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Build your house around my body by violet kupersmith was really good. Starts off a bit weird to begin with, you get the sense there's some magical realism, and then poo poo hits the fan The Protag Winnie is a bit lame and it's hard to empathize with her, but that gets better as the book goes on. Some storyline ends up a bit wonky and slightly unfinished, but there's some excellent social commentary in how the dudes are all characterized
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Apr 16, 2022 06:09
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I just finished Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby. I feel violated.
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Apr 17, 2022 03:22
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The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. This is actually my first David Mitchell so I didn’t super know what to expect as Cloud Atlas the movie was… not great. This book was a mostly fun read, though. I think it really could have been edited down a bit. Some of the character povs are a slog to get through and I found myself skimming, particularly in Crispin’s section. The “explain the crazy jargon of the conspiracy” a la Foucault’s Pendulum/Dan Brown I got a little tired of too- I much preferred when poo poo was actually happening with visible consequences, like in Marinus’s chapters. The emotional beats in the last third really made the novel. Incredibly satisfying ending and the ending narrator’s pov was one of the strongest.
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Apr 19, 2022 01:12
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Interesting to hear from someone that read that as their first one, because in many ways that was the culmination of a lot of the shared universe stuff from the earlier novels
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Apr 19, 2022 02:09
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The Grapes of Wrath A totally incredible anti-capitalist epic full of so much human soul and dignity that I was completely blown away throughout. I feel like it’s really crystallized my understanding of solidarity and collectivism and I can barely catch my breath with how heartbroken and miserable I am that we’ve forgotten these stories and lessons. It wasn’t a challenging read in any way, I enjoyed it and it was masterfully written and paced. I’ve been crying over the ending all day. This is similar to how I felt during The Open Veins of Latin America when I read about Paraguay. Just another door into a better future closed forever and anyone who remembers where the door was has been murdered or otherwise destroyed. Since I can’t talk about this book without the chapter 25 manifesto, and how it applies to us now: quote:
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Apr 19, 2022 03:45
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That's heavy, doc. I've mainly heard of the movie, being a film fan, and Henry Fonda is pretty cool. Cool to hear the book moved you like that. Only book from around then (1939) I've read is The Big Sleep, which ruled, its wit and smoothness was up my alley. Been meaning to dip back in years more often. At the moment I'm reading a couple books from the 80s.
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Apr 19, 2022 04:31
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The Worm Ouraboros by E. R. Eddison. A fantasy novel that was published 15 years before The Hobbit. I didn't enjoy it but I found it to be an interesting read because it not only preceded the works of Tolkien and Lewis but was influential on them and many other writers. I wanted to see how much it resembles and differs from later fantasy novels but then I remembered I hadn't read much fantasy since I was a child, but I was still able to recognize genre conventions that this book helped create so it was at least a useful read if not an enjoyable one.
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Apr 20, 2022 00:53
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The Man in the High Castle. Which I was pretty disappointed with. Just didn't feel like it went anywhere, wasn't particularly satisfying.
