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madlilnerd posted:This morning I finished reading Dracula, because I've thought for a while that I should actually bother to read some classic books. Turns out I didn't know the plot of Dracula at all, and was completely and pleasantly surprised. It can be a bit boring in places but by the end is a real page turner. I didn't know that Dracula was so... magical, you know? Slipping through tiny cracks, turning into weather, appearing as a twinkling mist, all that jazz was new to me. I recently finished this too, on my second attempt. The first time, I got bogged down in the fairly purple, potboiler initial chapters. But it was easier once I got past that. And - as above - the plot was a surprise. Van Helsing, Harker etc aren't passive but hunt down Dracula with logic and detective work. The style is a little old, lumbering and verbose and there are far too many scenes in which the character compliment each others bravery, intelligence or virtue. But in summary: better than you'd expect. On another random classic, I also finished Zorba the Greek. The style here is also slightly aged and clunky - with once again many declarations of intense admiration - and some of Zorba's behaviour looks fairly sketchy (arson, despising and making fun of old women) but it's very readable and snapshot of a time and place (Greece in the 30s) that doesn't feature in many books. Recommended.
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Mar 15, 2012 15:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I tried to read Zorba and had a hard time with it -- mostly because as a modern reader, any time I run into a book like that where one guy is rhapsodizing for page after page about how beautiful and handsome and emotional and awesome this other dude is, after a certain point I want to just scream "OK, JUST KISS HIM ALREADY." I realize it's a different era and so forth but to a modern reader or at least to this modern reader that book basically screamed "repressed homosexuality" from every page. That's true - I keep wondering if the relationship between the narrator and basically any other male character was subtextually gay. Maybe it was a different time, but the book was written in 1950 or so. It's not that different. I think you have to let the detail wash over you a bit: "okay, I don't quite get why you think Zorba is so awesome, but I'll accept the point". Still, the way they treat Dame Hortense is hard to take. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Mar 16, 2012 10:24
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Taking a break from a bit of serious reading, I picked up - and just finished - John Courtney Grimwood's Pashazade. I liked his previous RedRobe, so I've had this on my shelves for a while. The overall plot is that it's a cyberpunk story set in Alexandria, in a world where Germany won WW1 and the Ottoman Empire is still going strong. Our lead character Raf is whisked from jail in the US and bought to the city where he discovers that he is the son of an Emir, and is presented with a cushy job and an arranged marriage. Then one of his allies is killed and the police look at Raf as the chief suspect. It's not a million miles away from George Alec Effinger's work, and is very readable, at least at first. But somewhere about the halfway mark I started to get irritated with the book. There's a bunch of minor issues with the book: violence graphically described to the point of absurdity (there's several exploding eyeballs), a bunch of cliches (genius compute hacker kid, etc.), characters suddenly demonstrating skills or resources only when they need them. But the biggest problem, I think, is a strange imbalance between the plot and the background. The book spends a lot of it's length on Raf's backstory, which is largely irrelevant or ill-explained. (He's got a head full of cyberware and all these elite killer skills, largely without explanation and ignoring any actual experience.) There's a bunch of peripheral characters who contribute little to the plot. And all this background seems to steal space from the main story, as character motivations are thinly drawn and seem to leap about, mysterious things happen and are forgotten about, character's leap to conclusions that seem unfounded. At several points I stopped to wonder why something was happening. Summary: started well, fell apart, irritated me.
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Apr 19, 2012 08:29
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:I just finished this one yesterday as well, and it's the strangest thing: I loved the book, but I can't disagree with anything you've written here and can even add some complaints of my own, like the fact that the whole mystery of the book was solved in the last 10 or so pages without much buildup throughout the novel. I can totally see that - I didn't dislike it in the sense of it being a bad book (I've read a lot, lot worse), more that it seemed like all the parts were there for a good book but they didn't really come together. It's a great premise (Germany wins WW1, the Ottoman Empire never falls, its byzantine and corrupt bureaucracy continues to rule the Middle East into the 21st Century), a great setting (the rich and poor rubbing shoulders in this noir-ish Middle Eastern city), but the story - from my point of view - doesn't make much use of it. It feels more like the setup for a trilogy - which it it is. Once thing, is it ever adequately explained how Raf ends up with a head full of cyberware and killer instincts? The books seems to wave it away with a rushed explanation.
