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Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. I haven't really read many (any?) mysteries before but this one takes place in post-Katrina New Orleans and it kept me guessing the whole time. More importantly, the book has a David Lynch-esque atmosphere and a large amount of world building. Dream sequences, vaguely mystical things, that kind of stuff. Plus a through-line of this legendary (fictional) book about detective work called Detection that gets referenced and quoted in parallel with the events of the mystery and relationships of some of the characters. A lot of backstory referred to obliquely and it sets a great groundwork for the world to continue as a series. The only part I'm disappointed in is that the next book in the series doesn't come out until June, because I can't wait to get more of this.
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Dec 3, 2012 23:34
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Josef bugman posted:Anyway, sorry for using up everyone's time with this, I kind of expected that this would create some discussion, but I think I'd probably better sush before I say something truly stupid. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3503637
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Aug 12, 2013 23:52
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elbow posted:For those of you who have read The Bone Clocks, do you think it adds much to the story if you've written everything else Mitchell has published first? I've only read Cloud Atlas and loved it, and knowing that he brings back characters from previous books in TBC, I'm still deciding whether to take the plunge into the rest of his novels or to just go for this one.
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Oct 8, 2014 04:42
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Attitude Indicator posted:what was the last decent book palahniuk did anyway? some of his earlier ones were okay, but I gave up after pygmy, jfc.
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Apr 10, 2015 13:55
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I've read all of David Mitchell's books and I rank them like: 1. Black Swan Green 2. Number9Dream 3. Ghostwritten 4. Cloud Atlas 5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 6. The Bone Clocks But I'm sure somebody else is out there to tell me that I have them in the exact wrong order. I think it always comes down to how much I like the setting. The top 2 were the single stories where I liked the setting. Ghostwritten I liked most of the settings. Cloud Atlas I was about 50/50 on, Thousand Autumns I didn't like the setting, and Bone Clocks I only liked maybe 1.5 of the 6 stories. The prose is always good, so I never have trouble getting through it, I just don't remember or feel anything for the ones I'm not interested in.
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Jun 18, 2015 02:47
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I read Slade House by David Mitchell on my vacation. I'd rate it up there pretty high in the pantheon of Mitchell Mythology. Again it's 5 different first person short stories with a common theme of the house that tells a story. Part of the reason I liked it is because I was interested in all 5 of the stories, which is always determines how much I like the book. For like Cloud Atlas and Bone Clocks I wasn't really interested in more than 2-3 of the 6 parts of the book, so I rate those lower. As a standalone, it's quite quick and readable and tells an interesting story, although I guess the ending is probably a bit weird if you didn't at least The Bone Clocks. If you've read the other 6 Mitchell novels, you get a pretty good amount of universe development considering this book is only 230 pages. Bonus for me was that I was on vacation in England so the copy I picked up happened to be a signed copy.
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Nov 3, 2015 22:41
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The Sean posted:Does anybody have a link to a good fan resource for Mitchell's novels? I love how characters (or their ancestors/family) re-appear in different books and I'm also interested in how the timeline of each of his books looks as a whole considering that many story segments occur at the same or nearly-same time.
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Nov 5, 2015 16:52
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ulmont posted:How does this compare to No Country for Old Men, or The Road?
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Jan 27, 2016 05:39
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My Mitchell opinions are upside down to yours I guess, my favorites are Black Swan Green and number9dream, and I mostly didn't like Cloud Atlas and especially Bone Clocks. Excited for Utopia Avenue, though, just because I've read all his books so it's exciting to finally get a new one.
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Apr 8, 2020 14:33
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Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson Pretty drat compelling considering it's a 450-page book about the making of a single movie. It does aim to be comprehensive though, so there are some parts where he delves a little too deep into technical descriptions of how things are done without, for some reason, including many diagrams that would probably serve things better. But overall very entertaining, there are so many good stories around the making of the film.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:28
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Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man by Jonathan Snowden. Best wrestling/MMA book in years and years. Up there with Bret Hart’s book. If you want to hear tons of wild stories about Japan and early UFC and then WWF, this has it all.