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Apr 20, 2022 01:23
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Crosspost from the Stephen King thread but posting it here too because I'm happy I'm finally reading again after almost a year of not having the time and energy: I read The Institute over the Easter weekend (well, finished the last 40ish pages Thursday) and it was a light, enjoyable read. Not groundbreaking by any means, but enjoyable nonetheless. A perfect story for a lazy weekend, so to say. I wasn't ever bored and at times truly hooked by the story, but that was mostly in the beginning and middle. The ending was adequate, I think, but too predictable which is why it took me a couple of days after the weekend to get back into it and finish the book. I don't really know what to think of it. It was a solid 7.5 out of 10 read for me, and I liked that it felt modern without being stilted (sometimes I really get a sense of "Darn kids with their newfangled technologies" vibe from King even when I read stuff from a decade or two ago) and I liked the story and characters but it all felt very... I don't know, unoriginal? It was like King picked up on a ton of themes and ideas that were popular 10-15 years ago and decided he needed to write something along those lines. It was basically Cabin in the Woods + Stranger Things + New Mutants + Minority Report (at the end), and reusing themes from 11/22/63 and Revival, although it did feel more hopeful that those. I dunno. A fun read, like I said. I like the story and I liked the characters, even though I feel he uses characters like Tim a lot and nothing about him felt (again the word) original. Luke was fine. I did like the way he used his intelligence in a pretty natural and pleasant way, both to drive the story forward and as an exposition device. What I didn't like was that King seemed to be very aware that Luke was dangerously close to being like the perfect protagonist, and would insert these observations to highlight that Luke is just a kid. His thoughts on being classist/prejudiced towards normal people felt really random. Sometimes he'd be perfectly capable of grasping his interactions with others and at other times he'd doubt himself suddenly or realize he was being judgmental even though there wasn't really any reason for it. As if King felt the need to insert flaws into Luke to make him more believable/relatable/realistic even thought the situation at that point didn't motivate it in any way. It just felt random. "Oh poo poo, haven't reminded the reader that Luke isn't perfect in a while so now I just gotta make him doubt himself and be awkward for a second.", you know? I did really like that the ending was much more mundane than I expected halfway through. I was afraid that it was going to be a Revival like ending where there's a big unknowable evil that's connected to the dots and the kids are used to keep it at bay, and now that the system broke down the world is going to end a lá Cabin in the Woods, but thankfully it was just the evil of normal humanity at large, and the ambiguity at the end of whether or not the institute was right was nice. Still, that's getting into the web of precognition and couldn't they have prevented nuclear armageddon by making people miss phone calls and poo poo instead of killing them. Like they were trying to stop the first piece of a huge Rube Goldberg machine when they could've, much more efficiently, stopped it at one of the end pieces. I feel like if the Institute really had all that power and really did have the best intentions they've been doing a really lovely job, both for the world and themselves and whatever their agenda is, which they should've known. At this point, with all they've accomplished so far, preventing the downfall of humanity would go hand in hand with improving life for all people to a point they hadn't despite having over half a decade to do so. But that gets into ideologically complex territory and I don't blame King for not going there. 7.5/10
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Apr 22, 2022 15:33
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I just finished Point B (A Teleportation Love Story) by Drew Magary. It's very much a young adult story, with all the trappings that that entails up to and including the baddies being part of a bigger group of baddies, which in turn are a part of the biggest group of baddies who somehow control the entire earth despite being cartoonishly evil and incompetent at the same time. It's not a bad book, but it's also not very good. One of the few really good parts about the book are the characters and their interactions, but there's so much focus on the action that it feels like it's a movie that's been turned into a script and then embellished with some details to fill it out into a novel.
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Apr 23, 2022 21:38
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I felt the same way (it's not a bad book, but it's also not very good) about Drew Magary's 'The Postmortal'. I like Drew's online writing a lot though. Can't be great at everything is probably the lesson.
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Apr 26, 2022 15:08
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The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute. Turned out to be a very amusing book with some great characters throughout. I rented it after reading it mentioned in the Kurt Cobain 'Family Values' interview, not sure who would name their children after these Beans, but I'd like to meet them.
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Apr 27, 2022 03:18
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The Invisible Life of Addy Larue by V E Schwab Wow maybe my favorite book of the year so far? I’d recommend going in blind, or as blind as possible, but here’s a tiny hook: It’s about the life of a woman who makes a deal that she didn’t think all the way through, and the consequences of that choice across time. It’s a little heartbreaking and hopeful and the prose is astounding. If you like the interior narration of Song of Achilles, you will like this book too. E: another apt comparison is Life After Life E2: I looked at Goodreads reviews and phew some people really hate this book lol taco show fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 06:03
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Catch-22 by Joseph Heller It's amazing how relevant the central themes of the book still are; only instead of the military, it's everyday life. I certainly can't help but think that we are living in the Minderbinder economy, run by completely amoral people who have no respect for human life and no loyalty to anything but money, with social leadership composed of a gaggle of incompetents constantly trying to screw each other over to get ahead and satiate their own egos. Unfortunately it's also terribly, horribly sexist. I don't think there's a single female character given any depth beyond their sexual attributes, and they are uniformly depicted as sex-hungry trollops (or outright prostitutes) who are described by the author as "a great piece of rear end." It really gets old after not much time and really detracts from an otherwise fine novel. Also I was surprised by the upbeat ending. I know a lot of critics think it's a weak ending and a bit of a cop-out but I don't because seriously, Orr is the best. The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald I first read this back in high school, without having first read the Iliad or really being familiar with the Trojan War cycle beyond the fact that it was a thing that happened and was the cause of Odysseus' long exile. Having since read the Iliad (plus other fragments) and studied Greek mythology, I can appreciate it a bit more, seeing where and how it fits into the ongoing narrative. That said, the translation I'm reading seems a bit wonky, somehow. There are a fair number of neologisms and casual turns of phrase that feel incredibly distracting and out of place. Also, character names are spelled phonetically; for instance instead of seeing the familiar Cyclops and Circe, there's the Kyklops and Kirke, Clytemnestra is spelled Klytaimnestra, Phoenicia is Phoinikia, and so on. It takes some getting used to. I did like the translator's postscript, going into the geography of Ithaca and its environs, giving his impressions and how seeing the area in real life helped him visualize the characters' movements: The Odyssey is nothing if not dynamic, far more so than The Iliad, and I can't help but imagine that knowing the lay of the land would make the process of translating the work easier. It sure as hell beats Alexander Pope.
