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Kings Island: A Ride Through Time by Evan Ponstingle - this is a history of Kings Island released right around its 50th anniversary last year. Kings Island is a wonderful regional amusement park in Cincinnati. My family and I love the park and visit it regularly, so it was cool to read about the ups and downs of how it got to where it is today.
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Feb 12, 2023 15:55
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The Power of Art by Simon Schama tells of the life and works of eight artists; Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, Jacques-Louis David, JMW Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko. Van Gogh's chapter specifically allowed me to see him in a heartbreaking new light.
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Feb 14, 2023 15:03
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I read Clickers 1, 2, and 3 over the last few days. By J. F. Gonzalez and a whole crew of other authors. Really nails the creature feature B-Movie vibe with Lovecraftian mythology mixed in. Loved them a lot.
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Feb 14, 2023 23:36
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Clavell's King Rat. I read Tai-Pan and Shogun as a kid and thought I'd give the other books a try. It wasn't exactly bad but so much of it is now a cliché, and the ending was extremely predictable. (And I don't just mean the Japanese losing the war.) Would've started on Noble House already but it didn't fit in my bag.
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Feb 15, 2023 09:29
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FPyat posted:The Power of Art by Simon Schama tells of the life and works of eight artists; Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, Jacques-Louis David, JMW Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko. Van Gogh's chapter specifically allowed me to see him in a heartbreaking new light. Yeah, he's a very engaging writer and presenter. The TV show is also quite good. I disagree with him about almost everything, but I enjoy his work. Citizens and Embarrassment of Riches are his best books, I think.
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Feb 16, 2023 00:04
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I liked Red Rising, but I also recognize the badness. It's like reading a Jean Claude Van Damme movie. It's stupid, over the top, and fun. I haven't read anything after the third book though. I feel like it'll be too serious to be entertaining. But listen, I also read Dungeon Crawler Carl and enjoy that so maybe don't go spending your Amazon bucks on it.
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Feb 16, 2023 06:01
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Finished Clickers vs. Zombies, next on the list is Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z Brite.
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Feb 17, 2023 05:02
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Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison, about the MAX crashes and the history of the company and decisions that led to this happening. Well researched and written, I don’t know much about airplanes but the author explained the engineering details in an understandable way. Definite recommend.
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Feb 18, 2023 19:11
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Journey to the end of night I feel like I should've been depressed about the novel, but I found it all very positive and generally uplifting. As a bonus it's extremely readable, even in English it flows well enough to carry you along with zero resistance.
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Feb 19, 2023 06:29
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Just finished First and Only by Dan Abnett and for my first foreway into that silly little world of Warhammer 40K, it was pretty enjoyable. Easy breezy read through relatively quickly; and it kept my attention pretty good. Probably will continue through the series after another novel. I don't typically read series in sequence, I switch it up and jump around.
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Feb 19, 2023 17:43
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Just finished The Push by Ashley Audrain. Actually finished it a few weeks ago but I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s messed me up man. Super disturbing and one of the most harrowing accounts of grief ever. The last line was really cheap though. I took off a star on my GoodReads review for it. More recently finished Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo which was a lot of fun. I’m starting the sequel now.
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Feb 21, 2023 14:53
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The Killing Moon by NK Jemisin. Working on the sequel. The Good Immigrant US version. Various authors. Good anthology of personal essays on what it means to be an immigrant in a post-Trump US.
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Feb 23, 2023 04:05
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Just finished The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides -- Solid read, definitely can it being adapted for screen with ease. VERY easy to read -- if you have someone close to you who wants an easy read that'll keep their attention throughout (it's just over 300 pages as well which helps) this book is probably a good spot. Some plot holes or whatever but who gives a poo poo. Enjoyable.
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Feb 23, 2023 16:42
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The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff taught me plenty about the formation of America, but regrattably had nothing at all to say about how all this affected the natives.
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Feb 24, 2023 05:20
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Mumbo Jumbo Really cool novel, you can see all the things that Pynchon lifted from it for his own work. But it also always manages to keep itself tight and focused despite covering a drastically longer timeframe than any Pynchon novel. The only problem I have with it is the Digital Edition, the cross media appeal really doesn't work when the picture quality is so low that I cannot make out anything happening in them and worse than that the climax of the novel is a letter that the main character receives, handwritten, scanned in; I could not read said letter and just had to guess at what it said from context, not ideal. If you're interested in an Afrofuturist Foucalt's Pendulum check it out, but grab the physical novel.
