Brontoforumus Archive
Discussion Boards => Media => Topic started by: Royal☭ on May 16, 2008, 09:31:07 AM
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(http://www.joelconstantine.com/gallery/d/113-1/books_HEADER.jpg)
At my current job I find I have a lot of time to kill, so I spend most of it reading. Since January I've gone through a few novels and I'm finally starting to wear down my bookshelf and of course need new books to read. So if you've got recommendations, ITT books.
Crime and Punishment: I finished this one awhile back and was stricken by how passionately Dostoevsky writes. I'd previously read Brothers Karamazov, which is a better book, but it's easy to see why this one is so widely known as well. Raskolnikov is a truly conflicted protagonist, and Dostoevsky manages to walk that fine line between emphasizing with the character without approving of what he's done.
The Sun Also Rises: One of Hemingway's finest books. I've read it twice now, and I feel I got more enjoyment out the second reading than the first, especially considering I've read interpretations of the text as well. I've read this and For Whom the Bell Tolls (gannuk gannuck wee ooohh), both of which are fantastic Hemingway novels.
Flashman and the Dragon: I love the Flashman series. The best way to describe them is historical fanfiction. George MacDonald Frasier has taken a minor character from a 19th century novel called Tom Brown's School Days and turned him into a British cavalrymen who participates in some of the major events of British army history, such as the first Afghan War and in this book, the Opium War. They're always delightfully written and risque, and I was surprised to learn the series started in 1960.
Glory: A novel by Nabokov, and one from his Russian period. Not as keen on this one as the others, but still a well-written novel.
The Razor's Edge: I like Maughm, and this is a fantastic novel. Not as good as The Moon and Sixpence, but still a fantastic novel about the passion of living.
Bleak House: I read this one in a contest with a friend of mine, to see who could finish the 1000 page tome first. I won, even starting a day later. Probably not Dickens greatest novel, but some of the prose is clever and the novel takes an upturn in quality towards the second half of the novel.
I'm currently reading All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, after giving up on Losing Battles by Eudora Welty. I just couldn't take the dialogue, it was ridiculous. But Horses is turning out to be a good novel.
What is everyone else reading?
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At my current job I find I have a lot of time to kill, so I spend most of it reading.
fuck you.
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Cry more.
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Zadie Smith's White Teeth turned out to be a lot better than expected, considering it's her first novel ever. Mostly concerning the issue of how one handles race, history, culture, and genetic responsibility in a modern age which is still wrestling with the nature of integrating, rather than ideologically "conquering", minorities, and god damn does she do a good job. The triumph of this book is how she manages to make her cast display their flaws without ever making anyone act out of character; it's all incredibly believable, and a fluid, enjoyable read.
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is just balls-out excellent. It's mostly about the author's experiences in Vietnam, but it's written from a completely unbiased, self-reflective perspective... which it really needs to be. His main argument is that, while it's most often true, war isn't just hell, it's a million other things all going on at the same time, compounded into a massive, impossible-to-define shitshow we call "the war". Gripping read, and told in an honest, conversational way that I absolutely adore.
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I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I now see what they mean about 19th-century Russian authors. This book, so far, is full to the brim with very big ideas, each worthy of reflection. I won't be able to give them due appreciation on my own, and I don't exactly have a reading group, so I'm just going to proceed through it and see if the author himself provides a further examination of any of them.
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See AV [at time of writing it is a particularly plain cover of Lolita]. I am committing to reading it after basically a dearth of literature (the Bible was up because I felt compelled to re-read Numbers). Not yet begun, but word on the street is that I should pursue something a little easier.
In a less classic, non-fiction sense I was recently lent "Bonk". So far, I have read a story about a biologist who as part of his "studies" inserted a toothbrush into his urethra for taping to help make his study more complete.
Yeah. It's a book.
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Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe is pretty good if you like the fantasy type stuff sort of like harry potter and all. Its more or less a rpg without the gameplay and all the reading.
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Just finished "reading" The Brothers Karamazov. That is, I had an audiobook, which I listened to periodically over a period of, oh, eight months. I'd like to re-read it more conventionally, as it was most enjoyable, and, as Bill noted, worth further reflection.
Right now, though, I'm making my way through Robert Graves' I, Claudius, which has been recommended to me variously. It began a little dry; it is intended to be written as a (partially fictional) history, as well as historical fiction. At around 100 pages in, though, it began to pick up, and I have since found it quite an interesting read. Once this book is out of the way, I have a shelf full of varied works to go through, including James Joyce's Ulysses. I think I will start, however, on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, as I've had a bit too much of the classics at present.
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If anyone enjoys Science Fiction, I cannot recommend Joe Haldeman enough.
Best known for his story, "The forever war", Haldeman is fantastic in creating settings and atmospheres, and the eerie calmness of the places in between.
I strongly suggest finding his stuff at used book stores, and going from there as these treats have been around for sometime.
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Every time I read about an author getting inspiration for their book from a book, I want to go out and read that book. This is especially true with science fiction or fantasy. So I read a lot of Fritz Leiber Robert Howard and Jack Vance.
Right now, however, I'm reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. It's about an unapologetic rogue living in a George R.R. Martin -type low fantasy world. I'm only a bit into the book, but it seems like the author took a heist movie and translated it into medieval times.
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I really want to get my hands on some stuff by Lord Dunsany.
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Lately I've been reading military and warfare non-fiction. Sniping in France (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sniping_in_France) is an interesting read. It gives a much more up-front and personal view of trench warfare than the impression we got in history class; it's peppered with interesting details, characters and anecdotes.
Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (http://samurai.com/5rings/) is the autobiography of one one of Japan's most famous feudal-era swordsmen. A great deal of the book is dedicated to sword techniques, whose applications to the modern world are cryptic at best. Musashi eschewed heavy armour and defence for a philosophy of full-on attack, and we have him to thank for the popular image of the samurai as a wandering two-weapon fighter.
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I really want to get my hands on some stuff by Lord Dunsany.
here you go (http://openlibrary.org/a/OL39937A)
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Just finished reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose again. It's three things at once: first, a thoroughbred Sherlock Holmes murder mystery, right down to the inquisitive but less bright assistant off of whom the Holmes analogue riffs; second, it's a thorough and accurate picture of monastic life and the political climate of the church in the early 1300s - Holmes analogue is infact a travelling monk; third, it's an ode to and explanation of semiotics, the study of symbols.
It all goes together really well: Scripture plays a huge part in the lives of the people in the monastery, and it's the basis of most of their arguments. A culture based on a system of symbols is the perfect environment to explore semiotics, and Sherlock Holmes (for all intents and purposes) is the perfect character to do it.
I can't wait for Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book to come out. The Name of the Rose was dropped in the middle of a William Gibson spree. I've been rereading a lot of books I already know lately, and could stand to have something new, so hooray for this thread!
Also: Brothers Karamazov and The Forever War are some of my favourite things ever.
Also also: Envy, if there's one thing I have never ever ever played a console RPG solely for, it's the story and dialogue. If I want an RPG in book form, my old buddy R. L. Stine has some fine options available (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_Yourself_Goosebumps).
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Finally getting around to reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the original source of Joseph Campbell's eternally misinterpreted Monomyth. Every other source I've read on the topic has been casually apologetic for Campbell's 1930s sexism but man, it really does just smack you in the face as early as page 3. Dude was just a little too early for Dungeons & Dragons, I guess.
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Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (http://samurai.com/5rings/) is the autobiography of one one of Japan's most famous feudal-era swordsmen.
I never saw it as an autobiography. That's probably because the translation I read was framed as a philosophical treatise on killing men with a sword. Not whether or not it's right, but the frame of mind you must adopt to do it successfully.
It helps that the interpreter is a 10th Dan Hanshi of Karate.
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It's an autobiography if you assume that all Musashi did of note was whop people with swords. I wouldn't have my Musashi any other way.
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whop
Least sword-like onomatopoeia ever.
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I've been rereading Adam Cadre's Ready, Okay! Life and death in a fictional SoCal high school. It's got kind of a rough start--the author began writing it while he himself was still in high school, and despite what was surely an enormous amount of rewriting, it shows. Still, it never fails to knock my socks off.
Seems like all my books lately are pushing their protagonists toward incest.
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whop
Least sword-like onomatopoeia ever.
Unless your sword is an oar.
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It's an autobiography if you assume that all Musashi did of note was whop people with swords. I wouldn't have my Musashi any other way.
Least sword-like onomatopoeia ever.
Unless your sword is an oar.
Trust a shogun to bring a whop to a knife fight.
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whop
Least sword-like onomatopoeia ever.
Unless your sword is an oar.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z8sSi1DyVcA&feature=related
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Pretend I posted a video of Nightmare ringing people out with downforward horizontal using his joke weapon from SC2.
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If you haven't read Toxic Sludge is Good For You (http://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Sludge-Good-You-Relations/dp/1567510604/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213994296&sr=8-1), I suggest you do so immediately. This is book is vital to understanding just how rooted the PR industry is our government.
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I hate to say something like this in a thread where everybody is reading Dostoevsky, but lately I've been working through a new batch of Warhammer 40,000 novels.
Dan Abnett is still pretty much the best author of licensed sci-fi, and I can unequivocally recommend Brothers of the Snake as one of his best books. Abnett's recurring problem is that the first volume of a series is always his strongest, and iterative volumes are always progressively less good; as he's progressed as an author, his initial books in a series have only gotten moderately better (which isn't bad, since his first book still holds up very well), but his iterations have dramatically improved relative to their originals. Brothers of the Snake sidesteps this wholesale as a stand-alone book, however, and even aside from that it's easily one of the finest books he's written.
The "Horus Heresy" series has been interesting experiment from Black Library; each novel in the series is written by a different author. Unfortunately, there's still some sense of continuity, and some of the authors are pretty terrible; I've got "Flight of Angels" and "Legion", but I can't get to them because I can't stand to wade through Graham McNeill's "Fulgrim".
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Okay, since my last post, I've been reasonably active. I started and finished The Difference Engine (Gibson\Sterling) and The Sirens of Titan (Vonnegut). I enjoyed the first more than I was expecting to; it sheds some of Gibson's unique style, which isn't entirely for the worse (Gibson is the one author where I find myself rereading certain passages up to three or four times before I actually figure out what is happening), but the main plot still had oodles of Gibson vagueness. I think it might have had to do something with an [spoiler]AI[/spoiler], but you already guessed that.
Sirens of Titan didn't exactly wow me. I am an avowed Vonnegut fan, and I understand it was only his second novel, but I can't say I liked it nearly as much as I did, say, Breakfast of Champions or Mother Night. Nevertheless, it had its moments.
Now I've decided to continue my struggle against War and Peace. It isn't pretty. I've finished about 2/3rds of it, and it is boring. At this point, I could not in good conscience recommend it.
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I've only read about half of War and Peace (slight interruption due to be being thrown in jail), and I loved it, actually. I found the prose brisk and the setting interesting.
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Really? Whose translation were you reading? I forgot to mention: I'm also reading Don Quixote, a modern translation which I am enjoying immensely.
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(slight interruption due to be being thrown in jail)
:wat:
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Douglas Adam's typewriter for sale (http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=529347759&searchurl=an%3Ddouglas%2Badams%26bi%3D0%26bx%3Doff%26ds%3D30%26fe%3Don%26sortby%3D1%26x%3D38%26y%3D7).
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I read "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell (http://www.scarygoround.com/index.php?date=20080521). It was very awesome. I recommend it.
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Currently reading Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium for context purposes. I'm planning to read Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Young, which, according to one friend of mine, outlines how the modern city is a far more divisive entity than cities past. Somehow it got mentioned in a conversation about dating people you'd never normally associate with.
Anyway.
Both books talk about love. In Phaedrus, love is quantified philosophically as a kind of divine madness, while the Symposium is about who is most erotic.
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Symposium is about who can make up the most batshit insane theory about love while also advocating touching little boys.
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Any of you Sesslerbots read this shit as a kid? It was so fucking awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_of_Fear
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Eion Colfer (author of the Artemis Fowl series) is writing the sixth Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7619828.stm)
Uh... huh. Okay.
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:ohshi~:
So what reference do we go with here? "I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed" is good, but I think August (http://www.someguywithawebsite.com/blogarchive/week_2008_09_14.html#002640) nails it with "This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
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PANIC
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Is it Thursday? I could never get the hang of Thursdays...
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This is like getting upset about all those xth-party Star Wars books. Nobody's going to fucking care.
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I'm slogging very slowly through Infinite Jest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest) (actually, I should read that link--I bet it's really helpful) and picking at The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic (http://www.amazon.com/Last-Gentleman-Adventurer-Coming-Arctic/dp/0618517510) because it's easier to carry on a train.
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This is like getting upset about all those xth-party Star Wars books. Nobody's going to fucking care.
Right, and I'm pretty sure if you'd asked Adams what he thought about it, he would have responded, "What should I care if I'm dead?"
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I'm slogging very slowly through Infinite Jest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest)
Is this in tribute to the death of David Foster Wallace?
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I'm slogging very slowly through Infinite Jest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest)
Is this in tribute to the death of David Foster Wallace?
It was recommended by a friend.
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I'm just saying, good timing.
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This. (http://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-World-Terrifying-Circumnavigation/dp/0066211735)
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Re-read A Canticle for Leibowitz. Post-apocalyptic Catholicism never gets old, I tell you what.
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Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Nations). Written in 1776.
What better way to understand this mess (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=223.msg24749#msg24749), than to start from the beginning? Reading of capitalism before it was even termed, and that it was to have morality placed upon it... Simply staggering.
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The Clown turned his powdered face to the mirror.
"If to be fair is to be beautiful," he said, "who can compare with me in my white mask?"
"Who can compare with him in his white mask?" I asked of Death beside me.
"Who can compare with me?" said Death, "for I am paler still."
"You are very beautiful," sighed the clown, turning his powdered face from the mirror.
I need to get my hands on some more of this guy's work.
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I am reading Anathem, Neil Stephenson's latest offering. It has been quite entertaining, so far. Two hundred pages in, and he's only just started to move on from almost pure world building to the actual plot ( I assume), but it's pretty fascinating.
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Thread Necromancy!
I'm reading an adaptation of Metal Gear Solid by Raymond Benson.
It really is a bastardized form of the MGS script. Of course, I can't imagine anyone actually writing about slamming a long, silver bullet in to a well-oiled shaft without immediately trying to backspace and not being able to because it's broken.
Not that I would know anything about that...
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I have acquired a copy of The Manga Guide To Statistics. I'm almost afraid to read it. It's probably educational.
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I pulled David Brin's The Postman off my shelf to read on last week's trip. Yes, that's the book off which the Kevin Costner movie was based. This book, however, has the distinction of actually being worth your time. It's postapoclyptic, which is almost always a good thing, and there are certain elements that you can see have been lifted and used shamelessly in the Fallout series.
I did buy this at the $1 Book Store, but I would have happily paid up to $6 for the privilege.
