|
I barely touch physical books any more, but I'm constantly listening to audiobooks. The latest one was a bit of a surprise, Later Than You Think by Jack Williamson, a story following the main character investigating some murders and being drawn into a whole web of things like witches and werewolves secretly living among normal humans. The surprise part was that it's set decades ago, but because the audible cover is a new edition trying to make it look like any other mystery/thriller, I assumed it was an intentional stylistic throwback. But when it kept getting into older-seeming word choices and having noir-ish narration that leaned too far into old school sexism, I looked it up and, surprise, it was actually written in the 1940s. I can't really recommend it overall because it hits that kind of stuff from time to time, but its story is an interesting departure from the really pulpy sci-fi stuff of the day into something more serious and thought-out. It even goes into (too much) detail laying out how the genetics of lycanthrope populations would play out in the world, given the scientific understanding of the time. So, I didn't love it, but I thought it was an interesting historical curiosity after I figured out it was actually from back then, and not just aping the style.
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 21:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 10:55 |
|
|
bradzilla posted:Holy poo poo the original Jurassic Park book is so fuckin good I've been thinking about going back to that one lately. It's been quite a while, but I remember thinking it was solid, and it's basically my favorite pitch for a general techno-thriller. For other adaptations, another thread reminded me that I need to re-read Dune too. Sticking to audiobooks kinda screwed me over there, though, for some reason all audible has for that one is a full cast recording. Those are fine sometimes, but I'm general I much prefer a straight-up narration with one or two readers.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 22:32
|
|
|
I enjoyed that one quite a bit. I've come around a lot on King over the years, even with his many flaws there are also few books of his that I don't like on some level. Coincidentally, Tommyknockers is kinda my background reading right now, just popping back into it for a while when I'm between other stuff. It gets a bad rap as being the big novel he wrote at the low point of his struggle with drug addiction, and you can really feel that reading it. But I think there's a more interesting core story there too, it's always fun when he leans more into science fiction-y stuff, and it has some vibes from older works like Color From Out Of Space that I enjoy. Probably should've come back and edited the hell out of it after he was done blasting cocaine 24/7, but oh well.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2024 20:50
|
|
|
Disco Pope posted:Garth Marenghi I've been halfway through the audiobook version of TerrorTome for a while, I don't how I'd feel about the print version, but Holness narrating is great. It's a very funny book that I constantly chuckle at, but I was surprised to find out I don't listen to much of it at a time. Even though I like it, my best guess is that it's so constantly on in terms of structured comedic bits that it requires more sustained focus than the stories I generally listen to. Anyway, I still like it and I'm glad to see him getting more attention. It felt like DarkPlace was a hidden gem that almost nobody I knew had heard of for way too long.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2024 21:13
|
|
|
I'm re-reading Terry Brooks' Word & Void trilogy, which I enjoyed pretty well a few years back, but my favorite thing about it is completely accidental. The series is set in a recognizable earth but with some secret magical elements, with the books set in 1997, 2002, and 2012. But the funny part is that the latter two were written right after the first one came out, at the exact time to barely miss things like 9/11 and the massive shift in internet and computer availability and the proliferance of cellphones/smartphones. So the latter two are a glimpse into a world that never moved beyond the mid-90s. Computers are mostly just a novelty some people might have access to. Folks are running around in airports because the whole shift to security theater never happened. Someone in the last book gets their power and phone line secretly cut by a badguy, and they just go to bed vaguely hoping that the power and phone companies eventually fix it, because they have no concept of having even a dumb cellphone to make it trivial to contact anyone or call for help. It's such a completely coincidental circumstance that massively changes how the books read for anyone getting into them much after their 1997-99 publication dates. I think they were perfectly fine stories, but there'd be no way they'd stick in my mind nearly so much if it weren't for that one weird thing.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2024 20:00
|
|
|
I read that one a while back and enjoyed it despite that, too. The weirdest thing is that I found it on the giveaway table at work, which normally consists of 10-40 year old textbooks people get rid of when they're cleaning their offices.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2024 00:31
|
|
|
Vampire Panties posted:most recent book - This Is How You Lose The Time War I've been interested in this one for a while now, but haven't made the plunge. Two things about it - it seems like a lot of reviews praise the writing style over the plot, which could go either way for me, and it's short enough that I can never bring myself to spend an audiobook credit on it. Maybe someday it'll go on sale cheap enough to just throw some real money at it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2024 03:33
|
|
twist
|
