|
I think I would like to get in on this. I'm going to go for 20 books in 2014. It's not that much, but I would like to try focus heavily on consistency. I tend to binge on a series that I'm interested in for a month or two and then go months without reading a single book because I can't get into anything. I haven't really used my Goodreads account much, I mostly used it to check series information and reading orders but I'm going to make an effort to put in every book I read this year and set the correct "date read". I might try filling in previous years data with guestimates but it's not a priority. The point is to see if I can get 20 books fairly consistent over the course of 2014, making sure I'm always reading something. Feel free to add me on Goodreads, it will probably make me more accountable.
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2014 22:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:06 |
|
|
It depends on what your personal goal is I guess. If it's just to encourage yourself to read, then why not count graphic novels? It's not like it's a competition or anything, the amount of books selected as a goal is completely arbitrary and no one is out policing it. I personally don't read comics, they have never really appealed to me. I have the Hyrule Historia sitting on my desk waiting to be read though. It's basically a glorified art book, but I'll probably still count it towards my total. If taken to the extreme I guess I can see your point. I'm having a laugh thinking of a hypothetical scenario where someone proclaims they read "200 books" and then dump a few boxes of comic books on the table, but let's be honest, does it really matter? It would be a shame to have folks not take part because they were "ashamed" of what they read, that's not really in the spirit of the challenge is it?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2014 10:56
|
|
|
Stravinsky posted:So would it be cool and acceptable that I put down on my list of fifty books I read this year the Monday morning newspaper from this week? Do I personally care if you put down the morning paper on your list of books read? Not really, no. If that is your goal, go for it. It's a "reading challenge", the purpose is to set a personal goal and then try achieve it. It's not called the "novels that don't have illustrations in them challenge" and it's not some serious competition with a prize at the end if you meet the goal. I would argue the difference between "book" and "graphic novel" isn't even really the same as the difference between a TV Show and Movie. It's more grey than that, probably akin to a Direct-to-DVD Movie like The Ark of Truth. It's a movie, but it's just the same as one of the double episode specials of Stargate that they had at the end of a season. Is it a TV Show or a Movie? More importantly, does anyone really care?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2014 12:18
|
|
|
Stravinsky posted:This is mostly what my problem is to be honest. Its just seeing how much poo poo you can get through and really doesn't do much to make you a better reader and leads to putting dumb poo poo on your list because its a bunch of words you read so you can feel good about yourself at the end of the day. I don't even know why you have this assumption that people read solely to "become better readers" or why you hold this ridiculous notion that people shouldn't feel good or enjoy reading unless what they are reading meets your personal standard of complexity. Your mindset is so foreign to me I can't even begin to understand it. I read because I enjoy reading and I read things I enjoy (science fiction and trashy space opera mostly). I don't care if "I'm getting better at reading" and I certainly don't care if someone thinks they are somehow a better person then me because they read books with longer words in it. For the record, I don't pat myself on the back every time I finish a book, but if some folks do, why shouldn't they? There are all sorts of different people in this world that are at different reading levels, maybe getting through a single graphic novel is an achievement worth celebrating for them? Sometimes the act of taking time out of life to just sit down and finish a novel you started is worth a little personal celebration.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2014 07:24
|
|
|
2/20 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught 3/20 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible 4/20 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian The above three are books 7, 8 and 9 in the overall Lost Fleet series and the first three books in the Beyond the Frontier series. This means I'm currently up to date with the main series, but still need to read the two novels in the Lost Stars "spin off" mini-series. I obviously enjoyed the series or I wouldn't have bothered reading 9 novels in it, but they are far from perfect. They are military science fiction through and through so if you don't enjoy reading minute details about spaceship maneuvers, you're probably going to have a bad time. Below are some of my opinions about the series as a whole since it would be pretty pointless to pick out individual books and review them.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2014 11:01
|
|
|
5/20: The Little Book of Contentment by Leo Babauta
If you're not convinced, the ebook is free and is like 70 pages long, so it's not much of an investment. I really only read it because I needed a quick distraction from the book below. Despite being so short, it honestly felt too long. Like most "self-help" books, you could compress the whole thing down to a single chapter and it wouldn't lose any useful content. Despite my attitude towards these types of books, I still read them. I guess because they generally have a little nugget of useful info every now and then that makes them worth reading. Or maybe I just continue to read them because I actually hate myself, maybe there is a book out there to help me with this problem... 6/20: Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by Bell Hooks It's short. ~110 pages short. But it's dense. I'm honestly not really sure what to say about it or how to critique it. I enjoyed reading it and learned a lot, but it wasn't the introduction to feminism I was hoping it was going to be. I feel like I could've benefited from having my hand held a little more, but it's also possible that I'm just an idiot. Since I don't know what else to say and am worried writing anything else will just highlight my own stupidity, I will end this post with my favourite passage from Feminism is for Everybody: quote:If women and men want to know love, we have to yearn for feminism. For without feminist thinking and practice, we lack the foundation to create loving bonds.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2014 08:34
|
|
|
My reading habits slowed down for a bit a little while ago, but then picked right up again soon after thanks to a new job that requires I take a ~45 minute train ride each way (worth it though, it's a fantastic job). I've tried my best to attack my to-read list as randomly as possible so I don't just fall back on reading space opera back to back  The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia. This is not very good at all. It's basically a concept art book for a few modern Zelda games, expect anything more and you'll be seriously disappointed. I guess it got such high reviews because fans were happy with that?
