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The lit babies need spoonfeeding.
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Dec 9, 2016 17:43
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plays to try: those eugene o'niel ones where all the dialogue is written out phonetically so you know they've got an accent
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Dec 9, 2016 17:46
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It's the remix to ignition Written by Henrik Ibsen Makes you think about morals And the human condition
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Dec 9, 2016 17:59
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Franchescanado posted:PLAYS TO TRY Cool list, thank you for the effort post
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Dec 9, 2016 18:26
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Talas posted:Same here. Garrison Keillor's "good poems" are generally good. I am not big on poetry, but I really enjoy it. When I have to teach poetry in class, I will skip the text book and just pull stuff from there
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Dec 9, 2016 23:36
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CestMoi posted:The lit babies need spoonfeeding. They should be spoonfed rat poison
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Dec 10, 2016 00:04
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Roydrowsy posted:Garrison Keillor's "good poems" are generally good. I am not big on poetry, but I really enjoy it. It's a fine collection but for people going AGH POETRY it sure has a lot of poetry. Let's just tell them to read a little chapbook or something and suffer for the cause.
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Dec 10, 2016 03:39
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Corrode posted:I'm figuring out the categories for next year's booklord challenge and I think I'm mostly settled, but I figured I'd ask - is there anything that anyone especially wants to see included? Can be stuff from previous years, stuff that's not been done before but that you'd like, whatever. I have 20 settled already so probably only a couple more to include if anything good comes up. I just had an idea for one -- a book about a book/books. This could be nonfiction (something about the history of the book, for example) or fiction (If on a winter's night a traveler, The Eyre Affair, A Canticle for Leibowitz, for example) .
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Dec 12, 2016 03:40
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All books are about books if you really think about it
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Dec 12, 2016 04:30
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The Dictionary of the Khazars isn't. It's about eggs
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Dec 12, 2016 05:31
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An ex-colleague of mine was very proud of this theory he'd hatched, which basically said that all books are telling about dreams. War and Peace? A very elaborate dream. Master and Margarita? Clearly a dream. Moore's Jerusalem? A fever dream if I've seen one. I don't think he had a further point though. He was... an interesting man.
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Dec 12, 2016 08:14
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Make it that all books are dreams except those that are explicitly dreams and you've got yourself a theory
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Dec 12, 2016 08:30
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Corrode posted:I'm figuring out the categories for next year's booklord challenge and I think I'm mostly settled, but I figured I'd ask - is there anything that anyone especially wants to see included? Can be stuff from previous years, stuff that's not been done before but that you'd like, whatever. I have 20 settled already so probably only a couple more to include if anything good comes up. Two more: Read a book in the public domain/from Project Gutenberg Participate in a BotM / Read a book from the BotM archive.
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Dec 12, 2016 14:58
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This covers the end of October to the first bit of December. It looks like I'll finish up the BookLord challenge this week, and I've met my personal goal of reading at least one work of fiction every month (though I cut it close a bit at the beginning of the year). 98. The Invisibles (Deluxe Vol 3), by Grant Morrison This series feels like it just keeps getting better. This volume transplants the action to America, where we have X-Files influenced stories, more Biblical references, and multiple time-travel plots. In particular, the arcs are more cohesive and their sprawling wonderment has more scaffolding, though I feel that various threads from the previous volume are not pursued enough here. 99. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, by David Bellos This is a very meta, almost postmodern, book about translation in theory and in practice. Bellos attacks a lot of myths about translation: it’s not true poetry, humor, etc. cannot be translated, and he gives great counter—arguments. He also explains some real challenges to the field, such as the quadratic relation of language pairs to distinct languages leading to most possible translations happening either through just a few mediating ‘core’ languages (English very much first) or not at all. Read this book if you’re already familiar with a bit of linguistic theory or don’t mind looking it up and want to get in a good few hundred pages specifically on translation. 100. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, by Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut’s premise here is that he has Dr. Kevorkian lethally inject and then resuscitate him, several dozen times, at the Huntsville, Texas, maximum security prison, all in order to file stories for WNYC from the afterlife beat. It’s clever, funny, and sad. Saying too much would spoil the book, as it’s a super-short read (twenty minutes for me). Just a little snack if you’re hungry for Vonnegut, I suppose. 101. The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, by Sasha Issenberg So this is about the evolving nature of campaign strategy for US presidential elections. I read it before Nov 8, and thought it was fascinating. In retrospect, there are a lot of good, applicable, things here, and it would be worth your time to read it for the simple reason that it’s not someone desperately trying to show that they were right all along. Approach it critically, with current sources in mind. You’ve certainly spent a lot of time reading bullshit self-serving “what went wrong?” takes already so give this a shot. 102. East of West (TPB Vol 1), by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta This graphic novel is science fiction meets alternate history meets western meets anime. