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Vanity Fair, Gravity's Rainbow, and We Are Pirates! Loved 'em all. I'm glad Daniel Handler has a vehicle for adult jokes.
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May 14, 2022 17:32
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Between Two Fires by Christopher Buelhman. The historical setting and details were great, and I loved the omniscient viewpoint. It's rare to find good omniscient pov written by a modern author that works--it seems like most fantasy authors just defaulted to 3rd limited sometime in the late 80s/early 90s. But Buehlman uses it to great effect. One chapter in particular stood out, written from the point of view of a mother barn mouse. Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson is easily the worst book in the cosmere. It's really light on detail, which is not great for a fantasy book--so light it made visualizing most of the scenes difficult. The characters are all flat and none of them develop in any meaningful way. It's structured like a Back to the Future movie no one wanted, showing what certain characters were doing in the background of the trilogy books on their own, but I didn't feel like it added anything. If anything, the "twists" detracted from the original series.
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May 14, 2022 20:56
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Holy gently caress his descriptions of a dystopian wasteland are unparalleled.
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May 16, 2022 03:45
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Just finished Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. Holy hell one of the best books Ive read in the past 5 years! I loved this book, my head is still spinning try to think through all the themes and ideas in the books. I suck at writing so Im having a hard time articulating, but this is a great crime/idea book if someone was looking for something vaguely in the crime genre. Also Don Carpenter wrote this line, not in the book, that I find very funny "Hello. He lied." Anyway well worth it, the New York Review of Books republished it a few years ago.
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May 17, 2022 14:14
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Just read Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story by Christopher Moore and, when you strip away the heavy male gaze, the extreme quippiness, the lolrandom feel to the whole book, and the thirstiness of every character, there's a cute little romcom there. I liked his later books better, I feel like in some ways (but not all) mellowed out a bit. Fluke was funny and weird. I have a big soft spot for the stupidest angel.
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May 17, 2022 17:44
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Finished Gravity's Rainbow last week and now I understand Metal Gear Solid even more than I did before.
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May 17, 2022 19:40
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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. The protagonist summarizes his plight, why did this alien poet decided to capture and rape him, with "for the same reason pedophiles rape babies - my holes were tight". Bruh, you're a catholic priest. You should really know better.
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May 18, 2022 19:36
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I finished The Road. I liked it more than I thought I would.
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May 19, 2022 22:41
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The Road is good. I just finished Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. It started slowly but then accelerated into the stratosphere. A meditation on western cynicism and how to draw joy from life. I've been reading a number of books written during the interwar period and this is by far the most optimistic. The influence of Buddhism is fairly clear, but its not in your face. A classic for a reason and thanks to last Secret Santa for sending me a copy (in blissfully larger format paperback). Funny thing, when I went to shelve the book I went to that spot in the alphabet for Hesse and found a trade paperback with no cover at that spot. I took it out and...it was another copy of Steppenwolf. Neither I nor my partner have any recollection of that book. Feel like the book's story looped back at me IRL. There were clues though! It was stamped Ann Arbor Public Library, and it had a coupon for a video game arcade (ask your parents) that was there dated for a time when I lived there. So, I figure a friend of mine who was dedicated to hitting the library sales days either got a copy for me or I picked it up the one or two times I went with her, or a roommate who was a huge fan of that arcade and was an English major gave it to me (or I swiped it). Or I grabbed it from a pile of trash from somewhere with the intention of reading it at some point and forgot. But I am hosed if I can remember
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May 29, 2022 01:56
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The Woman in the Dunes by Kono Abe. A man is trapped in a sandy village by other people who are trapped in the sandy village. There's so much sand here. It's 1/8 mm big and it gets everywhere. A testament to how people get used to miserable circumstances when offered the slightest comfort. This is the first book I've finished in about eighteen months. Hopefully I'll get way more done in the next eighteen.
