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Last year I embarked on the "Hyperion" quartet, and I finished the last one (The Rise of Endymion) a few weeks ago. A gripping and enjoyable series that truly went places. I've moved on to more Dan Simmons -- I'm currently reading his suspense/horror novel Summer of Night. Re the second half of the Hyperion books (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) I found a central character in both books (who is also the voice of the narrator) to be obnoxious and unlikeable but the grand story told through those two books is awesome.
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Oct 15, 2020 11:09
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Just finished The Quiet American by Graham Greene, the copy I have has an introduction by Zadie Smith which is actually even better than the book but the book is pretty good. The bit where Pyle and Fowler are in the tower is 100% gnarly excellent and there are many nice sentences but I didn't love it and I'm still wondering why. Maybe it's hard to follow someone like Fowler for a whole novel.
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Oct 16, 2020 00:27
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Just finished A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear and holy poo poo. I think this is the funniest book I've ever read. If you're not familiar, it's about a libertarian "Free Town Project" where a bunch of people moved to a small town in New Hampshire to do a sort of Galt's Gulch-style semi-lawless utopia. It didn't go well. It went about as well as every goon project ever attempted. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there were actual goons that took part in this clusterfuck. Essentially, they ended up with (among myriad other things) a severe bear problem. Anyway, it's a compelling read and very informative about 1. Bears 2. Libertarians 3. The history of bear problems in NH 4. The history of libertarian sentiment in NH I loving loved it.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:31
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For some reason it's like $30 aud on the kindle store.
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Oct 17, 2020 05:41
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Farten Barfen posted:Just finished A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear and holy poo poo. Learned about this from a review in TNR and I'm delighted to hear it holds up. Can't wait to read it.
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Oct 17, 2020 06:03
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Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian. Very chill book about different culinary and cultural traditions around fish in West Bengal, Hyderabad, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Mumbai, Kerala, Mangalore, and Gujarat. Subramanian builds a strong narrative around all the ways in which fish and fishing shape people's lives, his included. Case in point: reminiscing about growing up with asthma and his parents trying everything--pills, inhalers, ayurveda, an "ice cream-free existence"--but the fish treatment doled out to thousands in Hyderabad every year by the Bathini Goud family. The fish treatment is basically cramming a yellow herbal paste inside a live murrel fish, which then goes down the person's throat. Now an adult writing a book on the fish traditions of India, the author decides to give the fish treatment a try. It's not great. According to Subramanian, the worst part isn't the fish, but the paste inside the fish, which tastes strongly of asafetida. Anyway, it's a fun and light book. Give it a shot if you like culinary travelogues. I also got Ishmael Reed's The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda after a week's delay. Mix-up at the bookstore. This is my third book of the year by Ishmael Reed, the other two being Mumbo Jumbo and The Last Days of Louisiana Red. The gist is that Miranda, tripping on Ambien prescribed by his agent, is visited by the spirits of people left out of Hamilton--enslaved people owned by the Schuyler family, Native Americans, indentured servants, and so on--in the style of A Christmas Carol. Is it as good as Mumbo Jumbo or Louisiana Red? No. Was it funny as hell and satisfying to read? Yes. Extremely. Also finished: Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky and Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich.
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Oct 18, 2020 19:03
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I read the BotM Kwaidan, which was a great collection of weird Japanese folk tales that you can read easily before the end of the month, so do so and get posting! I also just finished The Tindalos Asset by Caitlín R. Kiernan. I thought it was a very entertaining novelette that is part Hellblazer, part Men in Black, and part Lovecraft, with a touch of body horror tossed in for good measure. It had a nice build up with time skipping around various perspectives, but the climax arrived abruptly and I found the resolution hollow. It might be due to not having read the first two in the series? I dunno, but I have them now and will read them shortly.
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Oct 19, 2020 03:29
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A Hero Born (The Legend of the Condor Heroes #1) by Jin Hong This was a goon gift to me for TBB Secret Santa a year or two ago. I finally got around to reading it just now. I didn't know what to expect at all, but the description on the back calls it "A Chinese Lord of the Rings". That is not a good comparison at all and kind of threw me off when I started reading it. It really reminds of Asian movies I get from Netflix once in a while that take place in ancient China. I guess this book is kind of the originator of that? I had trouble keeping track of all the characters, even if there was a summary of each one included at the beginning of the book. It doesn't help that some of them had up to three different names. I probably won't read the rest of the series, but I appreciate that it exposed me to a book style I haven't read before.