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Apr 30, 2012 08:53
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:Yeah, I can definitely see that. I've got the second book, hopefully whenever I start that it'll flow a lot better now that the setup is out of the way. Right - I got that part, but thought it was bit thin and there had to be a better, more thorough explanation. Glad to see I didn't miss anything.
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Apr 30, 2012 17:11
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After the lengthy and very serious biography of Albert Speer, I retreated to lighter works: Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko: the basis for the two movies. In a nutshell, modern day Moscow is the scene of a cold war between two sides of magicians. Restrained by a treaty and vigilant observation by their opponents, the powers of Light and Dark jostle for position while ordinary people remain unaware of the struggle going on. Eh, it was okay. It's certainly very readable, but the movies made something colorful and lurid of what on paper is fairly prosiaic. You never get a good feeling for Moscow, it seems like it could be anywhere, and the protagonist several times has revelations about over-arching conspiracies and motivation (I realised now what their aim was, but I had no choice but to fall into their trap!), which - in the tradition of "Lost" - he fails to explain and in retrospect doesn't make any sense. It was an inoffensive timefiller. Angels of the Universe by Einar Már Guđmundsson: on a trip to Iceland I was surprised by the scale of the local publishing and writing and so picked up a few (translated) volumes. The first was a completely by-the-numbers crime novel (and full of genre silliness). The second was an enjoyable if slim novel (with a blurb from Bjork, seriously). This novel was next and won a few major prizes back in the 90s. The narrator tells his life from birth to death, including his descent into mental illness, as various characters pass in and out of the story, with individual episodes of tragedy or humour. The onset of madness is very well written, but again this felt a little slight. Still, better that than over long.
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May 28, 2012 08:54
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Aziraphale posted:If you've ever wondered how we might ever visit the nearest star or follow up on contact from another life form, while remaining true to the laws of physics, Contact is the best you can do. It's a bit geeky in parts (I'm thinking especially here of "continental drift man") but I always think of the reviewer who commented that while most "science fiction" was actually cowboys / detectives / etc. "in space", Contact is actually science fiction. It's well worth reading.
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Jun 29, 2012 14:07
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Major Isoor posted:Also, I've read that he's done another series, called "The Gap Cycle" I believe. I know it's supposed to be pretty different to the Covenant books, but is it any good? The fact that the roles in the series apparently keep changing (e.g. Hero > victim > villain sort of thing, I guess) is interesting, but how does it all hold up? Is it still of a the quality of the Covenant books, or does it fall short? I've read the first book of the The Gap cycle and decided not to go any further. This was a while ago, but I remember it as being all pretty grimy, rapey, everyone is an anti-hero, yadda yadda. While I thought this worked with Covenant or was at least justified, that didn't happen here and the overall story wasn't compelling enough to make me go on and the universe drawn wasn't so interesting. No doubt someone will chip in with "it really picks up around book 3". But there's plenty of other books in the world to read.
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Jul 21, 2012 18:20
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Stuporstar posted:Just finished Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, a playful romp through time (mostly the Victorian era) full of literary allusions. I think I would have enjoyed it more if she didn't lay the exposition on so thick ... Has anyone else read Connie Willis? Is she an over-explainer in all her novels, or is this one an outlier? I have a copy of Passage on my reading pile and I'm wondering if I should bother. Belatedly and I haven't read To Say Nothing of the Dog, but Willis is best as a short story writer. She doesn't over-explain and there's some pretty good stuff there. Maybe in TSNotD she remembered she's writing for the SF fans, who need everything spelt out for them.
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Aug 13, 2012 20:25
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Mr. Squishy posted:Finally I've been reading what I've been chastised for calling airport fiction; a collection of Chandler's stories called Trouble is My Business, ... The Chandler is of course great fun, though even reading four together is enough for the seams to start showing (especially Goldfish which is one twist too long, feeling rushed and silly). My favourite of the bunch is Red Wind, where all the funny coincidences that would normally turn out to be conspiracies remain random. While that sounds like it could just be lazy writing, when it's all written against the oppression of an el Nino, it feels quite profound. Trouble is My Business is not a great collection. I seem to remember that it was basically all the sort stories that hadn't already been collected elsewhere. Although it does contain the story that was later rewritten as "The Long Goodbye", and actually explains a lot of plot holes from excised plot elements. Now, content: Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko Angels of the Universe - Einar Már Guđmundsson The first - or part of the first - was turned into the movie of the same name. And tragically, the movie is much better and in fact a different sort of thing. For those who don't know, Night Watch is about Light and Dark magicians (not exactly good and evil but more idealists and cynics) bound by a treaty but locked in a cold war in which they maneuver for an advantage over each other. It reads a bit lumpishly, the narrator is going on all the time about the tunes he's listening on his walkman, the magical "laws" are at times opaque ... by the end I guess I was reading just because of my good memory of the movie. Skippable. It seems that everyone in Iceland is an artists of some sort and prizes for novels grow on trees. Angels of the Universe won some sort of prize, so I threw it in my pile of "Icelandic literature to be read". It's a slip of a novel, with the now-dead narrator looking back on his life and descent into madness. It's a touch ephemeral, but the scenes of insanity are well written, with the narration slowly becoming strange and manic. Not quite as hilarious as the back cover promises (maybe it's Icelandic humor) but well written. Worth a look.