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse are looking for their absconded comrade (who searches for love!), in a North America that was shattered long ago in the Civil War. It sounds intriguing, but there’s a lot to roll your eyes at, unfortunately. Perhaps the writer has tried to make too epic of a storyline for his skills. 103. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré I say that this is a mystery because a chapter near the end concludes with an almost explicit “Can you figure out what’s really going on?” to the reader, just before all is revealed. It’s a spy book, set mostly in Germany and England during the Cold War. It’s tense, has good characters, and is really well done. I’m glad the challenge had this category, or I might have never read it. 104. The Hidden Wealth of Nations, by Gabriel Zucman So if you add up the books of the world’s corporations, you wind up with a total global assets that is some six trillion dollars lower than total global liabilities. These numbers should be equal, by GAAP. So there are six trillion dollars in assets that are simply not there; the question is, where are they? How are they hidden? And what are the consequences of this? This is a laser-tight exploration of these questions, and is simply a great read. If you want to learn how those who are willing to play loose with the spirit of the law can accumulate wealth safe from any prying taxmen, look no further. 105. Why Not Me?, by Mindy Kaling Mindy Kaling’s latest is a collection of short humor pieces that I absolutely love. If you at al appreciate her style of comedy, you’ll enjoy this. 106. Abolition Democracy, by Angela L. Davis Angela Davis is an anti-prison activist, and this book-length interview has her explain how the fundamental notion of prisons as we currently have them is incompatible with democracy. She’s certainly one of the most prominent radicals on the subject around, and her views are well worth getting familiar with. This would be a good starting point for that. 107. The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry This novel is about a small Texas town where there’s little happening besides football and loving. It’s a brilliant portrait that focuses on a few young people dealing with their comings of age. It’s both tender and honest, and extremely well written. This was my first McMurtry novel, and I’m sure to come back to him now. 108. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, by Yiyun Li Yiyun’s short story collection has connecting themes of adopted and lost parents, and elderly people who grew up before the ascendency of Communism. It reads in many ways like a Chinese Dubliners, especially with its choice of characters to focus on and plot structures. Very highly recommended. 109. War Games: Inside the World of 20th-Century War Reenactors, by Jenny Thompson Thompson takes her years of active participation and study of war reenactors (of the two World Wars mainly) and turns it into a cultural portrait. It has a fascinating mix of anecdote and theory, and of sympathy and criticism. She comes around to the idea that this type of war reenaction at least is primarily an attempt to form personal connections with and ownership of shared history. 110. The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind, by David Cay Johnston It needs to be said up front that this book is less about contractual fine print than about market abuses, especially monopolies, laws that artificially increase corporate power, and non-transparency of companies. It is absolutely essential reading. Johnston’s quality of writing and research is impeccable, and he chooses his subjects so well. The way our monopolies, capitalists and government interact is absolutely awful in the US; many could tell you that but I haven’t seen any book succeed so well at both the nitty-gritty and the big picture as Johnston does here. 111. Let the Students Speak!, by David L. Hudson Jr. Hudson’s book seems designed for a high school or underclassmen study of free expression in schools. It would be a great tool for that, and is also pretty enjoyable just by itself. Hudson lays the groundwork well (no previous legal study necessary) and connects the dots between the different court interpretations of the First Amendment, showing both the trajectory and current battlefields of student speech. All your favorite cases are here, from Pledge of Allegiance refusal to Bong Hits for Jesus. 112. Fagin the Jew: A Reinvention of Dickens’s Classic Character, by Will Eisner This is a very late in life graphic novel from Eisner. Framed as a direct rebuttal from Fagin to Dickens about his portrayal in Oliver Twist, this novel explores Eisner’s thoughts on stereotypes and archetypes, on empathy for the villainous (in both the modern and archaic senses). Eisner uses Dickensian tropes of adoption and unknown heritage to build a sympathetic backstory for Fagin, from whom he sands off some rough edges. Eisner’s Fagin is still a brute and a criminal, though some of the explicit awful acts Dickens’s Fagin commits are here ignored. Does this lack of sheer demonization improve the character, his role in Twist’s story? See for yourself! The writing, artwork, and lettering are, as befits Eisner, exemplary. 113. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, by Sarah Glidden Glidden has written a graphic travelog of her Birthright tour of Israel. She has a very interesting visual style: cartoonish line work combines with a watercolor scheme that blasts authenticity into her scenery. She grapples with the history and politics of Israel and Palestine throughout; it’s complicated for her. This would be a good book for a young person who hasn’t really thought much about the Holy Land before; I enjoyed it as well. 114. Souther Bastards: Here Was a Man (TPB Vol 1), by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour In a lot of ways this was the flip side of The Last Picture Show. Depicting rather than describing, action instead of thought, pulp instead of literature. It’s about an old guy coming back to small town Alabama and not liking what he finds there. In true pulp fashion, the authorial god sends him a holy weapon and he decides to start cracking skulls with it. It doesn’t like up to it’s potential for me; it uses the trappings of Southern life without accessing its core, and feels inauthentic even for country pulp. 115. Chew (Omnivore Edition Vol 1), by John Layman and Rob Guillory So this guy has a superpower where whatever he eats, he gets visions of its past. The more he eats, the more he sees. He uses this power to solve murder cases. Yes, cannibalism. It’s gross, exciting and hilarious. If you’ve never had your stomach churn from a comic book, try this one. 116. