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TonyColorado posted:I just finished Moby Dick. it was for college. I hated it at first but I got into it and finifhes it in about four days of streight reading. It did have its moments even though it was long, but i wouldnt recomend it. I'm with you there. Read it about a year ago, and about 1/3 of it was interesting plot, and the other 2/3 was "how to skin a whale", "how a ship's rudder works", etc. I just finished the unabridged Les Miserables, and I felt it had the same problem. The plot itself was really very good. Interesting characters, an epic story... and hundreds of pages of digressions on politics, Parisian sewers, the battle of Waterloo, the inner workings of a nunnery, and street slang, to name a few. Sometimes they were interesting stuff to read, but it would always disrupt the narrative flow, and so it took me half a year to read the whole thing. I'd be getting into the story, and then BAM! Fifty pages on why this or that revolution was true and noble and why this one wasn't, with no mention of what happens to our heroes in mortal peril, causing me to put it down again.
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Dec 22, 2006 17:34
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Loophole posted:I just finished reading Dune aswell. It was way better than I expected. Having read Dune Messiah, I have to say that that one certainly isn't. It's a whole lot of five people talking around a table. I hear Children of Dune is better, but after that I'm taking a break. I finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, and really really liked it. It seemed to make a good deal more sense than most of Murakami's endings and yet was very open-ended. I was definitely a fan.
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Dec 27, 2006 08:50
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Ozma posted:I'm about to start Devil in the White City. I was on a Tudor kick and read some books about Henry VIII, his wives, and Elizabeth I recently and figured I'd move on to some other stuff. Devil in the White City is about the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and, specifically, H. H. Holmes the serial killer. Should be fun, I hope. Just started that today! So far it seems interesting, even if architecture isn't my thing. I just finished Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne, and enjoyed the hell out of it. An intelligent yet desperately horny 14-year-old tries to lose his virginity and gets into increasingly ridiculous situations. It reminded me a lot of Confederacy of Dunces, where things would just start off bad and get a great deal worse. Also, that kid had some very forgiving friends. edit: Paul was without a doubt the coolest character in the entire book and cracked me up every time he showed up Chamberk fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jan 3, 2007 |
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Jan 3, 2007 08:05
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Finished A Clash of Kings. Starting A Storm of Swords. I really need to catch up on these books so I can participate in those huge threads. (Haven't read book 4 yet, so I'm rereading the other 3 to catch myself up)
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Feb 7, 2007 00:10
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Tad Williams' Shadowplay. He's probably my favorite fantasy author; he'll never be as big as Martin or Jordan but he writes characters well and has a definite gift for the descriptive. Considering I've followed the story from its beginnings (Shadowmarch, which started off as a serial online story in 2001 and was eventually published as a book in 2004) it was great to reconnect with a bunch of old characters I hadn't seen in a while. It may be comfort reading, but to me, it's the literary equivalent of a La-Z-Boy recliner. 
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Mar 13, 2007 07:40
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Anna Karenina, finally. I enjoyed it, and the translation (Joel Carmichael did it, I believe) was lively enough to keep me interested. There were definite periods of boredom - like when Levin decided to plow the fields and think about field-plowing and agriculture etc etc - but overall it was a great book thanks to the characters and their relationships.
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Apr 11, 2007 19:45
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Finished In Cold Blood by Truman Capote last night. Excellently written, really gave you every single detail of the case, the victims, the criminals, and the investigation while being a fantastic read at the same time. Now on to The Once and Future King!
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Apr 25, 2007 00:06
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Finished Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. (I was on a bit of a nonfiction kick for a while.) I got bogged down in the "preparations of the World Fair of 1893" part for MONTHS, but once the fair started I couldn't really put it down, and I finished the book in a night. Fantastic stuff. Certain parts about things that happened during the fair gave me goosebumps.
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Apr 28, 2007 07:29
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The Once and Future King by T.H. White is a great, great book. It took the Arthur myth relatable/human and at times funny, at times really sad. The politics area of it is kind of iffy (especially the last few pages) but it's still a wonderful read.
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Jun 1, 2007 18:10
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East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I was expecting it to be a long and arduous read, but it was really interesting, read quickly, and the characters were really sympathetic. Lee is one of my favorite literary characters in a while - as is Kate.
