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I think I might want to get back into some Sci-Fi. How well has Snow Crash aged? I've never read the author and I've heard so many good things.
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Jun 20, 2010 21:57
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Chinaski posted:How well has Snow Crash aged? Not at all. fritz fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jun 20, 2010 |
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Jun 20, 2010 22:04
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Chinaski posted:I think I might want to get back into some Sci-Fi. How well has Snow Crash aged? I've never read the author and I've heard so many good things. I read it for the first time about 6 months ago and still enjoyed it quite a bit. It reminds you that it was written awhile ago when it describes things that basically exist now, but it's still a good story. edit: I like The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson better. You should read that one. It starts out seeming really, overly cyberpunk cheesy, but it quickly stops and becomes awesome.
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Jun 20, 2010 22:49
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Thanks - that's what I was afraid of. I can't really enjoy Gibson for the same reason. I'll go into another direction.
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Jun 21, 2010 11:51
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I would advise reading Atwood or Chabon or PD James type take on the genre, unless you're determined to go for some space opera type schtick. It's far more rewarding then revisiting Snow Crash, which was horribly flawed when it first came out, never mind now.
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Jun 21, 2010 23:09
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knees of putty posted:I would advise reading Atwood or Chabon or PD James type take on the genre, unless you're determined to go for some space opera type schtick. It's far more rewarding then revisiting Snow Crash, which was horribly flawed when it first came out, never mind now. How so? I just read it for the first time barely three months ago and nothing about was any less "rewarding" than the last Atwood or Chabon novel I read. There's twenty pages about Sumeria, but it's hardly a slog and aside from that the whole thing is extremely well put together.
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Jun 22, 2010 02:15
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I'm about 75 pages into Gravitys Rainbow, and I have no loving clue what is going on. How many drugs was Pynchon on? I read Against the Day, but at least that book had a semi coherent plot.
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Jun 23, 2010 03:09
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FakeHipster posted:I'm about 75 pages into Gravitys Rainbow, and I have no loving clue what is going on. How many drugs was Pynchon on? I read Against the Day, but at least that book had a semi coherent plot. Definitely stick with it, it becomes much easier to read after the first section. There really is a plot in there, I swear.
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Jun 23, 2010 05:18
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FakeHipster posted:I'm about 75 pages into Gravitys Rainbow, and I have no loving clue what is going on. How many drugs was Pynchon on? I read Against the Day, but at least that book had a semi coherent plot. A true hipster wouldn't give a poo poo about plot, or doing anything, ya know, productive ... and stuff ...
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Jun 23, 2010 05:21
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ONE TWO THREE TIMES TWO TO THE SIX/JONESING FOR YOUR FIX OF THAT LIMP BIZKIT MIX
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Daveski posted:Definitely stick with it, it becomes much easier to read after the first section. There really is a plot in there, I swear. I think the best way to read Gravity's Rainbow for the first time is just to give up on trying to make sense of it and let it wash over you. Just keep swimming!
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Jun 23, 2010 05:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think the best way to read Gravity's Rainbow for the first time is just to give up on trying to make sense of it and let it wash over you. Just keep swimming! That's how I tackled it. Also it helps to cast John Ritter as Slothrop.
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Jun 23, 2010 12:53
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FakeHipster posted:I'm about 75 pages into Gravitys Rainbow, and I have no loving clue what is going on. How many drugs was Pynchon on? I read Against the Day, but at least that book had a semi coherent plot. I've tried it three times but with no luck. Mason & Dixon, I've read six times (as I keep stating on this forum...), Against The Day, piece of pie - but GR? Can't freakin' do it.
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Jun 23, 2010 17:59
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I wear my "I read GR and survived" badge with honour, but it did feel like I was being tortured remorsely for about 700 pages of it.
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Jun 23, 2010 22:47
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Any tips on buying used books online that don't charge and arm and a leg for shipping? I managed to find a single book seller on Amazon marketplace that had like 10 books I've been wanting to buy, but their policy is $4 shipping per item, period. I'll be damned if I pay $4 to ship a book I'm buying for $.10. I guess Half.com is a popular place to buy books, is there a way to easily search if a store has multiple titles, so I can see which sellers have the highest quantities of books I want to save on shipping? Any other good sellers?
