunch sucked, or upper management dicking everyone over with some edict, but by and large it's a pretty dry and shallow read. A straightforward telling of events and little more. It all came into focus when I got to the end of the book and read the author blurb: he is (was?) the news editor of Kotaku which explains a lot. Thus this book will be returning to whence it came from, the good old thrift store. Also, if I didn't already have some awareness of how the video game industry works and some terminology in respect to making games I'm not sure I would have gotten as much out of the book as I did. I can see some one with no prior knowledge of this crap not understanding parts of the book. Admittedly I didn't read most of the footnotes but they didn't seem to add anything of value either.
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Dec 12, 2021 18:19
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Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston. It was okay? It was a mostly straight forward telling of a 2015 expedition to find a mythical lost city hidden in some of the densest rainforest on Earth. The history of previous expeditions to find it and how the new effort came to be are given, and since the author did come along on the mission, the lay person's impression of being there in a place where no human had trod in a good 500 or more years looking for evidence of human occupation. And then of course the joys of half the crew having picked up a tropical parasitic disease that is extremely difficult to cure, author included. The book ends with discussion on how tropical diseases are migrating north thanks to climate change and an observation on how fast a pandemic would happen thanks to air travel. This book was published in 2017, so that hits way different now. Overall an alright read, but I can't really recommend running out and buying a fresh copy, maybe if it turns up cheap at a used shop instead.
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Jan 12, 2022 17:08
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Ha! I literally found that book in a little free library and gave it a read. I'm with you, its OK. Yeah it got hyped up to me by someone else so I spent the 12 bucks on Amazon for it to help fill out an order and in an age of cheap books that's probably my biggest regret about it. I expect I'll just donate it after I get it back from the coworker who's borrowed it. I should be reading Van Gogh's Letters but instead have distracted myself with Bloom County: Real, Classy, and Compleat, which is outside the scope of this thread. At least I understand more of the references now that I'm an adult. Still remains one heck of a look into 80s America though.
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Jan 13, 2022 15:08
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After years of it being on my list and hearing about how it fills in background details and is one of the better modern Bond books by one of the better authors to take up the mantle I finally read the novelization of Goldeneye by John Gardner and it sucked. Yes it does fill some plot holes present in the film, but none of them really felt of consequence to either version of the story. And hooboy is it constrained by following an early draft of the screenplay to a T: Gardner could not or did not embellish much here. Honestly might have been more exciting if I had read the actual script to Goldeneye. Also there's a weird sort of pacing issue where what were the big swaggering moments in the film are curtly described with no extra words to flesh them out into the showcases they're meant to be. I'm thinking specifically of the archives/tank chase and the final fight here which the whole end of the book felt rushed. Also Boris' characterization was better on screen. All of that might be my bias though from having the movie still memorized as it was my childhood favorite. I've also read other non movie based Bond books from John Gardner and other authors and don't remember poo poo about them, but still remember details from Ian Fleming's books. I guess he really was the only one who could write Bond, even though it's still 50s pulp fiction bullshit. Memorable bullshit though, I should finish the read along thread that was here in TBB a while back. Reading people's reactions to book Bond was great!
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Sep 26, 2022 06:33
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Bilirubin posted:I read License Renewed by Gardner and all I recall was 1) Bond drove a custom Saab 900 and 2) it sucked punissuer posted:I’ve read all of the Bond novels - Fleming through Horowitz and Gardner was actually fine. Yes the car was very stupid and I was never sure whether I was supposed to think of it as the neutering of a high flying espionage service or actually threatened by the powerful Saab engine. I have read other Gardner Bond books, but yeah all I remember is the Saab, him almost freezing to death in Ice Breaker or whatever the title was, and the books overall being okay. Didn't Aston Martin have a hell of a time in the early 90s and that's why the choice of other cars for Bond? I know the films turned to BMW because something was going on with Aston. Also did anyone here read Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks? It's a one off Bond novel by that author and I remember it being also rather meh.
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Oct 3, 2022 23:55
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Indian Art: a Concise History By Roy Craven. The last textbook I have left from my art history days. I had kept it because it read super well when I bothered to read a chapter for the Indian art class I was taking at the time so I promised myself I'd read it in full later. A decade later it's still written well and is an easy read but, the subtitle's not kidding: this is a very brief overview of thousands of years of artistic tradition that barely has time to touch all the highlights. I can see why my professor had it for the class, it would pair nicely with other, more in depth material. This book is a part of the Thames and Hudson "World of Art" series of books which from what I've gathered is a series of books about specific art subjects written by an expert on that particular subject. I have a couple others from it and am interested to see how they compare. And with that, I've sort of achieved my miniscule goal of reading five books this year if I cheat and count the Bloom County omnibus as a book.  Still some time left to make it a proper five books.