Jurassic Park's been on my mind since it got mentioned upthread, and I finally jumped in to give it re-read for the first time in probably 15 years. Man it holds up so far, I'm standing by my thought that it's my favorite premise for its general thriller genre, and it seems like it's paying that off so far. Of course I love the movie, but I'm enjoying the stuff that got trimmed out of it. The whole intro tracing procompsognathuses from isolated incidents through the medical/forensic networks to slowly figure out what's going on was a lot of fun in a very Crichton-ish way, and it only barely made it into the movies as the beach scene in Lost World. With how meh the later movies have been, it really puts me in the mood to go back to this one in a miniseries or something which could go through it without rushing through to fit it in a single film.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2024 02:47
|
|
|
mysterious frankie posted:Wodehouse I've read a fair amount of his stuff, but most/all of the Wooster & Jeeves stories, they just clicked perfectly. Just very good, densely packed comedic writing, and adding such a specific narrative voice put them a step ahead of his other stories.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2024 16:58
|
|
|
Szechwan posted:Blood Meridian I've said it elsewhere, but Cormac McCarthy is an author made for audiobooks. I love his style and dialogue, but after listening to a couple others, I picked up a print copy of this one and was very surprised and put off by his written style. It works very well for me when someone else is reading it aloud, but I just don't like reading it visually.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2024 19:21
|
|
|
Dr. Gojo Shioji posted:I just finished Blood Meridian, and while the prose is often beautifully lyrical, the heavy polysyndeton usage made getting through sections sometimes difficult. There are instances of almost entire pages as single sentences, and I'd have to occasionally backtrack to find my place in the progression. I'd be interested to hear how it comes off in audio form. I had to look up polysyndetone, I hadn't heard it before, but the usage example reminded me exactly of his writing  And yeah, that type of construction can get old either way, but I often find a good narrator can make it sound starkly poetic in a way that doesn't work so well when I'm reading it myself.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2024 19:55
|
|
|
goatface posted:I find audiobooks too slow.   J/k, but I do speed them up a bit in general. I can understand not getting into them, but I totally am. I averaged a handful of hours per day last year and got through so many more books than I ever would, trying to mark off time to sit down and read. Narzack posted:Yeah, I can see that. I read No County and The Road, and that really put me off. Is the Blood Meridian audiobook good, then? It's been a while, but I generally liked it. I really loved No Country in that form, for whatever it's worth (although it's been even longer for that one).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2024 20:19
|
|
|
Earwicker posted:yeah exactly its good if you are doing a bunch of chores, or if you are planning and then prepping and then cooking an elaborate meal Yeah, a lot of my listening time is spent doing chores or work/games that don't take much brainpower. I also listen when going to sleep or if I have insomnia, but I generally keep those times to stuff that I've read before so it doesn't matter too much if I nod off and miss a bit.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2024 23:35
|
|
|
One of Cumsack McGirthy's greatest works
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2024 17:18
|
|
|
Live action actors are always a gamble for audiobooks, some of them knock it out of the park, but a lot just fall flat. And then there are the weird ones that I assume are plays for name recognition - Willem Dafoe reading The Langoliers was one that just made me laugh. Dude's a great actor, but he can't help playing every character as Willem Dafoe, which particularly doesn't work when one of said characters is a little girl
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2024 05:01
|
|
|
Well, I'm finishing up Jurassic Park today, and it mostly held up very well. It put me in the mood to re-read Lost World, which I have essentially no recollection of. I'm really curious how it will fare in comparison, I remember reading that Crichton was at least somewhat pushed into it by the first Jurassic Park movie being such a megahit, rather than being something he did out of his own interest. For what it's worth, I don't like the second movie, but I have a general idea of it not having much to do with the book. I guess I could just pull up Wikipedia and find out, but y'know, 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2024 23:17
|
|
|
Oh, that sounds good, I'm fine with it just being a fun enough follow up. More dino times to look forward to, then 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2024 23:36
|
|
|
Narzack posted:If you end up enjoying The Lost World, I'd also recommend Sphere, which I think might just edge out JP as my favorite Michael Crichton book. That's good to know, someone mentioned Congo earlier as a good one as well. I'll add them both to the list. I've actually read most/all of his books before, but it's probably been at least 20 years at this point  and I only really remember them in the most general sense, aside from Jurassic Park.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2024 23:01
|
|
|
Doctor Dogballs posted:i'm reading The Godfather cause the movies are really good. I like the book cause it's so pulpy and unpretentious. it's all like Ayy Oh! I'm Walkin' Here!!  that's funI don't think I've ever known anyone in person who's read it, I just know it as one of the classic "movie was better than the book" examples.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2024 00:10
|
|
|
I just had a nice surprise seeing that the Sphere audiobook is on sale for $5, so I guess that'll be my next Crichton reread. I'm enjoying Lost World, I've just been distracted by other stuff so I'm getting through it pretty slowly. Looking through his other titles, I just got reminded that he has a posthumous novel, Eruption coming out in a few months, finished by James Patterson. The blurb is about an eruption threatening to destroy Mauna Loa, but also involving a dangerous military secret hidden there. Curious how that'll turn out. I was just reminded of Crichton's questionable politics later in his life, but I don't know how much that'll overlap with whatever he wrote on this project. And I thought I'd read some James Patterson, but I guess I just recognize his name - whatever thrillers I've read that I was picturing were actually from some other author whose name I haven't remembered yet.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 23:25