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Jun 23, 2010 23:27
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Is there a specific thread in The Book Barn where I can post for help finding a book I once read, or do I start a new thread?
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Jun 24, 2010 00:18
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Fire In The Disco posted:Is there a specific thread in The Book Barn where I can post for help finding a book I once read, or do I start a new thread? well I'm going to take this opportunity to be an rear end and point you to a forum elsewhere that I created for explicitly that purpose http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Lost-Books/bd-p/lostbooks
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Jun 24, 2010 00:27
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Fire In The Disco posted:Is there a specific thread in The Book Barn where I can post for help finding a book I once read, or do I start a new thread? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2704537
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Jun 24, 2010 00:47
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Thanks, fritz. Earwicker, I might use yours too. 
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Jun 24, 2010 01:04
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abagofcheetos posted:Any tips on buying used books online that don't charge and arm and a leg for shipping? I managed to find a single book seller on Amazon marketplace that had like 10 books I've been wanting to buy, but their policy is $4 shipping per item, period. I'll be damned if I pay $4 to ship a book I'm buying for $.10. Depending on the strength of your currency, http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ is either good or unbelievably good. Free shipping.
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Jun 24, 2010 01:18
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abagofcheetos posted:Any tips on buying used books online that don't charge and arm and a leg for shipping? I managed to find a single book seller on Amazon marketplace that had like 10 books I've been wanting to buy, but their policy is $4 shipping per item, period. I'll be damned if I pay $4 to ship a book I'm buying for $.10. biblio.com lets the individual sellers set prices. So sometimes it's still like amazon gouging, but some (betterworldbooks) have free shipping. Most of them give you discounts on multiple books shipping from them.
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Jun 24, 2010 02:47
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abagofcheetos posted:Any tips on buying used books online that don't charge and arm and a leg for shipping? I managed to find a single book seller on Amazon marketplace that had like 10 books I've been wanting to buy, but their policy is $4 shipping per item, period. I'll be damned if I pay $4 to ship a book I'm buying for $.10. obviously he reason that shipping is $4 is that the book is $0.10. What net figure do you want to pay? Have you looked at ebay sellers?
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Jun 24, 2010 12:55
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therattle posted:obviously he reason that shipping is $4 is that the book is $0.10. What net figure do you want to pay? Have you looked at ebay sellers? I was happy that ShutteredIn posted that biblio.com link. Between them, and figuring out if I can use Amazon's SuperSaver shipping, I can probably shave over half off my shipping costs, and when you're buying 10+ books at a time, usually, that really does save you a lot of money.
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Jun 24, 2010 16:44
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I've been watching a lot of UFO documentaries lately... So much so that I've nearly exhausted the internet of new material, so I thought maybe it's time to get some books on the subject instead. I wrote down the names of several books mentioned in these docs, such as Budd Hopkins "Missing Time" and "Intruders", Leonard Stringfield's "Situation Red" and Charles Berlitz "Dragon's Triangle", and tried finding them online. Most of them seemed to be out of print and rather pricey, so I thought for the hell of it I'd try the used book store in town. Being in a city of 70,000 people doesn't equate to great selection when it comes to used books, but when I walked in the store on Saturday and asked the owner about UFO material he said "Oh a guy just brought in three boxes full of that kind of stuff, his father just died and left them all in his will. You can sift through them if you want, I haven't had the time to sort and price them yet." HELL YEAH!! I not only found copies of the four books I just mentioned, but also the first editions of the Condon Report, the Hynek Report, various other books by the same authors as above, and a few hundred other old rare hardcovers and paperbacks like that dating back to the 60's and 70's. It's a god drat treasure-chest of rare UFO material. Apparently the guy who had collected these books was a prominent mormon out in Cardston... Take that as you will, but he had numbered each book in his collection. As far as I could tell, the numbers went up to the 400s, so there's a fuckload of material in there. This is the best part... $2 each. I spent $40 and went home. Upon deciding which to read first, I recall having always read about the Condon and Hynek reports, but had never actually seen physical copies of the books themselves, so I decide to check eBay for their rarity. Hynek report yeilds a few auctions for the same book, anywhere from $5 to $20 depending on condition. When I search for the Condon Report, initially nothing comes up until I type the full name of the book "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects." There's one auction for the same book on eBay, starting at $200. The same one I paid $2 for.  I just thought I'd share.