quote:Because the games were developed [with a focus on gameplay], it could be said that Zelda's story lines were afterthoughts. So even though the series producer (Eiji Aonuma) says that the writing was an afterthought and came about by chance, they still thought it was a good idea to base a book around it. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I have mixed feelings about this one. I felt like half the time it was a charming, accessible, little introduction to zazen. In other parts I struggled with the overly abstracted examples. I'm not sure I'm convinced the talks by Shunryu Suzuki translate well to book form. I always felt like I was "missing something" when he used these elaborate koan-like examples. Ironically, just by thinking too much about it I'm probably missing the point. Sitting and meditating is nice though, so I'll just keep doing that and not really worry about it. The Books of Skyrim (download). A ~1200 page behemoth of short stories, religious texts, instruction manuals, poems, plays, songs, journals and notes from the Elder Scrolls Universe. Some of the short stories were really good, to the point they could be transplanted into their own volume to make the whole thing more accessible and readable to most fantasy readers. The problem is that for most of it, you really have to be quite familiar with the video games and the lore for it to have any kind of context. I'm a fairly big fan of the games so I have that foundation already, but others may not. Still, I enjoyed almost the entire time I spent reading it, which was probably far too long since it was easy to pick up and put down between other books. The Communist Manifesto. I think this is the third time I've read this over the years. Each time I felt I understood the concepts a little more. Even still, I'm nowhere near qualified to offer any kind of opinion of this without showing my general political ignorance. If you are interested, you should probably look up a review from someone qualified to make one. I'm currently reading The Poverty of Philosophy, also by Marx. I'm making (very) slow progress with it. I usually have to reread parts since I'm exhausted on the way home and don't have the energy to get absorbed in it. I think I'm going to have to have multiple titles on the go at the same time. Leave the stuff that requires effort for the ride to work when I'm fresh and just read some easy genre fiction or something on the way home when I'm tired.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2014 03:12
|
|
|
Dienes posted:Please review The Lusty Argonian Maid volumes 1 and 2 at your earliest convenience. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Bethesda decided not to publish the majority of that play. Instead, teasing us with the genius contained within two tiny volumes. The volumes contain extracts of Act 4, Scene 3 and Act 7, Scene 2 of the piece. Volume one is about the importance of weapon maintenance. quote:Crantius Colto: [..] Here, polish my spear. I'll admit that when taking game-play updates introduced in Skyrim into account, this advice is largely irrelevant since the mechanic of weapon degradation was removed. Still, I feel that historical context is important and this information was clearly invaluable at the time when it was introduced in Morrowind, since weapons could "wear". The last thing a player would want was to be swarmed by a pack of Cliff Racers and be stuck with a blunt or broken weapon. Not only did volume one impart valuable information to readers, it did so in an amusing and memorable fashion. It would therefore be a struggle to give it any less then five spears out of five.  Volume two attempts to convey various pointers about baking bread. quote:Crantius Colto: This loaf isn't ready for baking, my sweet. It has yet to rise. This is especially so when combined with the tip below, which conveys the importance of pre-heating the oven before going ahead and inserting the mixture. quote:Lifts-Her-Tail: Very well, but I'm afraid my oven isn't hot enough. It could take hours! The prose is similar to volume one and I am unable to fault it. But while volume two also contains useful information, it is arguably of less importance then what is conveyed in volume one. After all, when was the last time you heard of someone having their life saved thanks to a correctly baked loaf of bread? For this fact alone and because it can't be reviewed without at least partially comparing it to the first volume, I must give it a lower score of 4 bags of flour out of five.  If I have piqued your interest (which I hope I have), and you are interested in reading the full volumes, you can do so online without having to blunder through the ~1200 page Skyrim ebook I linked in my previous post.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2014 01:21