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May 30, 2022 01:31
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All Smiles Until I Return by Aron Beauregard. A group of people go to Hell. Hellish hijinks ensue, and two people fall in love. There were a few spelling errors that bothered me. Extremely transgressive, you have been warned. Also contains a character that’s clearly supposed to be Danny DeVito, which is reason enough to read it. It made me say out loud “I’m glad that’s not happening to me”, which I think is the point. Supernatural nihilism.
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Jun 4, 2022 22:55
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Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi - The collected true stories told by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi who can do more to move me in one paragraph than other writers can in an entire novel. You would expect from the description that this is a grim affair and there are dark passages sure, but the truly surprising thing is how often I found myself smiling at these tender moments of humanity despite all that is going on around them.
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Jun 4, 2022 23:39
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The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson (along with Mistborn earlier last month). Thanks to the recommendation thread for pointing me to it. The second book in the trilogy really hit the spot I was looking to itch for a fantasy setting trying to rebuild after the "big bad" is defeated. Lots of discussions on how things may actually have been better with an evil tyrant in charge.
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Jun 5, 2022 12:48
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Together We Will Go by J. Michael Straczynski (better known as the creator of Babylon 5). A very odd little story about a dozen or so people, all strangers to each other at the beginning, who for various reasons have each decided to commit suicide. And so they plan to go out with a bang: piling into a tour bus for a cross-country road trip, which is to conclude with the bus driving off a cliff. It's an epistolary novel, told entirely through journal entries, emails, text messages, etc, and so kind of by necessity it's at its best when it's heavy on the character moments, and at its weakest when it attempts quick action. It's far from perfect but strangely compelling, and worth a read in my opinion. One warning: I would NOT suggest it for someone who's seriously depressed. Almost all of the characters intend to kill themselves, after all, and we get to read their unvarnished thoughts justifying and glorifying that choice.
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Jun 5, 2022 17:42
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Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka. A group of killers all end on the Shinkansen bullet train. Interplay and violence ensue. The characters are by turns lovable and chilling, even though they all put people in the ground for fun or profit. It reminded me a bit of the John Wick Universe, with killers knowing of each other and having shared legends. The movie doesn't look like it's that concerned with following the book outside of character names and rough plot lines, sadly.
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Jun 5, 2022 20:34
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Spent the last week reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The first chunk of the book, revolving around Chip, a shithead professor of cultural studies who sleeps with one of his students and then writes a terrible screenplay about it, kinda put me off, because it felt like too many novels I've read that are about literary professors who have affairs with their students (an oddly populous genre) and at times felt like a pale retread of White Noise. Franzen does a good job of getting into Chip's head, but we spend a lot of time there at first (almost 150 pages - take that, bishop myriel), and by the time he's stumbling through the streets cursing himself for using the word "breasts" too many times in his script, I was just about ready to start ruffling forward in the book to see if other things start to happen (I'm aware of the irony that Chip's script features a "hump" of difficult monologuing for the audience to get over before the action begins). The main thing that kept me hanging on was the occasional intrusion of other perspectives, which floated across Chip's manic perspective like tantalizing little bubbles, but I can't deny that by the time I got to the second part, which plunges us into the life of Chip's sibling, Gary, I was starving for anything else. This is, mostly, the pattern of the book. We're given the perspectives of the five main characters in fairly large chunks, each one getting most of their own devoted segment, and though I think the Chip section runs too long and a little too closely to better works in the same genre, there's something to be said for the way Franzen is able to pull everything around into a totally new perspective and, as we're granted access to more and more perspectives, how he's able to play them off of each other. He also has a wonderful and all-consuming knack for observation, and for bending observations under the lens of these varying perspectives, so that we begin to pick up how characters might be (mis-)interpreting each other, even when we're not being granted mental access to both sides of a conversation. The narrative changes voices as it changes characters, but always remains at just enough distance for the reader to observe these changes and pick up on the delusions that are hidden from the characters who have them. The last segment is fairly devastating. Alfred, the father, has spent most of the (present) sections of the novel in varying states of (frighteningly well-described) dementia, and, eventually, suffers a Johnny Get Your Gun-style fate that is unflinchingly depicted and very, very painfully true to life. Franzen essentially gives this to the reader as the pound of flesh that must be extracted in order for the other characters to be granted their freedom - their corrections - from the misery that, to a great degree, he inflicted upon them. Can we accept him as being terrible enough to suffer like this at the end of his life? But here, again, we have to consider his perspective in the novel, his hard-lined morality and aloofness and the way he justifies himself, and how that's set against the things he says to others, the things he believes and espouses. Can a person really deserve suffering? I think there are some issues here and there throughout the novel - Chip's section is long and there are echoes of White Noise that are mostly distracting for the fact that they kind of lead to a dead end - but overall it's a really spectacular and engaging work.