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel Bechdel selects strips from across the continuity of DTWOF (1987 - 2008), roughly two thirds of all her strips, to create this massive collection. It’s an evolving time capsule of the common lives of gender and sexual minorities, and works really well as information, entertainment, and nostalgia. Of course, I would commonly read old Doonesbury collections from the 70s and 80s as a child so my affinity for old politics/drama cartoons may be much higher than above-average. 1) Vanilla Number - 116/80 2) Something written by a woman - Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth 3) Something written by a nonwhite author - March 4) Something written in the 1800s - Dracula 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) - Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II 1937-1945 6) A book about or narrated by an animal - Cujo 7) A collection of essays. - Men Explain Things to Me 8) A work of Science Fiction - Nova 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - The Sea and Civilization 11) Read something about or set in NYC - Ex Machina 13) Read Something YA - A Wrinkle in Time 14) Wildcard! - Loath Letters 15) Something recently published - The Making of Donald Trump 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now - Masters of Doom 17) The First book in a series - Ancillary Justice 18) A biography or autobiography - A Lawyer’s Life 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Generation - And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks 20) Read a banned book - The Handmaid’s Tale 21) A Short Story collection - Dubliners 22) It’s a Mystery. - The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
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Dec 13, 2016 03:40
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nerdpony posted:I just had an idea for one -- a book about a book/books. This could be nonfiction (something about the history of the book, for example) or fiction (If on a winter's night a traveler, The Eyre Affair, A Canticle for Leibowitz, for example) . A Canticle for Leibowitz is about a blueprint, not a book.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:24
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Book Riot has already posted the 2017 Read Harder Challenge The list has six special guest contributors this year: Daniel José Older, Sarah MacLean, Roxane Gay, Celeste Ng, Ausma Zehanat Khan, and Jacqueline Koyanagi 2017 READ HARDER posted:1. Read a book about sports. Compared to the 2016 Read Harder Challenge, there's a lot more comic book and genre-specific qualifications, and doesn't have as much variety. The actual challenges are much more specific. What's "reading harder" about re-reading a book? There's a noticeably much stronger push on reading books by "authors of color" instead of specific countries/continents. Having tried to stick with the 2016 challenge, I had a hard time trying to find a book that fit "First Book in a Series written by a person of color" that was outside of Fantasy/Romance or that would fit my interest. The fact that two are "Read Fantasy" and "Read a LGBTQ+ Romance Novel" is off-putting, since I hate those genres (I don't mind the LGBTQ+ angle, but Romance is mostly dogshit). Something to think about for those planning on doing a challenge again in 2017.
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Dec 15, 2016 14:28
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that's kind of bad. I mean I fully get + support that they want to get people reading more diverse fiction (and, uh, Wonder Woman comics I guess) but fully half of those are "read stuff by minorities" in increasingly bizarrely specific ways
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Dec 15, 2016 15:32
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A book about a person of color on a spiritual journey stands out as bizarrely specific and vague. A book with only minority characters seems ripe for pedantic debate. "There was that section with the white mailman, so I guess it doesn't count".
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Dec 15, 2016 16:16
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Eh I don't think it's all that bad and I like that it's not the usual "read a book by one woman and one black person" then 20 other generic challenges (as if you couldn't do a woman/POC/LGBTQ version of every permeation of "romance, fantasy, biography" in the first place) The romance is a little lame but I don't think that necessarily means shiny cover romance; the "spiritual journey" one is a little specific but again when you think of how many books are like that it should be easy to find one with a POC; I also don't think you can get too pedantic with the minority POV characters since it specifies POV characters; the comics are dumb but DC and Marvel are actually doing decent with their female characters atm (Ms. Marvel being a favorite) so it won't be total torture I dunno I probably won't be doing it anyway but it's only 24 books
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Dec 15, 2016 19:33
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I appreciate what they're trying, and BookRiot's staff is mostly female minorities, but the change from this year to next year was a noticeable jump, like they somehow condensed possible choices for each category. I enjoyed the 2016 challenge because it was easier for books subjects to cross over (IE, a book on politics that featured a major character who was transgender; a book on mental illness that was over 500 pages that dealt with sports, etc.) These kind of pigeon-hole this, which again, is probably good, because it will make people read more. But I'm probably not going to do the 2017 Read Harder Challenge.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:26
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Guy A. Person posted:Eh I don't think it's all that bad and I like that it's not the usual "read a book by one woman and one black person" then 20 other generic challenges (as if you couldn't do a woman/POC/LGBTQ version of every permeation of "romance, fantasy, biography" in the first place) Yeah, the Romance could be something like The Watchmaker of Filigree St or even maybe The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. There's more to Romance than bodice rippers.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:35
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Franchescanado posted:Book Riot has already posted the 2017 Read Harder Challenge Copy pasting this list, enjoy goons
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Dec 16, 2016 08:55
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I don't know what you guys are griping about, just read Hugo Award nominated LGBT romance Space Raptor Butt Invasion
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Dec 17, 2016 23:14
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Corrode posted:Copy pasting this list, enjoy goons I think you should strive to be more original
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Dec 17, 2016 23:18
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Did the new thread go live yet or I just missing it?
