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Samovar posted:I started reading 'Lovecraft Country', reached a section which made me think, '...is the author of this book white?', looked it up, found that it was indeed the case, and now really can't get back into it (also with the fact it isn't really grabbing me). Yeah, that was weird, I read it a while back and had the same realization. I was also mixed on it anyway, but with the specific characters and themes it covers, having "but written by a white guy" hanging over it the whole time didn't do it any favors.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:55
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Captain Hygiene posted:Yeah, that was weird, I read it a while back and had the same realization. I was also mixed on it anyway, but with the specific characters and themes it covers, having "but written by a white guy" hanging over it the whole time didn't do it any favors. At what point did you get that feeling? I got it when I was reading about Horace's doodles on the gas station stops indicating which places were safe for black peoples, and one of the 'safe' icons mentioned among castles, oases and tree houses was 'hobbit holes', and that was what made me think 'hold on a second'.
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Feb 26, 2024 18:49
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Honestly, it's been long enough now that I can't remember.
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Feb 26, 2024 18:57
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i am reading Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer its the first book in a four-book scifi series that i already read over the last couple years and finished a month ago. it's one of those things that really rewards a second read, the experience of reading the first book is completely different after learning what you do in the fourth. very good stuff.
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Feb 26, 2024 19:03
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For my own reading, I just wrapped up Jeff VanderMeer's Borne, after seeing it brought up in another thread. I like his writing style from the Southern Reach trilogy, and this one fits in pretty well stylistically and thematically, being set in a post-apocalyptic city in the aftermath of weird biotechnology running amok. It was interesting how much of the story (and a central character in particular) goes on with a lot left fairly ambiguous other than just generally knowing it fits into that setting. It's a bit of a mixed bag to put a lot of that in an infodump towards the end, but I enjoyed it on the whole. It put me in the mood to read that other trilogy again, too. Annihilation, especially, which I thought hit a particular surreal mood most effectively.
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Feb 26, 2024 21:18
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I'm about a quarter of the way into Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You. It really captures the mood of now in that it's about some extremely online people talking a lot about political and climate crisis. Rooney has a way of nailing characters in brief descriptions, and her books have a strong sense of place. I also really liked her book Normal People which I read a few years ago. I'm going to read some F Scott Fitzgerald next; got Tender is the Night from a thrift store and This Side of Paradise out from the library on audiobook.
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Mar 1, 2024 04:22
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Listening to Discworld audiobooks. Just finished The Truth and it was excellent, now on Monstrous Regiment and it is fun.
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Mar 1, 2024 05:06
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I'm in Congo now, and eh... feels like it's veering too far into backwards representation of Africa for me. It's also the oldest of these Crichton books, more so than I thought, which probably helped lead to that. One thing I do enjoy about it (and Sphere, and Jurassic Park) is the technology. They're all technological thrillers to some extent, and a lot of times they're general enough that you can forget when they were written. But then you'll hit a part where they go "and this corporation hit a breakthrough that let them leap ahead and produce computer chips with 256K of memory  ", and you're like, oh yeah, this is from 30-40+ years ago 
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Mar 1, 2024 05:18
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Listening to Discworld audiobooks. Just finished The Truth and it was excellent, now on Monstrous Regiment and it is fun. Ahhh, Discworld. My old friend.
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Mar 1, 2024 06:58
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Finished up Three Body Problem reread. It was ok, above average for sure but I still don't feel it was the revelational scifi that people say it is. I know it's a novel, which often necessitates having a main character, but there's a really hamfisted main character syndrome thing going on. Anyway I picked up the same author's The Wandering Earth. I'm 50 pages in and the main character is a complete jerk, let's see how this goes it could be interesting!