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Feb 25, 2023 02:02
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Read Waypoint Kangaroo which was a lot of fun. Post-Solar War spy games rapidly escalate. Not hard sci-fi by any means, as close to pulp as I've read for some time. Of the two gay characters one is murdered to give our hero motivation so that sucks.
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Feb 27, 2023 22:25
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boquiabierta posted:Just finished The Push by Ashley Audrain. Actually finished it a few weeks ago but I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s messed me up man. Super disturbing and one of the most harrowing accounts of grief ever. The last line was really cheap though. I took off a star on my GoodReads review for it. Yeah as a parent The Push hosed me up but I HATED that ending Ninth House was fun but I didn't enjoy Hell Bent very much
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Feb 28, 2023 07:05
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Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History by D. N. Jha. It's a collection of essays and articles by the author, with a few book reviews and interviews in the appendix, addressing myths about Indian history spread by proponents of Hindutva. The subject which sees the most coverage is the existence of cow sacrifice and beef eating in the Vedic and post-Vedic periods, a subject close to the author's heart since he received death threats after he published books on the subject, but he also covers other subjects like historiography and religious intolerance. A good, short, and well cited read.
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Mar 2, 2023 05:09
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Lost In Time by A. G. Riddle. It was terrible. I read it because my cousin was effusive about it. Her GoodReads review said how it was instantly one of her all-time faves, a page-turner, lots of fun twists etc. Plus dinosaurs! How could I go wrong? Let’s just say I’m not going to trust my cousin’s taste in books for a while. To start, the writing is awful. Cliche after cliche after cliche. The time travel stuff is, IMO, not done well… breaks your brain but not in a good way. Also, the way (minor spoiler) HIV/AIDS is a B-plot was so terribly done. It was like it was set in 1985 with no modern medicine at all. People don’t waste away from the disease anymore, at least not extraordinarily privileged people like this woman. Venting here because I can’t put my review on GoodReads where my cousin will see it 
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Mar 3, 2023 12:21
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FreelanceSocialist posted:The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Sounds interesting, thanks! Added to my exceedingly long 'to read' list... Just finished the newest Cormac McCarthy book Stella Maris, the sequel to The Passenger released a month or two before it. Glad I read it as it answered a major question left sort of unanswered from the Passenger. Together they were interesting without being amazing but covered a few topics and had some memorable characters. I read them while reading a few other books and it was funny recently I was jumping between Stella Maris where the main character is talking about maths and how the problems are kind of solved in another dimension without language or even thought. Meanwhile in Faith Hope & Carnage by Nick Cave he's talking about songs coming from some other dimension without reason or thought Also recently finished Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel who wrote Station 11, I really liked aspects of this and I'm always a sucker for time jumping and moon bases Candy House by Jennifer Egan had some really cool parts too, some interesting ideas and I ordered the paperback so I can flip through to check characters again instead of trying to flip around in the kindle. Love the kindle and it's my main reading thing but it's a real pain to refer to previous pages and find your way back to where you were. Also finished & bought A Swim In a Pond in the rain just because it was a pain to read on kindle and I want to give George Saunders all my money. And finished & bought Liberation day too, loved it, see above Speaking of George Saunders, if there's any one else who feels compelled to give him all their money, are you aware of his substack thing "story club" it is pretty good! They chat about short stories and writing etc. Finished Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis which I loved for the most part, could have done with less about turning the chewing gum into jewellery and museum pieces but the rest was really cool and interesting. Also ran out and bought this one. Harlem Shuffle was good and I look forward to the sequel. I never read any of his other books though Read 84 Charing Cross Road thanks to someone in this thread, a delightful quick read! Those are the most memorable from the last few months
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Mar 4, 2023 14:14
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Extinction Biome: Invasion by Addison Gunn: A mediocre, sci-fi, brink-of-the-apocalypse story. The premise is that climate change has caused the ice shelf to recede to a point that frozen pre-Ice Age animals, insects, and parasites have been revived and are causing havoc in the world. Governments have fallen and only a single multi-national corporation can save the day. It tries to cover too many ideas at once, though, and falls short in every way. I really need to stop reading books from old book bundles I bought, or at the very least, read reviews first. Side question. Anyone else on The Story Graph? I'm "prengekp" on there, and my Community list is empty.