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One of the books I selected from the library to read on the thirty-hour bus ride to WestKon '06 was C.J. Ryan's Glorious Treason (http://www.amazon.com/Glorious-Treason-C-J-Ryan/dp/0553587773/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226972824&sr=1-1), because from reading the back copy I thought it would be a regular Sci-Fi novel. I was wrong. It, along with the rest of the author's work, is basically softcore porn in space. I got no need for that in a non-visual medium.
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Just finished The Jungle. I guess I'm a socialist now! :nyoro~n:
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If you made it through the manifesto at the end, you're at least 1d4 points of Propaganda closer, Comrade.
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Wait, what's the AC on communism?
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Get with the program, guys. We're using 4e now, and communism targets the Will defense.
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I voluntarily failed my save. :serious:
wait, i think i used serious in my last post
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I am preordering this right fucking now. (http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347)
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WHAT. THE...
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Since this topic got bumped, might as well mention that I burned through G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday* throughout the latter part of last week. Chesterton's writing is quite fluid and frankly, beautiful, and though I guessed the plot of the remainder of the book one third of the way through, the ending still threw me right off.
But honestly, the best thing about the book was reaffirming that I can, indeed, still read a full novel in two days.
*if you've ever played Deus Ex, you've probably read some of it, too.
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I wanted to find Bored of The Rings funny. I really did. The authors seemed like they were trying so hard, and I just wanted to, you know, laugh at least once, so their efforts weren't wasted. In all honesty, though, it was pretty bad. It was like... like a MAD magazine feature, but instead of illustrations, there were detailed descriptions of what would have been in the illustration. Maybe they found different things funny at Harvard in the '60s, I don't know.
Besides, I found a much better parody of Lord of The Rings. It's called The Sword Of Shannara.
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Büge, well, it IS National Lampoon.
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At its core, Harpo Speaks is a book about a man who lived an extraordinary life. From turn-of-the-twentieth-century east-side Manhattan, which seems like another world, to the Alongquin Round Table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_round_table), where he got to rub elbows with the likes of Alice Miller, Ruth Gordon, and Alexander Woollcott, and eventually spinning out to other celebrities like George Burns, the Gershwins, and Jack Benny, Harpo lived a life like no other, and has as many zany stories as you'd expect.
It was written in '61 and is perhaps a little cleaner than it would have been if written today; there's little swearing and absolutely no tales of sexual conquest (though a few funny tales of attempted conquest gone awry) -- hell, given that his children are adopted, Harpo could be a virgin for all he relates in the book. (And I'd have LOVED to be a fly on the wall at the gatherings where Groucho and George Burns tried to one-up each other, but while Harpo implies these conversations were absolutely filthy, he doesn't give any examples.)
But so many great stories -- working as a piano player in a brothel at the age of 13, wetting his pants the first time he performed on stage, playing Murder with the Woollcott gang. A few of the stories are a little more somber -- he says very little about Hitler's rise to power, but what he says (about passing through Germany during that time and looking at the terrified faces in Jewish store windows) is powerful. As you might expect, Harpo doesn't need many words to create an effect.
All in all, a very fun book that I won't soon forget; nearly 500 pages but it never drags.
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Just finished Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I seem to recall someone describing it as "the ideal that Dan Brown's books consistently fail to reach", and that seems about right.
Now I'm giving Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow another go. Last time through I lost steam somewhere in Peenmunde; hopefully rereading the beginning will keep things from spinning out of control quite as quickly. (Although probably not--lately I've been catching myself murmuring "Imipolex G" at odd moments, just to savor the odd sounds.)
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I'm only a few chapters into Dan Abnett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Abnett)'s Eisenhorn Trilogy (http://www.amazon.com/Eisenhorn-Warhammer-40-000-Omnibus/dp/1844161560) [via Amazon]. One of numerous 40k novels. From what I hear, he is the best of the bunch.
Guns, swords, and intrigue! It appears to be written entirely in first-person, so you spend a lot of time getting into the mind of the main character.
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Just finished Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I seem to recall someone describing it as "the ideal that Dan Brown's books consistently fail to reach", and that seems about right.
I've said something like that in the past. I had to return the book before finishing it, but I hope to pick it up again sometime.
Now I'm giving Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow another go. Last time through I lost steam somewhere in Peenmunde; hopefully rereading the beginning will keep things from spinning out of control quite as quickly. (Although probably not--lately I've been catching myself murmuring "Imipolex G" at odd moments, just to savor the odd sounds.)
I heard that if you finish Gravity's Rainbow, you're eligible for a prize (http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=CG-STICKERPACK&Category_Code=CG). That's another one on my list. I just finished reading The Crying of Lot 49 for the second time, and am all geared up to drill through the collected work of Don DeLillo (http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/31522/). Most of them, anyway.
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I love Umberto Eco like few other truly modern authors.
A man so smart, just having so much fun is such a joy to read.
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Foucault's Pendulum
I've had that novel sitting uselessly on my bookshelf* for half a decade after a girl foisted it on me to read and then I moved to another state.
You telling me I should, like, actually read it?
* One of the several drawers I've stuffed my impressive dead tree collection into. Impressive because I very rarely actually read stuff off of dead trees anymore.
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You telling me I should, like, actually read it?
Depends how much patience you have for historians, philosophers, and semioticians jokingly indulging their inner conspiracy theorists, only to be proved (maybe) right. I thought it was fun, and it feels pleasantly authentic.
The Da Vinci Code (http://www.spatch.net/frontpage.cgi?entry=072105) is just a Suspense Mad-Lib in which Dan Brown folled in the blonks with academics, museums, and religious histories. There's the faint odor of Mary Sue. Almost as if he wanted to singlehandedly redeem the American opinion of higher education, and he thinks the best way to do that is to write action scenes involving professors.
I wish the two books weren't so firmly linked in my mind.
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Well, the conspiracy theories aren't really new. Robert Anton Wilson joked, before he died, that between The Da Vinci Code and What the Bleep?, he could have been rich if he'd just waited a few decades to publish his stuff.
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Yeah, Foucault's Pendulum is a 'conspiracy theory novel' in the same sense that The Simpsons was 'a sitcom'.
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I am preordering this right fucking now. (http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347)
I approve of this new trend. (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118000187.html?categoryid=13&cs=1)
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Well, I called it that mainly to avoid calling it [spoiler]Lovecraftian fiction[/spoiler], because I didn't expect Eco to actually namedrop that particular mythic figure. The fact that he did was amazing and excellent, and caught me by complete surprise. I preferred the more generic categorization for that reason.
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Ha -- RAW dropped all kinds of [spoiler]Lovecraft[/spoiler] into his work, too.
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I liked when Umberto Eco said that Dan Brown was "one of his creatures." He's one of my very favourite writers.
Reading a lot of Don DeLillo lately. Running Dog is my favourite. Anything that takes a really outrageous premise and makes it feel really believable and consistent is great.
On my way into a speculative fiction kick with some Kim Stanley Robinson and Bruce Sterling lined up.
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I know Foucault's Pendulum always gets pointed out to the nerd kids, but Anybody else read any of Eco's other stuff. I thought The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana was a bit too autobiographical* (still quite decent), but I thought that Baudolino was pretty good and I really loved The Island Of The Day Before and The Name Of The Rose.
*All his stuff is, to one extent or another. Except maybe The Name Of The Rose, which is more the greatest Sherlock Holmes fanfiction in history.
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Favourite thing about Name of the Rose might be how well it fit together. Take Sherlock Holmes, world`s greatest figure-out-er of complicated puzzles, drop him in a disturbingly accurate 14th century monastery (whose culture is built on scripture, a single gigantic semiotic puzzleworks) and write the story as (1) an ode to the study of semiotics (2) an also accurate approximation of the sort of book that was actually written in the 14th century.
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I was just about to start reading Name of the Rose so I think I should duck out of this thread for the time being.
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But I was so close to finally getting a chance to use the spoiler tags!
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You're in luck, Fort. I still have yet to read it, and it's now on the list, alongside Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century as well as A Pattern Language by multiple authors.
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I recently read through Dhampir by Barb and J.C. Hendee and proceeded to pick up the rest of the first set of books of The Saga of the Noble Dead after it proved to be a satisfactory read.
Although I feel less inclined to read them when my housemate, who is bigger on books than me (while being notoriously difficult about playing any new game ever), gives me snippets of it here and there and slowly saps my interest in it by doing so despite my clear disinterest in the practice.
:facepalm: I can't tell if it's just me losing interest because someone else enjoys something else I do or just how zealous and excited they get about it.
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For all the Canucks out there, I just read Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Renegades-Canadians-Spanish-Civil-War-Michael-Petrou/9780774814188-item.html?pticket=wl5euf455eurwz45wkarew2uxAo0vRtgluq63q8B%2bBz3W3Myy9M%3d), a gift from my roomate for xmas. I highly recommend this to any polysci/history nut from Canada.
I lived in ignorance of the Spanish Civil War, but it seemed arguably as one of the last defenses against Blitzkrieg. Specifically, in Order for the Third Riech to press east, having France, Spain and Italy Fascist was the easiest way to go about business, and the only ones who were willing to stem this was the Soviet Union, who gave a limited supply of arms, and soldiers through Communist Party Propaganda and Recruiting worldwide.
As this fell during the great depression, there were many Canadian Labourers who felt the call, for a few reasons: A lot of the volunteers were in labour camps away from the cities already due to the depression and for the same "bleh" that has led Canadians to volunteer for the four major conflicts that have followed.
Also, I found it amusing, that like in all other wars, the Canadian Battalion were pretty adept at fighting, despite being a rag-tag organization, yet be "politically undesirable" in the eyes of the commies for leadership roles...
A good read.
I'm now on "The Gamble" by Thomas E Ricks. As Petreaus is the great General of this era, I'm interested in knowing the background webs he cut through to get to the present state..
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The Manual Of Detection, by Jedidiah Berry.
This guy is a newcomer (this is his first novel), but he displays a mastery of the writers craft that is rarely matched.
The book is basically Sam Spade meets Alice in Wonderland and it is was AWESOME.
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How To Be Free, by Tom Hodgkinson.
The author's pitch convinced me:
http://idler.co.uk/books/how-to-be-free/
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How To Be Free, by Tom Hodgkinson.
The author's pitch convinced me:
http://idler.co.uk/books/how-to-be-free/
I'm not saying his sentiments don't have a deal of merit, but he seems to be advocation the other extreme when what we need is balance. There's a place for contemplation, relaxation, craftsmanship, and cooperation, but there is just as much a place for hard work, individualism, economies of scale, and clever machinery.
It's creating space for all of these that's always been the problem.
But it's his trumpeting the values of Chivalry that truly made me laugh. Chivalry and it's associated nonsense has been responsible for solid centuries of misery - and I ain't talking wimmin's lib.
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I agree, many of his ideas are impractical for most of us - for example, he suggests that we keep our own chickens. Still, he makes excellent points. What with climate change, suburban sprawl and credit crunch, a little mediaeval living might be what we need.
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I know, but his reliance on cheap stereotypes instead of facts ruins his ability to argue his point, no matter how valid that point may be.
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It's as if his tongue was planted in his cheek when he wrote the book. I haven't read the book, but from the little press release he doesn't seem to be calling for us all to start being serfs who live under aristocratic nobles. He pokes fun at people who share this unshakable belief that people in the past just knew how to live decently. It's similar to how conservatives of today just thought all of America's wholesome, down to Earth morals all died out after the 60s.
Then again I haven't read the book. For all I know he could suggest that the president be allowed to fuck our wives on the first night of marriage.
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Okay, http://www.gnooks.com/ is neat. Put in the name of an author and it will show you related authors. The closer they are mapped to the name, the more likely you are to like those authors. So they claim.
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It's like the music genome project, but for authors. Interesting.
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At some point in recent history I finished the audiobook version of Ender's Game. Very enjoyable, and the commentary from Card at the end was icing on the cake.
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Just finished Triplanetary and am... ambivalent. I really wanted to love it, but it hasn't sold me. I'm wishing I had started with Galactic Patrol or at least First Lensman, since my understanding is that Triplanetary was only added to the Lensman canon years later, and in fact doesn't have a single goddamn thing to do with anything.
I can appreciate Doc's exuberant writing style as he breathlessly describes the blinding megasplosions of unimaginably cataclysmic particle beams and scintillating force fields, but it moves much too quickly to build any sort of real drama. A titanic space battle of epic proportions will start and end within a single page, and the story as a whole is disjointed and ultimately goes nowhere. It's obvious that each chapter was originally published serially in magazines; there's an episode where a major villain previously thought dead is brought back and summarily killed off for absolutely no reason, all within the space of a single chapter, like bad anime filler. Maybe the novel format just doesn't do justice to the saga.
The characters don't help matters, as they are all ridiculously bland comic book caricatures and the dialogue is actually laugh-out-loud B-movie atrocious. They are impossible to care about except for their constant outbursts of hilariously out-dated 1930s slang. Between the one-dimensional characters, the excessive yet pointless spectacle, and the awesomely embarrassing sexism, it's like reading a Michael Bay film.
And yet! I am really digging the universe Smith is portraying here, and the sheer boyish glee with which he describes the catastrophic battles and ludicrously turbocharged space engines really is endearing. I feel like I am not approaching the work from the right frame of mind; if it were a movie or a comic I would probably love it, but for some reason as a book it is not meeting my expectations. I should love it, it's basically got all the ingredients. I'm told they eventually get space axes.
I want to take another crack at this. I will probably try to track down a copy of First Lensman and see if it clicks with me. I guess my question is: does it get better? Is it worth sticking it out to the bitter end, like a good Triplanetary officer would? Have any of you jerks even read this stuff?
FUN FACT: About a third of the pages in my edition of Triplanetary are actually taken up with a story Smith co-wrote with another guy with too many Es in his name, called The Masters of Space, which is utter retarded bullshit. It does not instill confidence.
P.S. I god damn never want to hear anyone call the animated Lensman movie a "travesty" ever again after this.
P.P.S. While reading up on the series it occurred to me that Samus Aran's name might have been originally intended to be a nod to Virgil Samms. She's certainly got the space armour, even right down to the "lens" on the back of her hand in Metroid 2, and she does hang out with space dragons. Someone get Gunpei Yokoi Yoshio Sakamoto on the phone right now, I need this confirmed! It's for science!
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If you like the Lensman book, let me know, I've been curious about that series for a while.
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Starting to work my way through Iain Banks' Culture books. I feel kinda silly for being so late to the game.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jZVE5uF24Q
More books need trailers.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090804/stage_nm/us_books_twilight
"Twilight" Author Accused of Plagiarism
Who'd she steal from? A preteen girl with esteem issues?
*reads*
"A writer plans to sue "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer, accusing her of plagiarism by lifting passages from an obscure book she wrote called "The Nocturne" and using them in vampire romance "Breaking Dawn," an attorney said on Tuesday."