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Mar 1, 2024 07:30
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BigHead posted:Finished up Three Body Problem reread. It was ok, above average for sure but I still don't feel it was the revelational scifi that people say it is. I know it's a novel, which often necessitates having a main character, but there's a really hamfisted main character syndrome thing going on. are you referring to the series or just the first book? i thought the second novel was a lot better than the other two and the one that i thought was the main reason the series is held in such high esteem. but yea i agree the characters are pretty weak
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Mar 1, 2024 09:29
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madmatt112 posted:Ahhh, Discworld. My old friend. Oh yeah was glad to see so many of them are included with Spotify premium.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:37
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Just finished the audio book version of "Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell ( narrated by Kirby Heyborne, on Audible ) A thoroughly enjoyable, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel with a comprehensive invocation of small-town rural life in the early 1980s UK under Thatcher. The perspective is from a then 13-year-old middle schooler dealing with bullies and the deteriorating marriage of his parents. The book has probably the best first-person portrayal of stuttering I've ever read. Many brilliant passages capturing local language and culture, it simply feels honest and true throughout except for maybe one or two parts where Mitchell lets his Extended Universe bleed through a little with one prominent character and several references from his previous novels, including The Cloud Atlas. Unlike these other works, this one is very much grounded in its 1980s setting and its timeline doesn't cover any overt eldritch supernatural horrors or mid-21st century postapocalyptic scenes. Interesting to me growing up in the same time period but in a different European country was just how much middle class life in the eighties was the same everywhere.
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Mar 1, 2024 16:14
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I'm reading Foundryside after trying half a dozen books. It's ok, kinda juvenile
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Mar 1, 2024 16:21
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Captain Hygiene posted:I'm in Congo now, and eh... feels like it's veering too far into backwards representation of Africa for me. It's also the oldest of these Crichton books, more so than I thought, which probably helped lead to that. Yeah, fellow Crichton bro. There are some passages that gave me pause, as well. Add some of that to his disappointing climate change skepticism(although, it seems from his fiction to be more of a belief that the rock we live on will be fine, any cataclysms we cause will simply wipe us and most of the other life on the planet out, but it's inevitable and new forms will arise and the cycle will continue) , and he seems like he was an rear end in a top hat. Or maybe just a really cynical misanthrope. I finished Eaters of the Dead a couple of days ago, and now I really regret not sticking with it when I was a kid, because I think I would have gone bananas for it.
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Mar 1, 2024 16:49
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Earwicker posted:are you referring to the series or just the first book? i thought the second novel was a lot better than the other two and the one that i thought was the main reason the series is held in such high esteem. but yea i agree the characters are pretty weak I thought the third book in particular was really weak in this area. There's exactly one lady who rose from low-level scientist to world-saving messiah figure for no reason. And then ascends again to being the only world-saving messiah figure throughout history because she constantly goes into hibernation only to be awakened at history's greatest need. And then she also happens to own the biggest corporation in the world, which has employees who will work to grow her wealth and status while she hibernates. Because she's apparently the only person in history capable of running a corporation. After she completely bottles the role of world-saving messiah the fourth or fifth time, she just happens to be in secret possession of the thing that can save her from the apocalypse, which the inventor of invented during her hibernation, kept secret, made only one of, and then didn't just use himself or for his family. Come on.
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Mar 1, 2024 18:38
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BigHead posted:I thought the third book in particular was really weak in this area. There's exactly one lady who rose from low-level scientist to world-saving messiah figure for no reason. And then ascends again to being the only world-saving messiah figure throughout history because she constantly goes into hibernation only to be awakened at history's greatest need. And then she also happens to own the biggest corporation in the world, which has employees who will work to grow her wealth and status while she hibernates. Because she's apparently the only person in history capable of running a corporation. i had covid while i read the third one and the brain fog helped a lot with all that. also, i noticed that the first and third book, which i felt were much weaker, had a different translator than the second one (they were translated by the fantasy novelist ken liu). while i doubt the translator is resposible for the second book being that much better i do wonder if there is something about the writing that ken liu missed or changed or something becuase imo it was a fairly major difference in quality.
