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I used to be the biggest PKD fan, but I had to look soberly on his later writings and decide that he went completely cuckoo. I think you'll get through Exegesis if you want to become one with Horselover Fat, or you're a curious psychiatrist. I myself only managed to descend (or ascend, depending on your perspective) to VALIS, by the way of Radio Free Albemuth, although I don't think it counts as two circles because between them they have about a quarter-book of original plot.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:30
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Scored an autographed copy of Levar Burton's sci-fi book at Half Priced Books . Not sure when I'll get to it...but I'm pretty damned stoked about it.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:53
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supermikhail posted:I used to be the biggest PKD fan, but I had to look soberly on his later writings and decide that he went completely cuckoo. I think you'll get through Exegesis if you want to become one with Horselover Fat, or you're a curious psychiatrist. I myself only managed to descend (or ascend, depending on your perspective) to VALIS, by the way of Radio Free Albemuth, although I don't think it counts as two circles because between them they have about a quarter-book of original plot. Honestly I thought The Divine Invasion and The Transmogrification of Timothy Archer were good too, though not nearly as good as Flow My Tears, Dr. Bloodmoney, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Game-Players of Titan, etc.
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Jun 23, 2015 18:43
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Oh. Well, something about tastes, because I actually don't think I've read any of those. My preferences lie in a different field of PKD's works... Yeah, when I said I used to be his biggest fan, it's on the basis of the fact that I didn't read anything but his books for some time. They synergized with my depression.  Then the depression passed, and fortunately or unfortunately there's so many books that I didn't manage to read even close to all.
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Jun 23, 2015 19:22
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Franchescanado posted:My book club is having us read The Martian by Andy Weir and I'm really not feeling it at all. I'm trying to give it a chance, but it's just so boring. I thought it didn't live up to all the internet nerd hype. I got through it easily enough, but it's not a fair comparison because I listened to it on Audible. The rest of the book is basically what you've read so far. It's kinda clever in all the complications and solutions and whatnot but it's not revelatory.
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Jun 26, 2015 08:56
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Thanks for the input on The Martian. I read up until 15% and gave up. I can see why people would like it, but I really didn't give a poo poo about the characters or anything involved. Most people in my book club told me "Oh, if you had waited until ____ happened half-way through, you would have liked it better!" but reading half of a book before it gets good is a pretty lovely way to sell it.
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Jun 26, 2015 13:24
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Most people I hear talking about it as a good book are folks who don't read SF in general; I guess it's a great science fiction for non-science fiction readers. Honestly found it rather boring myself.
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Jun 26, 2015 16:38
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I'm not the biggest fan of sci-fi, but I don't dislike it. Horror is my go-to for genre fiction. As added perspective, more than half of my book club gave up reading it as well.
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Jun 26, 2015 18:04
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I have the Exegesis, got it from a well-meaning family member that knew I was a big Phillip K Dick fan. Don't read it. As great and original a writer as Dick was, the Exegesis was never meant for public consumption and it shows. The Exegesis isn't a book, it's a chronicle left behind by an increasingly unwell Dick as he tried to puzzle through his obsessions on paper — basically it's nearly a 1,000 pages of Time Cube-grade paranoid ranting. Even if you're a serious Phillip K Dick fan, you aren't going to get much out of the Exegesis unless you're also a massive sperg or a Bible Code enthusiast. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 19:28
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Baby Babbeh posted:I have the Exegesis, got it from a well-meaning family member that knew I was a big Phillip K Dick fan. Glad I didn't pay full price for it then (traded in a bunch of my fiance's old manga  )supermikhail posted:Oh. Well, something about tastes, because I actually don't think I've read any of those. My preferences lie in a different field of PKD's works... Yeah admittedly I'm biased towards his older, weirder stuff. I would give Clans of the Alphane Moon a shot, especially as it relates to PKD's thoughts on depression/mental illness. The conceit of the novel is an entire moon that serves as a mental hospital where the patients don't know they're in a hospital, and each Clan represents a specific disorder (paranoia, depression, schizophrenia, etc) It's also one of his funnier novels. e: Has anyone read Irvine Welsh's new one, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins? I thought Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs was one of his best novels so I'm fully ready for another "weird" one, especially after the frustratingly re-hashy Skagboys precision fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 21:13
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 Dropped 50 bucks at half-priced books today. Where do I start?
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Jun 27, 2015 03:08
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OMG Robots in Time is SO BAD. It says it's Isaac Asimov's even though some dude wrote it long after he died and it really has nothing to do with anything Asimov wrote besides the 3 laws of robotics
Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Jun 27, 2015 |
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Jun 27, 2015 06:58
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Baby Babbeh posted:OMG Robots in Time is SO BAD. It says it's Isaac Asimov's even though some dude wrote it long after he died and it really has nothing to do with anything he wrote besides the 3 laws of robotics Noted. It felt sketch looking so new. I pretty much didn't look past Asimov. Probably going to start with American Gods.
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Jun 27, 2015 07:31
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:
Customer Service
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Jun 27, 2015 13:00
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:
Read the first few chapters of Lullaby and then throw it away once you get the plot.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:29
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Choke is alright for a Pahluniak novel. The movie is better, especially if you like Sam Rockwell.