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Oct 14, 2022 03:26
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Art Nouveau by Alastair Duncan. Another in Thames and Hudson's World of Art series. Since Art Nouveau is such a narrow time period of art this book is divided into type/medium of art, which is helpful as many artisans worked in several mediums. However, there is a dizzying array of names mentioned both famous and not that it's hard to keep up. Very list like: this book comes off best as a springboard, a suggestion of other possible artists to research in depth. I've only got one more book from this series to read (so you all won't have to suffer more reviews) but owing to how textbookish these seem I personally won't be getting more. Best reserved for the historical minded over those looking for art inspiration.
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Oct 16, 2022 15:05
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River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay. This was a reread, and while I still enjoyed it, the impact was diminished somewhat by me still remembering key events and the ending a decade later. To oversimplify the plot, this book is historical fiction about a dying Not China empire and the looming threat of the Not Mongols invading. Lots of characters and political intrigue going on in a distracted Not China court, while a common bandit decides it is his destiny to rise up and stop the Not Mongols and also take back the northern prefectures already lost to the invaders in years prior. The book doesn't have as happy of an ending as you would think since political machinations ultimately keep the bandit, who is now an effective army commander, from successfully repelling the invaders and retaking the territory when he was literally on the edge of doing so. It's in some ways a frustrating ending as we're trained to want happy endings, and it is a little rushed in the wrap up, but I respect the author for doing it. Also apparently this is a spiritual sequel to the author's other book Under Heaven which I think I'll pick up some time later after I whittle through the to read stack some more. Edit: Forgot to add River of Stars did a decent job of world building. Characters do reference a lot of fictional Not China history and it comes off fairly naturally as they're reflecting on the golden age and dynasties of Not China and trying to process what happened to bring their empire to the verge of collapse. Turbinosamente fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Mar 31, 2023 |
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Mar 31, 2023 13:21
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I didn't have time to follow along with the thread, but I finished A Night in the Lonesome October. I'm guessing it got overhyped to me because while it is a fine book, it didn't change my life like the internet says it should. What am I missing goons? I don't get the "perfect book" and "genius" and "this book was made for me drr drr" reviews. The only working theory I got is maybe it has to do with me not being deep into the fantasy genre?
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Oct 31, 2023 12:55
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Mr. Nemo posted:Who the hell was saying that lol. It's a fun book, that's it for me. Mostly Goodreads reviews to be fair. Though there's at least a few goons who've talked it up but they are less hyperbolic about it and mostly in the context of it being their Halloween/October tradition. Which is perfectly fine, I can't fault that, but I will likely not reread it myself. Edit: That and the whole "you gotta read it!" when ever it comes up, I guess I'm remembering the fans that are more militant about it. Turbinosamente fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 11:39
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Christ, I stumbled into some terrible science fiction lately. If you ever encounter a Brian W. Aldiss book drop it and run away especially if it is An Island Called Moreau. It's a bad updated for the 80s retelling of H.G. Well's original with gratuitous beastiality and extra gratuitous pedophilia.  I binned this book immediately after finishing and feel dumber for having given it a chance.I'm gonna switch gears on genre for a palate cleanser after the sci-fi garbage I accidentally acquired in a lot with Lonesome October . At least I have new appreciation now for how well October was written in comparison. Turbinosamente fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 13:50
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FPyat posted:The Art of War by Sun Tzu gets described as highly abstract and philosphical by some and primarily practical by others. I found it to be a mixture of the two. Many of the principles were sound and thoughtful, but I doubt its overall usefulness for businesspeople. In a similar vein I finished The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, which had hype quotes on the back implying it was mostly about dealing with confrontations and worded vaguely like it was trying to sell it to managers. In actuality it was like reading a textbook a professor wrote for their class, which makes it useless unless you attend the class or you don't get as much out of it if you had. I'll admit the tip to use all of the tools at your disposal was nice and it was a small if straightforward look into Mushashi's mindset on his success at dueling. Still unsure if I should keep this on the shelf or not though.