Similar name. Good. That's a good start.
*keeps reading*
"the passages in question involve few word-for-word similarities but that the two books have similar plot and character points."
Oooo. Not looking good for The Noctourne...
"In a cease-and-desist letter Williams sent to Hachette Book Group, he provided comparisons from the two books of a wedding, a sex-on-the-beach episode and a passage where a human-turned-vampire describes the wrenching change.
As another instance of similarities, Williams pointed out that characters in both books call their wives "love.""
Shiiiiit. Then they are just saying this for the money?
"He said Scott does not plan to seek monetary damages."
... What the fuck? Doing it just for what little publicity they can scrape?
"Scott made chapters from "The Nocturne" available online as she was working on the vampire book, which she wrote in her teenage years and released in book form in 2006"
Huh. So it's possible, I suppose, that Meyer's read the chapters? Is that what they are banking on? To get money? Wait. No money. Ummm...
What?
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Assisted suicide via Twilight fans?
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I guess attention seeking teenage girls never grow up. That's kinda cute.
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Oh yeah, books. I read those.
- One-volume edition of both (http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Antarctic-Farthest-Expedition-1907-1909/dp/0451200462/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249582104&sr=1-14) books (http://www.amazon.com/South-Endurance-Expedition-Penguin-Classics/dp/0142437794/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249581950&sr=8-1) written by Ernest Shackleton regarding his antarctic voyages.
I am a huge polar exploration nerd. I have way too many books on this shit and I still want more. I shifted into "read the originals" mode a few months ago, so there you have it.
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
Reread my battered copies during the week off. I dearly love Conan Doyle's Holmesian work, but it's funny as hell to watch him plagarize himself. Repeatedly.
"Wait... another man with a secret past, fleeing from a secret society from America? Or hay guyz... how about those big-game hunters with air-guns?" :hurr:
"GODDAMNIT I TRIED TO STOP WRITING THESE I REALLY DID, BUT YOU BASTARDS WOULDN'T LEAVE ME ALONE." :khaaan:
"..." :nyoro~n:
Next in the line-up:
- A new and detailed account of the fall of Rome, with more complete information than has been previously available (THIRD CENTURY FAIL). Been looking for something with more detailed information on the lost third century for a while.
- A book on the Chechen wars by a Russian foot soldier who served (http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-War-Chechnya-Arkady-Babchenko/dp/1846270391). Looks really good, though I'm almost afraid of what it'll contain.
- The Worst Journey In The World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This has been cited by multiple folks as "the finest travel book ever written". Going to see if the book lives up to the bombast.
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I recently read A Confederacy of Dunces (alternate title: The Worst Man in the World; or, One Million Stupid Things That Happened in New Orleans). It was astounding but my similarity to the protagonist (...?) made me want to kill myself more than once while reading it.
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Hey, kids! Ever wonder why political and economic discourse in the modern world seems vaguely psychopathic? Steve Keen may have some insight! (http://www.debunking-economics.com/)
Politics aside, Debunking Economics is noteworthy solely on the strength of the first chapter, which attempts to condense neoclassical economic theory into 30 pages and actually goes out and does it.
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A Confederacy of Dunces is a personal favourite of mine. The story behind its publication always gets me, too. The author wrote it in the late '60s, tried to get it published, failed, committed suicide. His mom finds a smudgy carbon copy of the manuscript, sends it off to a professor of English. Book gets published, wins a Pulitzer. :MENDOZAAAAA:
Currently reading East of Eden. So far, a much better read than Grapes of Wrath. Case in point, no multi-page turtle metaphors. :facepalm:
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I'm into page 56 of "The Last Centurion" by John Ringo by Baen Books, avail paperback.
It's a blog-style memoir of a us officer in the near future that was one of the survivors of the combined H5N1 virus and a big freeze.
The writting style is vividly entertaining, easy-to-follow, and frankly fun.
You can read the first nine chapters here (http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416555536/1416555536.htm?blurb)
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I've started reading The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. I'm only a chapter and a half in, but it's wonderful so far. It's about a guy who works in the IT department of a secret government organization involved in covering up demonic incursions from other dimensions. It's a sublime juxtaposition of the kind of stuff I deal with every day (on down to the jargon -- and Stross knows his shit, it's not Hollywood bullshit (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/7/16/)) and Lovecraftian horrors. I love stuff that combines the mundane with the extraordinary (Astro City, Harry Potter, Love and Rockets, ...), and this fits right into that milieu.
It's also very British.
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Oh god, I think I must obtain that book.
It sounds delicious. :want:
e: well damn, they had five different books by the guy, just not that one.
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I got World War Z in the mail yesterday, among other things, and devoured it over the course of the night. I actually feel genuinely bad about not reading this sooner, like I have failed you all as well as myself.
I've now started on the classic book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I'll let you know how it goes.
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Conversely, I feel bad about owning World War Z. I feel even worse that I read ten pages of it.
It was a gift.
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What's wrong with World War Z?
Didn't like the interview format?
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It's probably one of the worst written cash ins I can think of, not that his previous book was any better.
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Fuck you, I am defining "zombie" a very specific way and will then spend half the book calling you retarded if your definition differed from mine. Mine's right.
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You have no idea how sick some of us are of this pop-culture Zombie meme. Jesus, fuck, enough already.
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Hey Mongrel, could you help me build a zombie deck?
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I've now started on the classic book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I'll let you know how it goes.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
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Hey Mongrel, could you help me build a zombie deck?
:nyoro~n:
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My problem with World War Z was that it was an okay concept with a terrible execution. The writing never impressed me, and the vignettes were really hit-or-miss. The one about the old British soldier recounting the defense of the palace actually made me throw the book across the room.
It's funny, because I was actually pretty impressed with the Zombie Survival Handbook by the same author, but they didn't have it at the bookstore. I wound up getting this one instead. This one is basically a Michael Bay movie.
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Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
I'm more excited about this one. It reminds me of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_in_an_Adventure_with_Scientists), for reasons unknown. Which is a good thing, for those who are not yet tired of pirates (such as myself.)
Even if one is, The Pyrates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pyrates) is a good use of one's reading time.
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Both of those actually sound pretty interesting.
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Holy god, I missed the mention of P&P&Z and S&S&SM. Those are also terrible. I wouldn't read them if I had read every other book in existence.
Okay, I guess since I am just sitting here dissing books I should say something else.
I am trying to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but the writing style Eggers uses is exactly like the style of a friend of mine so I keep reading it and being like UGH THIS NEVER HAPPENED TO HIM. Then again, the foreword says to pretend it is about someone else, so...?
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You have no idea how sick some of us are of this pop-culture Zombie meme. Jesus, fuck, enough already.
Protip: The book wasn't for you.
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World War Z is fucking awful. just fucking awful. worst money I ever spent. every fucking character puts things in quotes like they're being sarcastic or something. they all effectively speak with the same voice. it's maddening.
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ding ding ding
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You have no idea how sick some of us are of this pop-culture Zombie meme. Jesus, fuck, enough already.
Protip: The book wasn't for you.
You'll note that I didn't buy it.
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jesus christ i'm glad it's not just me
i remember reading nothing but praise for world war z and i think i managed to get like four or five vignettes in before never reading it again
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I've got nothing against the thing on paper, I just don't think zombies translate into literature very well.
Or maybe I reserve dead trees as a sanctified holy ground from the sort of ironic camp I forcefeed myself in every other form of media.
I fully admit that I derive pleasure from being a pompous douche on this point.
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I liked World War Z. :shrug:
Fuck you, I am defining "zombie" a very specific way and will then spend half the book calling you retarded if your definition differed from mine. Mine's right.
Also assuming you don't have a link to the author shouting people down as dumb, it's probably vital in a fictitious but playing it kinda straight setting like this to set standards that you adhere to.
You have no idea how sick some of us are of this pop-culture Zombie meme. Jesus, fuck, enough already.
That Zombie Romance movie is gonna rule.
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Feh, the whole Zombies + Something Else trend peaked with Shaun of the Dead.
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I haven't actually read the book, but the audiobook of World War Z was excellent.
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That Zombie Romance movie is gonna rule.
Only if it's called WILD ZERO and has been out for many years already.
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Wild Zero and Shaun of the Dead are the only zombie movies I can stand to watch.
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you should probably go see zombieland
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You gotta get some 28 Days Later up ins
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I picked up Dean Koontz "Alive and Dead" a few days ago. Finished it yesterday. It's a new-age Frankenstein Trilogy that had the 3rd in the series be held off because it's set in New Orleans and was set to be released during the Katrina tragedy.
Maybe I'm a bit colored on the subject, but I waited years for it to be released. So it wasn't as good as I expected. Remembering back to the first two, and rereading them... Yeah, the 3rd is a huge disappointment.
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I soley starting reading Codex Alera because someone told they made a bet Jim Butcher couldn't write a book that was Last Legion/Roman Legionnaires/Late Roman Empire + Pokemon.*
So anyway, Book 1 is rather slow after the book is started with three backstabs. We talk about Rural Farmboy Hero and the wonders of animal domestication and furies (re: pokemon). But after the hilariously blatant pokemon fight at 65% completion, it basically descends into pretty fun [spoiler]battles with the native american/mongol hordes, inexplicable Totally Not Aliens[/spoiler] and general all-around things actually happening.
Book 2 is actually better story-wise with politics, fight'ins, and never really slows down (for me) like Book 1 did. Also Rural Farm- Tavi isn't a chore to read. And thank god, because he's the main character.
I liked it better, despite the lack of pokemon fights because apparently cityfolk don't name theirs and run around acting like wizards. They are lame.
Wiki tells me that the series is almost done and they're "short" in the modern sense. So I should have some good reads unless it becomes inexplicably terrible.
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Perdido Street Station takes us to a wonderful world of Evil Dystopic Victorian Fantasy London/New Crobuzon where convicts are turned into ironic cyborgs ("Remade"), sorcery has been industrialized ("Thaumaturgic engines"), and voting is determined by lottery (or if you pay the state a fee and twirl your mustache).
Despite this, it's actually presented very well and Miéville's prose is good at saying "this is actually horrifying" and having you believe it. The actual plot only starts halfway through and before that it's the cast and how their seemingly inane activities will doom us all. Which is quite interesting as the city (book has a map of it) is a very good set of legos for the characters mess around in. And be brutally killed by, since his books don't share main characters.
I've been meaning to start reading his stuff, actually. But blahbleh lazy.
Also, since this is rather bloggish, my library got me the one with the crap cover.
*The bet part may be a lie.
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If you enjoy Mieville, I also forward Jeff Vandermeer's Cities of Saints and Madmen and (with some trepidation) M. John Harrison's Viriconium cycle. Like Mieville, Vandermeer deals with grotesque, quasi-historical societies that use the trappings of the fantastic toward different, more visceral ends. (Vandermeer edited an anthology called The New Weird that tries to collect this fantasy-horror-with-social-undertones under a genre umbrella. Also enjoyable.) Vandermeer sometimes reads like a paranoid academic, sometimes like a feral myconid-hunter, and sometimes like Pratchett gone straight.
Harrison, on the other hand, is the Tolkien of alienation and decay. Or the anti-Tolkien, as he's famously against fantasy writers who provide their settings with so much background that one could write an encyclopedia/RPG supplement about them. He prefers dream imagery, shifting streets, and uncertain squalor. I keep the Tolkien comparison though, because he spends pages talking about the sky, or metal-tinged alkaline bogs that have formed around the remains of mad cultures past. His prose verges on the poetic, which often makes exact sequences of events difficult to discern. In short, dude's a High Modernist.
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I just finished Cooking Dirty by Jason Sheehan. He paints images and captures feelings so vividly, it gives me flashbacks to all of the kitchen jobs I've had. It's a memoir about his life as a line cook. I didn't think it was autobiographical at first, since it seemed so... dramatic. Anyone who's worked in a busy kitchen during a dinner rush knows what kind of controlled chaos goes on. The author's really good at conveying that feeling.
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So I'm reading The Gods of Mars, and it's pretty good until John Carter's kid shows up. Now I can't read it without thinking WHY WOULD ANYONE GIVE THEIR CHILD SUCH A DUMB NAME
Seriously, it's like ERB went 60 years into the future, and stole Transformers' naming conventions.
Everything else is pretty aces, though. Well, except for the whole racism thing.
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I meant to read The Neverending Story last month but it didn't happen. I'm not doing so good at it this month either.
I will tell you though that the movie handled Artax's death way, way better than the book did. Like it was a major transformational plot point in the film, but in the book it happens on page 6 and Artax is a talking horse like Mister Ed and there is no emotional gravity to the scene at all.
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One of my favorite books is Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe. During a recent visit to the bookstore, I saw she had another book out. It's called The Book of Heroes.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
This is the most passive book I have ever read. It didn't help that she felt the need to interject terms here and there and use them over and over and over.
And after reading as far as I have, I am pretty sure that a lot of people would struggle to following what's going on. Not that she jumps around. At all.
Just a very strangely worded book.
I still like it though. So I guess that is a credit to the author.
:nyoro~n:
(Or I am a great reader?)
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Sorry, I engrished that into "Great Leader" and I wanted to ask if the cover was red.
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Maybe it's just boring.
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I'm reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.
It's the amazing story of a young man whose mother is killed by vampires, swears revenge, and somehow ends up becoming President of the United States.
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I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman a few weeks ago. It's best described as "Harry Potter if Hogwarts was a college instead of middle/high school, with a little Narnia mixed in". It starts out pretty good! Annnnd the last 20% of the book or so kinda screwed the pooch for me, but I still enjoyed it all around.
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And Another Thing is pretty much what you expect: it's got a couple of good bits and a whole lot of blandness in-between.
"Just like the LAST two books," some wag pipes up.
Well no, because there's nothing here approaching the sparkling brilliance of Wonko the Sane or the clever complexity of the Guide Mark 2's plot. (Oh, and as for the Guide Mark 2...it just sort of goes away in the second chapter. Which is pretty much exactly what Adams would have done after writing himself into a corner, but not as funny.) Where Adams meandered, Colfer plods; the plot's a whole lot more focused than Adams's tended to be, but its frequent Guide tangents aren't as good and mostly revolve around Colfer working in more pun names than a Carmen Sandiego game. (There is a cheese worshipper named Aseed Preflux, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz has a son named Constant Mown, and we find out that Wowbagger's first name is Bow.)
Colfer never quite seems to know what to do with Arthur or Ford, but he puts together satisfying character arcs for Trillian, Zaphod, and, in particular, Random. I guess writing teenagers is his usual beat; he does quite a good job here (and in fact it was his cover blurb where he explained that writing for adults is a lot like writing for teenagers except he doesn't use the phrases "It's not my fault!" and "None of you people get me!" quite as much that made me smile enough to actually read the book) and frankly he should probably go back to doing his own thing.
It's not a bad book by any means, but Douglas Adams is irreplaceable, and Colfer would be better off doing his own thing than trying to fill those very large shoes.