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Dec 25, 2016 18:27
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Nope I'm doing it post-Christmas. Should be up on the 27th.
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Dec 25, 2016 22:30
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by year's end I'll be three books short for the vanilla challenge, and still miss a few on the booklord challenges. thanks and god bless
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Dec 26, 2016 10:44
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Corrode posted:Nope I'm doing it post-Christmas. Should be up on the 27th. Cool. Just thought I missed it.
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Dec 26, 2016 22:35
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New thread is here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3803016
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Dec 26, 2016 23:07
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Guess I'll finish off my year thenMr. Squishy posted:1 The Ministery of Fear by Graham Greene. Another thriller where the most interesting thing is the setting, this time London under the blitz. I considered including him as part of the lost generation (born 5 years after Hemmingway) but gently caress it. 76 David Lean by Kevin Brownlow. Comprehensive biography about the Lawrence of Arabia guy. I'm not sure it was quite necessary to leave in every anecdote of him yelling at someone who edited his film wrong, or a second, unrelated party confirming that he did do that. Also Barlow puts down every little kink of his personality to being raised a Quaker. But it's a big fun book for anyone even slightly interested in Lean it's worth a heft. 6 77 Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico as translated by many (but some by John Ashbery). I picked this up mostly because I felt I had been ignoring Ashbery, before reading the first page of A Nest of Ninnies cured me of that for a while. Hebd wanders around, seeing things, and occasionally he makes remarks. 78 House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Loved it. Tragedy rolled on loosely w/out the mechanical determinism of Hardy but still it rolls 79 A Gardener's Year by Karel Čapek. It was translated by someone but I don't have the thing in front of me and forgot to note it down. Very gentle, of course, it's about gardening, and filled w/ observations like how people say "it's never been so cold!" a lot, but there's something there. 80 William Gaddis: His Life and Works by Joseph Tabbi. How to handle writing a biography of an intensely private person? I guess a warning sign should have been Gass on the back-cover saying how respectful it is. Why Tabbi troubled to track down and talk to those that knew him if only to get on his high-horse and say "anecdotes will have to die with them!" So after doing an admirable job hammering out Gaddis' forebears (on the mother's side), this slim book that's embarrassed to go any further instead phases into Tabbi's criticism. It's also unbalanced because the cyberpunk thinks R. was good practice for JR, and the following 3 can be forgiven the man who wrote JR. I also caught quite a few howlers, like stating Richard Yates was buoyed up by the filming of his novel... 16 years after his death. 15 So I guess I am doing that lame thing of writing up a human as an animal. Well when I saw that the last one's new, how could I balk at that? And one of these things has to have been banned, right? The nazis loving loved banning books, they must have disapproved of just one, surely? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 03:02
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Last update for this year, so I'll list all my books and my top ten read books of the year. Overall, I read a lot of books I did not enjoy this month, one reason is I did not anticipate reading 84 books, so I had to dig deep to find some books the last two months. It was a fun challenge and I read more this year than any other year, by a significant amount. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennet A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole The Call of the Wild by Jack London Warlock by Oakley Hall The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmengway The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North The handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood The March of the Ten Thousand by Xenophon The Dubliners by James Joyce Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card A Little Life by Hanya Yangihara To Kill A Mockingbird by Lee Harper The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco Wolf In White Van by John Darniell How to Be Both by Ali Smith Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Death Comes for the Arch Bishop by Willa Cather My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante Patriot Games by Tom Clancy Strong Poison by Lord Peter Wimsey The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami, Haruki The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway The Vegetarian by Han Kang Those who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante The Sellout by Paul Beatt Life of Pi by Yann Martel The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle Boy's Life by Robert McCammon The Fireman by Joe Hill The Accidental by Ali Smith The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante End of Watch by Stephen King His Master's Voice by Stannis Lem Law A Secret History by Donna Tart The Girls by Emma Cline A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami Grendel by John Gardner Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Chimpanzee by Darin Bradley The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco East of Eden by John Steinbeck Stoner by John Williams At the Mountains of madness by HP Lovecraft Butcher's Crossing by John Williams Aquarium by David Vann Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Seed Collectors by Scarlett Thomas Signs preceding the end of the world by Lisa Dillman Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack Death's End by Cixin Liu The Black Count by Tom Reiss Solaris by Stanislaw Lem The Forever War by Joe Haldeman Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin 1984 by George Orwell Right Ho, Jeeves! by P.G Wodehouse The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury The Color Purple by Alice Walker His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe 78. King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild Again, non-fiction isn't captivating me, so I didn't enjoy this as much as I should have. It was interesting, but a chore to read unfortunately. 79. A Hed Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay I really liked this. It wasn't perfect and had some parts that I disliked, like the blog posts, but I liked the story and it had some neat twists. It was a quick easy read. 80. Concrete by Thomas Bernhard I thought this was okay, and interesting how the story unfolded. It starts out sounding like a struggling author who just had a vist from his sister who he spends pages and pages saying not so nice things about, but as the atory unfolds, it reveals a much more complicated and interesting story. It's all told from first person and he slowly reveals his real persona. 81. Silence by Shūsaku Endō I loved this book a lot. It's about a time when Christianity and those who practice and attempt to spread it are banned in Japan. A pair of Portuguese priests sneak in to Japan to help the Christians who practice in secret because all other priests have been killed, or rumored to have disavowed Christ. I thought it was an interesting story and a nice bit of history. 82. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill I didn't enjoy this and barely remember it now. 83. Tai-Pan by James Clavell After reading this I am questioning whether or not I would enjoy Shogun if I had read it now. I really did not like this book, and in reading it, recognized a lot of the same story telling techniques are used in Shogun as well, and they are things that really annoyed me. Anyway, I don't have much to say about this, other than it took me a week to read and I was extremely dissapointed. 84. Germline by T. C. McCarthy This was fine, it's a sci-fi novel about war, and the narrator's draw to not only staying in the war, despite not being required to, but also his seeking it out, and his uncanny abiluity to survice situations where everyone else dies around him. He also ends up falling in love with clones that are women bread to fight the war. Top Ten of the year: 1) Stoner 2) The Name of the Rose 3) Aquarium 4) How to Be Both 5) 1984 6) My Brilliant Friend 7) The Vegetarian 8) To Kill A Mockingbird 9) Grendel 10) Warlock Rusty fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 04:03
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I'm gonna leave this thread opened till like the 10th of January. After that it's gonna be locked.