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Mar 4, 2023 16:02
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Finished a few books in the past few months: Moby Dick - I was taken in by the first hundred pages or so, but getting through the whaling chapters felt like a slog at times. I don't know that I can add much to the discussion of this book. I was surprised by the suddenness of the ending. For most of the book, I failed to see Ahab as any sort of villain character, despite reading about the character often described as such. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (Author), Naveed Noori (Translator) - Translation of a Persian novel. The shortness and pacing of this was a welcome change after reading through Moby Dick. A good amount of the thin paperback consists of notes from the translator, which I found interesting. I don't know anything really about Farsi or much about the culture of Iran, so I'm glad the translator offered some insight into his process. The story itself is on the surreal side as they go. I don't recall too much of the plot details, but I do remember feeling like the contents of a fever dream or opium dream were being conveyed through the author's hand. I also found some of the lore around the book itself to be of interest. The book was banned from Iran at some point with the reasoning that it reportedly drove some readers towards suicide. I can't say I remotely felt moved in such a way. Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (Author), Charles Terry (Translator). The dramatized story of Japanese warrior and artist Miyamoto Musashi. Just finished this just a few minutes ago. It's been a while since I enjoyed a whole book so thoroughly. I was a bit afraid at the beginning that I'd be lost with all the Japanese names and places, but I think I managed pretty well to keep them straight in my head. This book was originally brought to my attention through the podcast of Jock Willink, who spoke highly of it and dedicated an episode to it. I decided to go in blind and read the novel before listening to the pod episode. The growth of the characters throughout was enjoyable. Also enjoyable was the way Japanese culture of the time bled through. It took me some time to get through the whole book (900+ pages), and I feel at the moment a bit sad that it's over. I may go back and re-read this book at some point. e: whoops got the author right for Musashi Colonel Taint fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 5, 2023 23:30
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Just put down Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic I heard for so long of course that the Discworld books were loved, I just never got around to it and pure fantasy books usually aren't my thing so they were never high on my list. The humor is perfection, I can't remember smiling at a book so often! The world is so kooky, the style is so clever and I am in absolute love! The Light Fantastic should be here tomorrow.
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Mar 6, 2023 03:31
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HEAT 2 If you like the film Heat you need to read this. If you're like me you understand that Heat is one of the best plotted and executed films in history, managing to weave together dozens of character's stories on both sides of the law into one of the most pulse pounding can't-take-your-eyes-off-it-experiences in film. This novel also does that, and it does it around the film. Before the film in Chicago with Hanna following a murder robbery case and the crew busting the vault of the outfit, in Mexico where the crew hit a cartel counthouse, in Paraguay where post film Chris has to reinvent himself; going from a street soldier looking to take scores into a modern criminal using the tristerian side of the internet to hock black market defense software to pariah states. The novel captures the tone and voice of Mann and his character's perfectly, when Hanna is screaming at a fence for information, you hear Pacino. And the new characters that link the prequel and sequel parts of the novel slide right in with only the slightest sense of contrivance. And like the film, the book does not let off the gas for a second. You are wading through tension for every second your eyes scan the page. The wry banter, encroaching loneliness suffocating the actors, the methodical skill being put to good or ill use, all can end in exploding viscera and rent flesh in an instance. It's fantastic.
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Mar 6, 2023 03:32
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TheWorldsaStage posted:Just put down Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic I have good news for you: the first two Discworld books are considered to be by far the weakest.