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Oct 19, 2020 04:46
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IbrahimSom posted:Last year I embarked on the "Hyperion" quartet, and I finished the last one (The Rise of Endymion) a few weeks ago. A gripping and enjoyable series that truly went places. I've moved on to more Dan Simmons -- I'm currently reading his suspense/horror novel Summer of Night. Hey, I've been meaning to post that I finished Hyperion and never did, and now I feel less alone! Finished Hyperion like a week ago, and I genuinely loved it. It helps that I'm an absolute sucker for the kind of...I'm not sure metanarrative is the right word, but having the main thread of the plot be broken up by related short stories that expand on the characters etc just delights me. The standout parts for me were the Scholar's story which is one of the only things I've read in recent years that's moved me to tears - it's so low-key and ordinary in how devastating it is, compared to normal sci-fi excess, and the Consul's the whole sequence of him revealing his betrayal had me grinning like a madman at how wonderfully it tied the other stories together, and expanded on the world (e.g. surprise, the Ousters aren't just space barbarians!). Just a great read all round. I'm about halfway through Fall of Hyperion right now, and really enjoying it. It doesn't have quite the same tone/pacing as it shifts into a bit more of a "standard" sci-fi progression, but still keeps a lot of the mystery and wonder, and the political/military intrigue makes up for the variation imo. [edit] And now I've just finished Fall! Still think it's great overall, definitely a good successor. Just a few minor niggles which may be just me losing focus/being tired at the end - the endgame seemed to teeter under the weight of all the plot threads resolving and I definitely had to go reread some parts to try to make sense of what was happening, and even then there were some small bits I just gave up on and hoped all would become clear later on. Nothing that put me off though  I've heard really mixed things about Endymion on here so I'll probably not go straight on to it now. Annoying protagonists are a massive hate but if the overall writing and story can compensate for it it may be worth. Might try reading something that isn't scifi next as my last 4 or 5 reads have been! Not the Messiah fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Oct 21, 2020 |
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Oct 20, 2020 12:46
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Just finished Denis Johnson's posthumous The Largesse of the Sea Maiden and I loved it. It's a short story collection about [lack of] regrets, aging, friendships, and Elvis Presley, with an overarching theme of mortality. I was really captivated by Johnson's language and I immediately got his novella Train Dreams to read next.
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Oct 22, 2020 15:08
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Zone One by Colson Whitehead. Now I am about halfway through Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:17
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don longjohns posted:Zone One by Colson Whitehead. Now I am about halfway through Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin. Eyyyy I read that earlier this year, I’m not sure I’ve found anyone else who’s read it. What did you think? I found it to be a very competent and I liked the story (still don’t think I get Mark Spitz) but overall seemed kinda gray.
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Oct 23, 2020 16:42
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Sandwolf posted:Eyyyy I read that earlier this year, I’m not sure I’ve found anyone else who’s read it. What did you think? I found it to be a very competent and I liked the story (still don’t think I get Mark Spitz) but overall seemed kinda gray. I enjoyed it. Sometimes the prose got very long-winded describing cityscapes and Spitz's life stories, but overall I enjoyed the pseudogov't trying to sponsor zombie cleanup through corporations. It's a great corporate dystopia disguised as a zombie novel. It plays on themes from Romero and other zombie movies, and I appreciated a fresh take on those themes. I too puzzled over Spitz. The book comes right out and says he is an average guy, just a survivor, who lives because he doesn't think too deeply about anything. But he totally does. He starts the story overthinking to the point where he almost dies as a result. It's contradictory and I couldn't figure out why. Overall I interpreted the story as being about PTSD not just from a disaster and subsequent global collapse, but also the day-to-day drudgery of capitalism.
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Oct 25, 2020 02:43
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I finally read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. I thought it was very entertaining and enjoyed it--this is not normally a genre I normally read. It felt unfinished to me. Does the story continue in some of these other books like The Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
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Oct 26, 2020 16:37
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knowonecanknow posted:I finally read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. I thought it was very entertaining and enjoyed it--this is not normally a genre I normally read. It felt unfinished to me. Does the story continue in some of these other books like The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Yeah. There's 5 books in the trilogy (it's a joke), though the books kinda vary in quality. It doesn't end in a super satisfying manner though. Worth reading through if you liked the first book though!
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Oct 26, 2020 17:03
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The first three form a trilogy of sorts. The fourth one is mostly a nice, stand-alone romcom which I thought was very cute and fun on its own merits but some fans didn't like because it was different. Don't read the fifth book.
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Oct 26, 2020 17:10
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Thanks folks! I'll keep reading the series.