Because really, of all the up-and-coming writers I've read in the past decade, the one who reminded me the most of Douglas Adams is Charles Stross -- and his writing is absolutely nothing LIKE Adams's, at all.
I think that's rather the point: do your own thing and let the Hitchhiker's Trilogy be.
And if you really want the upbeat, nobody-dies-after-all ending that Adams purportedly wanted to write, the closest you're ever going to come is the Dirk Maggs radio adaptation, not the sixth book.
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Blood Meridian is the only book I've ever read in my adult life that has made me physically uncomfortable. Saying I "loved" or even "liked" it is not really accurate but Cormac McCarthy's genius in prose is undeniable. To see him describe the world in Blood Meridian is to forget, for a moment, that anything good has ever come of it.
I started reading American Gods and now I am certain that Neil Gaiman is Dan Brown for nerdy dudes.
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It's really hard for me to want to read a McCarthy novel due to the fact that it will achieve nothing but to genuinely, purely make me feel terrible.
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It's hard for me to want to read a McCarthy novel due to the fact that the last one I read was pretty terrible. All The Pretty Horses was a thoroughly generic story wrapped in insufferable prose. And yes, I'm gonna harp on the punctuation - it is the most fundamental sacrifice of readability for style, which is never okay. Making your book physically difficult to read, for no purpose except to get people to comment on how you made your book physically difficult to read, does not make you a genius, it makes you a horse's ass.
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I want this so bad (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603800964/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp)
I might have to go spend all the money I was trying to save for a trip.
Not because I like Star Wars that much but because I like QUALITY that much.
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Not clicking. Describe what you're linking to or GTFO.
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Star Wars Jedi Text book bible thing?
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That's not a holocron ::(:
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Not clicking. Describe what you're linking to or GTFO.
I DID click on it and I still can't tell what the hell that thing's supposed to be.
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Re-read Tigana on a whim after what, 14 years? Still good. Appreciated emotional and political nuances more than when I was a teenager. Also, somehow forgot how much fucking is in this book. Possibly appreciated that about as much as when I was a teenager.
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I liked Guy Kay when I was quite young. I'll always respect him for being the stand-up dude who helped Christopher Tolkien, but man, his books are totally unreadable to me now.
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Product Description
The Jedi Path, Fully Illustrated, with Removable Features and a Mechanical Vault
With the push of a button, the doors of the vault open in a wash of light and Star Wars sound effects. The inner platform rises, revealing this exclusive edition of The Jedi Path.
This ancient training manual, crafted by early Jedi Masters, has educated and enlightened generations of Jedi. It explains the history and hierarchy of the Jedi Order, and what Jedi must know to take their place as defenders of the peace in the galaxy—from mastery of the Force to the nuances of lightsaber combat.
Passed down from Master to Padawan, the pages of this venerable text have been annotated by those who have held it, studied it, and lived its secrets. From Yoda and Luke Skywalker to Count Dooku and Darth Sidious, they have shaped the content of the book by leaving mementos tucked within the pages, tearing out pages, and adding their personal experiences as tangible reminders of the lessons they’ve learned.
Through wars and rebellion, only a single copy of this manual has survived. It is now passed on to you.
The ancient Masters who wrote the text: Fae Coven, Grand Master and head of the Jedi Council; Crix Sunburris, Jedi Ace starfighter pilot; Restelly Quist, Jedi Chief Librarian; Skarch Vaunk, Jedi Battlemaster and lightsaber expert; Bowspritz, Jedi Biologist and expert on the Living Force; Sabla-Mandibu, Jedi Seer and Holocron expert; Morrit Ch’gally, Jedi Recruiter; Gal-Stod Slagistrough, Jedi leader of the Agricultural Corps.
Jedi who added personal commentary: Yoda, Thame Cerulian, Count Dooku, Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano, Darth Sidious, and Luke Skywalker.
Removable features: A letter tracing the book’s history, a severed Padawan braid, a metal Jedi Credit medallion, a Jedi starfighter patch, a burned poster of the Jedi Code, a map of the Jedi Temple, a lightsaber diagram sketched on the back of a napkin from Dex’s Diner, and a note on the missing pages torn from the book by a Sith.
Created in collaboration with Lucasfilm—along with an acclaimed Star Wars author and revered Star Wars illustrators—this volume provides new insights into the history and lore of the Jedi Order while introducing never-before-seen ships, creatures, characters, and details about how one trains to become a Jedi.
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I liked Guy Kay when I was quite young. I'll always respect him for being the stand-up dude who helped Christopher Tolkien, but man, his books are totally unreadable to me now.
Urrrrgh, I'll say. I tried reading The Summer Tree a few years back. A Chapters employee recommended it to me when I was on my way to my parents' house. NEVER AGAIN
I gave it to Silversong in a PDS :3c
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Tell me about it. The entire Finovar Tapestry is like some kind of terrifying Emo Nerd Catalcysm.
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Just finished Foer's Everything is Illuminated, which I picked up on account of liking his more recent Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's got some good bits, but overall, it wasted way more of my time on way more stupid bullshit that I should've put up with.
Every chapter in the book is about one of three plot lines:
(1) Foer's fictional history of a Jewish community in the Ukraine from the 1700's-1941. This is the actual decent part of the book, wherein we get really fucking stupid narrative excuses forcing the main characters to
:deal:
Like we have a loving husband, just married, getting a sawblade lodged in his head, causing him to uncontrollably go into fits of abusive rage on his wife, at random times. There will then follow a long and beautifully-written sequence where the wife tries to find a way to live with her husband in spite of this terrible thing. Such things happen basically every chapter to every main character. It's forced as hell, but it gets Foer writing about what he wants to write about, and that's usually worth it.
(2) This retarded modern-day wacky roadtrip where the author self-inserts himself as a man trying to find the woman who saved his father from the holocaust. He flies to the Ukraine and hires two wacky Ukrainians and their shitty car with their wacky dog and they argue a lot in broken English (which is supposed to be so, so fucking funny) and basically every Ukrainian they meet is casually anti-semitic (which is supposed to be so, so fucking funny) and holy fuck are these chapters a waste of time.
(3) One of the two Ukrainians exchanges letters with the author, using the wrong words constantly because his English is not very good and basically just constantly showing off how ignorant and naive he and his family are of everything (which is supposed to be v. funny and v. clever because he uses unexpected vocabulary!!!!!!!!!!!!). There are perhaps three things he says during the course of the book that are profound and interesting, and naturally, Foer immediately feels the need to balance things out by following up with the dumbest fucking statement a wacky foreigner could make.
It's supposed to be this towering achievement of post-modern Jewish-American literature, but plot-jumping bullshit aside, it turns out to be a holocaust story wherein the Nazis show up to the town, mercilessly antagonize and kill everyone, and leave them to dealwithitdogg. This is the oldest and most fucking tired Jewish theme in the book, and good god am I sick of them milking this thing for drama when they have literally nothing new or remotely interesting to say about it all. The take-away from this is that the Nazis were pure evil and It Is Bad When Violence Happens To Innocent People.
fffffffffffffffffffffffff I wasted so much time on this goddamn book
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Whenever I read any book that seems like a waste of time after the fact, I just reassure myself that it's not The Wheel of Time.
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I read all 3 Steig Larsson books recently and they were pretty good. But hell if the first part of the first book took me like two months to get through because it was so freaking boring.
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Finished up McCarthy's The Road a week back and found myself enjoying it a lot, lot more than I'd expected. It is as depressing as you'd expect, and there's a lot of logistical bits, but more than often enough it is just fascinating and utterly beautiful. The way he removes society's history and focuses on just the man and the son's creation of it is genuinely gripping.
The movie version felt like it could not possibly tell the real story here, and so we just got survival.
Started on Matterhorn after that. It's slow, but it's been a real good read so far.
No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares. It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away.
ALSO: Time has only intensified my contempt for Foer!
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(http://i52.tinypic.com/14qov5.jpg)
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It's not exactly a book but it sort of fits here.
I started reading The Salvation War, and let me tell you, it is laughable. If you really want to read it, google it. I quit after the first chapter. How to describe it though...
Okay. Imagine the Left Behind series. Only flip-flop it so that it's a screed against Christianity. Layer on a heaping helping of "Humanity, Fuck Yeah" from Heinlein's Starship Troopers. And finally, inject it with Tom Clancy-esque fetishization for military technology and terminology.
Oh yeah, and it's got a rabid fan-following that rivals Twilight in its intensity and capability for butthurt.
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I hope they make a video game out of it. There's been a big empty spot in my life ever since the Xenosaga series ended.
Anyway. Been reading The Narcissism Epidemic (http://www.narcissismepidemic.com/index.html). Good stuff if you're into psychology and sociology.
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Ted Chiang's Stories of your life and others is an amazing collection of short stories.
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Koah elaborate
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Koah elaborate
The general premise is that society, on the whole, is becoming more narcissistic, and that's bad because it leads to something I like to call Writing Checks Your Ass Can't Cash Syndrome: Everyone overestimates their own abilities and thinks they're better/smarter/more attractive/whatever than they really are, and when something big comes along (like, say, what happened with Enron) they end up fucking up something fierce because they didn't have nearly enough of a grasp of the situation as someone more humble and competent, albeit less outspoken. Plus it leads to an entire generation of egotistical children with major entitlement issues who expect more than they're due and will probably end up repeating the same mistakes as their forefathers for the same reasons.
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So just this general manufactured confidence. I get the feeling this is made worse by the fact that what was smart enough for a particular system or expertise like twenty/thirty years back is not close to what's needed nowadays as things've become steadily more complex
ALSO: dude word on the street is that you stone cold punched out a cyberdemon is this the case
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I've read ozens of books. I love books. I just started the Sword of Truth series with Wizard's First Rule (which is the truest rule ever) and can't wait to check these others out. Apparently the timeline is thus:
Debt of Bones (Prequel to Wizard's First about the [spoiler]Barrier going up[/spoiler] which I might read next)
Wizard's First Rule
Stone of Tears
Blood of the Fold
Temple of the Winds
Soul of the Fire
Faith of the Fallen
The Pillars of Creation
Naked Empire
Chainfire
Phantom
Confessor
The Omen Machine (coming soon ?)
The Law of Nines ([spoiler]Takes place hundreds of years later in a parallel dimension?[/spoiler])
Is there a shark-jumping book, or some horrible fact that Terry Goodkind's management team has politely glossed over? I don't want to get six books in and suddenly go, "I'm not doing this anymore." because of something every real book worm should know.
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I was turned off the Sword of Truth series by the furious enthusiasm of several unfortunate acquaintances. I don't know that there's anything actually wrong with them, but I can't give them a fair shake.
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Stop reading after you're done with Wizard's First Rule.
It's fairly decent fantasy boilerplate, but the characters do tend to ramble on about things, since the main character knows as much as the audience about magic and history. It gets especially silly when [spoiler]the villain is dying near the end and has a conversation with the wizard Zedd about Richard's ancestry.[/spoiler] It's clear that the first book was intended to stand on its own. Afterwards, Terry Goodkind slides into self-contradiction and thinly-veiled objectivist tracts.
Right around Naked Empire is where it's plain that he's disappeared up Ayn Rand's ass, thanks to a scene where the main character slaughters a group of pacifists for their "hatred of moral clarity." His words, not mine.
I was never sure why there were so many copies at the local used bookstore until I read about that scene.
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Terry Goodkind will tell anyone who asks that he doesn't write fantasy, no sir. He writes deep novels of philosophical reach. Which, of course, no fantasy novel can be.
* There is a special reason for this: Ayn Rand, the sci-fi author that he writes his Author Tract in support of, loathed fantasy. Seriously, she hated it with the boiling intensity of a thousand suns. Therefore, since Goodkind knows that he is of course writing 'correct' books, they cannot possibly be fantasy in his mind.
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i enjoyed them up through around pillars of creation. Faith of the Fallen is pretty much full on "capitalism is better than communism" screed but I still enjoyed reading it. Depending on how much you get sucked in if you read that far you might just have to finish the rest as I did.
And while I don't remember that scene exactly, hadn't the "pacifists" just lethally poisoned him?
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Afterwards, Terry Goodkind slides into self-contradiction and thinly-veiled objectivist tracts.
In other words, Guild will love it.
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I only like my own stupid bullshit.
I agree w/Buge... First Rule is a good book! and now I face Soul/fire Faith and Pillars with markedly less enthusiasm, having felt a certain gestalt is missing since Stone/tears page 1. I did like the [spoiler]sisters, but mord sith are approaching Piers Anthony-level cutesy entourage territory and I'm dissappointed in how often TG relies on brutal rape scenes[/spoiler] rather than, idk, subtlety or imagination...
ya ill finish these
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Someone told me I could easily skip Blood of the Fold and Faith of the Fallen, but so far I'm feeling better and better as I read into the series, honestly.
In what is the best bit since [spoiler]Verna and Richard's discussion on betrayal[/spoiler], it is revealed that [spoiler]Jigang uses welfare[/spoiler] to destroy a civilization before conquering it, like something out of 'right wing' nightmares. I like Nicci as a [spoiler]main character. She's that emotionless femme fatal villain I love to see fall hopelessly in love with a Paladin hero as he wins her heart with his unwillingness to harm her[/spoiler]. Not that that's what's going to happen. I have no idea yet since I'm on page 101. Either that or it will be a [spoiler]repeat of Denna.[/spoiler] Either way, good, good stuff.
This series' engine is the middle-ground common sense of the main characters contrasting the environment's horribly convoluted social ideals... the result being that the reader is forced to see extremes in their own lives.
I think my favorite thing about this series is how the author cares nothing for reality or the reader's disbelief-suspension mechanism. People who lack those shouldn't read fiction anyway. I can't wait to see if they ever kill the Keeper (or bother?!). This kind of writing is what makes television work.
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Best part, when [spoiler]Zedd plans a wedding to distract the troops.[/spoiler]
Now it's onto books on tape or PDFs since I can't find the next one. Apparently this one [spoiler]leaves Richard behind, which is good since he's become a messiah at this point[/spoiler] and it's best to use him sparingly, imho.
This series reminds me of greeting cards. It doesn't fucking matter what goes inside, as long as it's not too awful.
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Came down with a case of the gay recently and hunkered down with The Magic of Ordinary Days by Ann Howard Creel. I came in expecting a heart-wrenching tear-soaked romance and all I got was a stern talking-to about Japanese and German internment in World War 2. I mean, this just sucks right now. The main character is just a straight-up 21st century woman constantly judging folks from 1945-era midwest, appalled that people have the horrible horrible opinions they do. Honestly, the way she writes the era, it was everyone's conscious choice to believe as they did - no inherited opinion or misinformation or even laziness/apathy.
fffffffffff I'm ditching this immediately and moving on to Eating the Dinosaur, because holy hell do I need a good read.