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Jun 11, 2022 23:55
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Powered Descent posted:Together We Will Go by J. Michael Straczynski (better known as the creator of Babylon 5). A very odd little story about a dozen or so people, all strangers to each other at the beginning, who for various reasons have each decided to commit suicide. And so they plan to go out with a bang: piling into a tour bus for a cross-country road trip, which is to conclude with the bus driving off a cliff. It's been years and years since I read it, but I think Straczynski just up and stole the plot to Arto Paasilinna's "Hurmaava joukkoitsemurha"?  (I picked the Spanish translation as it has a bus on the cover.)
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Jun 12, 2022 23:54
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Just finished Gareth Hanrahan's The Shadow Saint, the second book in his Black Iron Legacy series, and I really enjoyed it. The setting is fascinating, and as a mousey historian type, I liked that the mousey historian character is legitimately terrifying by the end of the book. Now I'm just grumpy that my library doesn't have the next book.
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Jun 13, 2022 16:58
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Fighting Trousers posted:Just finished Gareth Hanrahan's The Shadow Saint, the second book in his Black Iron Legacy series, and I really enjoyed it. The setting is fascinating, and as a mousey historian type, I liked that the mousey historian character is legitimately terrifying by the end of the book. I've been curious about those, since (as Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan) he's well known in the tabletop RPG community for producing many excellent adventures, including Eyes of the Stone Thief and The Zalozhniy Quartet. Guess I'll have to take a look.
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Jun 14, 2022 12:30
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Selachian posted:I've been curious about those, since (as Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan) he's well known in the tabletop RPG community for producing many excellent adventures, including Eyes of the Stone Thief and The Zalozhniy Quartet. Guess I'll have to take a look. You can definitely see the influence on that work on the Black Iron Legacy books - the worldbuilding is some of the best I've read in years.
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Jun 14, 2022 21:06
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Just wrapped up the one-two punch of Jane Eyre (reread) and Wide Sargasso Sea. 1. Rochester is still awful. Reading Jane Eyre is like watching your nice friend fall for a douchebag and there’s nothing you can do about it. Brontë does such a great job capturing the seesaw feelings of a crush and flirting (but not sure if you’re flirting) and it has to be with a dude who locked his wife in the attic?? You sure Jane??? Anyway. It’s a classic and a fast read with an insightful narrator. Also some real crazy poo poo goes down. (Totally forgot about the fortune teller part, like, what the gently caress?) Glad I picked it up again. 2. Wide Sargasso Sea is incredible. Holy poo poo I could talk about this book for days. It’s only 180 pages and I don’t think there’s anything I would have added or cut from the book. It’s basically perfect. There’s essentially two narrators that are actively bad at communicating to each other. They’re both entrenched in their own trauma (Antoinette was screwed from the beginning) and culture (Rochester is patriarchal rear end in a top hat) and are unwilling to really listen to each other. Rhys does an incredible job demonstrating how people can interpret one event completely differently from one another. Just even the style (stream of consciousness ish-very postmodern) added to the whole instability vibe of the novella. Sure, maybe I didn’t fully know exactly wtf was going on at certain points but the language so so evocative and effective. I would read an entire novel set in the first part of the novella.
