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i'm reading Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer. it's the fourth and final book in a scifi series called Terra Ignota this is a series i've been reading slowly for the past two years. slowly both because the writing is rather dense and reference-heavy in parts, and also because of an extraordinary amount of hosed up stuff in my life during that time which has kept me from reading at my normal rate. i'm now about 30 pages from the end, but it's one of those series that takes a long time ending. (also i took a break in the middle to read Deborah Madison's autobiography) the series has some truly fascinating world-building. the author is a professor of renaissance studies so even though it's scifi or at least speculative fiction it is largely concerned with philosophy and politics, much moreso than technology. the story takes place in the 25th century at a point where there has been no major war for over two centuries now and instead of geographic nations, humanity is mostly organized into seven values-based "hives" that people choose to join. discussing religion in the open is illegal outside of special reservations. gender has largely disappeared from public life. the moon has a city on it, and mars is in very early stages of terraforming, but the story is about earth. the overall arc of the plot follows the global collapse of this "hive system" and way of living, and a glimpse of what comes after. what i like about it is that as someone who was really into medieval and renaissance history in college it's nice and refreshing to read scifi that makes such heavy use of a lot of what i've read in very different contexts. i also like that the plot has many legitimately surprising turns of events and well-done reveals. and the scope of the thing is huge. there's also a fair amount that i don't like about it, but i think overall i'm still on the positive side. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Feb 1, 2024 17:11
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the only McCarthy ive read is the border trilogy, of which i enjoyed the first two books but the third wasn't so great. but i've heard all of the film adaptations of them suck.
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Feb 2, 2024 20:09
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cumpantry posted:i dont see the application of audiobooks without a real commute to listen to them through. sitting in traffic for an hour is miserable so i understand craving a story. but when else am i supposed to feel like specifically listening? am i meant to sit on the couch and just close my eyes or something? lay in bed? they are nice when doing some basic task that doesn't require a ton of thought like cleaning my place or folding laundry or prepping food etc
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Feb 2, 2024 22:46
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cumpantry posted:i guess if i had a planned chore day they could work, cuz individually those tasks don't usually take more than thirty minutes... at a speaker's pace, what is that, the prologue? 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 also good for flights, or while doing a puzzle, or drawing, or grinding in some rpg etc also i did used to just lie in bed and listen to them when i was a kid, but i haven't done that in years now.
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Feb 2, 2024 23:28
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Zugzwang posted:My problem with audiobooks is that podcasts exist. There are too many good ones that only require me to pay attention for, say, 40-90 min rather than many many hours.  you don't have to pay attention to an audiobook for many hours though? most of them have chapters. just like a typical podcast (or tv show) has a season divided into many episodes. there are quite a few that have a season-long narrative, but you still listen to each episode one by one. audiobooks work the same way, you can easily just listen to one chapter at a time.
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Feb 3, 2024 00:53
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Doctor J Off posted:Audiobooks are great, but there are definitely books that need to be read instead of listened to. I read Ulysses last year and it would have been unmanageable as an audiobook. i would never sit and listen to the entirety of Ulysses but i will say that hearing recordings of Joyce reading passages from that and from Finnegans Wake really helped me appreciate both books and contributed a lot to the voice my head adopted while reading them. (but also the recording quality it's hard to stand more than a few minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww
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Feb 3, 2024 16:02
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Doctor J Off posted:I've been putting off reading Finnegan's Wake because of it's reputation as a challenging read, but this could be a way to break into it. I can imagine setting up to take on the reading with a computer with an annotated text, the audio version, and the book in hand. it's definitely better with a guide and there are a few good ones. i prefer a guide in book form rather than online since there are less distractions that way. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell is great and very thorough. there are also some great essays by Robert Anton Wilson that explain how FW works and are very helpful in understanding it from the outset. i think they are collected in the volume Prometheus Rising or maybe in one of those Cosmic Trigger books unfortunately there is no full audio version of FW read by Joyce himself, just a few small passages. i've never looked for another audio version. but i will say it's very helpful to try reading certain bits out loud yourself. most words in the book are actually multiple words sort of fused together - sometimes from different langauges - and reading passages out loud helps figure out all the different things he's trying to say at the same time. there's also multiple puns in almost every sentence of the book. re: Kim Stanley Robinson, the only book ive read by him is The Memory of Whiteness which is about a composer/conductor touring the solar system in some kind of orchestra-ship. it seemed to take place concurrently with the Mars trilogy, as there are a couple chapters that take place on Mars and mention some of the political movements from those books. overall the whole thing felt very thin, some interesting ideas but not a lot of meat when it came to character or story, and it didn't seem to really end up... anywhere or say much. so i wasn't very motivated to read more of his stuff. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Feb 3, 2024 |
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Feb 3, 2024 18:28
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DicktheCat posted:I'm reading Snow Crash for the first time. i can't imagine reading that book now. i read it in the mid-90's and loved it but after everything the internet has turned into since then it would read so completely differently. and also im no longer a horny idiotic teenager. i read cryptonomicon somewhat recently and it was fun but parts of it were pretty cringe and it really could have used some editing. like you could tell stephenson was at the height of his fame and they were just letting him do whatever the gently caress he wanted. there's literally three entire pages describing how a guy eats cereal at one point. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Feb 6, 2024 |
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Feb 6, 2024 18:10
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Deep Glove Bruno posted:simenon is great, but i think his romains durs (non-maigret books basically) are even better. he is brutally efficient with character and plot in a way where you're like, yeah, that's the exact minimum to get a good story and he nailed it the only non-Maigret book i've read by Simenon is The Man Who Watched Trains Go By and it was way darker than the Maigret stuff. really good though. but you definitely have to be in the mood for that sort of thing.