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Sep 9, 2012 15:44
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My neighbourhood association had a charity sale back in September. We got lots of donations of books ... but very few buyers. People don't even want to pay a buck a book. Why is how I ended up with several boxes of secondhand books in my dining room. Dipping into it, I first read Ben Aaronovich's The Rivers of London. Briefly, a young police constable is transfered to the Metropolitan Police unit that deals in occult and magical events, including keeping the peace between the squabbling old gods and spirits that cluster around London and the Thames. There's the inevitable villian that dogs our hero throughout the book, before the inevitable climax where only the hero can defeat the wicked plot. Writing style is very much like Douglas Adams in "Dirk Gently" mode, with the hero making many sarcastic aides to the reader, making fun of the ridiculous people and institutions he has to deal with. (Fun fact: the author used to write Dr Who novelizations, just like Douglas Adams.) There's a lot of fun detailing all the various river gods and their relationships (e.g. the grandmotherly Thames who is Jamaican and can be bought off with a shipment of ale and spirits) and some close and detailed geography. (At several points I recognised the parts of London the action was taking place in. Once I thought the author has got it wrong until I realized I had mistaken the location.) Since the denoument inevitably involves MAGIC, it all gets a bit arbitary at the end and you'll probably recognise the villain way, way before the hero does. But it's fast and fun and a bit different. I may have to read the sequels. Second was Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For the record, I saw the Swedish film and thought it started off as a promising mystery before losing it with a clumsy solution, ludicrous villains and an unpleasant subtext. To my surprise, the book is much better. Yes, it's unabashed pulpy airport lounge fiction. Yes, it desperately needs editing (multi-page backstories on minor characters, descriptions of everyday trivia like prices and what people mare eating, what a character paid for a flat in the 1980s). And lord, the wish fulfilment. But it's surprisingly readable and flies by for a novel of that length. Many thngs that I found ridiculous in the movie are better justified in the book, as well as the sexual violence being largely implied. There's still plenty of bollocks in the solution, but no more than many other mysteries. I still can't see why these books have become such a global sensation - they're competent rather than clever - but I may even read the sequels some day out of interest.
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Nov 12, 2012 17:24
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Clayton Bigsby posted:Wrapped up Timescape by Gregory Benford last night, #14 in my Goodreads 2013 challenge. Yup, that's about it. There are so many of those SF writers who just can't write. I just finished Death in the City of Light by David King. True crime with an incredible hook: Early 1944, Paris. Residents of a suburban street complain of the acrid smoke continually flowing from the chimney of a house. No one answers the door and eventually firefighters break in. They find a stove alight, stuffed with body parts, a pit containing an uncountable number of decaying bodies, bones so numerous the police resort to weighing them to guess how many bodies they represent. The police are initially reluctant to investigate, before sending a delicate query to the Gestapo. The reply reads FIND THE MADMAN WHO DID THIS ... There's conflicting loyalties, the complications introduced by liberation, a variety of colourful characters, false identities, shady underworld figures, collaborators, the resistance, a trial ... a truly incredible story. Goes on for a bit long but very interesting.