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Mar 2, 2024 11:28
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 cum
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Mar 3, 2024 01:17
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I've been chipping away at Blood Meridian over the past couple of months. I always want to chug a glass of water and take a shower after every couple of chapters. I'm not super familiar with Wild West/ desert vocabulary, so I'm doing a lot of googling lol Aliensandwich fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 02:51
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Reading Shogun again because of the hulu series and I'm having to do it online for free on my phone [I'm poor,] and man do I hate reading a book online. It's literally less pleasurable. I am extremely grateful I found it though I read super fast and I SO miss all of my paperbacks
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Mar 3, 2024 03:57
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Aliensandwich posted:I've been chipping away at Blood Meridian over the past couple of months. I always want to chug a glass of water and take a shower after every couple of chapters. really curious how that film is going to turn out and what they do with the character of The Kid
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Mar 3, 2024 04:15
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Aliensandwich posted:I've been chipping away at Blood Meridian over the past couple of months. I always want to chug a glass of water and take a shower after every couple of chapters. it is an amazing work of art but it made me fell like, a bad person
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Mar 3, 2024 04:26
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naem posted:it is an amazing work of art but it made me fell like, a bad person made you feel like a bad person naem.
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Mar 3, 2024 04:29
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naem posted:it is an amazing work of art but it made me fell like, a bad person This, but for the cum cookbook
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Mar 3, 2024 04:29
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Spinz posted:Reading Shogun again because of the hulu series and I'm having to do it online for free on my phone [I'm poor,] and man do I hate reading a book online. It's literally less pleasurable. try your local library
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Mar 3, 2024 17:39
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Reading "If It Had Happened Otherwise" a collection of alternate history essays written in 1931. Mainly bought it for Winston Churchill's "If Lee Had Not The Battle of Gettysburg" and I do not think Winston Churchill understood the American Civil War. It is actually a double alternate history, written from the perspective of a historian in a world where Lee won Gettysburg, writing about our history as if it was alternate history. In the essay, Lee wins Gettysburg, marches on Washington and then unilaterally ends slavery, which is certainly an assertion, given slavery was written into the Confederate constitution, also given that Lee fought a lawsuit to not free slaves he inherited. But after this, Britain drops its objections to supporting the Confederacy and intercedes to force a peace. At some point this shift causes Disraeli to become a Liberal, Gladstone to become a Tory, and the US, the UK and the Confederacy to become an economic union of English speaking states. This union then heads off World War 1 before it kicks off. I really don't think Winston Churchill understood the American Civil War. edit: also shoutouts to Philip Guedalla, when I saw he wrote "If the Moors in Spain had Won" I expected the worst Islamophobia, but it's kinda utopian, Granada becomes a center of enlightened thought and a refuge for free thinkers in Europe, and when an analogue to WW1 kicks off they end up in control of Iberia. No shoutouts to GK Chesterton for being really really racist against Turks in his essay. TaurusTorus fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 18:13
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Spinz posted:Reading Shogun again because of the hulu series and I'm having to do it online for free on my phone [I'm poor,] and man do I hate reading a book online. It's literally less pleasurable. https://www.thriftbooks.com/ is kinda the poo poo. Also, Fujiko > Mariko all day. Although, Mariko is pretty rad, too. Just has bad taste in dudes(Buttthorne). That said, it's also pretty great when he goes back to visit his homies and he's just hella grossed out and thinks they're so dirty that he chucks all his clothes and walks home naked.
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Mar 3, 2024 18:33
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naem posted:it is an amazing work of art but it made me fell like, a bad person Yeah for sure. It really manages to feel like a grand epic adventure while simultaneously being an incredible bummer the whole time. lovely people bein' lovely
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Mar 3, 2024 19:36
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Everybody recommended The Spear Cuts Through Water to me, and I liked the first half, until they killed my favorite character, the disgusting, diseased, deformed, foul-smelling, giant talking telepathic tortoise and I quit reading it. Also I could tell the two protagonists were totally gonna gently caress, and I thought one of them was way too good for the other on account of not being a mass murderer. I’ll probably finish it someday. I was looking for something like Imajica, anybody know any weird epic fantasy like that? No China Mieville, please.
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Mar 3, 2024 19:50
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Bottom Liner posted:really curious how that film is going to turn out and what they do with the character of The Kid Yeah, same tbh. It's gotta be a tricky movie to make structure-wise, considering how dense the story is, let alone the subject matter. Dennis D'onofrio as Judge Holden is a solid choice tho
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Mar 4, 2024 03:27
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Really wander how much of a participant they'll make him vs observer, since so much of the book leaves that unsaid, and that makes for a vastly different story based on interpretation.