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2024 17:55
|
|
|
Honestly, it's been long enough now that I can't remember.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2024 18:57
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2024 21:18
|
|
|
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
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 05:18
|
|
|
naem posted:it is an amazing work of art but it made me fell like, a bad person This, but for the cum cookbook
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2024 04:29
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2024 17:03
|
|
|
Moral: never read a series more than seven books long
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 06:38
|
|
|
redshirt posted:No lie cross heart the last 7-9 books of The Expanse series are the best. LOVE THEM. I dig the whole series of course but then they end with this???? I liked that series a lot the first time around, but I was rereading it last year, and it felt like it sagged enough in the middle that it should've been tightened up into two shorter related story sequences. It's late and I'm tired enough now that I can't remember my specific complaints, but I'm confident enough to sleep on my assessment 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 06:58
|
|
|
Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:The books suck poo poo. The characters are thin as poo poo and uninteresting, the women are horribly written even by SF standards. The dude has a really creative mind when it comes to technological sci-fi concepts but his gender politics and understanding is is straight up just "HARD TIMES STRONG MAN EASY TIMES SOFT MAN" bullshit and it only becomes more emphasized as the series goes on, enjoy reading like, pages upon pages on how effete the future men are and how the one protag from the past could barely tell them apart from women. Incredible stuff. The first book intrigued me enough to continue, but I gave up by the second for a lot of these reasons, the gender characterizations in particular. On the sci-fi side, for all its big ideas, I felt I was constantly getting mad at it for getting too far into magical hand-wavey technology plot shortcuts by the second book, I just stopped reading it after that. I wish I could remember more specific complaints, but it just kinda disappeared from my memory once I gave up on it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2024 03:56
|
|
|
madmatt112 posted:Baxter wrote The Long Earth with Terry Pratchett. I really enjoyed it back in my 20s. An imaginative romp through alternate worlds, and IIRC a bitchin’ eco-climax that really made me want to read the next one to find out how they wrote the aftermath. It’s fun when the two authors are so different, almost every chapter is quite clearly written by one or the other. I was 90% sure I recognized the name from reading The Long Earth ages ago, but I immediately got distracted and forgot to look it up. It's been long enough that I don't remember much about it, except for it understandably being a tonal shift since I read it at the tail end of working through all the Pratchett books I could find at the library. I should give it a re-read, it's popped into mind occasionally as something I should do, just never when I'm actively looking for something to read.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2024 16:06
|
|
|
What the  But yeah, that probably would make for a more interesting movie
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2024 18:08
|
|
|
I do think the kids are a weak point in either version. Maybe kids are just terrible in general?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2024 16:52
|
|
|
More like The Too Ploddy Boredom
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2024 23:25
|
|
|
Back before I mostly switched to audiobooks, I was big into Kindle. I was slow to get into it initially, but what really won me over was that I'd do some reading in bed before I went to sleep - it was just so much less disruptive to read from a dim screen with the lights out than to have a lamp on the whole time. Especially once I realized the Kindle phone app works fine, you don't even need a hefty tablet. That was enough to get me to switch over, I basically only use physical books now if I'm reading technical stuff for work, or if the power's out and I'm saving my phone battery. It does feel a bit sad, because I like the physicality of print books, but the convenience just won me over.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2024 16:01
|
|
|
I wonder how Hunt For Red October fares these days. I read a ton of Tom Clancy when I was in college and just starting to expand my book consumption beyond the pretty restrictive limits I had growing up, but looking back on it, it feels like an embarrassing amount of   wankery. Red October feels like it might have been a bit apart from that, though, and I have overall good memories from the film, too.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2024 19:09
|
|
|
I really need to get around to Solaris, it's been on my interest list forever but I never got around to it. I put it on my wishlist to remember when I get another audiobook credit.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2024 20:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 10:55 |
|
|
bigperm posted:It's scifi that takes place (so far) on Earth in the 90's and I guess I'm an old man now because it's really comforting to read about people who still rent movies and can't imagine a cell phone being confronted with extra-terrestrials. Honestly, that was enough to get me to check it out on a whim. I was vaguely aware of its basic premise, but I assumed it had a future setting. I really enjoy a good fantasy/scifi story that's set before the last two or three decades of tech advancements, it adds an interesting layer of nostalgia in that I can remember those days but it feels like such a different time before ubiquitous computers/internet/smartphones.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2024 21:26
|
|