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Feb 13, 2013 23:30
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Panic Attack posted:Adolf Hitler, My Part In His Downfall which is of course by Spike Milligan. I'd honestly not heard of the book until recently, and plan on chasing up the next volumes- though to my delight I find there are seven in total. It's nice to read an account of these dark times through the words of a fantastic comedian, but at the same time he doesn't downplay the darkness of it all. I sincerely regret not reading it sooner. From memory, the subsequent volumes get darker and darker until there's one that almost devoid of humour at all. Be warned. I just finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I'll grant that given its length - a treekiller even compared to other treekillers - it read easily. There's a lot of talking heads and exposition (hell, most of the book is talking heads and exposition) but it kept my attention until about 3/4 of the way through. However, at the end I'm not sure what to make of it. There's a lot of "I saw a qwarg sitting on a frob" which serves to make the setting seem more exotic than it actually is. Actually, I kept seeing bits and pieces of actual history and other stories renamed and repurposed. Given the central conceit of the book, you might argue this is no accident. And there's a strange juvenile air to the characters, a group of young monks, that kept reminding me of Harry Potter or The Famous Five. (Our earnest and idealistic heroes investigate a mystery, benevolent adult figures occasionally pop in to scold them or say they're on the right track.) Although the resolution is foreshadowed right from the beginning of the novel - care of endless reams of Greek philosophy and speculation - it still didn't sit right with me. We shall do magic with maths! In summary, I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone.
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Sep 16, 2013 10:09
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Finished Dan Simmon's Ilium. The start of the novel is a great hook - a 20th century historian, resurrected by what appears to be the ancient Greek gods, is sent to observe and report on the Trojan war, which is in progress. Meanwhile, a group of humans living idyllic lives on Mars start to face questions about how their world is run, while a group of machine intelligences in Jovian orbit hatch a plan to investigate mysterious activity on the long abandoned inner planets ... It's perhaps unsurprising that the novel can't answer all the questions it raises and seems almost disinterested in doing so, perhaps putting it off to a sequel. But it's got rousing action, great scenery and is very pacey. I finished this in a few days. Highly recommended for a good exciting read in which nano-assisted Greek heroes clash and very human machines explore a hostile planet. Note that Simmons is one of those authors that went off the rails after 9/11. It shows up in a few places in this book ("effete liberals", "foolish academics") but is largely ignorable.
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Sep 20, 2013 11:31
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Groke posted:Unfortunately it's... not as ignorable in the sequel. drat. I mean, Ilium has a lot of very manly men (the idea of a Greek army facing down the gods is awesome, but you don't want to think about the logic of it too much, i.e. nukes) but it was an entertaining bit of fluff. Would I be right in guessing that the sequel doesn't really answer a lot of the overhanging questions?
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Sep 20, 2013 12:56
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kaworu posted:I may make an Ursula K. Le Guin/Earthsea Cycle/Hainish Cycle megathread. Probably just an Ursula megathread. Is this a reasonable idea? I think she is certainly worthy of it, having an extremely long, prolific, and almost unbelievably influential career over the last 50 years. She's probably the greatest living sci-fi/fantasy writer of her generation, still going strong at around 85 years old, I believe. Hell, yes. Le Guin sometimes gets disparaged and is often ignored, but in almost every novel she's stretching the genre and experimenting, reaching for some point. Your comparison with GRRM is apropos: I'm unconvinced he's written anything more than potboilers or airport lounge fiction (as satisfying as they may be), while it's incredible to look at Earthsea and how Le Guin developed the series and worked outside the usual white / cod-medieval / wizards cliches of fantasy.
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Oct 28, 2013 09:57
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A A 2 3 5 8 K posted:I finished Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin and I of course don't know what to think yet. Instead I'll quote what's become one of my favorite passages from any book I've read. Winter's Tale is an awkward sort of book - it's longwinded, cryptic, indulgent, sentimental and possibly meaningless. (I shudder to think what the movie is going to be like.) I once read that it is the favourite book of dreamy impractical young men. But it works despite or perhaps because of that. There's dozens of beautiful passages like the one you quoted, because it's an can indulge in these side-stories and irrelevant details. A book that will be meaningless to most readers of SA, but I just finished Don Walker's Shots. It's probably one of the most Australian books I've ever read and verges on being culturally untranslatable. Walker was the piano player and songwriter for a famous Australia band in the 80s, and "Shots" is a very impressionist, flow-of-consciousness memoir from his youth, through the band days and then travelling around the world. He explains little, gives almost no back story or context, there's just incidents and pictures gathered from his life. quote:Poor Billy Keeper. Hangin' in the barn, discovered on Empire Day, the afternoon making its long eventful way to cracker night. In truth, something hangs low over the grown-ups all day, like they all knew, like they had a delegation secretly doing it, everyone waiting, then the ealry afternoon siren sweeping out from town, the yellow ambulance through the railway gates, through the picnic ground and down to Keeper's farm. A great book but - as said - very niche.