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Dec 28, 2016 21:51
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I'mma finish off the year: #35 - #88. I only got 90 / 120, but there was a period this year where I completely stopped reading, which didn't help. 36) The Book of Strange New Things – Michel Faber. 4/5. 37) Daytripper – Fábio Moon. (Amazing artwork). 5/5. 38) A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James. (Holy Jamaican slang, Batman). 4/5. 39) The Book of Memory – Petina Gappah. 4/5. 40) A Slip of the Keyboard – Terry Pratchett. (I miss Pterry. Bloody Alzheimer’s). 4/5. 41) Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography – Chester Brown. 3/5. 42) Paper Tiger: Inside the Real China – Xu Zhiyuan. 4/5. 43) Harrow County vol. 1: Countless Haints – Cullen Bunn. 4/5. 44) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – Alison Bechdel. 4/5. 45) ODY-C, vol. 1: Off to Far Ithicaa – Matt Fraction. (Beautiful artwork but hard to follow story). 3.5 (4)/5. 46) The Silk Roads: A New History of the World – Peter Frankopan. 4/5. 47) Showa 1939 – 1944: A History of Japan – Shigeru Mizuki. 4/5. 48) Y: The Last Man – The Deluxe Edition Book Four – Brian K Vaughan. 4/5. 49) Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman – Lindy West. 5/5. 50) The Snow Queen – Joan D. Vinge. (Best Novel Hugo winner 1981). 4/5. 51) Shell-shocked Britain: the First World War’s legacy for Britain’s mental health – Suzie Grogan. 3/5. 52) Anya’s Ghost – Vera Brosgol. (A.k.a. Be wary of stalker ghosts). 4/5. 53) We Stand on Guard – Brian K. Vaughan. 4/5. 54) DMZ vol. 1: On the Ground – Brian Wood. 4/5. 55) The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry – Gabrielle Zevin. 4/5. 56) Orlando – Virginia Woolf. (Time travelling gender bending). 4/5. 57) Niagara Falls All Over Again – Elizabeth McCracken. 4/5. 58) The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek. (Mildly racist pre- and during World War One shenanigans. Was planned to be twice as long had the author not died early). 4/5. 59) We3 – Grant Morrison. 4/5. 60) Deadly Class, Vol. 1: Reagan Youth – Rick Remender. 5/5.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:47
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The rest of what I read: 61) The Trees – Ali Shaw. 4/5. 62) Panther – Brecht Evens. (Beautiful artwork but a bit too weird for kids). 4/5. 63) Authority – Jeff Vandermeer. (I can kinda see why people were disappointed in this book after Annihilation). 3/5. 64) The Eighth Day – Mitsuyo Kakuta. 4/5. 65) The Body Where I Was Born – Guadalupe Nettel. 4/5. 66) Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women – Harriet Reisen. 4/5. 67) A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back – Kevin Hazzard. 4/5. 68) Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl – Donald Sturrock. 4/5. 69) It Was The War of the Trenches – Jacques Tardi. 4/5. 70) The Vegetarian – Han Kang. (Winner of this year's International Booker Prize). 4/5. 71) Kindred – Octavia Butler. 4/5. 72) Gilgi – Irmgard Keun. 3/5. 73) Cat Country – Lao She. (Not so much about cats, but a political allegory for 1930s China that isn’t wildly different from modern-day China). 4/5. 74) Lud-in-the-Mist – Hope Mirrlees. (Proto-Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Certainly closer in style and substance than Sorcerer to the Crown, which was good but lightweight). 5/5. 75) The Female Man – Joanna Russ. 4/5. 76) The Romanovs: 1613 – 1918: Simon Sebag Montefiore. 4/5. 77) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms – N. K. Jemisin. 5/5. 78) Where Am I Now? – Mara Wilson. 4/5. 79) The Anchoress – Robyn Cadwallader. 4/5. 80) Out – Natsuo Kirino. 4/5. 81) The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead. (I've read a few books about race recently. I wonder why). 4/5. 82) A Closed and Common Orbit – Becky Chambers. 4/5. 83) The Girls – Emma Cline. 3/5. 84) The Game of Kings – Dorothy Dunnett. 4/5. 85) Midnight Robber – Nalo Hopkinson. (Sci-fi Caribbeans). 4/5. 86) The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber. (Neo-Victorian doorstopper, albeit with more sex than actual Victorian novels). 4/5. 87) The Sellout – Paul Beatty. 4/5. 88) This Is the Way the World Ends – James Morrow. (I wonder why I have to read books about potential nuclear disasters? Thanks a bunch, Trump). 4/5.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:50