XYZAB fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Jun 25, 2010 |
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Jun 25, 2010 08:02
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Searched all 5 pages, and I don't see any posts about the Sword of Truth series. I've seen a few people refer disparagingly to it, but that's it. Is it just completely hated (and so not talked about) by the Goon intelligentsia?
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Jun 25, 2010 22:55
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SouthShoreSamurai posted:Searched all 5 pages, and I don't see any posts about the Sword of Truth series. It's called loving The Sword of Truth. I'm sure there are fantasy threads in TBB that would be perfectly down to talk about it, though.
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Jun 25, 2010 23:33
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*scans book barn* What the? Doesn't anyone read fantasy in this place??
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Jun 26, 2010 02:25
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ShutteredIn posted:biblio.com lets the individual sellers set prices. So sometimes it's still like amazon gouging, but some (betterworldbooks) have free shipping. Most of them give you discounts on multiple books shipping from them. Thanks for this. For some reason, I'm paying $12 less on Biblio for the same books, from the same bookseller, then I am on Abebooks.
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Jun 26, 2010 03:05
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maxnmona posted:*scans book barn* What the? Doesn't anyone read fantasy in this place?? Any interest for a "How do you approach fantasy?" thread?
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Jun 26, 2010 03:49
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Mr. Fun posted:Any interest for a "How do you approach fantasy?" thread? I'm for it, the forum is clogged with so many Hemingway, Proust, Pynchon, and Joyce threads it'd be nice to broaden people's horizons.
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Jun 26, 2010 03:55
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Is there a list somewhere of all the previous books of the month from the book club?
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Jun 27, 2010 08:42
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7 y.o. bitch posted:It's called loving The Sword of Truth. And it's about a sword, that has the word "TRUTH" written on it, in all capital letters.
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Jun 27, 2010 16:10
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Checkered Slacks posted:Is there a list somewhere of all the previous books of the month from the book club? I quit posting ALL of them in the monthly post because it was just getting too long, but for the people without archives, here's the full list (2009 and the year so far are in the current post): 2006: May: "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift. June: "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut. July: "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote August: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez September: "The Stranger" by Albert Camus October: "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman", By Richard Feynman November: "Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger December: "The Importance of Being Earnest" (Wilde) and "Memories of my Melancholy Whores" (Marquez) 2007: January: "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky February: "The Plague" by Albert Camus March: "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck April: "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami May: "Notes from Underground" By Fyodor Dostoyevsky June: "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco July/August: "Infinte Jest" by David Foster Wallace September: "Love in the time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez October: "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski November: "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie December: "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson 2008: January: "Blindness" by Jose Saramago Febuary: "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut March: "Lolita", by Vladimir Nabokov April: "Babbit" by Sinclair Lewis/"The Windup Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami May: "Post Office", by Charles Bukowski June/July: "Mein Kampf", by Adolf Hitler July: "The Prince", by Niccolò Machiavelli August: "A Confederacy of Dunces", by John Kennedy Toole September: "VALIS", by Philip K. Dick October/November: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid December: The Hound of the Baskervilles
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Jun 27, 2010 19:13
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Hey, 7 y.o. bitch: I started Frye's Anatomy of Criticism last night and I've only got through the polemical introduction but it's really cool and he's very clear and pretty enjoyable to read so far. I've also got his Fables of Identity, but I'll see how much of Anatomy goes over my head before starting on it. You mentioned Frye a while ago and made him sound interesting, so thanks for that!