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Mar 4, 2024 03:35
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Reading Lewton-Brain's Foldforming, which is supposedly completely groundbreaking but in practice consists of a picture of one chapter after another of a really cool finished product, incredibly detailed instructions on how to hit a sheet of copper with a hammer to produce a little kink, and then telling you to draw the rest of the owl
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Mar 4, 2024 03:55
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Bottom Liner posted:Really wander how much of a participant they'll make him vs observer, since so much of the book leaves that unsaid, and that makes for a vastly different story based on interpretation. That's very true. His presence is pretty vague at times, especially during attacks led by Glanton. He does do a lot of cruel/ brutal things explicitly, like the flashback of him teaching the gang to make gunpowder out in the wild, which ended up being an insidious calculated slaughter. I feel like a miniseries could do the story justice due to its density
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Mar 4, 2024 06:24
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im on the epilogue of war and peace and for christs sake tolstoy wrap it up already. good book though
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Mar 4, 2024 06:55
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Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language I'm gonna linguist thos xenos like they never been before
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Mar 4, 2024 06:59
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TK8325 posted:im on the epilogue of war and peace and for christs sake tolstoy wrap it up already. good book though Isn't it? I'm due for a reread 
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Mar 4, 2024 09:02
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I’m reading Robert Aickman’s Cold Hand in Mine. It’s my third collection by Aickman (well, one collection was actually his novel The Late Breakfasters with a handful of random short stories thrown in by the publisher for some reason) and so far it’s very strong. It has one of my favorite stories of his in it, The Hospice (https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/hospice/), which I read some time ago. People say Aickman’s stories are often inscrutable, and I agree, so long as you approach them as a simple retelling of events. They often seem like allegories about confusion and distress over sexuality, identity, relationships, modernity, and pretty much every other normal form of human interaction; the fact that his musings are shoved into the armor of weird stories about strange things happening obliquely to eccentric people isn’t just a formality to elevate it above journal entries, but also serves a point to heighten the readers unease about the themes even if they don’t share his perspective on life (and give you a reason to actually read it all). It also mimics the way we exist. You get up, things happen. You may or may not know why, but you feel like you do know, or at least you should. You are moved on to the next event forcibly by time, whether or not you have time to figure out why what happened happened. Life can be maddeningly vague, especially if you were taught all experiences can be qualified with a positivist method, and in times when you find yourself especially stricken by the vagueness, even normal events can feel as though they’re brimming with immanent, esoteric meaning.
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Mar 8, 2024 15:24
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I mentioned it a bit ago, but I went back and re-read the Southern Reach trilogy. I like it a lot, but my favorite thing is how it uses different narrative types, depending on the viewpoint character. It starts off with the first book being a first-person narrative by the initial main character, then switches to a second character but using third-person narration for the next book. Then, the final book adds even more viewpoint characters, and rotates through first-, third-, and even second-person depending on which one is the current focus. It's a neat way to keep things fresh and give you various amounts of information about what's going on at the time, I'm not sure I can think of another book I've read that shifts around like that. That said, I like the first book the most. The story and expanded worldbuilding in the later books are good, but overall I prefer the more sustained mood in the first one. I think it works well with the greater ambiguity you get from largely being plopped into central mystery phenomenon, without too much surrounding information.
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Mar 13, 2024 17:03
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I've only got like 200 pages to go of Blue Mars! My god, I just read a 20 page chapter that was one character cross country running. That's it. LOTS of geographic and weather description though. It's like you're in this forested valley on Mars.
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Mar 13, 2024 17:09
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I'm reading Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. Fitzgerald is great as ever. He's fully developed in his mature style. There's a sense of foreboding doom permeating the story just dripping with disappointment and failure. It's a great read. I'm also enjoying the Russell, but I put off reading it because of how much of a downer the first one was (The Sparrow). If you like realist sci fi about what might happen on first contact it's worth a read.
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Mar 23, 2024 01:39
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