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Started the year off strong with 1I, Claudius and 2Claudius the God by Robert Graves. I won't add pointless adjectives to their well-deserved piles of praise, but one thing that's rarely noted, I think, is the major change in tone between the first,narrated by Claudius the mousy, persecuted dweeb of an aristocrat who escapes death only because he is widely perceived as an idiot, and the second, in which Claudius Caesar willingly succumbs to the same egotism and blindness he had observed in his predecessors—from a dissociated, ironic distance within his own mind. Cool. 3. The Traitor Baru Cormorant: I listened to this by audiobook over the course of a 14 hour car trip. A few disconnected and remote thoughts since I disliked it and didn't dwell on it much. It relies too heavily on a sort of non-twist that is telegraphed ages in advance (and confirmed by the title). The audiobook narrator is breathy and melodramatic and even mispronounces the main character's name, apparently. The main character is a sort of lesbian Alan Greenspan and the book's exposition dwells far too long on simplistic Econ 101 garbage. The fantasy baddies calling homosexual women "tribadists" never, ever gets less awkward to hear. 4. The Blind Assassin, on the other hand, was lovely. Its big reveal is also telegraphed, but in a natural way, as you gradually realize subtle inconsistencies between the (several) interweaving narratives, some real, some fictional—no one is written to shoot *unreadable looks* across dinner tables or some other HBO poo poo to give the reader a jab in the ribs, because the writer is herself a character genuinely aiming to deceive. This is Margaret Atwood, and much is made of the sci-fi, but the real meat is in the second-level frame narrative around the sci-fi tale, the novel-within-a-novel also titled The Blind Assassin and attributed to the main character's deceased sister. If I had one complaint, it would be that Atwood dwells too long in the top-level narrative of the old woman without giving us a reason to care about her—she grew on me eventually, and it pays off, but there were a couple places when the tedium almost made me put the book down for good. Actually, nevermind. Just typing this makes me realize that the tedium of the old woman's life is part of the point. I'll stop complaining. 5. Pound/Joyce is just the correspondence of Ezra Pound with and about James Joyce. These people really knew how to write a letter, and Pound's uncensored early reactions to Joyce's work include gems like: quote:It is the ten years spent on the book, the Dublin 1904, Trieste 1914, that counts. No man can dictate a novel, though there are a lot who try to. And for the other school. I am so drat sick of energetic stupidity. The 'strong' work . . . balls! And it is such a comfort to find an author who has read something and knows something. This deluge of work by suburban counter-jumpers on the one hand and gut-less Oxford graduates or flunktuates on the other . . . bah! And never any intensity, not in any of it. 6. John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio gives a clear and erudite perspective on the philosophical underpinnings of liturgical Christianity. Like most modern encyclicals, though, it stops short of taking what might be called a confrontational stance on particular issues, despite making it clear that the author holds a strong view on such-and-such philosophical question. 7. Augustine's Confessions. I'm sure everybody makes the same comment, that Augustine was awfully horny for a Church father. The translation I read was awkward, but it was a library book and I can't remember which one it was. 8. I might be cheating by claiming The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. I skipped around a lot to hit her most famous ones first ("Parker's Back," "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "Good Country People") and then filled in haphazardly based on how cool I found the titles. So I'm not sure I got them all. In any case, I came away reeling. Powerful stuff. Most of what I remember are connections I made to Faulkner and Woodrell's stuff. Goddamnit, I really shouldn't have waited until the end of the year to write these up. If you've pegged me as a Catholic from these last three, by the way, you're wrong. I just follow a free-associative plan of reading and have a lot of Catholic friends. After I told them I had finally given in and read O'Connor, those same friends recommended 9. Orthodoxy, in which G.K. Chesterton pontificates in a clever, uniquely British sort of paternal-polemical tone that must warm the hearts of those already inclined to agree that, yes, Jesus lives and he's Catholic... but ultimately says not much of lasting value. 10. Changing gears, on a lark I read Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, the full effects of which I have yet to realize. Medium itself and his essays collected in 11The Essential McLuhan came along at a shockingly appropriate moment in my life, as Donald Trump's tweets were taking the news media by storm and I was returning to school full-time for a humanities degree. McLuhan simultaneously sensitized me to the media onslaught of the election and inoculated me against its worst effects, since I was able to identify what bothered me and put it into writing or, even better, turn it off. ...and there's no way I'm finishing this post today. Jesus. I'll try and wrap it up in the next one, maybe save the blurbs for my favorite books.