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Apr 27, 2022 23:53
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I finished Necroscope 4 and then read The Burrowers Beneath in one day. Fuckin love Brian Lumley.
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Apr 30, 2022 15:41
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The Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh, a historical epic set at the start of the Opium Wars. Really enjoyed it and would welcome recommendations for more fiction from this era/location told from the perspective of the victims of the British Empire/unfettered proto-capitalism.
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May 1, 2022 21:27
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Being given The Weird, the anthology from the Vandermeers, got me interested in weird fiction, so I checked out The City and the City by China Mieville. Spoiler-free: I was expecting this to be a lot weirder than it was. It got me thinking about what I actually see, ignore, and choose to do either in my every day life. More spoilery: I didn't expect the whole thing to be so mundane, aside from the weird-fiction vibe of overlapping cities. There's some bizarre stuff, but it's frustratingly never explained or explored, because the author is only interested in telling the story of this murder mystery. A lot like being able to see where you want to go but being hand-held and pulled in the opposite direction.
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May 2, 2022 21:58
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LifeLynx posted:Being given The Weird, the anthology from the Vandermeers, got me interested in weird fiction, so I checked out The City and the City by China Mieville. Spoiler-free: I was expecting this to be a lot weirder than it was. It got me thinking about what I actually see, ignore, and choose to do either in my every day life. More spoilery: I didn't expect the whole thing to be so mundane, aside from the weird-fiction vibe of overlapping cities. There's some bizarre stuff, but it's frustratingly never explained or explored, because the author is only interested in telling the story of this murder mystery. A lot like being able to see where you want to go but being hand-held and pulled in the opposite direction. Ultimately I thought he was trying to Make A Point and it ended up actively detracting from the actual story. Wouldn't recommend this book to anyone interested in Mieville.
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May 2, 2022 22:17
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Just finished Lost Horizon a bit ago. A bizzare and very of-its-time combo of overly passive descriptive prose, episodes of snappy and well-executed material that doesn't insult the reader, and running through it all, a magnificent spectrum of 1930s British paternalistic racism that stretches from "oh well that's pretty open minded, for the time period" to "tugs at collar nervously" to "only members of the Nordic Race can gain the full benefit of this mysterious Oriental power, and we have created a fallout vault of enlightened Western culture to survive the coming apocalypse with our loyal servants of the other races".
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May 3, 2022 06:38
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Just finished The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. So for a story centered on the idea of (spoilered for both plot and content) a celibate priest getting raped by an alien, it didn't do half bad as an ontological exploration. I thought the heartbreak and despair juxtaposed a lot of commentary about the will of God was really interesting. The bad: Really rushed ending that also injected a weird sense of hope which seemed off-putting compared to the end run up Plot/content due to the priest being light years away, earth found out about and pilloried thr guy for his wrongdoings long before he came back, which included both sex work and child murder Only the child murder bitbis absolutely an afterthought as the huge resolution of the book is that he was not willingly engaging in sex work, but was being raped- oh and also it was an accidental death of a child which had no emotional impact at all since it was a character we hadn't seen for a hundred pages It was almost as if the author thought that maybe earth wouldn't be pissed in the priest's absence if it was just sex work. She wanted the guy to come to a world that hated him but her story definitely wasn't about the child. Plot Some characters are killed off screen, big main characters that I liked, and they just drop off the earth. Such little resolution that it was really off putting. This is probably a byproduct of how rushed the ending was. Overall it was a good read, definitely kept me engaged, but I won't be reading the sequel.