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Aug 13, 2007 04:02
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Stan Lee Jeans posted:Honestly, I thought Lee was a pretty boring character and more of a plot device, but maybe that's me. Kate was fun though, in a Wuthering-Heights-Heathcliff sort of evil way(was that the name? It's been a while). Although to be fair I liked Heathcliff better for his motivations but hated the rest of Wuthering Heights The only part of Wuthering Heights I enjoyed was the first two pages of the book, when the narrator is chased around the table by dogs. I thought the whole book was going to be full of awesome stuff like that. God, was I disappointed. Just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. The entire book was just as pretentious as its title. It was a nice little clone of Donna Tartt's The Secret History until it took a plot twist in the last 60 pages or so that was just kind of silly. Then again, the author leaves it all up to you whether that ending was real or just the conjecture of the main character. That blatant vagueness just made me feel like the book was even more pretentious than its presentation made it.
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Aug 14, 2007 07:57
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The Cider House Rules by John Irving. I've always found his characters to be a strong point of his writing, and this wasn't an exception. I didn't really care for Garp at all, and Omen Meany was a little too saccharine for my tastes. Cider House Rules managed to toe the line between the two very well - not quite as sickly-sweet as Owen Meany, not quite as HEY GENDER POLITICS GUYS GENDER POLITICS as The World According to Garp.
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Feb 25, 2008 00:54
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Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami. Kind of by-the-numbers Murakami, but entertaining nonetheless. I just like his writing style, it could be dry but it's got a little bit of wit and it just reads so well. He could write a book about preparing breakfast and it'd be readable. Now I probably should scrounge up a copy of Wild Sheep Chase to see how the two tie together...
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Mar 6, 2008 01:36
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Rabbit, Run by John Updike - I mentioned it in the Bad Books thread, though after some reflection I probably shouldn't have posted it there. It's just that the things Rabbit did made me so loving angry, especially near the end. I understand that Updike was definitely showing the consequences of Rabbit's actions and not at all endorsing them, but I've never liked a protagonist less.
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May 18, 2008 06:43
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American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Interesting book, and I'm still mulling it over. Great satire of that whole culture, though - it shocks you and it makes you laugh and sometimes it just bores you. Very interesting.
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Jun 29, 2008 08:37
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The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju. It's a pretty comprehensive look at the early days of comics and the moral crusade against them. I couldn't really decide what kind of stand Hadju was taking; he would jump to odd conclusions and gloss over the fact that, yes, there were comics with bloody axes and severed heads on the covers that maybe six-year-olds shouldn't buy. It's awful that so many people lost their jobs, of course, but you'd think that some of those "weird" horror comics writers could exercise a little discretion. Still, I liked the book and picked up Positively 4th Street, Hadju's book about Dylan, the Baezes, and Farina.
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Jul 20, 2008 19:20
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Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck. I really liked this book. It's a bit simple, but that's not a bad thing. Steinbeck's attempt to recreate the Round Table in California is a really charming, funny, and touching story. And it kind of reminds me of college life, to be honest.
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Jul 26, 2008 03:55
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This was a reread... of a 800 page book. And it was worth it. All the details and side-stories and footnotes help to make it a very immersive story. Honestly, the more minor characters like Childermass and Lascelles were more interesting than some of the majors, but despite all that I found the more fanciful version of 19th-century England a lot more interesting than most of the era's writers made it. 
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Jul 26, 2008 23:25
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The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. It's very much a story of layers, with an old woman in the 1990s talking about her life with her sister in the early parts of the 20th century. Interspersed with her tale are snippets of the book her sister wrote (called "The Blind Assassin") that seem to fit in with the story she's telling, somehow... it's a very good book, very well-written, but it does take a little while to get started. Worth the effort, though, I think.
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Aug 25, 2008 17:06
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Mack the Knife posted:Read A Soldier of the Great War next I've got that lined up to read soon. Winter's Tale was interesting enough to get me interested in a new author, that's for sure. He's got a lot of stuff out, too.
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Sep 10, 2008 18:47
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Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham It started a little slowly, but once I really got into it (out of stubbornness if nothing else) it began to be a lot more interesting. It's basically a "coming of age" novel with a bit more introspection, plus one of the most train-wreck romances of all literature. Lots of pondering about religion, free will, art, etc. It isn't anything insanely special, but it's a good read. Thick as hell, though - I'll be glad to move on to something a little lighter.
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Sep 11, 2008 21:40
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American Pastoral by Philip Roth - A good book, but man did it go on! It's all about Swede Levov, an American everyman, played football, basketball, and baseball, was a Marine, inherited his father's business, tall, broad-shouldered and blond - everything you'd think of as an American Man. And then his daughter gets caught up in anti-Vietnam war sentiment and does something drastic, and his life starts to go to hell. The big problem is that it could go on way too long when detailing Swede's angst - you definitely got a full character study of the guy but near the end, it seems like enough already. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - Fantastic book, I read it in a weekend. It was what I needed after American Pastoral. A quietly sad book about three people who went to a special boarding school years ago, and how that school shaped their future. I'm being purposefully vague, but there's definitely a twist that you wouldn't expect. Excellent. If I weren't such a manly man, I might have shed a tear or two at the end.