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Dec 29, 2016 00:13
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Bandiet posted:1. The Stranger by Albert Camus 40. We Found A Hat by Jon Klassen. The best of his 'hat' trilogy, and the best picture book I've read in years. Brilliantly developed and beautiful illustrations. 41. Standing Water by Eleanor Chai. Really personal poems that didn't interest me. 42. Lotte In Weimar: The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann. Insanely good, and underrated in Mann's bibliography. It is outside the box, considering that most of his novels stretch over huge amounts of time. This is mainly a character study of Lotte from Young Werther, as an old woman, plus all the adoring fans that she has conversations with throughout the day. 43. Last Stop On Market Street by Matt de la Peña. It was good, but it definitely should not have won both the Caldecott and Newbery. The illustrations are nothing special, and I still don't approve of the Newbery being awarded outside of middle grade. 44-46. The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, and The Collection by Harold Pinter. This was my first reading of Pinter. I don't really have a formed opinion of him yet. All three had extremely funny moments, but only The Caretaker really had an impact. The Collection felt like a throwaway and The Birthday Party tried too hard. It's all over the place. 47. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. Some great vivid moments - the meeting with Anny stands out... I really don't buy that philosophy poo poo though. I'd never counted how many books I read before so the vanilla number was a long shot. I'm also pretty cut up that I didn't get to read any airplane fiction this year. :/
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Dec 29, 2016 00:33
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Final update, because it's less than 14 hours left of the year and I have to watch the kids for most of that time so am exceedingly unlikely to finish the book I'm currently reading before 2017 begins. Previously: 1. White Line Fever by Lemmy Kilmister. 2. Slåttekar i himmelen by Edvard Hoem. 3. Half the World by Joe Abercrombie. 4. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. 5. I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire. 6. Anabasis by Xenophon. 7.-9. The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, The End has Come edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. 10. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck. 11. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold. 12. Red Rising by Pierce Brown. 13. Demon Dentist by David Walliams. 14. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. 16. Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling. 17. Doktor Proktors Prompepulver by Jo Nesbø. 18. Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer. 19. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima. 20. Før jeg brenner ned by Gaute Heivoll. 21. Billionaire Boy by David Walliams. 22. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. 23. The Quiet Game by Greg Iles. 24. The Vegetarian by Han Kang. 25. Maurtuemordene by Hans Olav Lahlum. 26. Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald. 27. Destroyermen: Blood in the Water by Taylor Anderson. 28. Gangsta Granny by David Walliams. 29. The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross. 30. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. 31. Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. 32. Ratburger by David Walliams. 33. Sønnen ("The Son") by Jon Nesbø. 34. Svein og rotta i syden by Marit Nicolaysen. 35. Døden ved vann ("Death by water") by Torkil Damhaug. 36. Ildmannen ("The Man of Fire" would be a good translation) by Torkil Damhaug. 37. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. 38. Stoner by John Williams. 39. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. 40. Thornghost by Tone Almhjell. 41. The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams. 42. Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. 43. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. 44. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. 45. Jerusalem by Alan Moore. 46. Se meg, Medusa ("See Me, Medusa") by Torkil Damhaug. 47. Sangen om den røde rubin ("The Song of the Red Ruby") by Agnar Mykle. New: 48. It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. BOTM for December. 1935 novel about a Fascist takeover of the USA, set in the then-immediate future. Loved this, it was concise and funny despite also being grim as gently caress. 49. Doktor Proktors tidsbadekar by Jo Nesbø. Norwegian children's book (target age maybe 8-12, it's several hundred pages of mostly text). Read it aloud to the 8-year-old. #2 in an ongoing series about a moderately insane inventor and his two primary-school sidekicks. This one involves time travel across a lot of mostly French history, in an attempt to fix the inventor's tragic failed romantic past. Funny but a bit forced, relies a bit much on poking mostly good-natured fun at French clichés (the main villain is even named "Claude Cliché"). 50. Babylon's Ashes by "James S.A. Corey". #6 in the Expanse series, felt very much like "#5, part 2" and was a cracking good read. Ties most plot threads up pretty neatly although we all know there are more sequels coming. 51. The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Have read this in bits and pieces since it came out this summer, just finished a few days ago. A huge anthology of what must be more than a hundred SF short stories (and a few excerpts from novels) from across the whole of the 20th century. Sorted chronologically; the editors selected a lot of stories from outside the common or garden-variety English-language market, many of which were originally translated for this collection. A good number of Latin American stories, etc. Plus of course a number of more familiar names. They've tried to represent many different stages and directions in the evolution of the genre and while I can't say every story was exactly entertaining as such, nearly all were at least interesting. Bonus points for also including a story from the recently-departed Norwegian writer Jon Bing (who was basically patron saint of SF literature in Norway, wrote a ton of stuff from the 1960s onwards; his 1970s novels about a slower-than-light "library ship" travelling the galaxy gathering and disseminating knowledge have a big part of the blame for