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May 4, 2022 23:25
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Just finished Dark Eden by Chris Beckett and Working by Studs Terkel. Dark Eden was weird. It was a super interesting concept, and I really liked parts of it, but other parts were super disturbing and just not a fun read. I dont know, mixed feelings I guess. Overall I cant say that I'd recommend it necessarily but I did find it interesting enough that I sort of want to read the next book in the series. Working was a nice read. Did it in chunks bit by bit in between other books. Really liked it more as more of a time capsule for labor during the time, interesting reading about the state of peoples jobs at the time, how computers/technology was starting to impact it.
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May 5, 2022 18:53
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Just finished the first book The Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Gotta say overall not a bad bit of crime fiction. I was primarily curious because it was/is released as a series on Apple + and if given the option I prefer to read the book before watching the show unless it's Wheel Of Time which just had too many drat characters and got too confusing to finish
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May 5, 2022 19:00
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Just finished The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. So for a story centered on the idea of (spoilered for both plot and content) a celibate priest getting raped by an alien, it didn't do half bad as an ontological exploration. I thought the heartbreak and despair juxtaposed a lot of commentary about the will of God was really interesting. I finally chalked it up to cultural differences, assuming the book was written from the perspective of some culture where priests are respected and not assumed to be loving children by default.
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May 5, 2022 23:09
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Xander77 posted:Oh hey, I just barely remember this. It was such a weird take that I couldn't get where the author was coming from at all. For me I was willing to suspend disbelief, assuming it akin to the Jesuits of the Musketeers as opposed to catholic priests from the US of today.
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May 5, 2022 23:51
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Xander77 posted:Oh hey, I just barely remember this. It was such a weird take that I couldn't get where the author was coming from at all. It’s been years since I read it too. If I recall correctly somehow The Vatican is the leading science institute in the world.
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May 6, 2022 00:19
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Sock The Great posted:It’s been years since I read it too. If I recall correctly somehow The Vatican is the leading science institute in the world. I finished it a month or so ago. The Vatican isn't a scientific institute in the book, specifically -- they just know a lot of people are able to pull some strings to put a scientific expedition together faster than anyone else once they receive the signal. They stack the mission with a handful of other Jesuit priests in addition to the secular scientist characters since it's pretty common for Jesuits to also be academics. I liked the book a lot (even not being religious myself) but I would agree that you need to sort of divorce the fictionalized/idealized version of the Catholic Church/priests in the story from the version we actually have for it to fully work.
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May 6, 2022 02:42
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Homicide: a year in the killing streets by David Simon drat, I think this may become one of my favourite books. I'm not even a fan of non-fiction or crime stories, but I should've expected that the book goes way beyond that. The characters are amazing, for good and bad. The little moments of humanity investigating horrible crimes. So good. If you enjoyed any second of any of Simon's TV shows go read this book.