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Please tell me it includes
1. dinosaurs
2. eating
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Buge just buy it and read it it is good
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http://shelf-life.ew.com/2011/03/03/dance-with-dragons-date/
:omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg:
:omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg: :omg:
:omg:
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You fucker. I had just come here to post that.
Though I saw it on georgerrmartin.com (http://www.georgerrmartin.com/if-update.html).
"Hey, girlfriend."
"Huh?"
"There's a release date for A Dance with Dragons."
"Wow, cool. When is it?"
"July."
"Yay...wait, this year?"
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Just finished up Halting State by Charlie Stross.
The hook is that there's a robbery in a virtual world, a bank heist in a fantasy MMO -- something that should be impossible and requires a major hack of the game. Contrary to the "bank robbery, but with orcs and dragons!" setup, it's not as wacky or as fun as the Laundry novels, it's straight-up hard, not-too-distant-future SF; William Gibson didn't get the cover blurb just because he's a name.
Charlie's not faking it, either; he's got a CS degree and when he looks at what MMORPG's and AR could be like a decade from now, he's not just playing with the "OMG there are terrorists in Second Life!" media sensationalism (though that DOES form a big part of the basis of the book), he's got a very thorough technical explanation for how his world works, in terms of clients, servers, authentication, distributed networking, and dev tools. But most importantly, he understands the relationship between gamers and games.
And therein lies the book's most interesting conceit: it's told in the second person, in present tense, and the POV rotates among three different principal characters. It's a book about role-playing games where you, the reader, play the roles of the three main characters. And he very deliberately starts off with Sue, a lesbian cop with a ridiculous Scottish accent and the character who has the least in common with the target audience of the book, and introduces Jack, the recently-unemployed game designer, last.
I don't know how much a layman would enjoy the book -- he throws out jargon like "griefing" and "digital signing" without explanation (or a glossary like in the Laundry books) -- but that contributes to the feeling that hey, this book is for us.
Also, he's got a sequel coming called Rule 34.
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The title sounds like a deliberate a reference to the Halting problem (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Halting_problem) from CS.
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oh yeah i remember that book
the last 5% of it is extremely stupid, but i agree that his MMOG/AR speculation is totally bad
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I didn't like Halting State's second-person mode of writing. It's jarring to "be" a character you can't relate to or control.
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the last 5% of it is extremely stupid
I wouldn't say "extremely stupid" but I'll agree it's not up to the rest of the book. It almost feels like he's got two different books squished together in there.
I didn't like Halting State's second-person mode of writing. It's jarring to "be" a character you can't relate to or control.
I think that's kinda the point.
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...was going to add, at the end of the post, that while Jack gets fleshed out a bit by the end so that he's not just Reader Surrogate, Sue's backstory basically amounts to a stock origin from a BioWare game, but I didn't because I couldn't think of anywhere to go with that.
Up until I realized that her wife's name is Mary. :facepalm:
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So Charlie Stross's ideal is to be a Scottish lesbian cop?
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He settled; his ideal was a Scottish lesbian who double-enrolled (http://chainsawsuit.com/tag/two-cops/) in police academy.
(Every time I try to type "enroll," it comes out as "entroll.")
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Today I went to the local bookstore with a list of two books I wanted, as well as three authors I'd take anything by.
They had nothing from any of the three authors, neither of the books, and one of the books they couldn't even order a copy from a respectable publisher.
All the hipsters can go fuck themselves - having indie tastes sucks.
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Here. (http://www.abebooks.com/)
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Right, but I was trying to support my friendly local independent bookseller.
So much for that.
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Yes, and I'd like to support my friendly local games store, except replace 'friendly' with 'grouchy,' and 'games' with 'the same goddamned 40k models and Magic cards that were there a month ago.'
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Today I went to the local bookstore with a list of two books I wanted, as well as three authors I'd take anything by.
They had nothing from any of the three authors, neither of the books, and one of the books they couldn't even order a copy from a respectable publisher.
All the hipsters can go fuck themselves - having indie tastes sucks.
Never mind indie; I couldn't find a copy of fucking Clash of Kings at the local library, the local indie bookshop, OR Bookman's. Did my best, guys; looks like it's $23 at Amazon for the first four books for me and I'll find somebody who wants the copy of Game of Thrones I already have.
Oh yeah, I read that Game of Thrones thing everybody keeps talking about. Devoured it, really; I can certainly understand the appeal.
Also, are "RR" the ideal middle initials for a fantasy author? Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work.
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Someday I'll finish Midnight's Children.
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(http://anotherdimension.pyoko.org/chroniclesofconan.jpg)
Every Conan story Howard ever wrote, including unfinished manuscripts and the two novels, in a single leatherbound tome of power. I could seriously crush my enemies with this thing.
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(http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c4/c21777.jpg)
:mystery:
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Wait, which one of those is written in human blood?
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what do you mean which one
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I MEAN WHICH ONE.
DO YOU WANT HUMAN BLOOD TO LOSE ITS MARKET VALUE?
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I now own three copies of Walden, and I've never read it even once.
:tldr:
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And I hope you never have to read that sanctimonious, privileged garbage.
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I think it's worth reading. And understanding the context of Thoreau's constant lies by omission.
Also, what the fuck is his deal with woodchucks and sitting on pumpkins?
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(http://0.tqn.com/d/german/1/0/w/T/FreudCigar200.jpg)(http://data:image/jpg;base64,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)
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Go The Fuck To Sleep, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson (http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B00551W570&qid=1308282691&sr=1-1)
Also, it's free.
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it's like i'm seeing double
four samuel l jacksons!
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Creating the innocent killer (http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm)
An essay on Ender's Game, which I thought was quote good!
(the essay, not the book)
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Loose Connections: The terrible secret of Tom Bombadil (http://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html)
Hee hee~
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that bombadil thing is awesome
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He has another one where he explains that R2 and Chewbacca were actually the top agents of the Rebellion and the real power behind the movies (see "previous entry"). It's pretty funny.
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I'm about two thirds through Crime and Punishment right now. It's getting really fascinating, but gat dang are there are tons of Russians beating their wives, husbands and children in there. Forget the stupid murder, there's domestic abuse behind every other door in that country.
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When you base your subculture around alcoholism that's sort of a given.
...
Wait, I forgot I'm Irish.
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Well, there, the wives often give as good as they get. Sometimes even preemptively.
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So I got Dancing with Eternity, by Sniper voice actor and Ellen McLain's husband (something Lowrie)
Basic plot: In the 4Xth century, multi-star system-spanning humanity revolves around two technologies - the "reboot", an expensive procedure that de-ages an elder human to young adulthood, and the "net", which connects nearly every human being on the universe with no lag and allows for a strange social-powered FTL travel. The obligatory burned-out old hand, mysterious rich dame, burly dude, funny engineer guy, plucky engineer chick and mysterious past young lady must explore the cosmos for... well, what they're looking for is cleared about 90% through the book.
The book is very much a first-time effort (oh god so much exposition) and I found two misused "you're"s, so take note. It's also very much an "old writer" book (lowrie is over 50, I understand) in its reflections about loss, success, and etc. It's not really a book about the unknowables of space, it's more about the good, bad, horrible and desperate things humans have always done to humans and will contine doing upon the end of time.
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Like smashing each other over the head with jars of pee.
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Anne Rice criticizes Stephanie Meyer (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/twilight-saga-vampire-stephenie-meyer-anne-rice-255909)
:wakka:
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Cripple Fight! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqw1FI1hfJA#)
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If Ann Rice is cremated after she dies birds will explode due to an increase of lousy books that spawned a movie where Rosie O'Donnell dresses in dominatrix and of course Rice.
I bought and read Destination: Void on kindle and it's an interesting read if you can take heavy technical jargon and a somewhat outdated interpretation of computers. I'm surprised that I read it all on an iPod touch.
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If Ann Rice is cremated after she dies birds will explode due to an increase of lousy books that spawned a movie where Rosie O'Donnell dresses in dominatrix and of course Rice.
I bought and read Destination: Void on kindle and it's an interesting read if you can take heavy technical jargon and a somewhat outdated interpretation of computers. I'm surprised that I read it all on an iPod touch.
I've actually been doing a lot of reading on my iPhone lately simply because I always have the damn thing on me. I'm looking forward to actually getting my Hot New Kindle later this month so I have something easier on the eyes for the evenings though.
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If Ann Rice is cremated after she dies birds will explode due to an increase of lousy books that spawned a movie where Rosie O'Donnell dresses in dominatrix and of course Rice.
I bought and read Destination: Void on kindle and it's an interesting read if you can take heavy technical jargon and a somewhat outdated interpretation of computers. I'm surprised that I read it all on an iPod touch.
I've actually been doing a lot of reading on my iPhone lately simply because I always have the damn thing on me. I'm looking forward to actually getting my Hot New Kindle later this month so I have something easier on the eyes for the evenings though.
It's fine on my eyes with the words zoomed in, I like that I can get obscure out of print books though kindle but I'm not sure I'd spend 79$ on a device made specifically for it.
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Last I checked, Anne Rice vampires turn into -porcelain- after a long period of time.
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It's fine on my eyes with the words zoomed in, I like that I can get obscure out of print books though kindle but I'm not sure I'd spend 79$ on a device made specifically for it.
I started thinkin about the Kindle when I saw the new Neal Stephenson novel at the bookstore; it's like $40 and about six inches thick. Even if I was going to shell out that much money, I'd never read it, because I do all my reading on the bus or at school or during lunch, and I just won't carry around a book that big. (That's why I never got around to reading my copy of Anathem.)
But the Kindle version is $15. Four books like that, and it's paid for itself.
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It's also a matter of sheer convenience. I've bought a lot of books I probably never would have gotten around to reading due to the ability to just go "oh, that sounds interesting, let me download the sample of the first chapter". And then when it gets to END OF SAMPLE I am all like goddamnit gotta see what happens next.
Sure, you can also do this in a bookstore but I am not a massive tool and the fucking chairs are always occupied anyway.
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John Dies at the End was a fantastic read. I recommend, it just went back into print. The reviews stating how weird it was to be horrified and laughing at the same time sound like marketing going wild, but it's actually not that far from the truth.
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I started thinkin about the Kindle when I saw the new Neal Stephenson novel at the bookstore; it's like $40 and about six inches thick. Even if I was going to shell out that much money, I'd never read it, because I do all my reading on the bus or at school or during lunch, and I just won't carry around a book that big. (That's why I never got around to reading my copy of Anathem.)
But the Kindle version is $15. Four books like that, and it's paid for itself.
My girlfriend's talked about getting a Kindle so she doesn't have to lug around her textbooks, but from what she's seen even the ones that are available in the format are on a "rent" basis and expire after you're done with the class. She is not interested in that model and wants to own her textbooks.
I'm so proud.
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- Buy a physical copy.
- search([book title], [pdf|epub|mobi|whatever]);
- Hopefully be protected under digital backup law.
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John Dies at the End was a fantastic read. I recommend, it just went back into print. The reviews stating how weird it was to be horrified and laughing at the same time sound like marketing going wild, but it's actually not that far from the truth.
I second this. A genuinely good read.
A few months ago somebody mentioned an asian author and their series of books, but I can't for the life of me find the post or even remember anything about it other than I'd intended to pick one of them up and give them a read. If any of you mooks know what the shit I'm referring to, please tell me! Author may have been female, but I'm not sure.
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It might've been www.olimu.com/Notes/ChinaBooklist.htm (http://www.olimu.com/Notes/ChinaBooklist.htm), but that link no longer appears to be working?
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I bought my Kindle since it was cheaper than purchasing (in four or more enormous physical volumes) the single public-domain book that I wanted to read at the time. Everything else has been gravy.
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Ouch. Was it the Mahabharata?
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Water Margin?
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Ouch. Was it the Mahabharata?
Yes. I'm quite liking it so far.
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Kindle has an app for basically every portable device that grants access to the same library, so I'm not understanding all these comments of "I need a Kindle to read <x>."
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Well, if your portable device is in fact a dedicated ebook reader and not, say, a tablet, then Amazon is pretty much going out of its way to lock its competitors out. Or if you've got a (non-Android) Linux machine, you're pretty well screwed there, too.
Also, this "library" deal they're doing now only works on Kindles, not on the Kindle reader on other platforms.
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Kindle has an app for basically every portable device that grants access to the same library, so I'm not understanding all these comments of "I need a Kindle to read <x>."
A nice 6-inch e-ink device is much more comfortable for recreational long-form reading than a phone-size LCD or stationary monitor.
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Yeah, that. The fact that Kindle is the e-ink device that I'm getting is a factor of my having used the app up until now so that I retain the library I have built up.
Well that and my sister tried a Kobo and a Sony reader, both of which ended up being buggy pieces of shit for her until she finally returned both, got a Kindle, and has never had a problem since.
Oh yeah, books. I'm currently reading Robocalypse (http://www.amazon.com/Robopocalypse-Novel-Daniel-H-Wilson/dp/0385533853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320498505&sr=8-1) which is basically World War Z for the war against Skynet. It's pretty good so far!
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Well it seemed like you guys considered the Kindle to be a prerequisite to reading Kindle books, instead of having a number of amazing technical qualities that I have talked about at length. I was wondering if one of us had missed something.
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So Neil Gaiman's been pushing Amazon's Audiobook Creation Exchange (http://www.acx.com/) quite a bit lately.
Here's the idea: we're now living in a world where audiobooks can be packaged, sold, delivered, and carried on the cheap. Damn near everybody in the first world has a mechanism for transmitting ten hours of audio directly from the seller onto a device that fits in their pocket. Audiobooks may still be a niche market, but the overhead of the twentieth century is completely gone. All you need is somebody with a book and some recording equipment, and a website to sell the finished product.
There are also a hell of a lot of books in the world, and most of them don't have audiobooks. Moreover, there are a hell of a lot of people who could be making those audiobooks and turning a profit at it.
So ACX is a pretty straightforward solution -- rightsholder puts book on list soliciting an audio recording, reader auditions for it.
I'm quite enamored of the whole idea and think I'll put some auditions in. I've already found a book listed that happens to be sitting on my shelf unread; may as well give it a read and see what happens.
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Arc for reader of every book ever.
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For my birthday I received Flatland which is a classic about a square who lives on a piece of paper in a civilization of polygons and how he has come to realize that there is also a "Lineland" and "Spaceland" (that's us). I'm about halfway through it. It's pretty good! I hope to finish it by the end of the night.
I also got American Psycho, which I'm excited to read because the movie version is one of my favorite films, and the only movie that I can watch over and over again without getting tired of it.
Finally, I got 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. It's a book about a woman who gets put in a different dimension or something. I've only read one other book by Murakami (After Dark), which I absolutely loved. 1Q84 is said to be his masterpiece, and I'm excited to read it.
If I remember, I'll come back and tell you guys what I think about them when I'm done.
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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is about several things:
* The most realistic depiction I've seen of what a virtual world and the companies that run it might look like in 20 years.
