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Beyond the Mauve Zone by Kenneth Grant. Loony Thelema stuff is highly entertaining to me. Before that it was a reread of Flow My Tears by Philip K. Dick which is just a great book.
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Dec 26, 2023 13:27
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Those books get really bad because the dude's gender politics are so unbelievably cringe inducing. Cool concepts but just awful moment-to-moment prose and beyond one dimensional characters.
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Dec 26, 2023 16:13
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Reading the DS9 book A Stitch in Time by Andrew G. Robinson who played Garak. The prose is pretty bad and the constant switching of tenses is weird, but it's a pretty good read regardless. Just fun to spend more time with the DS9 characters. Also reading the name "Tain" over and over is funny. I'm prob gonna re-read The Name of the Rose after. I watched the adaptation with Sean Connery again and while it doesn't really capture what makes the book such a masterpiece, I still think it's a good rear end movie. Wish there was more media that just took place in monasteries. I'm chipping away at Galactic Pot-Healer as well, but that one has been slow going as PKD can put me into a funk if I'm not in the right mindset. When I was a teen and in my early twenties I thought his books were super entertaining mind-bending romps with a lot of incredibly clever ideas, now that I'm older, they're still that, but all the existential and emotional poo poo hits a million times harder. He had an uncanny, and kinda brutal, knack for getting at the core of what makes people anxious and confused about life and existence on an elemental level; a big reason why I think he's one of the greatest authors I've ever read. PKD could bang out those short books like a maniac and still somehow managed to send you down a philosophical, self-reflecting rabbit-hole with far fewer words and far less descriptive and emotive prose than other writers could manage in 500+ page novels. Martian Time-Slip is mad unsettling.
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Feb 26, 2024 06:06
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Started Clive Barker's Weaveworld for the first time.
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Mar 29, 2024 22:02
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TK8325 posted:I'm two thirds of the way through The Three Body Problem and...it loving sucks. It's so boring. I feel like the author crams in a bunch of technical bullshit to cover up a mediocre story. I don't loving care about the wavelength size of the red coast dish. If I wanted a technical journal I'd read PLOS One. Unless it picks up I don't think I'm gonna finish the trilogy. 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. Those books are such overrated dogshit. Sci-fi straight up isn't interesting anymore unless the author's comprehension of social sciences is just as interesting as the more superficial tech poo poo. Authors in the 60s had a flimsy excuse, but that poo poo came out in like the mid-00s and it reads like some Heinlein rear end dookie. I read the Xenogenesis books right after those ones and they were a million times better and actually delved into facets of the human psyche, gender, and genetics in a way that was compelling rather than someone just writing out cool ideas they had about future tech while taking a poo poo.
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Apr 4, 2024 03:44
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Nigmaetcetera posted:I’m reading The Sparrow. I hope the hosed up poo poo starts soon, I hate it when I’m promised a hosed-up spectacle and it fails to materialize. Its not going to be enjoyable hosed up poo poo lol. That book and its sequel are heavy asf. Tho the author stating that part of her inspiration was weird Columbus apologia kind of soured me on them a bit.
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Apr 5, 2024 01:06
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redshirt posted:Anyone read "Parable of the Sower" series? Yeah they're really good. I like Octavia Butler a lot. The Xenogenesis books are some of my favorite sci-fi and go into some very fascinating subjects. Her and LeGuin are a bit apart in years but imo they beat out tons of their contemporary SF authors - notably because they can actually write tolerable male AND female characters instead of the perpetual struggle that is for a lot of genre authors - but also, as I said in a previous post, they had a grasp on social and gender dynamics that their peers often sorely lacked. Also to me Philip K. Dick's writing is great, not just the ideas. You can't be a bad writer and manage to make books like Ubik feel as surreal and affecting as it does. The ruminations on life's borrowed strength that it relinquishes at death in Galactic Pot-Healer really hit me hard on a recent read. I think he has an incredible knack for going indepth on very existential ideas without getting mired in navel-gazing. It never feels like the characters are pontificating out of nowhere, their personal crises and angst always feels natural in their situation and at the time it happens. A lot of SF and fiction in general can't really grasp WHEN to start letting the word count fart up and let the internal monologue run free. Martian Time-Slip is a good example of that, would that book be nearly as disturbing and effective in carrying such an aura of entropy if Dick wasn't able to imbue it with that atmosphere through his skill with writing? I think what Dick excels at, especially in that book, is also personalizing the existential crises for each of his characters too. Many of them are going through similar things, but they internalize it differently. Butler and LeGuin are very sociological in their approach. Dick was someone who (correctly) understood that any relationship we have with future technology won't just have a strong behavioral effect on us, or introduce us to strange new circumstances, but that it would affect, and unlock, core parts of our psyche in an existential sense. His characters come in tangible contact with concepts we can only think of intangibly because of future technology, like the pseudo-afterlife in Ubik - and of course that would be something that would gently caress us up philosophically in all kinds of ways if we could experience it in reality.
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Apr 10, 2024 19:44
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 08:44 |
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Thesaurus posted:Just started The Name of the Rose, and loving it. This book probably spawned thousands of medievalists Yo I'm rereading it right now lol. Its one of my favorite books of all time and I regularly knock it out in less than three days cuz I just go crackhead on it, so engaging, smart, thematically rich, and with so much incredible research yet it's easy asf to read. I def recommend just reading it by itself your first time, but if you ever decide to reread it, this is an awesome companion text: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/10487
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Apr 26, 2024 21:30
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