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Jun 27, 2010 20:09
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Facial Fracture posted:Hey, 7 y.o. bitch: I started Frye's Anatomy of Criticism last night and I've only got through the polemical introduction but it's really cool and he's very clear and pretty enjoyable to read so far. I've also got his Fables of Identity, but I'll see how much of Anatomy goes over my head before starting on it. Frye is one of the clearest writers in literary criticism, and I think it's sad that his style and method have gone so out of favor. The polemical introduction is the most controversial part of the book, the rest is pretty much a repetition of the same general structure of analysis. If the book is anything, it is over-rigorous, but I think that intensity of rigor provides illuminating moments that might be overlooked by literary historians (for two examples, the importance and definition of the masque in symbological terms, and the same for the anatomy work). His final sections on non-literary speech are wicked in their disgust, and I think pretty visionary (and I think that section as well can be too-easily dismissed by our media-studies obsessed academic practice nowadays, particularly when such an influential critic as Kristeva built her entire theory of feminine ecriture around the notion that literary speech was a special place that can locate itself outside of politics. I find Butler at fault for this one.) I don't think much should "go over your head," but I think AoC provides a great reading list. 7 y.o. bitch fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Jun 28, 2010 |
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Jun 28, 2010 05:49
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Also, I'm considering starting a poetry discussion thread in TBB. It'd be pretty much a free-for-all discussion, so a bit different from the PHIZ thread I had a while back. If there's dedicated interest in one, I'll do it. I think one comprehensive discussion thread might allow for it to stay alive in the sea of sci-fi and fantasy threads.
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Jun 28, 2010 05:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:And it's about a sword, that has the word "TRUTH" written on it, in all capital letters. Ok, never mind then.
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Jun 28, 2010 22:42
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I'm into the first essay now. Not being very familiar with more than the reputations of the basic schools within lit crit, it's really interesting for me to see a bunch of stuff that I've dimly identified or seen mentioned kinda opaquely elsewhere set forth systematically and clearly. I'm keeping notes of stuff he refers to that I haven't read and also feeling a bit guilty for having avoided Aristotle's Poetics. 7 y.o. bitch posted:Also, I'm considering starting a poetry discussion thread in TBB. In a typical TBB poetry thread you'd post some Donne and watch the scintillating discussions beginning with "does _____ mean his weiner?" take off like wildfire, then someone would follow that up with Siegfried Sassoon; sex and violence having been covered, the thread would die. It would be nice to see a different kind of poetry thread.
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Jun 28, 2010 23:23
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7 y.o. bitch posted:Also, I'm considering starting a poetry discussion thread in TBB. It'd be pretty much a free-for-all discussion, so a bit different from the PHIZ thread I had a while back. If there's dedicated interest in one, I'll do it. I think one comprehensive discussion thread might allow for it to stay alive in the sea of sci-fi and fantasy threads. Free-for-all, or free-form? 
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Jun 29, 2010 14:36
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7 y.o. bitch posted:Frye is one of the clearest writers in literary criticism, and I think it's sad that his style and method have gone so out of favor. The polemical introduction is the most controversial part of the book, the rest is pretty much a repetition of the same general structure of analysis. If the book is anything, it is over-rigorous, but I think that intensity of rigor provides illuminating moments that might be overlooked by literary historians (for two examples, the importance and definition of the masque in symbological terms, and the same for the anatomy work). His final sections on non-literary speech are wicked in their disgust, and I think pretty visionary (and I think that section as well can be too-easily dismissed by our media-studies obsessed academic practice nowadays, particularly when such an influential critic as Kristeva built her entire theory of feminine ecriture around the notion that literary speech was a special place that can locate itself outside of politics. I find Butler at fault for this one.) For literary criticism, I find it's hard to beat this one: http://www.amazon.com/Pooh-Perplex-Freshman-Casebook/dp/0226120589 He did a follow-up volume for more modern lit-crit schools, but it unfortunately isn't as funny.
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Jun 29, 2010 16:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:For literary criticism, I find it's hard to beat this one: If you had introduced this book as simply a sympathetic satire of lit crit, and a funny read, that's fine. To say that "it's hard to beat" in terms of "literary criticism" means ... what? That it "explains" different schools better than any other book? That it itself is one of the best examples of lit crit (an enormous field) available? That you have nothing but disdain for lit crit? Please explain.
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Jun 29, 2010 17:49
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