* A story about 80s pop references which is itself a 80s escapist adventure (teenage kid must use his KNOWLEDGE OF 80S CULTURE to SAVE THE INTERNETS)
* Richard Garriot as Willy Wonka.
It's a bit rushed at times (I don't think Ernest Cline is a big arcade fan), and a bit too starry-eyed for anyone that has actually lived through the 80s to swallow. A nice weekend read, though.
Also, I've criticized books with depressing endings and books with happy endings. This is because I am an unpleasable jerk.
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For fun, I recently pulled out one of my old childhood books (http://www.librarything.com/work/11646257/get/). It's one of those "365 stories" books, where each story is only a few simple paragraphs (though some stories continue as a serial over three or four days), suitable for five-year olds.
The first thing is that is a Czech book, so it's actually mostly full of old eastern and central European fairy stories. Watermen, bargains with devils, lazy soldiers, the Baba Yaga and all manner of wonderfully unsuitable stories pop up throughout. And even the hopelessly conventional stories with clever peasants, talking animals, or questing princes are more far more charming than saccharine.
But the best part is hundreds and hundreds of beautiful illustrations by Czech artist Karel Franta (http://tinyurl.com/7fqxu46).
It's easy to knock off a whole month of stories in a half-hour, but even so it makes a wonderful fun bit of a change from just about any other kind of book I might read.
And... at the other end of the literary spectrum, I hear Umberto Eco has a new book out :cake:
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Holy shit, I had one of those kicking around when I was a child. I remember that cover. I wonder if Mom still has it...
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Yeah, it's basically "A Children's Book of Mike Mignola Source Material".
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Hey dudes
So a good friend of mine from the dorms and beyond just got his first novel published. Lev Grossman called it one of his most anticipated books of 2012. I am here to shill for him.
http://www.amazon.com/Rook-Novel-Daniel-OMalley/dp/0316098795 (http://www.amazon.com/Rook-Novel-Daniel-OMalley/dp/0316098795)
The first couple chapters read like Gaiman Noir. It's pretty entertaining!
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(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51003KHvtbL.jpg)(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51sZurFOEFL._SS500_.jpg)
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http://www.amazon.com/Shatnerquake-Jeff-Burk/dp/1933929820 (http://www.amazon.com/Shatnerquake-Jeff-Burk/dp/1933929820)
After a reality bomb goes off at the first ever ShatnerCon, all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner. Featuring: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane, Priceline Shatner, Cartoon Kirk, Rescue 9-1-1 Shatner, singer Shatner, and many more. No costumed con-goer will be spared in their wave of destruction, no red shirt will make it out alive, and not even the Klingons will be able to stand up to a deranged Captain Kirk with a light saber. But these Shatner- clones are about to learn a hard lesson . . . that the real William Shatner doesn't take crap from anybody. Not even himself.
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Someone I know actually has that book and has the following comments:
Nem: I've got that book, and that summary is better than the rest of the book.
Nem: Although I guess it might be worth it if you enjoy reading about people getting messily murdered.
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Hunger Games (just the first book):
I like the world and I liked the characters; it sucked me right in. The premise and pacing are top-notch; it was a page-turner.
My gripes:
1. Where are the computers? I know this is a post-apocalyptic setting, but it's not one of those "bombed back to preindustrial times" settings. The Capitol has cloaked hovercars, and there are other signs of not-too-distant future tech. So there should be computers. And even if the servers and satellites got wiped out so that there's no worldwide Internet anymore, the Capitol, at least, should have some kind of citywide network.
2. Not enough moral ambiguity. Yes, I realize that it's a YA novel, but it goes for such a pitch-black tone that it's disappointing that [spoiler]Katniss never actually has to kill anyone but the "bad guys". The entire book is overwhelmed with her considering what she'll have to do when she has to kill Peeta or Thresh or Rue -- and then Thresh and Rue are conveniently picked off by other characters, and of course she doesn't have to kill Peeta. Even the suicide pact at the end is calculated; she doesn't actualy intend for them to kill themselves, she knows that she's got the Capitol in checkmate. It's yet another one of those stories that raises questions about morality and the nature of heroism, only to give the hero a way to sidestep them rather than having to answer them.[/spoiler]
Course, I've just read the first book; it could be that these quibbles are resolved in the sequels.
I am preemptively disappointed with the movie because I know Hollywood would never make it the way it should be made: as a mockumentary composed entirely of the footage the audience watches on TV.
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I couldn't get over how fucking obtuse she was in regards to peeta throughout the entire book. It basically slaps you in the face the entire time. I found myself wanting someone to just tell her, "Bitch, what is wrong with you!"
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"Sixteen-year-old girl doesn't realize dude is totally in love with her" is the single most realistic element of the book.
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save yourself some time and just stop with the first one
seriously
please
the rest of the trilogy wiped out any goodwill i had toward the first book.
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Ah -- so it IS like The Matrix.
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Yeah, I can second what Niku said. I haven't actually read the books (though I plan on reading the first) but several good friends of mine whose opinions I have learned to trust said exactly what Niku did.
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Honestly, I have a lot of problems with the first one too (mostly what Thad said, but I'm also not really a fan of her writing in general), but the conceit alone is enough to make it worth reading. I actually hope the movies manage to smooth over the things that I don't like about the story in order to make something I can fully get behind, but hope in one hand and crap in another.
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So okay. Finished the first two Discworld books; thoroughly enjoyed and would like to read more.
Given that there are 3 dozen more of these things, it seems prudent to ask what I should read next. Should I just keep on moving through Equal Rites, or grab something from somewhere in the middle? I know City Watch seems to be his current focus, and genre mashups like "fantasy police procedural" do tend to amuse me. (Next book in my stack is Fuller Memorandum, latest of the Laundry novels, which of course mashes up eldritch horror, spy thriller, and workplace satire.)
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It really depends on whose trail you want to follow, since the thing about Discworld is that the books are loosely organized into small trilogies and sequences. If you want to read more Rincewind (although his stories kind of wear thin, since he's a self-confessed coward) go with Sourcery,
Faust Eric, Interesting Times and The Last Continent.
I highly recommend Mort.
The other books in the Death series are pretty good. Reaper Man is a bit shaky (Death is the main character in it, and he functions better as a secondary character) but once you hit Soul Music and Hogfather, things get better.
Equal Rites isn't that necessary, so I'd just go straight to the Wyrd Sisters/Witches Abroad/Lords and Ladies/Maskerade/Carpe Jugulum series.
There's a few stand-alone books in Discworld. Of those, I would say that Small Gods and The Truth are the ones most worth your time.
Okay, I've beaten around the bush long enough. The Watch novels are where his writing really shines through. Maybe it's the concept of a ragtag group of "normal" folk trying to get by in a fantasy world. Maybe it's that Lord Vetinari goes from an "off-the-peg tyrant" to a brilliant foil for the characters. If you HAD to choose a sequence to follow it would be the Watch novels.
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I think I posted this elsewhere in a thread maybe once before, but I'll do up my recommendation again.
It's up to you whether to proceed chronologically or not. It's not a bad way - you'll see how Discworld evolved in Pratchett's mind.
The main thing to understand is that there are roughly three "periods" in the Discworld series and then to decide based on that. (for background, consult publication order here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld))
There's the early period, when Discworld is still being developed. Pratchett's ideas about his world aren't set in stone and he's exploring them as much as the reader is. There are some really amazing seminal books in this period that come to define the series (i.e. Mort or Wyrd Sisters) and there are also some real clunkers (Pyramids, Moving Pictures). This period ends with Moving Pictures.
This is followed by his middle period, when he is just on all the time. When Pratchett hit his stride he simply could not write a bad Discworld book. Dureing the middle period his one-shots do not compare to the other periods (Small Gods is certainly his best one-shot and possibly is his finest book overall) and each of his recurring series (the Witches, Rincewind, the Watch, etc.) all hit their second or third book, when Pratchett is comfortable with the characters but hasn't mined them out yet, resulting in probably the best books for his franchise characters (Reaper Man, Soul Music, Witches Abroad, Men At Arms, feet of Clay, Interesting Times, etc.). This period runs from Reaper Man to maybe Feet of Clay.
The last period is the Mature period, which does kind of fall into hit-or-miss again, but avoids the extreme highs and lows of his earlier periods. Not many of the books are actually terrible (though anything involving Time Travel - Thief of Time, Night Watch - are just awful and start to wreck his own characters), but even many of the better ones feel like they whiff a bit. There are even ones that start out as good as any of his best, but end with a heartbreaking thud (Monstrous Regiment). I think he really understood his world completely at this point, but that in a way it was too familiar. In this period Pratchett stops exploring the world or it's characters and starts using them to directly comment on modern events, which makes Discworld slowly begin to feel something Bedrock does in the Flintstones. The unique fantasy feel of the world is dulled and it just becomes a platform (the Watch characters in particular become really badly overused). I truly wish he'd left off Discworld and tried something entirely new for a while, because it really feels like he fell into a rut. That said, there are still some solid, readable books in this period (Jingo, Fifth Elephant). If you really love the first period and the middle period, you might as well go on and finish some more. Just drop the ones you don't like. This period begins with Hogfather.
If you just want to read the very very best, I would recommend the following:
The Colour of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Equal Rites
Mort
Sourcery (maybe)
Wyrd Sisters
Guards! Guards!
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods
Lords and Ladies
Men at Arms
Soul Music
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Feet of Clay
Jingo
The Fifth Elephant
The Truth (maybe)
Which is 19 books out of 49.
If you really really like The Truth (which introduces the only new core character group in the late period), maybe also Going Postal or Making Money
Do NOT read Watch books after The Fifth Elephant (which mainly works because he takes away all the Watch's hard-won victories by putting them in a foreign country), they will only make you cry. The latest one - Snuff - sounds flat-out awful.
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I would agree with that, more or less, except make Guards Guards the first book. It's really the strongest of the series starters.
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I hear they've got a Watch TV series in the works; I think it sounds like a great idea.
(My fiancee seems to exclusively watch shows in the "cop show with a twist" genre. Psych, Dexter, Bones, Grimm...)
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The last period is the Mature period, which does kind of fall into hit-or-miss again, but avoids the extreme highs and lows of his earlier periods. Not many of the books are actually terrible (though anything involving Time Travel - Thief of Time, Night Watch - are just awful and start to wreck his own characters), but even many of the better ones feel like they whiff a bit. There are even ones that start out as good as any of his best, but end with a heartbreaking thud (Monstrous Regiment). I think he really understood his world completely at this point, but that in a way it was too familiar. In this period Pratchett stops exploring the world or it's characters and starts using them to directly comment on modern events, which makes Discworld slowly begin to feel something Bedrock does in the Flintstones. The unique fantasy feel of the world is dulled and it just becomes a platform (the Watch characters in particular become really badly overused). I truly wish he'd left off Discworld and tried something entirely new for a while, because it really feels like he fell into a rut. That said, there are still some solid, readable books in this period (Jingo, Fifth Elephant). If you really love the first period and the middle period, you might as well go on and finish some more. Just drop the ones you don't like. This period begins with Hogfather.
I think he's commented on how writing Watch books became more and more difficult because he'd written the characters as too competent. They've solved every crime put before them and it's difficult to give them new challenges. I think he equated it with Superman.
Okay, after a brief googling, I found this from an interview (The source page is dead, though. This is a transcript on a forum post from 2005):
The city watch, which is now quite a force to be reckoned with, represents a kind of a problem; it's like having Superman in place—there isn't actually much room for Batman until Superman is out of town for a while. It will be the sheer weight of history and geography that will probably bring Discworld to an end.
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It kills me that he could compose the thought that "sheer weight" will bring down the Discworld, without following that through to the next thought, which is that nobody was forcing him to continue writing Watch books or Discworld books at all.
Not that I ever want him to stop writing, but he used to have some other really neat stuff. I hate that that tap has long since been shut off.
But in fairness, it's incredibly tough to decide to go out (or at least slow down dramatically) when you're at the top of your game, even when you're as sharp as anything. Nowadays comfortable familiarity may be one of the things that's keeping him going.
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Mongrel is an old man who hates a familiar series going into new directions. Night Watch is amazing and what he calls the "mature" period is some of Pratchett's best work. Developed characters dealing with actual situations instead of dragon-slaying or end of the world crap. Although Snuff is pretty weak, I strongly recommend all his other newer works.
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...I am sure everyone would rather I just skipped the Superman/Batman rant and take it as read, right?
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Mongrel is an old man who hates a familiar series going into new directions. Night Watch is amazing and what he calls the "mature" period is some of Pratchett's best work. Developed characters dealing with actual situations instead of dragon-slaying or end of the world crap. Although Snuff is pretty weak, I strongly recommend all his other newer works.
I dunno. I tried reading Unseen Academicals, I really did. It just wasn't good.
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Mongrel is an old man who hates a familiar series going into new directions. Night Watch is amazing and what he calls the "mature" period is some of Pratchett's best work. Developed characters dealing with actual situations instead of dragon-slaying or end of the world crap. Although Snuff is pretty weak, I strongly recommend all his other newer works.
New directions? Anything but. They go from fantasy books with a truly unique feel to a weekly television series with a laughtrack (in the worst cases).
I really mean it with the Flintstones analogy. How is stuff like [spoiler]The clacks (i.e. the internet)[/spoiler] or [spoiler]increasing rights for "minorities"[/spoiler] anything other than a hamhanded blundering way to force "MODERN ISSUES" into what was previously a unique universe with an incredibly complex internal logic? It's not like Pratchett couldn't comment on modern issues without maintaining his carefully-built world's consistency either; he did so brilliantly in books like Small Gods.
And as for Night Watch, how can [spoiler]Old Sam Vimes going back in time and teaching Young Sam Vimes to be Sam Vimes[/spoiler] be anything other than awful. It practically destroys the magnificent character created in Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms AND is an incredibly bad cliché that (to my knowledge) has never worked in ANYTHING unless it was played for straight laughs and nothing else.
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Incredibly complex internal logic? The series started as flat out BLATANT parody, the timelines didn't even make sense because the author WASN'T paying attention, because it didn't matter to him. In Color of Magic, Ankh-Morpork is Lankhmar to the point of having its own Fafrhd and the Grey Mouser, Wyrd sisters is awesome, but it's also just a huge send up of hamlet and macbeth. I think you're worshipping his "carefully-built world's consistency" when it didn't even exist until other people came together and made maps. As far as minority rights or putting modern shit in the books go, ever since equal rites, ie the third fucking book, civil rights have been a topic. It's right there in the fucking title. Things like the clacks (which is telegraph, not internet btw) is simply a continuation of Moving Pictures and Soul Music, something he's been doing all along. Integrating and parodying modern trends in a fantastical setting.