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Dec 1, 2013 13:48
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Just finished Naive. Super by Erland Loe I think I picked it up while looking at a bunch of recent and slightly indie fiction. It's had a bit of a reputation - you can find webpages of quotes from it. The narrator is an anonymous 25 year-old who, in a fit of anomie, drops out of university to think about things, while minding his brothers apartment. The slightest of books, you could easily knock this over in an hour or two. Even given that, it's a simple, light read as the narrator makes lists of things that make him happy, looks up swear words in a library catalogue and plays with children's toys. The language is also very plain and a little staccato, perhaps due to the translation. Not a deep read, not a great one, but maybe a comforting, pleasant one for when you're a little depressed and needing a bit of low-key comfort.
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Dec 3, 2013 20:03
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Zola posted:Just finished The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Someone had listed it in a set of recommendations posted to another TBB thread, it sounded interesting, it had a reasonable price on Kindle so I checked it out. I tried to read the sequel and failed. No one felt like a period character, more like stereotypes with 21st century attitudes and thinking. But others may find it different. Anyways, re-read Po Bronson's Bombardiers. Basically, it's "Catch 22" but in the world of finance. It's as entertaining as that suggests. Unfortunately, Bronson has never quiet hit these heights again. Recommended.
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Jan 12, 2014 00:16
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), because this is really an excellent read. An insane serial killer on the lose and the creation of the a criminal profile to identify and capture the killer...in 1896. It's a novel, but it reads like it's historical fact. A lot of attention to detail, interesting characters and a well-plotted story. I highly recommend this for anyone who likes a good procedural
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I used to read everything Egan wrote. Don't take "used to" as a real criticism: I weaned myself off his work after I started to notice the tics and habits in his work: we'll stop for a few chapters now to discuss exotic quantum physics which doesn't actually advance the plot. And now we'll discuss the ontological basis of our own reality. But you'll notice these things after you've read a lot from any author. He does really clever stuff, and is one of the few science fiction writers who is actually writing science fiction (as opposed to cowboys / soldiers / detectives with spaceships & rayguns). I'd especially rate his short fiction, Quarantine and Permutation City. Anyways, my own reading has been derailed badly by work but I finished Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Compared to the movie, it does a lot more telling than showing, and the whole thing is a lot more bleak and nihilistic, exploring the crappy lives of almost everyone involved in the story. Which maybe makes it slighter weaker? Still a good read and it feels fairly authentic in that there aren't any one-dimensional bad or good guys, just a lot of messed up and disappointed people.
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Nov 18, 2014 14:48
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Just finished Dear Leader by Jang Jin-Sung, which has the lurid subtitle "North Korea's senior propagandist exposes shocking truths behind the regime". Except, he wasn't and your mileage may vary on the "shock" factor. Jang was a rising but junior member in one of the propaganda offices, responsible for writing epic poems praising the leader and forging positive commentary from South Koreans. So, while he wasn't as senior or singular as the title makes out, it is very much an insiders look at the regime, a contrast with Nothing to Envy. Is it good? Well, it's a solid bit of misery-porn, albeit a well-written one. I have some doubts about the veracity of some parts - the final section in particular reads like an adventure novel. But it's very readable and as said presents a different view on North Korea. I'm no expert, but particularly interesting was his statements that the cult of personality and security apparatus was built up by Kim Jong-il while he was out of favour and his brother was earmarked for the leadership. The un-questioning need for loyalty and security allowed him to infiltrate all sectors of government, eventually isolating his father Kim Il-Sung and edging out any rivals.
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Dec 30, 2014 20:52
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Just finished a bit of science fiction: Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life was excellent, a set of short stories that are actually decently written and aren't all about rayguns / world-building / lemme show you some physics and the usual cliches that SF authors indulge in. Admittedly some stories are better than others, but quality is high. (There's one that I found a bit hokey and irritating and it turns out to have been one of Chiang's earliest stories rewritten.) And you can sort of see his chosen devices and ways of putting together a plot. But hell, I enjoyed it. Good stuff. This was followed by the interesting contrast of Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime, which is a set of three novella all set in a future where a "Peace Authority" has taken over by "bobbling" (sealing into stasis) any resistance. I remember enjoying this when I read it years ago, but it seemed slightly clunky and old-fashioned this time. Vinge seems to change his mind about how bobbling works partway through the story, there's a sexy lady AI to help our hero, a sexy Asian superspy who's always right, the world is one in which university lecturers would seem to be the rebels and sort after experts ("he was the best algorithms man on the West coast"), the authoritarian bad guys are weak and helpless before our daring heroes, there's a real libertarian wet-dream in which a military invasion is turned back from "ungoverned" land by a farmer with nukes ... Maybe it's not aged well. Maybe it was always clunky and awkward and I was just younger.