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Mar 6, 2023 08:57
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Jedit posted:I have good news for you: the first two Discworld books are considered to be by far the weakest. Yeah by nerds 
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Mar 6, 2023 09:01
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A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik El is a junior in the school for mages, the Scholomance. It's less a school and more of a prison crossed with a military academy. It's brutal, deadly, cruel, just the worst. But still better than the alternative: the world is full of evil things who find magically gifted kids an easy meal, and Scholomance was created to give them a fighting chance at survival. If you've seen this book recommended before it's probably followed by "It's like Harry Potter, but ______". That's an overused comparison, but in this case I think it's warranted. It's like Novik read Harry Potter and decided to do the exact opposite wherever she could. But by doing so, she threw out the baby with the bathwater. All the genuinely good parts of Harry Potter, such as the whimsical nature of magic, the comfy social situations, the fairy tale feel of it all, are all swapped for much more unpleasant versions. The wizarding world of the Scholomance really sucks. That could have been interesting in a different context, but this is a YA book, so our protagonist is legally obligated to respond to even horrific events with a resigned sigh and snide comment. It's a very scary and stressful setting, but one that is being filtered through the lens of a cynical YA high schooler. It's not a great juxtaposition. I actually liked El as a character; she was dealt a rough hand, vaguely similar to Frozen's Elsa (almost surely the author's inspiration), and she contrasts well with the rest of the characters. Her cynicism is warranted. But I very much wish I wasn't in her head the whole book. It's written in that pseudo-diary format every YA book loves, and close to 80% of the book is El's internal monologue reacting to both past and present with the same detached "yep, just another day in Magekiller High School" tone. The worldbuilding is especially clumsy: she'll namedrop a common thing in her world, gives you maybe a few paragraphs to piece together what it is from context, only to then painstakingly explain the entire thing and its history and its related wikipedia entries in the middle of dialogue or an action scene. There were many parts I liked. It had a lot of interesting things to say about privilege and education using magic as a metaphor. Its magic system was novel, an intriguing combination of language and intention and belief. But I won't be continuing the series, and it's hard to recommend this to anyone, even those with interests in magic school settings
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Mar 6, 2023 09:54
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A Congregation of Jackals by S Craig Zahler. Western thriller in which a group of characters' past come back to haunt them. Written by the guy that wrote the movies Bone Tomahawk (Kurt Russell Western horror) and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Vince Vaughn prison movie). This book needs an editor. Overwritten, tedious prose. Yeah we get it, you have a thesaurus, but there's no reason to take it out on us. When the reader isn't being bludgeoned with a bunch of 10 dollar words, they are instead subjected to repetitious language that makes it seem like the book was written in one pass very slowly...like a paragraph a day. For example two characters are described as "sun bronzed" three times on the same page. Oh and I hope you like the word "presently", because the author loves it. Kindle says it's used 67 times in a 258 page book. You are probably thinking "oh I guess I should expect it every 3.8 pages, huh?" but that's where you'd be wrong. The author appears to forget the word occasionally, then make up for it, sometimes using it three times on the same page. Presently, he found his grip. Presently, they came to a clearing. Presently, they shot the bad guys. My kindle edition of this book says "author's preferred text", which, eeesh Story wise it's pretty straightforward without too many surprises, with a few scenes of brutal violence. The characters are pretty thin. Bad stuff happens to innocent people/animals. Bad stuff also happens to characters who have it coming. By the end I was ready to be done. If the book's prose wasn't so annoying, it would've been a more enjoyable read. However I certainly will not read it again and I can't imagine I'll seek out more books from this author.
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Mar 6, 2023 12:54
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WHY BONER NOW posted:A Congregation of Jackals by S Craig Zahler. And Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, in which he threw out every bit of canon to make a wank fantasy for Nazis. Because he is a loving Nazi. Don't read Nazi books.
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Mar 6, 2023 14:03
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Hmm, you know that goes a long way towards explaining a weird part of the book concerning a Jewish character.
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Mar 6, 2023 16:04
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Jedit posted:I have good news for you: the first two Discworld books are considered to be by far the weakest. Like I'm so psyched I have so many books to read. I'm hooked
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Mar 6, 2023 18:54
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WarpDogs posted:A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik Yeah I put that one down maybe 30 pages in. Sucks because I loved Uprooted and Spinning Silver but oh well, A Deadly Education was a turd.
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Mar 6, 2023 19:24
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TheWorldsaStage posted:Like I'm so psyched I have so many books to read. I'm hooked I'm incredibly jealous of you right now.