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Jun 15, 2022 05:09
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A Black and Endless Sky by Matthew Lyons. Ugh. I need to stop getting suckered into spending my monthly audible credit on horror novels that have catchy, poetic titles and seem to have a decent amount of good reviews and buzz. Overall it was an okay novel with some really cool moments, but while I was listening I kept thinking 'drat. I bet some of the other books I was thinking about spending my credit on this month were a lot better.' There are some really beautiful descriptions of the open desert and the horrors of going on a road-trip/being trapped in your own life sprinkled throughout the novel, but it just suffers a lot from what I see in a lot of horror novels and what I'll call Stephen King syndrome, where not only do we show what's going on with the character's inner and outer lives, but we also take some time to tell it because we assume the audience is stupid, then we reiterate the showing *and* telling process a few more times. The violent fight scenes are also okay in concept but overwritten. Just a lot of overwriting overall. And I don't even think it was a bad book or anything, just a clean three-out-of-five. Lots of cool moments. Also lots of 'meh.' I also just couldn't get into the heads of characters who compulsively get into barroom brawls. That seems like an interesting pathology that a better book could have explored, but these characters just didn't work and seem real for me. Eh. After that I also finished The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. Just an amazing and beautiful/heart-wrenching character-and-character-interaction driven novel, as always. The second novel in the Wayfarer's series, A Closed and Common Orbit, is one of my favorite books of all time and this wasn't quite at that level, but it was still such a joy to read. Roveg, the kindly and jovial space-crustacean is a character who's going to stick with me for a long time. Also big props to the premise of writing a sci-fi novel with no human characters in it at all. We need more books like that.
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Jun 20, 2022 03:41
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The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. The end of the first trilogy in the Mistborn series. A good wrapper to the trilogy in my opinion, though it didn't necessarily end the way I wanted it to (I don't like it when main characters die even if it fits very well into the story.). The book did a lot more world-building on the technical side of how the universe's power works compared to the first two, which I enjoyed. Lots of solid character growth, introduction of new characters that fit well into the story, and characters discovering new mechanics of the "magic" in the world. I was enthralled by the dive into the origins and tragedies of the Kandra and Koloss, and how even though he was ruthless, the Lord Ruler did love his people and was ultimately doing his best given the circumstances (The reveal of atium being Ruin's physical manifestation and the careful planning he took to hide it were jaw-dropping.). I'll be taking a break, but will definitely jump back into Sanderson soon.
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Jun 20, 2022 16:13
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Finished Red Station by Kenzie Jennings a few days ago. It's pretty fun if you're into splatterpunk and have read a western or two.
UwUnabomber fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 18:15
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Dune Messiah. A re-read, since it's been forty odd years since I'd read it. A brave sequel that could easily have been something more palatable to readers and publishers for the sake of a buck, but Herbert doesn't take that path.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:04
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Fighting Trousers posted:Now I'm just grumpy that my library doesn't have the next book. Thank you, Overdrive recommend feature! Just finished The Broken God, and WOOOF. What a way to end it. Definitely hope Hanrahan gets the chance to finish out the series.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:55
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Robot Wendigo posted:Dune Messiah. A re-read, since it's been forty odd years since I'd read it. A brave sequel that could easily have been something more palatable to readers and publishers for the sake of a buck, but Herbert doesn't take that path. Being a much smaller book, it came out in Galaxy magazine before being released as a book. I think it's possible Herbert didn't know how big Dune would be for his career yet, and the prestige of serialized release of a smaller book seemed like a good deal. Dune won the nebula and tied with Zelazny for the Hugo, but those two things are necessarily guarantees for big money. I don't know if you can attribute Herbert's willingness to write difficult fiction to his not being a sell out. Dune was really weird when it came out. The other books are less accessible because they don't follow the hero's journey. I wonder, if Herbert had know that his success with Dune was in large part due to it being an adventure/coming of age tale, if he would have written the sequels differently.