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Jan 13, 2015 02:03
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ClearAirTurbulence posted:Sadly, that's the feeling I get a lot of times when I revisit the old SF and other genre fiction I used to read. I think sf is particularly vulnerable to that: flashy futures, the good smart guy defeats the dumb bad guys, a bit of sex and romance. It's like catnip for dorky young males.
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Jan 13, 2015 08:32
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SF is about the only genre where libertarianism persistently and explicitly shows up. Don't know why: maybe it goes with the slightly undertone of fascism that often underlies SF. On to "Armour", it's a strange book. It has such a reputation and so many people have read it, but it's not actually well written.
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Jan 17, 2015 12:10
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No Wave posted:The Fountainhead... I was shocked how much fun it was up until about page 650 (out of 725 in the edition I was reading). Wouldn't disagree. I think it's decent read that largely escapes the strawmanning, mouthpieces and other faults of Atlas Shrugged. You can read it just as a novel, rather than a polemic. Not the usual fare covered by this thread, but I just finished Dan Harris' 10% Happier. Potted summary: fairly hard-nosed journalist suffering from burnout and stress turns to meditation and almost reluctantly becomes an advocate for it. It's a fairly satisfying read because Harris shares many of my doubts and scepticisms (his take on Eckhardt Tolle is almost exactly mine) and he doesn't disguise how difficult meditation can be. Not a long read and recommended. After a very high pressure period at work, it's exactly what I needed advice-wise.
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Jan 30, 2015 01:44
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Willa Cather's My Antonia. On a recent trip, I got to tackle and finish quite a few books I had on the go and this was perfect fodder. In a sense, nothing much happens in it and the whole framing / excuse for the book is a bit thin. (The author meets someone from her home town on a train, they say "That Antonia was quite a character, heh?", the companion writes up his memories and the author says, "welp, here they are". I believe this part got cut from some editions.) The story is perhaps nothing special, just one event after another, but it's a remarkably kind and humane story where even the villains are understandable and the hard struggle of taming the prairie isn't glamourised. And there's some nice prose: quote:The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska. quote:There seemed to be nothing to see: no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made
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Feb 16, 2015 17:24
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Captain Hotbutt posted:Blankets by Craig Thompson. An "Illustrated Novel" (super-long graphic novel) about love, loss, and faith and how those all mix together when you're a teenager. The artwork is beautiful and the story is really well told from a mature and knowing perspective. Full of melancholy and bittersweet nostalgia stuff but never heavy handed or self-pitying. Blankets is terrific. It's such an unpretentious sweet story told with just enough art. His most recent volume Habibi is also terrific, almost for the opposite reasons. It revels in intricate complex art and the story is opaque in parts. Recommended.
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Apr 5, 2015 21:57
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Realised that I hadn't posted about finishing Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash. I'd opened it up when I was in a bit of a funk, burnt out by reading things that were too much like work, too "worthy", too much like self-improvement ... and it was just what I needed. Dash has an undeniable talent for crafting great stories out of odd moments in history, scrupulous about adhering to what is recorded but painting great pictures of people and their circumstances: quote:It was at some time after 3 a.m., when the alertness of the crew was at its lowest ebb, that the lookout, Hans Bosschieter, first suspected that all was not well. From his position high in the stern, the sailor noticed what appeared to be white water dead ahead. Peering into the night, Bosschieter thought he could make out a mass of spray, as though surf was breaking on an unseen reef. He turned to the skipper for confirmation, but Jacobsz disagreed. He insisted that the thin white line on the horizon was nothing more than moonbeams dancing on the waves. The skipper trusted to his own judgment, and he held the Batavia’s course, sailing on with all her canvas set. In 1629, a Dutch ship laden with goods, money & jewels went off course on it's way to on its way to Java, stranding it's crew and passengers on a series of deserted island off the coast of West Australia. The captain set off in a ships boat to get rescue, unwisely leaving the other survivors in the charge of a lesser merchant, who was a disgraced bankrupt and a charismatic heretic ... Incredible story that allows Dash to talk about all sorts of things like Dutch trading companies, apostates, Aboriginal archaeology and more. Highly recommended. Followed it up with Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, which is the source for The Thing in it's various incarnations. Entertaining book, if a little old-fashioned that sometimes overplays its hand. "What if these alien creatures have a strange biology unlike ours that - say - allows them to imitate other creatures?" But it's odd to see how much of this made it's way into the John Carpenter film. A decent read.