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Feb 1, 2022 06:18
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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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Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende Last month I was listening to an old episode of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell that had Eric Brende as a guest, and I was intrigued enough by the premise of his book to go find and read it. On the show, I found him to be insufferable as a person, but I wanted to know more about the experiment and the Minimite people. After finishing the book, my opinion hasn't changed. Eric is a little weasel guy with some daddy issues and the hubris to think that he can solve the world's problems by not owning a TV. The frustrating part is that he is onto something, but he gets so close to understanding that the problem is the system of capitalism without actually realizing it and saying it. How can you write "mutual aid" several times in your book and not get the hint? I got a huge laugh out of the throw-in part near the end where he went to the college lecture on feminism and these primitive societies and bravely chimed in with his "actually, the patriarchy is not so bad in the Amish community," triggering a "sigh of approval" from the rest of the audience. Sure Eric, that's definitely why they were sighing. And really astute of him to make sure he shoehorned his point into the book as the entire rest of it is how many different men he got to know in the community while getting to know none of the women. 2 out of 5 jars of sorghum molasses
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Sep 29, 2022 16:17
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How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell The premise was good, and well-researched. A lot of engaging references to other books that I'm going to look into. The issue I had was the framework being constantly likened to her enjoyment of bird-watching. Since that topic does not interest me, there ended up being pages-long passages in each chapter that I completely tuned out from, preventing me from getting the most out of my time with the book. Maybe her upcoming book Saving Time will have less bird stuff?
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Oct 18, 2022 14:10
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The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy Not my favorite. The opening portion and the last chapter were the tremendous poetic McCarthy that I love, but there was a lot in the middle that was not compelling. Like, a less interesting Suttree. I did not like the parts with The Kid at all, so I will be interested to see if there is something in Stella Maris that might grant more value to the Alicia sections. Still interested in reading articles and analysis about the book, and may be able to revise upward with time.
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Nov 6, 2022 17:30
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Is This Legal?: The Inside Story of the First UFC from the Man who Created It by Art Davie with Sean Wheelock Tremendous story. Humorously written, tons of really neat details and unfiltered opinions about the creation of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. If you like MMA, or pro wrestling, or sports, or traditional martial arts, there's something for everyone there. A lot of the story is focused on the Gracies, of course, but there's something for everyone. Very easy to read and has some good photos from the archives as well.
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Nov 17, 2022 02:21
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Gleisdreieck posted:Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk. Author had a few clever ideas but they grew stale after the first third of the book. This would have been better as a short story. Also a reminder that Palahnuik said it's the first of a trilogy and that motherfucker still owes us the other two books, 16 years later.
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Mar 31, 2023 00:23
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Spent the last few months re-reading the Neapolitan novels, in the sense that I read the first 3 in 2015 but never read the fourth one, so I read the first three again to finally finish. Truly a masterpiece series that had gave me several moments of true shock, beautiful prose, and a crushing storyline. Definitely going to read as many other Elena Ferrante books as I can. Also going to check out the TV adaptation, maybe I can hear what the difference between dialect and proper Italian is.
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Apr 23, 2023 14:13
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The_Other posted:I had read other works on scientology before so I was somewhat familiar with various aspects of the cult and some of the terminology (Rinder also has a helpful glossary of terms at the end of the book). What I found most interesting was Rinder's explanations on why it's so hard to leave scientology as well as why someone would allow themselves to be treated the way scientology treated Rinder.
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May 5, 2023 19:26
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I just want that motherfucker to finally write the other two Rant books he promised 16 years ago
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May 7, 2023 18:40
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Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover. Remarkably interesting look at one of the only places left for frontier life in America. Conover dug up so many interesting stories, and the book really builds to the chapters at the end about crime, Covid, and even the supernatural. Meditative, descriptive, and lived in. Couldn't believe how new it was, it came out in November 2022 and I had apparently bought it on Kindle for $3 in February because I have the dream of the idea of prepping in my head even though I will never do it. Plus the Amazon reviews had a few people complaining about the author shoehorning his liberal viewpoint in, which is exactly the type of criticism of a book I love. (It was even-handed, they were mad he didn't write "they were right" when reporting that the virus was a myth.)
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May 22, 2023 00:32
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I spent like two months reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks expecting it to turn into... something, instead of the nothing that it petered out into. I get what the theme was, but when you have that as your theme you are then forced to be held to the strength of the basic story and there were just so many sequences that I found uninteresting populated with characters I didn't care about. Oh well. I'll still probably end up reading more Culture books in the future because I was interested in that part.
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Aug 8, 2023 21:08
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Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape by Jenna Miscavige Hill with Lisa Pulitzer My first time reading a full book on Scientology, so the look at the inner workings was the interesting part. Less interesting was Jenna's personal story, because she had the famous name she figured out that she could do what she wanted when the time came and certainly didn't have the consequences that a normal person would. Easy to read and equal parts entertaining and horrifying, though.
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Sep 6, 2023 16:35
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