As far as Night's Watch, I think you're just being dense. [spoiler] Vimes teaching Vimes is like, 5 percent of an amazing book, and he himself says over and over that this kid isn't him and that it's going to take 30 years of getting fucked over by life before he is. He's not time-looping himself into awesomeness, he's timelooping himself into barely staying alive. Carcer, Vetinari, and the city under the Unmentionables is an awesome story regardless of what you think of Vimes going back in time to be his own mentor.
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Yeah, it started as a blatant parody of Lankhmar (and Conan), but one of the core reasons the Discworld series became so good at all is because it quickly took on a life and identity of it's own. Which is certainly not the first time something like that happened. You can see that even in the first two books. Like what are the sea trolls and the crazy over-the-edge sequence a blind parody of exactly? Or Rincewind himeself? Or the Luggage?
When I talk about internal logic, I'm not talking map locations or timelines or whatever. If you that's what you think that's what I meant by "internal consistency" you're missing the point. I'm talking about the character and quality of the people and places that gives it that unique feel. Yes there was always some parody and social commentary mixed in there, and those are is crucial to the books too, but it's never so heavy-handed or clumsy as it gets later on. In the series' prime, the whole was much greater than sum of the parts "parodying modern trends in a fantastical setting".
But that's enough. It makes me uncomfortable as it is addressing the creative decline of a man who has a painful and legitimate reason for one, I'd rather not belabour that. I still think of him a great writer (twenty phenomenal books in one series is absolutely nothing to sneeze at) and some later missteps won't change that opinion. I could cite the fact that a couple other people here didn't disagree with me, but better that Thad read as much as he likes and decide for himself.
You also seem to be pretty mad about my opinions. So call me a moron again or whatever, but I gave my recommendations and I'm done here.
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Fuller Memorandum: Man, this book.
First of all: Laundry's not funny anymore; it's a pretty serious tonal shift from the previous books. That's because the series is building to a climax; the next book is called The Apocalypse Codex, and this one tells you what's coming right off the bat. There is a god, he is coming back, it's going to mean the end of the world -- and that's not a good thing, because this isn't Jesus or Buddha, it's an entity that thinks people are food, not friends.
And so this book is appropriately nasty. Where the first book had Bob fighting Nazis and the second had a Bond Villain, the third has him fighting cultists who seek to hasten the end times -- and that comes with all the nastiness you'd expect. To wit: this book has cannibalism and child sacrifice.
Under the circumstances, the workplace satire is much more muted. It's there, but the biggest recurring theme is that people who are under stress and working too hard make mistakes. Big mistakes.
The mystery's mostly drained out of it, too -- while Jennifer Morgue built toward a twist ending that caught me by surprise even though he'd left enough clues to figure it out, in this one he really telegraphs his punches and the two major twists are obvious. But again, that's not really the point; at this point we're into a straight-up horror novel.
And if it sounds like I'm being critical, keep that in mind -- I'm not. I was a bit shocked by the tonal shift, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book; edge of my seat. Stross is as sharp as ever, and, without giving anything away, the climax of the book involves a demonic summoning with a floating pointer -- he's still clever as hell with the whole "computational demonology" premise.
This thing is dark (and I hear Rule 34 is too). But hell, if you've read the first two, you probably want to keep on going. It continues to be a great damn series.
(Huh -- apparently I never got around to reading Overtime (http://www.tor.com/stories/2009/12/overtime).)
EDIT TO ADD: I was initially disappointed to find out that the Fuller in the title was not Buckminster Fuller, but just remembered that oh yeah, every character in the series has a name that's a reference to somebody -- Bob Howard, Pinky and the Brain, Dominique O'Brien (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_O%27Brien), James Angleton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton), and so on (with the in-universe explanation that real names carry power and so they all use pseudonyms). So yes, of course the Laundry's Fuller would be named after Buckminster Fuller.
(Knowing Stross, I'm willing to bet he's even got references mapped out for all the characters who only have one name. Andy's been in all three books but as far as I know this is the first one to connect that rather common first name to a "daffodil-haired graphic artist".)
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Well this is disappointing: I just found out that the Twenty Palaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Palaces) series has been canceled (http://www.harryjconnolly.com/blog/?p=5488) due to low sales.
I became aware of the series when the author guestblogged for Stross about a year ago; he framed it in a post which I thought was rather clever, High and Low Thrillers (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/02/high-and-low-thrillers.html). (He contrasted it to the Laundry series thus: Laundry is a High Thriller because it gives an insider's perspective of a secret government organization whose mission is to Save the World, while Twenty Palaces is a Low Thriller because it's about a guy who barely knows what's going on and whose missions are more about saving small towns than the entire world.)
To the series itself: it's about Ray Lilly, a recently-released smalltime crook. He's smart but not well-educated, and he's in way over his head; he's fallen in with a secret society dedicated to tracking down rogue magicians and stopping them (with a focus on the ones summoning "predators", your standard Lovecraftian oogly-booglies). It's in that genre that people have been calling "urban fantasy", though in actual fact the setting is small-town rather than urban.
I've read the first two books and thoroughly enjoyed them; I'm disappointed to find out the series is canceled. As it is, I recommend them; you can read chapter 1 (http://www.harryjconnolly.com/blog/?p=731) of the first book, Child of Fire, free, and the ebook version (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002PYFW9S/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=happyexposure-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002PYFW9S) is a buck (paperback (http://www.amazon.com/Child-Fire-Twenty-Palaces-Novel/dp/0345508890/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0) is $8 new, with a bunch of people selling used copies for nothin' -- buying it used isn't going to convince the publisher to make more books, but I really don't think every single person reading this post buying a new copy will either, so, y'know).
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Don't listen to Mongrel, the Watch books are great.
Another addition I would make are the two Moist von Lipwig books, Going Postal and Making Money, which are both very good, and are great Pratchett takes on civic institutions.
The two best stand alone books are easily The Truth and Small Gods. Small Gods might be better, but The Truth is the much more important of the two if you want to have the full picture of the Ankh-Morpork meta-arc, which is a story told, primarily, across the Watch novels, The Truth, and the Moist books, but informs any book that takes place in part or in full within the city.
EDIT: haha, oops, blind replying to a thread I haven't check in awhile. Post still true, if tardy.
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This is a pretty good article: http://moongadget.com/origins/dune.html (http://moongadget.com/origins/dune.html)
It starts out as a description of the similarities between Star Wars and Dune, but quickly changes into a ridiculously exhaustive examination of all the sources Frank Herbert drew on for Dune. It's neat!
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On a dare from the girlfriend, just finished reading Little Brother.
Not enough :hurr: s in the world.
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I just finished Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor (Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Daughter-Smoke-Bone-Laini-Taylor/dp/0316134023)) and it wasn't bad. It's definitely a modern YA fantasy novel (hip blue-haired inked protagonist, literally angelic love interest that soon dominates the story) but the world it starts to build is a pretty good one. I get the feeling it could lose a lot of people at a certain point, but I enjoyed it pretty well all the way through.
Well, right up until the literal TO BE CONTINUED ending. Sequel's out in November, kids!
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Smoke and Bone sound like a pair of Power Rangers comedy relief bullies.
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and who says they can't adopt a daughter?
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The Angel Grove Municipal Court. :(
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I'm 100 pages away from being able to discuss A Dance With Dragons with people! Yaaaaay
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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/The-Night-Circus-Erin-Morgenstern/dp/0385534639/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334688419&sr=8-1)) is a pretty awesome goddamn book that reminded me a bit of The Prestige and a bit of Carnivale, and I'd recommend it if you liked either of those. The characters in it are sometimes fairly loosely drawn, but the titular circus makes up for what they lack. Bonus points awarded for it being a completely self-contained novel, since it seems everything else I am reading right now has a damn sequel or three.
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Man, trying to make a coherent Moorcock collection is about enough to make your eyes cross. The stories have been written, rewritten, and collected in so many different damn editions over the past 50 years; the guy was prolific as fuck and just kept building. (Still is, though he's slowed down over the past 20 years or so.)
I've picked up used copies of a few of the White Wolf editions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Champion#The_Eternal_Champion_Sequence); they're mostly broken up by character but their ordering is on the arbitrary side. "Book 1" begins with The Eternal Champion, which makes sense inasmuch as that's the one that crystallizes the whole Multiverse premise, but sticking the bulk of the Elric stories in Books 5 and 11 seems a bit odd. (I read "book 5" first, years ago, and think I'll bounce to "3", the Hawkmoon stories, next. That's roughly the chronological order they were written in, but only roughly, because Song of the Black Sword collects material written in 1972, 1989, 1976, 1961, and 1970, in that order. Yeesh.)
On the one hand, Moorcock's pretty adept at writing the sort of serial fiction where you can pick up any novella in or out of sequence and make sense of what's going on without needing the entire background. On the other, when they're collected they DO tend to feel pretty disjointed and give you the sense that you're missing great big swaths of backstory.
Course, as a guy who's been reading superhero comics for 25 years, I'm pretty good at handling stuff like that.
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Gilbert Gottfried reads 50 Shades of Grey (http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6770096/gilbert-gottfried-reads-fifty-shades-of-grey).
Regrettably not a real product.
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Illuminatus! vs. Atlas Shrugged (http://jmrhiggs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/illuminatus-vs-atlas-shrugged.html)
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(http://i.imgur.com/IN3ji.jpg)
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Oh Man, Oh God, Oh Man (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vHRMeRszw4#)
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The Right Honourable Jules Léger had some taste.
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Where did our "Good deals on the internet" thread go, I can't seem to find it anywhere.
Anyway, The complete collected Sherlock Holmes for Kindle is on Amazon.uk for 77p (so like a buck fifty) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003A03RRU/ref=pe_221811_31545351_pd_re_dt_dt1)
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You know, it never really sunk in just how long The Lord of the Rings really is until I started listening to the audiobook (on youtube). It's a vastly different experience when your brain isn't just picking up words visually, and you have to listen to someone pause between words and sentences and switch to other voices for each character. As such, each segment is about an hour long.
They hadn't even left the Shire after four hours.
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I once read the whole thing to my brother (in several sittings, obv), so I have some inking of that.
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Isn't the entirety of Middle-Earth based on stories Tolkien used to tell his children?
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Actually they're based on his private magical fantasy world that he started writing about in his late teens. He did create Hobbit stories to tell his kids and so wound up publishing the Hobbit. Then when people asked him to write more stories about Hobbits, he realized that the story took place in the same world he's been creating since he was a kid and reconciled the two with LotR.
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More or less. He DID start writing fantasy stories right around the end of WWI; originally they were overtly set in England but over time they evolved into Middle-Earth and the related fantasy lands. By the time The Hobbit was published, it was definitely already slotted into his internal continuity; he'd already worked out the backstory with Gandalf meeting Thrain, who the Necromancer was and what Gandalf was up to all those times he conveniently left the party every time it was narratively convenient, and so on.
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I thought he created Middle-Earth as a framework to base the Quenya language around.
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More or less. He DID start writing fantasy stories right around the end of WWI; originally they were overtly set in England but over time they evolved into Middle-Earth and the related fantasy lands. By the time The Hobbit was published, it was definitely already slotted into his internal continuity; he'd already worked out the backstory with Gandalf meeting Thrain, who the Necromancer was and what Gandalf was up to all those times he conveniently left the party every time it was narratively convenient, and so on.
That's partially true, but in the case of The Hobbit, his own foreward describes something closer to my post. I think the way it worked out was that he linked the Hobbit to his mythology after initially creating it but prior to editing/publication.
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Reading The Silmarillion feels like a huge chore until you get to about where Beren and Lúthien get together. Before that there's not much dialogue, so you don't really get a feel for the characters or their motivations or anything. I know it's supposed to be a Saga and everything, but it doesn't help that every character has like four names throughout their lives and there's no way to tell them apart. I struggled to find some context to relate everything to, but I couldn't. As a result, I can barely remember what happened. Elves, lamps, flowers, trees... meh.
After that, it's a breeze. Especially when you get to the Akallabêth. One thing bugged me, though... are we to assume that Sauron took his ring to Númenor? Because in the story, only his spirit fled when the seas swallowed that land. It wouldn't make sense for him to leave it in Mordor because he was pretty darn paranoid over it, but at the same time, if he did take it, how did he escape with it?
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[unnecessarilylongpreamble] So, I may have mentioned it before, but I'm actually a guy who likes spoilers. The best stuff survives being spoiled because one-time twists aren't a big deal to me (except maybe in some rare cases where they are very very well done). I find it's the dialogue, the plot construction and all the other stuff that's still good after many readings that really floats my boat. So I often go reading spoilers and summaries of stuff I think I might read, because frankly I don't want to waste time and money getting books or movies only to find a third of the way in that I hate it.[/unnecessarilylongpreamble]
Anyway, for a long time I thought about picking up the Sharpe's series. It's a light-read/Adventure Fun historical fiction series about a rags to riches officer in the British army in the Napoleonic era. It's about 20+ books and there's also a TV series based on the books starring Sean Bean.
So I finally got around to reading the spoilers for the series and man, those books refrigerate more women than a trashy dance club held in a meat locker. Not a single woman survives more than two books and most don't survive the one they appear in. Some don't actually die, but instead betray Sharpe or whatever else (sometimes dying anyway), but the end result is the convenient freeing of the hero to get mad in the same book and chase more skirts next book.
I thought it was funny just because the kill rate is so high it ceases to be offensive and is instead merely hilarious, as if Sharpe is some kind of walking node of cosmic disaster who only affects the opposite sex.
I mean, I get that these are just silly episodic adventures and Sharpe's supposed to be a womanizer, so matters have to be arranged to allow Sharpe to do his thing every book. But taken all together it just reaches a rather comic absurdity.
Reminds me of when my brother and I were kids, he, my dad, and I all got into Clive Cussler novels (which are also very hilariously trashy). At some point we noticed that no woman could survive a Clive Cussler book uninjured and started a joke guessing competition to predict how that would happen each new book.
:tldr: bad "series" books are repetitious in funny ways.
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After that, it's a breeze. Especially when you get to the Akallabêth. One thing bugged me, though... are we to assume that Sauron took his ring to Númenor? Because in the story, only his spirit fled when the seas swallowed that land. It wouldn't make sense for him to leave it in Mordor because he was pretty darn paranoid over it, but at the same time, if he did take it, how did he escape with it?
Well, you can handwave plotholes in the posthumously-published stuff with "It wasn't finished."
There's a bit in Unfinished Tales, for example, where the White Council meets to discuss how they're going to deal with the rising threat in the East. Saruman says something bellicose; Gandalf blows a smoke ring then reaches for it only to have it disappear before he can grasp it.
It's a pretty good bit but as Christopher Tolkien points out himself in the notes, it's completely inconsistent with what happens in Fellowship of the Ring -- because Gandalf would damn-well not walk right into Saruman's clutches if he already suspected he was trying to get the One Ring for himself.
It's all fascinating stuff anyway. I've got a couple more of the posthumous books I haven't gotten around to yet and probably will one of these days. I got through The Book of Lost Tales and The Lays of Beleriand maybe six years ago and kinda hit a point where I'd read enough different versions of The Children of Hurin.