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Apr 17, 2015 16:50
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Archer666 posted:Finished Neal Stephenson's Reamde and while entertaining, I felt that the book really didn't need to be 1000+ pages long. You could cut out several hundred pages worth of Stephenson just rambling on about geographical trivia and the MMO game and it'd still be a good read. That comment could apply to just about every Stephenson novel from Cryptonomicon onwards.
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May 12, 2015 16:30
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I recently raved about Mike Dash's Batavia's Graveyard, so I went on to read another of his books: Satan's Circus. In a nutshell, it's about the career of a cop in early 20th century New York, his intersections with the famous and infamous, and his eventual trial for murder. It covers the later years of the Tammany Hall machine, the period leading after "Gangs of New York", graft and crime. I didn't like it quite as much as BG, but it's an undeniably messier story that sprawls over decades and a huge cast of characters. Most of the book is endnotes, references and an index. But it's still an intriguing story of an astonishing corrupt time and place.
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Jun 9, 2015 11:39
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That seems like a pattern of Gibson's trilogies. The middling Virtual Light shifted into the awesome Idoru and finished with the anti-climatic All Tomorrow's Parties, which seemed a lot like he said lets see what all the old characters are doing and send them off. Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History have a loosely shared cast, but also a lot of characters that are nearly identical and even very similar plots. Obviously, I read all of them but they left me with the feeling that they were less than they appeared to be.
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Jun 15, 2015 19:28
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Vanderdeath posted:Armada doubles the gently caress down on the nostalgia wank and the 1980s as viewed through a Middle Class White Man's Lens. The main character is an rear end in a top hat whose dad dies and leaves behind a bunch of dumb 80s poo poo that no kid in the middle 21st century should care about. I got friends that justify their massive and endless accumulation of videogames / boardgames / anime by saying that it's "a collection" that they're going to pass on to their kids. Like their kids are going to be interested in dubs of "Gunsmith Cats" or obscure wargames from the 1990s. Anyways, I just finished The Peripheral by William Gibson. Short review: good, enjoyable. Long review: it may be the most Gibsonesque novel that Gibson ever Gibson'd, layered thick with "Chinese biopolymer" and extemporaneous declarations of how the world is. Some impressions: * The prose is actually very enjoyable and there's lots of quotable quotes: "poo poo. Volumes of it. Hitting a multitude of fans." * I even managed to pick the short story it was based on: "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling * Of course, nothing is really explained in the end: the story device just is. But that's okay - it's a way to set up the story. * The post-apocalypse reconstructed London is actually a nice setting because I hated the London that appeared in Zero History. The setting of the decaying, second-world USA is also neat. * The ending, as is traditional in Gibson, is a bit disappointing and comes down to two powerful but nebulously defined entities clashing head-on until one out badasses the other. ("Our vague high-tech stuff is being defeated by the enemies vague high-tech stuff. So I need you to go and do this specific task. No, I won't explain why.") So don't read it for the ending. * I hope he doesn't turn this into a trilogy. * They spend a lot of time in armoured convoys or explaining security details, which does drag by the end. * Some nice characters like Connor Penske, the crippled veteran of "First Haptic Recon (speed, intensity, violence)" who rides around the decrepit badlands of his home town at all hours on a motorcycle adapted to fit his crippled body.
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Aug 3, 2015 14:10
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I just finished Reamde by Neal Stephenson and ... don't bother. Look, it's surprisingly readable page-to-page. You'll want to know what happens next. But Stephenson has basically reinvented the Robert Ludlum novel, except with a lot more digressions about MMOs. It's super-long and needs editing badly. There's tonnes of tech-porn, details about guns and routers and cars, replete with brand names. The settings get an excruciating amount of detail, to the point where in the climax I swear that piles of rock and clumps of trees are getting loving paragraphs. There's the wildly successful MMO that everyone in the world plays from spec ops operators to money launderers to MI6 operatives. And the MMO sounds like your most power-tripping teenage session of D&D. There's an excess of badasses, to the point where I was getting them all confused. It reads like a treatment for a movie, right down to the zany asian chick, laconic Russian badass, unkillable super-terrorist. Everyone gets paired off at the end with their love interest. If you haven't worked it out, I am officially done with Stephenson.