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May 6, 2022 03:15
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DurianGray posted:I finished it a month or so ago. The Vatican isn't a scientific institute in the book, specifically -- they just know a lot of people are able to pull some strings to put a scientific expedition together faster than anyone else once they receive the signal. They stack the mission with a handful of other Jesuit priests in addition to the secular scientist characters since it's pretty common for Jesuits to also be academics. It's an odd book. It was so acclaimed at the time but when I read it some years afterwards, it just didn't quite work for me. It's been a few years but: * As above, the Vatican isn't really a scientific leader, it's more a catalyst (really a plot excuse) to assemble the crew and the mission. It's a bit thin but is necessary to get the story going, so I gave it a pass. It's like inventing a hyperdrive because you need to have travel between star systems - we need the Vatican to be involved so we can get the priest to the planet * Slightly more irritating is that the crew are all friends, in that way that SF fans love: "I'm going to have a big adventure with my friends and no nasty bosses and there will be romance because we're friends!" It felt a bit squee-core but again, maybe we can use the Vatican angle to explain it away - the recruited people they knew and trusted, not the best people * The story intimates a lot about what went wrong, building up to it, and when the reveal came, I just didn't buy it. The shuttle pilot forgot to refuel? A mechanical failure would have been more plausible * But the biggest thing for me was that it seemed a bit Orson Scott Card - a blameless central character being noble about being shamed and reviled by everyone, wallowing in their noble sacrifice. Akin to trauma porn, they tell you it's going to be terrible, building up to it, then repeatedly tell you how terrible it was
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May 6, 2022 12:50
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Just finished Dark Eden by Chris Beckett and Working by Studs Terkel. Working is something else. It's a bit of a historical document now but I still recall the certain characters, like cop who tells tales of how he put punks and hippies straight, with Terkel's terse sidebar "he (the cop) lives separately from his family". I should really read more of his work
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May 6, 2022 12:53
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nonathlon posted:It's an odd book. It was so acclaimed at the time but when I read it some years afterwards, it just didn't quite work for me. It's been a few years but: for what it's worth, they had just been in a plane crash, and refueling involved leaving the planet, so it might have been an oversight. That said, the big mistake reveal was not the fuel issue. Yes, that got them stuck, but it was the planting of the garden that was the crux of why everything went to hell.
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May 6, 2022 13:06
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Point. As I said, it's been a while and the memory of what stranded them on the planet rather than what sealed their fate was the thing that fixed in my mind. The garden bit actually was well plotted.
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May 6, 2022 17:26
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Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. It was too short. I didn't hate it but I can't think of anything much to say other than that there wasn't enough material to hold everything together satisfyingly.
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May 7, 2022 00:12
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White Coke posted:Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. It was too short. I didn't hate it but I can't think of anything much to say other than that there wasn't enough material to hold everything together satisfyingly. Yeah, it felt like he could have done so much more with the idea. Just finished The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell, which puts me two-thirds of the way through A Dance to the Music of Time. Petty military bureaucracy infighting, punctuated by sudden outbursts of violence from the Blitz. Selachian fucked around with this message at 00:29 on May 7, 2022 |
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May 7, 2022 00:26
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Mr. Nemo posted:Homicide: a year in the killing streets by David Simon For sure, you'd definitely want to read The Corner if you haven't already.
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May 10, 2022 16:56
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Of all things, I just finished reading Twisted by Miranda Leek. I found an extremely beat-up copy for sale at my local flea market for 50 cents, vaguely remembered there being a Let's Read thread years ago, and picked it up on a lark. Part of me feels like I should go back and demand my two quarters back. For those of you who're lucky enough to no know about it, Twisted is a book about extremely unlikable shapeshifting amusement park rides murdering scores of innocent people while the book tries to convince you that they're actually the good guys. The story follows Rodney, a I recently saw a clip of Alan Moore talking about how you should read terrible books to get better at writing, and now I completely understand what he was talking about because I feel like I could write the next great American novel after reading Twisted. 10/10, highly recommended to those who don't mind losing brain cells.
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May 11, 2022 00:41
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Twisted sounds rad as hell.
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May 11, 2022 01:22
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Twisted sounds rad as hell. Yeah when is the movie coming out?
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May 11, 2022 04:21
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No seriously I'll buy it from you for $0.50.
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May 11, 2022 07:28
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I'd buy it for a dollar! (Or, I dunno, a reasonable offer, but I have a dead-tree crap collection where it'd fit nicely.)
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May 12, 2022 00:19
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Matrix by Lauren Geoff It’s about a 12c lesbian nun building a feminist utopia. I mean, it’s fine. I’m mostly here for Medieval #BanAllMen or whatever but wow the book is pretty boring. Not a lot of true conflict or tension because of the omnipotent, detached pov and that the protagonist easily accomplishes whatever goals she sets, sometimes within the same page. Marie does have a small moment of epiphany (see what I did there?) when she realizes what a monstrous, selfish rear end in a top hat she’s been her entire life and then just doesn’t change. Maybe the truest thing about this novel heh. I’m extra bummed because there’s a LOT to explore about the setting in this book- the relationship of women and god/art/power, the blurry lines between an institution and a community, female companionship in medieval England, etc. but instead it just felt like reading a flowery Wikipedia article.
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May 13, 2022 05:26
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