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Mar 6, 2023 19:30
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A recent release about recent history, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams These two New York Times reporters wrote a book based their coverage of the saga of Viacom, parent company of Paramount Pictures and CBS. It intertwines two narratives: the decline and death of Sumner Redstone, the studio owner, and the disgrace of Les Moonves, the CBS CEO who was forced out due to #MeToo allegations. I picked this book up because I was very curious about why Redstone had split Viacom into separate corporations for Paramount and CBS, as this also split up the movie/TV rights and creative control for Star Trek, among other franchises. Everybody finally figured out having two separate companies was a bad idea, and the companies re-merged into ViacomCBS just in the last few years. Redstone's daughter Shari is essentially the hero of the book, as she steps in to rescue her father from this and other bad decisions, both in his professional and personal life. Unfortunately, the corporate split-up I was originally interested in was not treated in any detail at all; evidently Redstone had two competing mid-level executives at the original Viacom who were both potential CEOs, so he chose to split the business and give one to each successor, rather than promoting one and shoving the other out the door. That part of the story took up no more than a single page. The first half of the book mainly concerns Redstone, who continued to chase younger women well into his 80s. He managed to pick up not one but two gold-digging women who convinced him that they would care for him in his old age and insinuated themselves into his estate plan: an ex-girlfriend who continued to stay at his mansion after they broke up, and another woman who became his fiancee but was simultaneously involved with an ex-soap opera star who had done jail time for impersonating an heir of William Randolph Hearst. Around this time, Redstone also basically browbeat a 25-year-old flight attendant on his private jet into an utterly bizarre sugar-daddy relationship, even though it was clear that she wasn't going to sleep with him or entertain any kind of deeper commitment. Meanwhile, his daughter Shari had done a stint as an executive at Viacom but became alienated due to the male-dominated corporate culture. As her father became more ill, she had to step back in both on the corporate side and the family side. This half of the book was extremely tough to read and basically misery porn. Redstone was aggressive towards women in quite demeaning ways, but in his later years was subject to constant gaslighting by his live-in girlfriends, cutting him off from his family to ensure they could inherit the bulk of his estate. Shari makes her way back into the picture, but not without controversy, including multiple lawsuits and court-mandated evaluations by a psychiatrist specializing in elder care. If you've ever had to deal with an elderly relative's final years, this stuff is very hard to read. The second half of the book is where the corporate maneuvering and Moonves come into play. Shari sees the rise of Netflix and the dominance of Disney in the streaming market, and becomes convinced that the separation of Paramount and CBS was a big mistake. CBS, however, has been by far the best-performing of the traditional TV networks under Moonves' tenure. Even though the Redstone family corporation National Amusements has benefited from a dual-class share structure that guarantees them dominant voting power, the rest of the CBS board sees no reason to get saddled with the underperforming Paramount Pictures. Meanwhile, Moonves has allegations of sexual assault going back to the 1980s haunting him, and a long-time Hollywood agent with a couple of Moonves' victims on his client list is lightweight blackmailing Moonves to find work for them to keep them quiet. This part of the book definitely deserves a content warning; the authors don't sensationalize their reporting about the assaults, but what Moonves did was always shockingly abrupt, and happened in places where the women couldn't easily get away from him. Long story short, the outside members of the CBS board eventually find a law firm willing to challenge the Redstones by issuing a special dividend of shares with increased voting power to counteract the Redstones' super-voting shares, but this is all scuttled when the allegations against Moonves finally erupt into public awareness. Moonves is summarily ejected, Shari Redstone comes out on top, Paramount and CBS re-merge into the new-old ViacomCBS, Sumner passes away halfway through the process with the gold-digging girlfriends written out of his will... everybody else lives happily ever after? I dunno, judge for yourself... Star Trek sucks worse than ever these days, but Paramount+ seems to be doing good business with all that Yellowstone cowboy stuff, and my mom liked Sly Stallone in Tulsa King... I guess they're still keeping the boomers happy, if nobody else. Overall, this is a hard one to recommend. It's mostly about ugly people doing ugly poo poo. The corporate law aspects near the end, with counteracting super-voting shares in a dual-class share structure, was the most fascinating part of the book to me. This is how a lot of the big Silicon Valley companies are set up these days, so it's interesting to know that somebody has a legal theory about it, even if it hasn't been taken to court yet.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:20
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tuyop posted:Yeah I put that one down maybe 30 pages in. Sucks because I loved Uprooted and Spinning Silver but oh well, A Deadly Education was a turd. Mileage may vary, I had a hard time finishing Uprooted and thought it was mediocre, but loved the Deadly Education trilogy.
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Mar 7, 2023 15:04
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istewart posted:A recent release about recent history, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams I should probably check that out. My dad worked directly under Sumner Redstone at Paramount/Viacom, and I wonder what he'd think about this.
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Mar 7, 2023 16:03
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Colonel Taint posted:Finished a few books in the past few months: the blind owl owns, sounds like I’ll have to get a hold of musashi
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Mar 7, 2023 17:49
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. Had been meaning to read it for a while, finally got round to it and loved it.
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Mar 8, 2023 00:22
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Educated by Tara Westover much more intense than I was expecting. Gripping, compelling, but not exactly enjoyable.
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Mar 8, 2023 05:22
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WarpDogs posted:A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik I liked the first two well enough but the final one, Golden Enclaved, was just horrid and if my time had even the slightest value I’d be even more annoyed.
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Mar 9, 2023 05:24
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