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Sep 8, 2015 13:53
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Archer666 posted:This echoes my thoughts exactly when I finished(Reamde). At some point it even became clear he just mashed two of his books together just to make this even longer. I got the real feeling that he started with the MMO plot and either ran out of steam or figured that people couldn't get excited about virtual world hijinks, so he slapped on the terrorist subplot that takes over the second half of the book.
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Sep 11, 2015 09:25
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Francois_Dillinger posted:In between putting it down and picking it up I have read the following: 'Homicide: A year on the killing streets' and 'The Corner' by David Simon. If you're a fan of The Wire, then read these immediately. It's worth underlining that the two books are almost a matched pair in that they portray the cops side and the street side of the drug war, respectively. My big takeaway from "The Corner" was how hard it was for people to escape poverty and addiction and how easy it was for them to backslide.
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Sep 13, 2015 23:54
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Solitair posted:I just finished The Lord of the Rings, which has taken me most of the year to read. I didn't have the difficulties that a lot of people on this board have had with it, and what I've taken away from it is that this is a book that somehow manages to feel like the most epic, world-spanning thing ever and yet it still comes in at a length where it could be published in one volume (I got that one-volume edition on Kindle.). I don't see that a lot, especially not to the degree it's accomplished here. Well worth my time. LoTR is a treekiller epic, where actually a lot of stuff happens. Until many modern fantasy epics which are even longer and spend a lot of time spinning their wheels. Based on the recommendations upthread, I pushed Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth up my reading queue. I wasn't bowled over as much as those readers were, but it's still a great book. Ultimately, the question does arise as to how much of what Aslan says is justified or reasonable. Few of us are biblical scholars and we have to take a lot of what he says on faith, from a field that is rife with interpretation, confabulation and mystery. During the text (and in depth in the footnotes), he does give some time to opposing views. In balance, there seems to be a number of indisputable cases where his thesis is borne out: the New Testament is a heavily doctored story of a Jewish nationalist, paved over by later non-Jewish followers.
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Oct 14, 2015 15:55
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Snak posted:I started to read Zealot when I was gripped by the sudden urge to read something popular and topical for once. Unfortunately for my opinion of Reza Aslan as a scholar, I was also taking a college course on the new testament. I had to put Zealot down after a few pages because it became clear that he had done less research I had during the course of my undergraduate class. Some of the "speculation" that he makes about the early life of Jesus is framed as an educated possibility, when these ideas have been outright disproven by more rigorous academic sources. He wanted to tell a cool story, but framing it as historically plausible was either ignorant or dishonest on his part. Well, drat. This is what I feared. Would love it if you had read the whole thing and could give an opinion, but I guess I can still take away some of the ideas from it. I was especially taken with the martyr Stephen getting large parts of his theology wrong. Biblical study seems like a really catty, snarky field. I read some criticism of Bart Ehrman's work that was basically just ad hominems and repeated assertions without argument that he was wrong.
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Oct 15, 2015 18:59
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Bitchkrieg posted:The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Three words sum it up: "Ambitious but flawed." I had a similar reaction. Back when it first came out, it was all the rage, lots of people saying how great the book was, it won a few awards. But it's a little frustrating in actual execution, because the narrator keeps hinting at the there being some single, terrible mistake that they made. But actually, it's a long list of largely minor mistakes and actions. (I found the whole incident where the lander runs out of fuel to be absurd.) And lord, does the book wallow in the humiliation and torture.
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Oct 27, 2015 14:48
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General Battuta posted:I just finished The Hot Zone and while it's initially really gripping, Preston's set of tools for creating tension are pretty limited, and eventually it just gets a little silly every time he calls something Lethally Hot or Level Four or High Pucker Factor. The Hot Zone is strange. The story fizzles out about halfway through. In a way it was true to life - the epidemic took its course.
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May 25, 2016 00:18
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Quandary posted:My biggest issue with the Hot Zone was Preston's attempts to make it a dramatic narrative. Ebola is terrifying enough on it's own but he tried to make it scarier by giving us every detail about the lives of random researchers and injected cliffhangers into the novel. At least to me, it came across pretty goofy and childish. I'd forgotten about that - some researcher in a random car accident? Irrelevant to the story, and it all fizzles out with talk of hotel bills and office space at the CDC.
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May 26, 2016 10:57
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