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Oct 26, 2020 17:22
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Megazver posted:The first three form a trilogy of sorts. The fourth one is mostly a nice, stand-alone romcom which I thought was very cute and fun on its own merits but some fans didn't like because it was different. I like the 4th book almost as much as the first, but it's standalone only in the sense of being kind of a "side story". I'd imagine it'd be confusing if you were to jump right into it. The fifth book is the one to skip but it has its moments and there won't be any more so.... It is pretty bleak though.
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Oct 26, 2020 19:39
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"Skip" probably isn't the right word to use when that would take you right to the Eoin Colfer book.
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Oct 26, 2020 19:52
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Lockback posted:Yeah. There's 5 books in the trilogy (it's a joke), though the books kinda vary in quality. It doesn't end in a super satisfying manner though. Worth reading through if you liked the first book though! the fifth ends brilliantly, you can just feel how sick he is of writing sequels and he makes it absolutely 1000% clear that there won't be any more.
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Oct 26, 2020 22:40
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I recently finished The Last Policeman trilogy. The impending doom framework was depressing as all gently caress, but the stories were well done. I found the ending satisfactory even though I half-expected it to be a dream of some kind or the asteroid to be deflected.
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Oct 26, 2020 23:23
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knowonecanknow posted:I finally read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. I thought it was very entertaining and enjoyed it--this is not normally a genre I normally read. It felt unfinished to me. Does the story continue in some of these other books like The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? The first two books are basically novelizations of the original 12 episode run of the BBC radio series. A bunch of stuff is different in the books from the radio series, and then there were sequels to the books and then radio versions of the books, and a TV adaption that took parts from both versions, and a shorter audio play version that was released on LP which changes things up even more... Basically Douglas Adams kept reworking things every time it was adapted and the continuity is all over the place but that's really part of the charm of it. I highly recommend tracking down the radio play versions, they are classic. And I actually really love the short LP version of TRATEOTU, they re-did it with the full original cast and it actually feels way more polished with better comedic timing than the original radio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SguL_w2Oerw
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Oct 27, 2020 00:44
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sebmojo posted:the fifth ends brilliantly, you can just feel how sick he is of writing sequels and he makes it absolutely 1000% clear that there won't be any more. Entropic posted:I highly recommend tracking down the radio play versions, they are classic. They're well worth buying.
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Oct 27, 2020 14:44
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don longjohns posted:I enjoyed it. Sometimes the prose got very long-winded describing cityscapes and Spitz's life stories, but overall I enjoyed the pseudogov't trying to sponsor zombie cleanup through corporations. It's a great corporate dystopia disguised as a zombie novel. It plays on themes from Romero and other zombie movies, and I appreciated a fresh take on those themes. I thought Ling Ma’s Severance was an excellent sort of response to Zone One. Kind of an immigrant millennial exploration of identity and ennui in a plague with late stage capitalism making everything much worse.
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Oct 28, 2020 02:13
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Not the Messiah posted:Hey, I've been meaning to post that I finished Hyperion and never did, and now I feel less alone! It's definitely worth the read. I found Endymion/Rise of Endymion as satisfying as the first half.
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Oct 28, 2020 08:57
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Just finished I Am The River by T. E. Grau. This is a short horror novel set in, and in the aftermath of, the Viet Nam war and a secret operation into Laos. Its extraordinarily well written, has a constantly shifting narrative focus but it all gets brought together wonderfully at the end.
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Nov 1, 2020 00:25
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Finished The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt yesterday. Ever heard of the 1898 Wilmington insurrection? It's one of the single worst instances of Jim Crow policy/white supremacy in the American south. And this novel is a contemporary indictment of it. I'm still processing it because there's a lot to take in (  so many racial slurs in the mouths of white people), but it is a worthwhile novel.
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Nov 1, 2020 01:51
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The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes' theory is that humans weren't conscious in the way we currently are until around the second century BC. He quotes pretty extensively from the old testament, ancient inscriptions and most extensively from Homer's Odyssey. Until that point the right hemisphere of the brain acted as a hallucinated voice of God or dead tribal elder which instructed the left hemisphere what to do. There's a lot of discussion of neurology as well as historical and cultural evidence given. He points to everything from music and poetry and (most obviously) schizophrenia as vestigial remnants of our Bicameral nature. It's a pretty wild theory and a dense read, but I found it fascinating and (at least as someone with zero neurological qualifications) hard to dismiss. There are many points where he goes out on a bit of a limb and then says something like "but of course more research needs to be done on this" and there's almost no discussion of ancient Asian cultures. Hard to find. I couldn't get it on the kobo store (I ain't buying poo poo from Amazon Bezos can suck my loving dick) so I ended up downloading and converting a PDF of it, which landed the (many) footnotes often in the middle of the page. If you can find it, and have an interest in consciousness or history, definitely read it.