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Jun 21, 2022 00:20
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MartingaleJack posted:Being a much smaller book, it came out in Galaxy magazine before being released as a book. I think it's possible Herbert didn't know how big Dune would be for his career yet, and the prestige of serialized release of a smaller book seemed like a good deal. Dune won the nebula and tied with Zelazny for the Hugo, but those two things are necessarily guarantees for big money. Analog Magazine declined to publish the serialized Messiah after publishing what would become Dune because the editor, John W. Campbell, said readers wanted heroes and Paul was definitely not that in Messiah. Fortunately, Galaxy stepped in at that point. It's helpful to remember that Dune itself wasn't a huge success at first, either, so Herbert could have course corrected with Messiah and given publishers something more pew pew and action oriented--but he didn't. Like Tolkien--who really disliked Dune--Herbert had a vision and followed it.
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Jun 23, 2022 16:11
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Robot Wendigo posted:Like Tolkien--who really disliked Dune--Herbert had a vision and followed it. Mind if I ask for details? I'm curious. If this is a bad place to get into it feel free to quote me in the tolkien thread or something.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:26
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Against All Gods is an excellent book by the wonderful Miles Cameron about surveillance capitalism, imperialism, exploitation, inequality, and killing the absolute poo poo out of gods who suck rear end and live off the sweat of your brow.
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Jun 25, 2022 03:04
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I finished Reincarnage and it owned bones. Machetes through the face and man-traps. Can't wait to dig into the sequel. Still working on the extra content from the expanded Maximum Carnage version.
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Jun 25, 2022 03:09
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Finished Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Fleshed out a lot of ideas that have been on my mind but that I didn’t have the words or prerequisite knowledge to build on. As a depressed person, I do think he missed the mark on mental illness (regardless of it’s possible social roots, mental illnesses are also individual medical pathologies and should primarily be treated as such IMO). Probably gonna read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber next.
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Jun 27, 2022 02:22
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Dysthymia posted:Finished Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Fleshed out a lot of ideas that have been on my mind but that I didn’t have the words or prerequisite knowledge to build on. As a depressed person, I do think he missed the mark on mental illness (regardless of it’s possible social roots, mental illnesses are also individual medical pathologies and should primarily be treated as such IMO). if you like Fisher's writing, and want something lighter but still in the same vein, The Weird and the Eerie is a fantastic collection of essays. He has a real knack of speaking vague feelings (fitting considering "weird fiction" is all about feeling!) into concrete ideas and theories.
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Jun 27, 2022 17:39
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Dark Gold by Christine Feehan. 3rd book in the Carpathian series...and so far the worst, even for my incredibly low standards for this series. The cover's amazing though:  
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Jun 27, 2022 18:28
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Dysthymia posted:Finished Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Fleshed out a lot of ideas that have been on my mind but that I didn’t have the words or prerequisite knowledge to build on. As a depressed person, I do think he missed the mark on mental illness (regardless of it’s possible social roots, mental illnesses are also individual medical pathologies and should primarily be treated as such IMO). There's a Communist Surrealist periodical you should check out if you're so inclined. It's called The Locust Review and it's on Patreon.
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Jun 27, 2022 19:21
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StrixNebulosa posted:Dark Gold by Christine Feehan. 3rd book in the Carpathian series...and so far the worst, even for my incredibly low standards for this series. She looks like she's about to get Rick Rolled by Dracula
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Jun 28, 2022 05:33
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Just finished Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. This was real good. I recommend it as well.
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Jun 28, 2022 10:53
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The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Perhaps the first Gothic novel ever written, I found the story itself to be okay but enjoyed reading the editor's notes and commentary about the historical context of the novel and the cultural and political significance of Gothic-ness.
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Jul 5, 2022 04:29
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Finished Reincursion.
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Jul 5, 2022 08:34
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Finished The Last Season by Eric Blehm over the weekend, a v.good book with a sad ending. I've been listening to Desert Oracle Radio a lot recently, which has made me slowly dial back how fast I do hikes and take less pictures to soak in the wilds, and this book helps reinforce that idea for me.
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Jul 5, 2022 22:56
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