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Jun 27, 2015 20:16
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I think Chokeis his best book. Lullaby suffers from having an interesting and weird plot ruined by the intolerable characters, like Oyster.
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Jun 27, 2015 20:31
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Franchescanado posted:I think Chokeis his best book. Lullaby suffers from having an interesting and weird plot ruined by the intolerable characters, like Oyster. I'm a little unfairly biased against the guy's work, but I did think Survivor was legitimately brilliant and fun. I went ahead and got the new Irvine Welsh from the library. I'm about 1/5 of the way in. I know by now not to judge any of his books by the first act, especially his "American" books (and I guess he lives in Chicago now, for whatever reason), but the main character is admirably unlikeable. At least, I hope he's doing it on purpose when he uses really outdated and funny references and catchphrases. He may just be really old and really out of touch with American culture.
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Jun 27, 2015 21:43
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precision posted:I'm a little unfairly biased against the guy's work, but I did think Survivor was legitimately brilliant and fun. I loved his stuff for a while and now can't really stand him, but I still think both Survivor and Haunted are fantastic, and I'll definitely re-read them.
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Jun 28, 2015 01:43
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Interesting how varied the reactions to Palahniuk's works are. I think he's an abysmal writer but with often interesting themes. I didn't like Choke at all and Survivor was meh but Invisible Monsters's theme was tremendous (though executed with his typically mediocre style).
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Jun 28, 2015 06:13
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regulargonzalez posted:Interesting how varied the reactions to Palahniuk's works are. I think he's an abysmal writer but with often interesting themes. I didn't like Choke at all and Survivor was meh but Invisible Monsters's theme was tremendous (though executed with his typically mediocre style). I've never read any of his books so I picked a couple up. Even he says fight club was a better movie than it was a book so I wasn't worried about that one. I liked Choke as a movie and thought it touched on some really interesting themes. They seem like they'll be fairly light reading so at the very worst I lose a couple of hours to  books.
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Jun 28, 2015 06:45
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:I've never read any of his books so I picked a couple up. Even he says fight club was a better movie than it was a book so I wasn't worried about that one. I liked Choke as a movie and thought it touched on some really interesting themes. They seem like they'll be fairly light reading so at the very worst I lose a couple of hours to The writing is just so wretched that it can be a struggle to get through. His hallmark deal is to introduce a recurring motif that is used in lieu of actual character development (in Fight Club, whenever emotion is needed to be displayed it occurs in the form of "I am Jack's raging spleen" or w/e. In Invisible Monsters, it's in the form of a photographer asking for poses from a model, i.e. "Give me anger. Give me longing"). He does this in every book and it's oh so tiresome.
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Jun 29, 2015 08:32
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regulargonzalez posted:The writing is just so wretched that it can be a struggle to get through. His hallmark deal is to introduce a recurring motif that is used in lieu of actual character development (in Fight Club, whenever emotion is needed to be displayed it occurs in the form of "I am Jack's raging spleen" or w/e. In Invisible Monsters, it's in the form of a photographer asking for poses from a model, i.e. "Give me anger. Give me longing"). He does this in every book and it's oh so tiresome. It worked for me in the fight club movie. As a convention repeated throughout multiple non-connected stories/characters I could see how it would get annoying.
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Jun 29, 2015 09:06
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In Lullaby, the motif is counting backwards and he does it ALL THE TIME. Palahniuk is weird, in that the first book you read by him will be your favorite, second book will be good but not great, third book you're onto his shtick and realize the first two reads weren't as good as you thought but there's no point to go back and find out. I think he starts his books out strong, but that's because it's usually a short story not relevant to the actual plot, but echoes some of the themes he's working on. The haunted house section of Lullaby is great and is the best part of the book. Choke was consistently good, but has a plot point about an anal bead. Fight Club was better as a movie. I tried to read Haunted but had to stop after the third or fourth story.
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Jun 29, 2015 14:55
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Franchescanado posted:
It's this. Palahnuik's books are all about equal with each other in terms of quality, but he's a pretty narrow prose stylist and his writing is most interesting when the shtick is new to you. It's like watching a magic trick that's been spoiled for you — once you know to keep your eye on the magician's hands it stops being entertaining and starts being "Oh, I see what you're doing there." I don't think his writing is BAD, per se, but he definitely runs into problems because his voice is so strong that he almost can't write any other way. He's comparable to Steven King — they both have certain vocal ticks that get really annoying once you've read them extensively, but King is marginally less tedious because his style is at least broad enough that you don't feel you're reading the same story over and over again.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:41
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Franchescanado posted:Palahniuk is weird, in that the first book you read by him will be your favorite, second book will be good but not great, third book you're onto his shtick and realize the first two reads weren't as good as you thought but there's no point to go back and find out. Myth: busted! The first one I read was Lullaby, which I thought was just OK, then Choke, which I liked a little better, then Fight Club, which I really hated (but love the film), then Survivor, which finally clicked for me.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:55
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Baby Babbeh posted:It's this. Palahnuik's books are all about equal with each other in terms of quality, but he's a pretty narrow prose stylist and his writing is most interesting when the shtick is new to you. It's like watching a magic trick that's been spoiled for you — once you know to keep your eye on the magician's hands it stops being entertaining and starts being "Oh, I see what you're doing there." I see what you're saying but I feel like King is a much, much, MUCH better writer.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:46
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And with King, his stories aren't just varied by premise or genre but by style as well. It's not even consistent by era, because he wrote Dolores Claiborne (one of his best) at the same time as Gerald's Game (one of his worst). Around that time he also wrote Insomnia which is kind of brilliant in its sheer absurdness. It might be the most Stephen King of all King novels.