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Feb 7, 2024 16:28
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i enjoyed the book but yeah the movie is better. the book has several other plotlines that were cut from the movie, of varying quality. also a lot of stuff that ended up in the second movie as the basis for the young vito story.
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Feb 10, 2024 01:24
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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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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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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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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted: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. this is why i'm so taken with the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. i'm currently reading it for the second time and really loving it more than i did the first time. it's a history of the 25th century written by a peculiar and unreliable narrator and it's far more about philosophy and religion than it is about technology. the author is a renaissance scholar and the way that her work informs her speculative fiction is fascinating basically it takes place in a world in which there has been a global peace (minus a few minor strifes) for the past couple of centuries. among other significant changes, human society has moved beyond geographic nations into a system called "hives". the books are about how that system falls apart and what comes after.
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Apr 10, 2024 03:41
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i love the weird poo poo Dick wrote towards the end of his life like VALIS and its sequels, some of his journals from around that time have also been published (as The Exegesis of Philip K Dick) and it's fascinating reading, if a bit harrowing at times but my favorite book of his is Confessions of a Crap Artist. its got a very different tone than his other books and doesn't really fall under the scifi umbrella, more a very dark family drama set in mid 20th century Bay Area
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Apr 10, 2024 16:38
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Thesaurus posted:Does anyone like latin american authors? my favorite is Jorge Luis Borges. he mainly wrote short stories, and also essays. his short stories are fascinating, some of the best i've ever read, especially the ones from the collections "the Aleph" and "the Garden of Forking Paths" also recently read the Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and quite enjoyed it and yes Marquez is great. Hundred Years of Solitude is brutal but incredible Earwicker fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 17:50
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im visiting my parents a grabbed a haul off my dad's bookshelf to take back. some are his and some were mine from a long time ago
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Apr 12, 2024 18:06
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Enfys posted:I keep meaning to reread Doomsday Book, but it absolutely destroyed me when I read it years ago. thats one of the ones im less familiar with but it looked very intriguing i'd also never heard of Shibumi before seeing it on his shelf but i grabbed it because it looks both terrible and great "Nicolas Hel - Born in the ravages of World War 1 China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go master, he survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and its most accomplished - and highly paid - assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel's secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection... shibumi. Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his magnificent Eurasian mistress, Hel faces his most sinister enemy - a supermonolith of espionage and monopoly. The battle is drawn, ruthless power and corruption on one side and on the other... shibumi."
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Apr 12, 2024 19:59
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i just started Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman. a huge tome filled with every evil WW2 wrought in Russia and Germany in the form of a fiction following one family (but based fairly closely on Grossman's own life, according to the intro). so far its very well written and harrowing also reading Dragonriders of Pern at the same time for some head space. its not exactly "light" but at least its got dragons and no nazis. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 16:19
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im reading My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Totula. which is also the name of an album by David Byrne and Brian Eno that ive loved for a long time, but never read this book until now, it's an extremely intense and semi-autobiographical story about a young Nigerian boy who gets lost during a war and ends up wandering into the world of the dead, the "bush of ghosts" where living people are not allowed to enter, and the various creatures and spirits that he encounters. extremely good so far
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May 12, 2024 02:37
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Captain Hygiene posted:Lol, I've been enjoying Forge of God so I looked up other Greg Bear novels to see what might be next, and his top three most popular are all stories in the Halo vidyagame universe. Maybe they're perfectly fine, it's just always funny to see some existing property like that for an author I've always thought of as more, I dunno, highbrow? i mean he's been around for a long time, my dad still has a ton of Greg Bear novels from the 70s through 90s, well before the idea of videogame novelizations existed. but i'd bet those Halo novels made him more money than the entire rest of his output, probably allowing him to retire in actual comfort
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May 15, 2024 23:10
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