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Nov 25, 2023 07:20
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lifg posted:How To See by David Salle I have an art history degree and it doesn't help much with contemporary art other than giving me something to blame for it. Since art is now "anything you want it to be" that means everybody has been pushing the boundaries for the past 100 years and you get stuff that worked and a whole hell of a lot of poo poo that didn't. I can't remember if I posted about it here but in a similar vein I read The Quality Instinct in hopes of improving my ability to detect good art from the collector's side of it and did not get what I wanted out of it. Lots of nice and amusing museum anecdotes though. And God I'd love to chat about art all day too. 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. Turbinosamente fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Dec 8, 2023 |
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Dec 8, 2023 20:40
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I finally for sure have read The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I had read a good chunk of them in my youth but was never sure I had got all 60 stories and forgot half of what I did read because it's been so long. Book's still good and feels surprisingly modern in it's writing style though I think that's do to my having read too many classic romance novels from the earlier half of the 1800s and their flowery language. The only thing that really sucked was me noticing half a dozen typos and formatting errors in the edition I have which is the 2009 Barnes and Nobles one with the fancy binding (remember when they did those editions of classic books and sold them for $20 a pop?). Usually it was a missing letter, and one of the last stories had words with hyphens randomly in the middle; evidently they were originally words that fell at the end of a line. And the strangest error was "exact!y." Christ, glad I never bought any other of those fancy editions from B&N if that's the kind of quality in proof reading they had. TL;DR: read some Holmes especially if you haven't before, and it's worth powering through the Mormons r evil! back story explanation in a Study in Scarlet to get to the good poo poo later.
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Jan 28, 2024 20:18
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NGDBSS posted:All of the novellas that aren't Hound of the Baskervilles are bad. Doyle had a nasty habit of padding out a standard Holmes mystery and then stapling on a completely different story at the end. It's like he had some other ideas in a desk drawer that weren't fit for publication, and the novellas allowed him to print them anyway. Yeah I was not thrilled about having to do the back story poo poo again with Valley of Fear. I'll admit the twist there got me but it was so out of the blue it felt like a convenient out for Doyle. The short stories are definetly better if a little tired by the end of the run. You can feel that Doyle is scraping for ideas at that point. My favorite for whatever reason is still The Speckled Band and that's pretty early on.
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Jan 28, 2024 21:25
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It could be worse, I could be in here talking up some Holmes fanfic. I don't think I've read a single one of those that was good and most are forgettable, although I don't think I will forget the one that ended with a transforming mech train because that was hilariously stupid even for a steampunked Victorian setting. And yet I am still foolishly drawn to post Doyle Holmes junk like a moth to a flame even though I know it will be garbage.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:20
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3D Megadoodoo posted:The Seven-per-cent Solution isn't a horrible novel. I can't say it's very good, either. Yeah I've been sitting here trying to remember the plot of it because I know I read it a long time ago and disliked it. Is that the one where it's implied that all the Moriarty poo poo was a coke fueled delusion on the part of Holmes and that Watson wrote the "official" version of the death at Reichenbach Falls as cover for Holmes being out for the count doing rehab? It gets talked up as being "one of the good ones" once in a while and I failed to see how.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:39
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I'll be honest with you here: I don't remember lmao. Could've been. I just remember Sigmund Freud beating Hermann Göring in a swordfight. Lol wut, I don't remember that, though I think Holmes may have visited Freud for addiction help. poo poo, maybe we should have a competition to find the dumbest piece of published Holmes fan fiction ever written.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:48
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Okay I am compiling the recommended Holmes pastiches for later use once I winnow down my to read stack some more. I'll even try that Neil Gaiman Lovecraftian one because Neil Gaiman. I've been purposely avoiding the Lovecraft/Holmes crossovers because of this:anilEhilated posted:The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove. Boy did I not know what I was signing up for when picking that one. He also wrote three Lovecraftian Holmes novels that somehow manage to be even stupider; the mecha train made me laugh, those felt like straight-up insulting the reader's intelligence. Everybody loves to pitch ultimate logical science detective man against the ultimate illogical paranormal horror and there are way, way, too many takes on Holmes versus the Elder Gods as a result. And because there are so many I expect the majority of them to be pretty badly written. It's practically a cliché in and of itself at this point and I'm left wishing that authors would explore something else as a source of conflict for Holmes. The only bit of paranormal Holmes I have read was a graphic novel that crossed over with Dracula which I remember being pretty alright, but didn't endear me to this weird subgenre.
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Jan 30, 2024 01:51
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I own three of the originals: From Russia With Love, Diamonds Are Forever and For Your Eyes Only. Though I haven't read FYEO yet, not that I've seen so far. They're more grounded than the movies tended to be. Yeah I tend to agree with this, though there is one ridiculous thing near the end of Doctor No that popped into mind immediately. Speaking of pulp fictiony thrillers I've just finished Black City by Boris Akunin and it read like a bad James Bond book while somehow being way too weeby for its own good at the same time. Also way too much character introspection, but I don't know if that's the author's fault or just how Russian lit works in general. It was also the last of the series apparently, and probably a bad jumping on point, but it did not endear me so I will not be seeking out the other books.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:16
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