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Nov 2, 2020 06:33
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Sounds like garbage honestly OP. Like, how did all humans around the world achieve this mental transition at that particular point in time?
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Nov 2, 2020 06:51
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Indeed, the current consensus is that the "bicameral mind" is probably bunk for that reason and several others like cherry picking historical texts.
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Nov 2, 2020 07:29
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this sounds like some real pseudoscience poo poo
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Nov 2, 2020 08:27
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Bilirubin posted:Sounds like garbage honestly OP. Like, how did all humans around the world achieve this mental transition at that particular point in time? The number of people and complexity of their society spread beyond what bicameral hierarchies were capable of. That combined with increased contact and trade with people who spoke different languages and had different gods. He points to the apparently inexplicable collapse of large (pre Columbian) south American civilizations as proof. Look I'm not saying it's watertight, but it's an interesting read.
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Nov 2, 2020 09:23
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That book is cool and it doesn't matter that it's probably wrong.
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Nov 2, 2020 09:52
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yeah lmao at everyone being like 'duhhhh that sounds not true' about a book with a cool premise that begins O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all一 what is it?
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Nov 2, 2020 13:53
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in madness explained: psychosis and human nature by r. p. bentall he talks about that book and how it's clearly not particularly scientifically sound and makes wild claims with 'there are a bunch of different words for various emotional states in ancient greek' as its substantiating evidence, but then mentions a patient of his who was extremely distressed by constant auditory hallucinations, happened to read the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind and came back to him like 'ive still got hallucinations but now i know that people have had hallucinations for millenia and only recently have we pathologised it, thanks for trying but you didnt do anything julian jaynes did' so you know maybe not exactly hard science, but can be a really helpful, interesting idea to people and the book is fun
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Nov 2, 2020 14:08
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Also David Milch the writer of Deadwood and all around visionary lunatic was inspired by the book which is how I found out about it. Not for nothing but if you've got some time to kill his lectures on writing are incredible. He goes from trying to parse the most indecipherable bits of Kierkegaard to offhandedly reminiscing about burying a dentist in the Mexican desert and getting wrecked on ether while making acid in the 70s.
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Nov 2, 2020 14:33
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A human heart posted:That book is cool and it doesn't matter that it's probably wrong. OK well I'll put it on my speculative fiction reading list then. I mean, I read all the Carlos Castaneda books so what the hell Speaking of which, I read Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin Kiernan yesterday, and I found it much better than Tindalos but still, a cool idea is not allowed to grow and develop due to restricted page length.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:27
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Get in the Van - Henry Rollins Pretty terrible. A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami I liked the last half of the novel more than the first half. My first fiction Murakami - I'll definitely read more.
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Nov 2, 2020 21:08
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joedevola posted:The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ quote:Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.
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Nov 2, 2020 22:29
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Finished Perdido Street Station! I'm...not sure how I feel about it? I love the weirdness and detail of the world, but I feel like that was pulling me along more than the plot and characters were. I really felt myself struggling to jazz myself up to keep going at points and a lot of the characters just seemed super flat and directionless I think - the prose being periodically impenetrable really didn't help. That said it still kept me going to the end, so it's not *too* offputting. Kept wavering between a 2 or a 3 star rating on goodreads but settled on a 2, where I think it shall remain. Also the way it ends is pretty garbo. Highlights because I don't want to seem too down:I adore the Weaver and want an entire book of him getting up to shenanigans. I was also weirdly fond of the small sections focusing on the leadership of the city - I'd have liked some more of that, like a dark universe Vetinari from Ankh Morpork dealing with all these bizarre races. The little glimpses of the society in general I liked - the city and its inhabitans feel complete in makeup for lack of a better word. Infiltrating the cactus Glasshouse was great - I'm an absolute sucker for heists and intrusions into hidden societies/places. Lowlights: Lin being drummed out halfway through and her ultimate fate. C'mon. Isaac didn't seem to have much character I? didn't think. The endgame as I mentioned seemed garbage - a lot of revelations and twists and deus ex machina pile up into a big set piece that just sort of...happens? Like oh I guess we're betraying now out of nowhere, and the other characters don't comment at all and are just a-ok with this. Shrug. It also feels way too long and the pacing is wacky. Just take out like half of the lead up to the plot starting in earnest i beg of you Unrelated but that's my third book I've finished in as many weeks, after a long time of just not reading regularly. Feels good to be back
Not the Messiah fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Nov 3, 2020 |
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Nov 3, 2020 00:07
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