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Nov 10, 2008 15:53
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LooseChanj posted:
To be fair, the first two books are sort of your standard "I got whisked away to a magic school!! Isn't this neat?!" fare. It gets better with the third book, I think. Autobiography of Malcolm X, with help from Alex Haley - I enjoyed reading about how I was the devil.  Really, though, this was a really good book both as a character study of one of the most interesting people of the 20th century and as a historical document.
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Jan 10, 2009 23:17
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Snowmanatee posted:300 pages actually, and I only point this out because I'm 250 in and it's taking me foreeeever. I guess I don't like nature as much as I thought I did. I've read four books since I started Walden. I did just read that other Glass book (Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters/Seymour, an Introduction) and I can only halfheartedly recommend it. The first half (Raise High the Roofbeams) is really enjoyable, funny and easy to read. The second half is just Buddy Glass talking for 120 pages. Just talking. Some of it's interesting, some of it is intolerable, but it's all very weirdly meta. At one point Salinger, in the voice of Buddy Glass, suggests that Buddy is the one who wrote Catcher in the Rye.  edit: just saw that Infinite Summer link, I've had a copy of that book sitting on my shelf for the better part of half a year, looks like I'll have some sort of motivation to read it now
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May 30, 2009 16:48
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Just finished Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold; it's a fictionalized version of the life of Charles Carter, a famous 1920s magician. He's chased by Secret Service agents, he courts a blind girl, and he puts on the magic show to end all magic shows. Haven't had this much fun reading a book in quite a while.
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Dec 24, 2009 20:47
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By the way, all this talk about Anubis Gates has resulted in me ordering it from Amazon with a gift card I got for Christmas. Here's hoping it's as good as you say! Finished Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale which was a pretty solid Atwood book that didn't rely too much on flashbacks - the only real problem with her books, I've learned, is that she really overuses the narrative device of a frame story. Also read Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, about a servant in India who starts his own outsourcing company - and also murders his employer. Very cleverly written with a great narrative voice. It won the Booker Prize in '08.
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Jan 3, 2010 19:58
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Rabbit Hill posted:I just finished A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book and I'm sorry to say I was disappointed. She's one of my favorite writers and I've read nearly work of fiction that she's written (except for the "Frederica Quartet"), so I had high hopes for this. But...it was just too messy and cluttered. She interweaves paragraphs of exposition regarding what else is going on in history in throughout the chapters, but rather than being enlightening, it was distracting. And I feel like an idiot for saying this, but I thought there were too many characters -- I couldn't always keep track of who was related to whom and what their story was. The characters I thought were important just kind of fade away without ado toward the end, and the rest I never found to be fleshed out enough to be interesting. I really tried with this book. Anarchists? Interesting! Pages of descriptions about how the anarchists dressed? Not so much. Finished Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, which was one hell of a good read. A mystery about a book and its disappeared author, lots of betrayals, plot twists, and a hissably evil villain. I've heard The Angel's Game isn't as good, but I'm willing to give it a try.
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Jan 28, 2010 19:27
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Finished Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion on Monday; it took a good while to dig through. It's one of those books that you get wholly absorbed in - which I wouldn't have expected from a book about loggers in Oregon. Lots of switching between the past and present and points of view of different characters, sometimes mid-paragraph, sometimes mid-sentence. Very Faulkner-esque in a lot of ways. Also finished Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, which was very surreal and absurd. I'm not sure I fully got it, but I did enjoy it.
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Feb 18, 2010 17:23
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Green Crayons posted:
I just finished it this morning, and I liked it as well. The style of writing does suffer a bit from being a little overly proper, but the story itself does suck you in. Plus, it's nice and short at about 100 pages. I'll wait for the paperback release of The Magicians, but I've heard good things from a lot of people - it made its way onto a few "best of 2009" lists, I think. Oh, and Encryptic - good to hear about Memoir from Antproof Case. I've read both Winter's Tale and A Soldier in the Great War and I think Helprin's pretty good. Both of them took me a while to read, but were worth the time I put in. Chamberk fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Mar 15, 2010 |
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Mar 15, 2010 18:52
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freebooter posted:Here's my full review: I suppose the style is a personal thing, but I liked his style, and I liked the book overall. The idea you're talking about struck me as a little cheesy (faux-X-Men as metaphor for India? huh?) but I thought the execution was done well enough. Either he was going to make a 3000-page book about the Children, or he was just going to show India through the life of Saleem - which is a great deal easier. A book about all the Children at once would have been pretty hefty, and most likely a mess - I feel they were better just used as a metaphor of India's ruination by Indira Gandhi and her Emergency, and how it killed/ruined a great deal of things that could have been amazing about an independent India.