|
|
|
I guess you like Banks, Mahler?  I'm actually reading my first Culture (and Banks for that matter) novel at the moment, Consider Phlebas. I think I'm about 1/4 of the way through and am definitely enjoying it. I could probably see myself ignoring a whole bunch of other stuff on my to-read list and just continue to read more Culture, but I guess I'll see how I feel when I finish. Does his style change much through the series? I usually hate perspective changes but there seems to be enough (enjoyable) content between changes and there aren't many characters to keep track of (so far) that I can deal with it.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2014 01:20
|
|
|
Mr. Squishy posted:Well, now I'm imagining the worst, like a book of Zelda concept art or summat. That's not fair. I don't know how to mark read books on Goodreads so they don't count towards the book total and wanted to post about how bad it was in the thread. (Also in my defence, it's the only book on my list that isn't non-fiction or a novel).
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2014 08:23
|
|
|
Stravinsky posted:4)Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami If you're going to make parody posts could you at least not include descriptions of mothers sucking on their babies dicks?
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2014 05:45
|
|
|
"Haha, look at all those idiots posting about comic books in the book barn". *posts about reading child porn erotica* Yep, you sure showed those guys.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2014 08:10
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:And aside from that, a book is a container for words. An audiobook is an alternative container for those same words. What difference does it make if you read it as text or listen to it as audio? Well, this is the reading challenge thread. Listening to audio isn't reading, they are completely different mediums. If the Game of Thrones TV show was 100% faithful to the books, would that count? Red Shirts: I'm quite fond of John Scalzi. I've already read all the novels in the Old Man's War series so this was the next logical step. It's basically a parody of Star Trek and for the most part was enjoyable. The "main" novel itself was cut sort and continued in the form of three short codex instead. A pretty weird format but it worked out in the end. I probably looked like a loving idiot smiling to myself while I was reading on the train. Consider Phlebas, Ian Banks: I love the Culture universe Banks developed (I'm reading the next in the series now). It's pretty safe to say it's one of my favourite science fiction settings. That being said, I did not give a single gently caress about any of the characters in this novel. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels: It's difficult to judge since it didn't really introduce any concepts I haven't already read about before. Apart from a few words that have droped from common use, Engels prose is still easily readable today. The Infernal City and Lord of Souls, Greg Keyes: Two novels, but probably should have just been combined into one. They were honestly pretty passable fantasy, they just kept me entertained since I'm into Elder Scrolls lore. If you have never played any of the games and don't care about the surrounding lore, don't bother. Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx: This is actually really quite good. It did a great job of explaining wage-labour in a nice, simple way. I'm reading Player of Games by Banks at the moment and I'm quite tempted to completely ignore my to-read list and just keep reading Culture novels.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2014 09:33
|
|
|
Argali posted:I thought that too last year until I got to Excession. Can you explain? Is it completely different to the other novels in the series? If it's going to ruin Culture for me maybe I'll skip that one  .
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2014 07:32
|
|
|
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is pretty much the best book I've ever read. quote:Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything. I almost actually reached my goal so I had to increase it by another ten books. A good chunk of them will probably be by Vonnegut.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2014 09:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:06 |
|
|
Achieved my original goal of 20 books in July, I then amended it to 30. Got to 24 in mid August and then the screen cracked on my Kobo reader. It was one of the original models so it had a good run, but I haven't got around to buying a replacement one yet. Of course, I can't read paper books in the mean time because
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2014 01:07
|
|