hooking me on SF in the first place). Highly recommended. Currently reading Revenger by Alastair Reynolds but that'll have to go on the 2017 list. Booklord challenge: 1) Vanilla Number - 51/40 2) Something written by a woman- I Don't, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, The Vegetarian, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Lud-in-the-Mist, Svein og rotta i syden, Thornghost, Bad Feminist 3) Something Written by a nonwhite author - Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Vegetarian, Bad Feminist 4) Something written in the 1800s - Three Men in a Boat, Plain Tales from the Hills 5) Something History Related (fictional or non-fiction your choice) - Slåttekar i himmelen, Anabasis, The Name of the Rose 6) A book about or narrated by an animal - Thornghost 7) A collection of essays. - Bad Feminist 8) A work of Science Fiction - much of The Apocalypse Triptych, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Red Rising, Half a War, Acceptance, Children of Time, Luna: New Moon, others 9) Something written by a musician - White Line Fever 10) Read a long book, something over 500 pages - The Name of the Rose, The Quiet Game, goddamn Jerusalem, The Big Book of Science Fiction 11) Read something about or set in NYC - Kitchen Confidential 12) Read Airplane fiction (Patterson, ect) - Sønnen definitely qualifies for this 13) Read Something YA - Half the World, Red Rising, Half a War, Thornghost 14) Wildcard! - I Don't 15) Something recently published (up to a year. The year will be the day you start this challenge) - Half the World, Half a War, Children of Time, Luna: New Moon, Babylon's Ashes, The Big Book of Science Fiction 16) That one book you’ve wanted to read for a while now. - Three Men in a Boat 17) The First book in a series - Red Rising, The Quiet Game, Luna: New Moon 18) A biography or autobiography - White Line Fever, Før jeg brenner ned, arguably Kitchen Confidential 19) Read something from the lost generation (Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, ect.) or from the Beat Generation - Sweet Thursday, It Can't Happen Here 20) Read a banned book - Sangen om den røde rubin 21) A Short Story collection - all volumes of The Apocalypse Triptych, The Big Book of Science Fiction 22) It’s a Mystery.- The Name of the Rose, The Quiet Game, Maurtuemordene, Sønnen, Døden ved vann, Ildmannen, Se meg, Medusa Additional individual challenge: Norwegians: 11/10 Non-fiction: 5/5 Max re-reads: 2/5 BONUS INDIVIDUAL CHALLENGE: What the hell, I've followed the BOTM for both January and February; I'm going to keep doing that for the rest of the year. (Escape clause: Will reserve the option to skip books I've already read.) 12 for 12 on this. All done. Ready for next year (have joined the 2017 challenge with pretty much the same parameters).
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Dec 31, 2016 10:28
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I have 9 1/2 hours to read 120 pages of my last book to meet my target and I'm busy because it's NYE in Scotland where we're obsessed with it 
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Dec 31, 2016 15:33
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You can do it, Larry! I believe in you! (But it's okay if you don't. No pressure.)
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Dec 31, 2016 16:33
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Been neglecting this for months, but a final update is in order: Kallocain by Karin Boye: A dystopian novel inspired by the author's experiences with Nazism and Soviet Communism. In the year 2000, an oppressive dictatorship uses a truth serum to make citizens reveal their innermost secrets. Somehow not very memorable, I certainly recall far less from this novel than from the similarily themed 1984. So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Mondiano: read this due to the author being a Nobel Prize winner. An older writer living in Paris goes off exploring his own past, like a small scale version of In Search of Lost Time. A short novel of a hundred pages or so, the characterisation of the protagonist is well done, but as a whole it left little impression on me. Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf: an absurdist take on the hard-boiled detective novel, this book is quite unlike anything else I have read. It has very little in common with the film based on it, but the surreal nature of the setting and the abilities of the toons makes for an entertaining read if you like absurd humor. L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy: this hard-boiled detective novel is well crafted, but seems very cliched in its execution. The basic plot seems similar to many other detective stories and the characterisation seems quite flat. One character is a brutish thug, the Mexican woman speaks perfect English except for words like "puto", and so on. It is pretty well known, especially after they made a pretty good film based on it, but on the whole it seems like a generic detective novel. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer: a middle-aged woman finds herself trapped behind an invisible wall in the countryside, and soon after it seems that everyone on the outside dies. Finding herself the seemingly only living human left on the planet, she spends the next years tending to the fields and some animals she adopts. Basically, she sheds most of the trappings of modern civilization and finds contentment in the daily effort to survive. It is somewhat repetitive, but the psychological characterisation makes the novel worthwhile reading. Some more history books: Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies: Essentially a series of essays on polities that do not exist anymore, the various chapters are uneven in quality. On the whole quite interesting, but probably only for those who already are interested in the subject matter. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard: a popular account, readable but lightweight. Hard to remember any details. Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich: in the same vein as the above, a history of the papacy consisting of chapter on the selected popes and what they had to deal with during their reigns. Too little information to impart any decent insight into the subject matter. Booklord challenge: 1) Vanilla Number 24/40 2) 3) 4) 5) 7) 8) 12) 18) 21)
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Dec 31, 2016 18:50
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