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Apr 6, 2010 05:17
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Just finished The Executioner's Song, a 1000+ page book about a convicted murderer, Gary Gilmore. Since I was born in 1983, I had no idea who he was, but apparently in 76-77 he was big poo poo. Most of the book is about his fight for his right to be executed (rather than spend the rest of his life in prison) and the legal complications that ensue. It's an enormous book, and quite thorough - by the end, I felt like I knew Gary Gilmore personally - which makes the end that much more sobering. Good, good book.
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Apr 12, 2010 14:03
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Finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman last night. It was an interesting parody in some ways of Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia, but on the other hand it treated its characters like they were out of The Secret History or Special Topics in Calamity Physics. It was an interesting mishmash, but the last 100 pages or so took an odd turn and I ended up having mixed feelings about the book. It was okay, but not great.
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Apr 26, 2010 20:11
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Hedrigall posted:The Magicians by Lev Grossman. That's a good way to put it. Like I said, I feel like it kinda faltered at the end, but I'm still planning to read the second one as well. Dunno where they're gonna go from there, but it should be cool. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov was a very weird way to present a story, or several stories. There's a wonderful 999-line poem at the beginning, and... 160 pages of commentary, most of which has nothing to do with the poem itself. The commentator may or may not be an exiled king from an Eastern European nation... or he might just be a nut. This seems like one of those books you could read in several different ways, with evidence for each approach. Interesting stuff.
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Apr 29, 2010 20:23
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All I really know about Tropic of Cancer is that my coworker showed me a bit of what he was reading and it was possibly the raunchiest sex scene I'd ever seen. So if you're down with that, have at it!
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Apr 30, 2010 18:40
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Finished Ann Patchett's Bel Canto this morning. Loosely based on a hostage situation in Lima in 1996, it tells the story of a large gala (a birthday party, in fact) that is taken over by terrorists. Though the hostages start out fearing their captors, as days and then weeks pass, they become used to - and soon dependent on - their captivity and the people who hold them captive. There's also an opera singer. Overall, it was a pretty good read. I might have to read more Ann Patchett sometime.
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May 12, 2010 21:13
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Finished Predator's Gold by Philip Reeve. It's the second book in the Mortal Engines series, which has a pretty cool premise... thousands of years after "the Sixty Minutes War" the world is an irradiated wasteland and cities have to move around on giant treads and devour others to survive. Even as I read the first book, I thought that the idea of a many-tiered mobile London chasing down smaller towns to destroy was an awesome idea. Predator's Gold didn't actually introduce any new concepts, but it was still a pretty fun read.
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May 23, 2010 15:12
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O Rapture posted:the underwritten female characters. Yeah, no kidding. "Oh, you're a nerdy hacker who's out of shape? I'm a beautiful badass scavenger woman who's been living a rough life since her childhood. Let's gently caress." At least he blew his load in the first 30 seconds... I laughed at that. It's been a while since I read that book, but I seem to remember most women in that book existing to have sex with the male characters.
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Jun 4, 2010 22:20
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The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie - A pretty goddamn amazing book. Two Indian actors - one famous for Bollywood romantic epics and near-worshipped in his home country, the other trying to distance himself from India by becoming a British voice actor - fall out of the sky above London after their flight is bombed. One becomes an angel, one becomes a devil, and that's just the start of the weirdness. I love Rushdie's writing, and it was interesting to see him take on London instead of India. I'm still turning it over in my head, but I really did love it.
Chamberk fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jun 18, 2010 |
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Jun 17, 2010 22:19
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Wrojin posted:Fantasy goons have been burned enough by authors who drop the ball on series that they have no optimism left. The third book in this series has been announced, I'm pretty sure that it was due out this summer, but now the release date has been removed. This doesn't inspire confidence. The most recent news I'd heard is that he HAS turned in his manuscript, though it's a bit late. I'm trying to remain hopeful, because they can't all be GRRMs.
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Jun 20, 2010 19:37
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Recently finished Kraken by China Mieville and Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Both were pretty good, though a little disappointing. Kraken seemed like a more "gritty" version of Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere", though I've got to give Mieville points for creativity on some of the creatures and ideas he cooks up. Bright Lights, Big City was a shorter novel about a young, disillusioned, coke-snorting yuppie in New York in the 80s, and it was written entirely in the second person. (Still not sure why.) It was a good read, but not quite as good as the other McInerney book I've read, Brightness Falls. (It's about TWO young, disillusioned, coke-snorting yuppies and their marriage.) There are some obvious comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis, but McInerney manages to be a little more sentimental and a little less vicious.
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Jul 22, 2010 22:29
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