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This is pretty cool- oldest existing joke collection: http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/quinn_jokes.shtml (http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/quinn_jokes.shtml)
most of them are entirely understandable, if not laugh-out-loud hilarious
EDIT: like this
A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."
Cannot believe that translates ~2000 years
Stuff like this is pretty precious to me. Nothing shortens the gap of ages like bad jokes.
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A young man was asked whether he took orders from his wife or if she obeyed his every command. He boasted: "My wife is so afraid of me that if I so much as yawn she shits."
hahaha it's funny because domestic abuse and poop
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I don't think it's a coincidence that Perdido Street Station is paced like a train ride: it starts out really slow; there's a whole lot of time spent looking around at the scenery. But once it finally picks up some steam, it really moves.
It spends an awful lot of time meandering around New Crobuzon, talking about the architecture and the different districts and the different races and cultures, and the book is probably halfway over before it finally introduces the central conflict. But once it gets there, everything falls into place. It's supernatural horror, political intrigue, steampunk, and a rather good and well-realized fantasy world all rolled into one.
Mieville spends that first half of the book on world-building, but it's all for good reason. His fantasy races are damned interesting and he puts a lot of thought into them; there are a few traditional European fantasy races, like garuda and vodyanoi, but no elves or dwarves to be seen; instead, he's got women with bug heads and human bodies, sentient cacti, a giant spider from a higher dimension, and hand-tentacle creatures that possess other hosts. He also bends the steampunk aesthetics a bit with a very twenty-first-century view of robots, and, most strikingly, uses creatures called the Remade -- usually criminals sentenced to have their bodies altered, parts replaced with machines or pieces of other animals.
I see the conflict as being, ultimately, one between duty and power -- the good guys are the ones who want to destroy the evil they're up against, out of a sense of obligation; the bad guys want to harness the evil for their own purposes, because there's money to be had.
There's an undercurrent, too, about the double-edged sword of scientific curiosity -- that it's the thing that will make the world better, but in the hands of the careless or the amoral, it can also wreak untold suffering.
I haven't quite made it to the end yet but I'm approaching the home stretch. It's fantastic stuff; Mieville's become one of my new favorites, both in novels and comics.
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And oh man that ending is a fucking GUT-PUNCH.
It's clear well before you get there that even if any of the major characters survive, they're not going to be able to go back to the way things were. But Mieville manages to hit you with two big "You thought it was bad? Here's this. This is worse." twists right at the end. I can't remember the last book I read that left its protagonists in such miserable condition at the end, but I'm willing to bet it had "Steinbeck" somewhere on the cover.
Which isn't to say it's a bad ending. It's a pretty fucking GREAT ending, actually. Mieville sweeps up the remaining loose ends with aplomb and gives a pretty pitch-perfect, if not very happy, sense of closure.
And my big question at the end: "Are there any other books set in this world?" And the paperback I was reading answered me on the next page, with an advertisement for The Scar. (And there's one more, Iron Council.) I haven't read so much as a summary of the other two books, but from what I gather they're exactly what I want: standalone novels in the same world, not sequels.
Because as I said, the closure here's just too good. I don't need to know anything about what happens to any of the characters from this book after it ends. But Mieville's created such a brilliant, well-considered world, I damn well want to hear more about IT.
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I kind of consider Perdido Street Station to be a Hot Mess (to be expected, since it's one of his earlier works), but I'll be damned if it wasn't fascinating and engaging all the same.
Definitely check out The Scar, though. It doesn't have quite as many kicks to the stomach as Perdido Street Station, but it keeps all the compelling world-building from the previous novel without having a storyline that eventually turns into [spoiler]a bug hunt[/spoiler].
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Apparently you can't make a blonde Anne of Green Gables. (http://news.ca.msn.com/local/pei/blonde-voluptuous-anne-causes-stir-amongst-fans)
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I just gave Little Brother (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/) a read, because Doctorow's doing a signing at my local independent bookseller tomorrow and, considering he's there to promote the sequel, I figured I should probably give the first book a read in advance. (If the bookstore doesn't limit him to signing Homeland, I intend to have him sign the case for my Nexus 7, since that's where I keep his other books.)
If I have a complaint about the book, it's that it's didactic -- it has a tendency to explain everything from the history of cryptography to how DNS works. Given its audience (high school kids) that's totally understandable, though, and handled with aplomb. It's a very easy-to-read, thorough crash course in modern technology (except for the part where he incorrectly states that MAME can play Pong and console games, but I think we can forgive him for that).
Before I get into the nutmeat of the story, I'm going to start with some more fundamental praise: Cory Doctorow remembers what it's like to be 17 years old. This novel, told from a high school kid's perspective, rings true. Marcus becomes, through circumstance, a larger-than-life hero -- but he's more relatable than that. He's a kid who builds computers and plays games (video games as well as ARGs, plus some reference to his LARP phase). He's got friends and teachers he likes and administrators he doesn't and he wants to get laid and there's a bully who has it in for him. He reads true; he's a teenager.
Up against that backdrop, the plot, too, is all too believable. As the name implies, it's a twenty-first-century, teenager-starring take on 1984. There's a terrorist attack and the US government suspends civil liberties in the name of national security. Secret prisons, no lawyers, underage prisoners detained indefinitely, their parents left to assume they're dead.
Marcus leads a resistance -- he sets up a darknet using ParanoidLinux for people to disrupt the government's new security measures, cause chaos, and generally point out that all these violations of the Bill of Rights aren't actually making anybody safer. (I thought ParanoidLinux was a case of Doctorow namedropping a real distro, but on looking into it I've discovered it's the reverse; the book came first and the real ParanoidLinux came from that idea. That speaks to the plausibility of Doctorow's fictional tech -- although it doesn't appear to have ever gotten past alpha, which is a bit less flattering.) From there the book is largely about cat-and-mouse -- a pretty smart escalation of the technology Marcus uses to hide, the technology the government uses to search for him, and the new ideas he has to come up with to stay one step ahead. It's all really well-thought-out and plausible, and indeed most of it is technology that already exists -- the biggest leap is probably the existence of an Xbox console that Microsoft gives away for free (and even then, come to think of it, I got MY Xbox for free with purchase of a PC).
It was written in 2007 and has proven mostly-prescient -- sure, there's no free Xbox and the Republicans didn't win in '08, but there are definitely shades of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests in there. (Indeed, in tomorrow's Q&A I intend to ask what he feels Occupy's strengths and weaknesses were/are and what its lasting impact will be.)
Anyway, I thought it was really quite a good YA novel, and it's a quick read besides. And because it's Cory Doctorow, you can download it for free (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/).
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Doctorow recently published an interesting piece in Jacobin called "Four Futures" (http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) where he ponders on potential futures given the creation of a Star Trek like replicator. It's a good read, and full of brain-fodder.
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Up against that backdrop, the plot, too, is all too believable. As the name implies, it's a twenty-first-century, teenager-starring take on 1984. There's a terrorist attack and the US government suspends civil liberties in the name of national security. Secret prisons, no lawyers, underage prisoners detained indefinitely, their parents left to assume they're dead.
Just tell me it doesn't end the same way as 1984.
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No, it's far stupider. The entire book is pretty goddamn terrible, but the ending in particular is just idiotic.
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Well, he just released a sequel, so no.
The good guys win in this one. And while it's a pretty resounding victory, they don't get everything they want, and, as you might expect, the federal government isn't ready to give up on the whole surveillance thing.
I haven't so much as read the flap on my copy of Homeland, so I don't know what happens next, whether there's a corresponding 6-year gap between the books, or what. But, looking at the news over the past few years and much of it from BoingBoing and Doctorow himself? Outrage cools, most people quit paying attention, surveillance becomes normal, the faction that thinks you SHOULD give up essential liberty for temporary safety doesn't go away, and no it does not matter a goddamn if a Democrat ends up in the White House instead.
Then something else happens and people get pissed off again for awhile; rinse and repeat.
Of course, some locales have longer memories than others; I neglected to mention, in the previous post, the importance of the San Francisco setting. This is a place that's been at the center of a lot of protests over the years, up to and including the Bay Area as a major focal point in last year's Occupy protests.
Anyhow, like I said, I don't know what happens in Homeland yet, but given the title I have to assume it's about another clash with DHS, and Doctorow's sure got plenty of material to work with from the last 6 years, from Twitter and Facebook to iOS and Android to the Arab Spring to drone strikes.
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No, it's far stupider. The entire book is pretty goddamn terrible, but the ending in particular is just idiotic.
You're a lawyer and I'm (at least nominally) a computer scientist; I can see the disconnect. The tech is sound (if, as I said, didactic), whereas there's a pretty good pair of recent blog posts (1 (http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2013/02/01/little-brother-part-1/), 2 (http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2013/02/06/little-brother-part-2/) -- major spoilers, for those of you who haven't read the book) explaining why the law is mostly wrong.
But dogg, you can mount a better criticism than two sentences of "It's stupid." If that was the quality of discourse I wanted I'd be on Bleeding Cool ComicsAlliance YouTube pretty much any other fucking forum on the Internet instead of here.
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Okay, how about "The entire narrative is a mess of badly-written wish fulfillment in which a teenage superhacker runs circles around those wacky feds with the power of CROWDSOURCING and LINUX and bangs his HOT ETHNIC GIRLFRIEND and saves the world and in the end is a hero to everybody. The prose is laughably awkward, the characters stereotypes, and the plot a sad joke. Doctorow might get points for the HOT ETHNIC GIRLFRIEND being Spanish instead of Asian, but oh wait it turns out the Asian girl was also in love with Our Hero the entire time!"
The states' rights nonsense at the end was just the capstone of a tall pile of bullshit. The book is dreadful, and should be read for the same reason one might watch Space Mutiny.
Oh, and if anyone was wondering what Cory Doctorow considers sexy writing, consider this erotically-charged encounter:
"It undoes in the back," she whispered into my mouth. I had a boner that could cut glass. I moved my hands around to her back, which was strong and broad, and found the hook with my fingers, which were trembling. I fumbled for a while, thinking of all those jokes about how bad guys are at undoing bras. I was bad at it. Then the hook sprang free. She gasped into my mouth. I slipped my hands around, feeling the wetness of her armpits -- which was sexy and not at all gross for some reason -- and then brushed the sides of her breasts.
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:jizz:
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feeling the wetness of her armpits -- which was sexy and not at all gross for some reason
tired of fucking the same old boring holes?
well have we got news for you
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badly-written wish fulfillment in which a teenage
So, most modern fiction.
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Man, quit hittin' the haterade, already.
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Okay, how about "The entire narrative is a mess of badly-written wish fulfillment in which a teenage superhacker runs circles around those wacky feds with the power of CROWDSOURCING and LINUX and bangs his HOT ETHNIC GIRLFRIEND and saves the world and in the end is a hero to everybody. The prose is laughably awkward, the characters stereotypes, and the plot a sad joke. Doctorow might get points for the HOT ETHNIC GIRLFRIEND being Spanish instead of Asian, but oh wait it turns out the Asian girl was also in love with Our Hero the entire time!"
Yes, big improvement, you have now spread "It's stupid and terrible" across three sentences instead of two and added some all-caps words and exclamation points. MUCH more sophisticated and not at ALL like a half-coherent rant in any given Internet comments section.
Oh, and if anyone was wondering what Cory Doctorow considers sexy writing, consider this erotically-charged encounter:
You do realize you just went from complaining that the whole thing was unrealistic wish fulfillment to complaining that the narrative of a 17-year-old getting to second base for the first time was sweaty and awkward, right?
I mean, you didn't like it. That's cool. I just don't see much reason to be a prick about it.
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The signing was fun. (http://www.corporate-sellout.com/index.php/2013/02/11/signage/)
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I can't finish Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
It's intensely frustrating. I want to read it, but it's just so dry and dull, as it's been written from a very detached point of view. I gave up after a few chapters, and all I remember is the oath in the peach grove. There was some kind of scene afterwards where Guan Yu beats up a guy outside Zhuge Liang's office, I think? There was nothing to latch on to, if you get my meaning. It was all very clinical and distant, without feeling or colour.
I've tried reading it in small doses and I've tried reading it in longer stretches, but it just feels like I'm reading a textbook and not a story. Actually, in many ways it reminds me of the Silmarillion (at least, the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta). You don't get a sense of what the characters were thinking when they made their choices, or how their reactions to events influenced and changed them. They just do what the story requires of them because that's what's written.
The way I'd visualized it through secondhand media sources was a medieval Chinese Game of Thrones, but it's totally not. Am I way off-base here? Is there a version of the Romance that actually gives some meat to the story?
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There's an NES version that does (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny_of_an_Emperor)
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Did you hit up threekingdoms.net like I suggested in (I think) this thread? I would agree with your comments if you're foolishly trying to read the thing by itself. It's a very old book from the other side of the world about events that are twice as old again, so yeah, you're gonna need some help to figure out what in the fuck is going on in the heads of these people.
Also keep in mind that it's not 100% fiction; it's a really outlandish chronicle of actual history. So in minor details yeah, they're doing shit for literary effect, because Luo Guanzhong was a shameless Han supremacist, but on the grand scale most of the characters are doing stuff because that's what they actually did.
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Huh. Apparently I had the C.H. Brewitt-Taylor translation and threekingdoms.com recommends the Moss Roberts version.
Probably made some kinda difference.
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Today I'm reading Tirant lo Blanc (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/378), or at least an abridged modern English translation thereof, a chivalric romance published in 1490. No less esteemed a figure than Miguel de Cervantes once called it the best book of its kind, but it's not widely known today because it's originally in Catalan rather than a more widespread language like Spanish.
The first chapter alone has faked deaths, matching rings, hitting a baby to make it cry, invading Moors, mysterious hermits, prophetic dreams, dudes kissing dudes on the mouth, improvised explosives, duels to the death, solemn oaths with church-related exceptions, a baptism in blood, and all the time people talking about how awesome chivalry is. And this is just a prologue to the real story. It's totally bananas!
Needless to say I'm having a grand old time.
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Following up on this from the DuckTales thread:
I love Rob Paulsen's live podcast with June (http://ec.libsyn.com/p/2/1/7/217d62c6d9b639d4/055-June_Foray_Talking_Toons_With_Rob_Paulsen.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d01cf8232d7cd5b8bab&c_id=4865523) from last year. She's basically delightful.
I'm about halfway through her autobiography (http://amzn.to/19rV52f) (<-- affiliate link) and she certainly is.
It's a slim little thing (like June Foray!) at around 160 pages, many of which are pictures; it's not an exhaustive story of her life or career but it's full of memories of all the wonderful people she's worked with over the years.
She knows she's got the best job in the world, and her appreciation and enthusiasm for all she's done is infectious. And she knows how to tell a good story, too -- when she started out in radio, she wasn't just performing, she was writing her own material, too.