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Jun 29, 2015 21:35
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Exactly. King has range, Palahnuik does not. Really, while I bag on King a lot for his prose, he's really impressive to me because he's been able to maintain a fairly high bar of quality over a very long, very prolific career spanning many different genres and novel styles. He may be a pulp writer, but he's a drat good pulp writer. I doubt any of the more literary authors I read could hold a candle to him if they tried to match his pace and his diversity of subjects.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:49
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I got a question, there's a book I read that I can't remember the name of. There was a virus that killed men, or made them sterile or something. And there was a guy who was immune to it. He was like a ruffian type, and his pee was a weird color. He had a lot of kids, like, too many for him to really know them all by name, so the thing that marked out his descendants was that their pee was the same unusual color. That's all I remember.
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Jul 1, 2015 15:21
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boom boom boom posted:I got a question, there's a book I read that I can't remember the name of. There was a virus that killed men, or made them sterile or something. And there was a guy who was immune to it. He was like a ruffian type, and his pee was a weird color. He had a lot of kids, like, too many for him to really know them all by name, so the thing that marked out his descendants was that their pee was the same unusual color. That's all I remember. This thread might help: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2704537&perpage=40
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Jul 1, 2015 15:36
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boom boom boom posted:I got a question, there's a book I read that I can't remember the name of. There was a virus that killed men, or made them sterile or something. And there was a guy who was immune to it. He was like a ruffian type, and his pee was a weird color. He had a lot of kids, like, too many for him to really know them all by name, so the thing that marked out his descendants was that their pee was the same unusual color. That's all I remember. No idea, but I bet Orson Scott Card wrote it.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:03
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I think it would be cool to make a thread in which people could post a list of books they are considering reading and have other people tell them which to read first, since this is a situation I find myself in often. Or would the Recommendation thread be best for that?
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Jul 6, 2015 00:37
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post books
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Jul 6, 2015 01:08
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Well, last night I finished The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins. By the middle of the book through to the end, it did manage to be entertaining, albeit mostly in the most base and crass ways possible. Mind you, I am saying this in the context of other Welsh novels. I had thought that he'd never write anything as pointlessly vulgar and voyeuristic as Porno, but I was wildly wrong. I now regret dissing Skagboys, because it was infinitely more insightful than this thing. Looming large in the book is his use - well, abuse - of American slang. I don't know if he's doing it on purpose, as in, "ha ha, Americans sound so stupid!" or, and I think this is more likely in the context of him now living in America, he's just embarrassing himself. Even in South Beach, people don't talk like Lucy Brennan. Even the most mincing queens don't talk like Masterchef Dominic (whose cameo is thankfully brief). If Masterchef Dominic wrote his own dialogue, I apologize but it's pretty clear why he's a chef and not a writer. Equally poor is his depiction of Lena, which is just all over the place. He introduces her, and for most of the book she acts, as a "gosh golly!" midwestern prude, and then some ways in he retroactively casts her as a Neil Gaiman artist punk-goth. He doesn't do this in a way that makes any sense, either, he simply expects us to selectively forget that the novel he started writing is not the same one he finished writing. Besides the problems with all that, which would be excused by a compelling story, he's essentially just rewriting his own previous novel The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, except gender swapped and far worse. If Skagboys was a retread of Trainspotting and Glue, at least it's a good faith effort, with lots of meat to chew on. Sex Lives ends up being a short meal of empty calories, which would be a funny meta-joke if he and his publisher weren't expecting people to pay money for it.
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Jul 6, 2015 17:54
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precision posted:Well, last night I finished The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins. I've never heard of this person, but based on this post I have to ask: why do you keep reading his books?
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Jul 6, 2015 18:00
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Because while he has had ups and downs, he has never written a truly bad book until now. Also, you've never heard of Irvine Welsh? 
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Jul 6, 2015 18:11
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How about the film Trainspotting, heard of that? Orange poster, young skinny Ewan Mcgregor looking cold?
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Jul 6, 2015 18:32
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I'm reading All the Light We Cannot See and it's really good, but it's one of those books with very stiff bindings, so I have to keep it pried open. I have a shoulder injury from the military and doing this makes it hurt. But it's such a great story that I have to push through the pain. This like the time I read War and Peace for 8 hours and my hand cramped so bad I couldn't go fishing.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:24
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blue squares posted:This like the time I read War and Peace for 8 hours and my hand cramped so bad I couldn't go fishing. That is just not a sentence I would have ever imagined reading.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:47
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