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The Young Homer posted:I just finished Bridge of Birds, a re-read of Drawing of the Three, Son of a Witch, and The Prestige. Ah, one of my favorite books. I'm glad you liked my recommendation 
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Nov 16, 2006 01:28
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Cat's Cradle is actually my least favorite Vonnegut after Piano Player. Not that it's bad, but I thought Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, Sirens of Titan, Bluebeard, and even Galapagos were better. I really wanted to like it, but it didn't really affect me the way Vonnegut's stuff usually does :-\ I agree. To me Cat's Cradle combines a shallow understanding of religion with bad poetry, annoying characters, a boring plot, and a whole lot of smugness into one unpleasant whole.
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Oct 15, 2007 20:55
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Zero Karizma posted:I just finished God's Debris by Scott Adams. Yes, the Dilbert guy. I swear it was worth reading. Honest. I read a little bit of one of his serious books and he came across as a delusion new ager. I stopped reading right around the part where he was talking about his belief that if you really really think hard about something happening and write that it will happen a hundred times a day, then we will influence the universe and it will happen. This concept, of course, later being known as THE SECRETTM Anyway, he seems full of poo poo to me.
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Nov 29, 2007 02:48
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Zero Karizma posted:But aren't all these "I have the answers to the universe" books full of poo poo? All actual religious texts are pretty much wishful thinking in my mind anyway. Speaking as someone who both doesn't believe in god or the literal truth of the bible, and is pretty religious, I'd say you just don't know enough or have thought enough about it to bother understanding religious books. Religious books that are used by societies to guide their understanding of the universe are complex frameworks of metaphor and symbolism describing the most difficult issues of human existence, and are pretty far from wishful thinking. But if you feel like arguing with me, take it to PM because I don't want to derail this thread.
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Nov 29, 2007 04:23
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Euphoria 5L posted:I just finished Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I borrowed that book when I ran out of books to read while traveling and started it thinking it was some pulp detective story. It, uh, wasn't a pulp detective story.
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Jan 18, 2008 07:18
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LooseChanj posted:Am I the only person who thought this book was awful? It's full of all the things that make bad fantasy and sci-fi bad. It's full of the things I roll my eyes at during bad Star Trek episodes. And it's far too long. I didn't find Perdido Street Station absolutely terrible, but I didn't find it very interesting either. I read it half-heartedly until I happened to find a book I wanted to read more and then I haven't bothered to go back to it. The plot was unfocused and only fitfully entertaining, the characters didn't really have much personality, and the sci-fi elements were really dumb. I think I'm making it sound worse than it is, because it's not even interestingly bad, it's just mediocre.
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Apr 30, 2008 19:57
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SaviourX posted:Why do you even try to read fantasy, max? You make all these half-assed attempts and then comment about how it's so boring and trite le sigh, and then spout some poo poo about Nabokov, and then any time someone ever mentions fantasy again, you're quick to pipe up that you don't like it. I thought it was science fiction, which I don't dislike. I really like Snow Crash, and I don't really care about the stigma which has appeared around it for some reason. And I've also really enjoyed some non-traditional fantasy stuff like American Gods , so I'm not inherently against reading a book like that. I'm just against reading bad books, which in my experience has included almost all fantasy. If I have reason to think that the book might be good, then I'm happy to give it a try despite my reservations with the genre. I gave George R R Martin a try because HBO was making a series from it. I gave Perdido Street Station a try because the author sounded like an interesting guy. I really don't care about my literary penis length, I'm just interested in good books and annoyed by bad books.
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May 1, 2008 08:27
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Evfedu posted:A Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. This is one of my favorite books ever. On a side note, when I was in high school I sent Barry Hughart one of my short stories completely out of the blue. He had no idea who I was, I just sent it because I loved his writing. Anyway, he sent me back a multi-page critique and a writing assignment. Then when I sent him my response to the assignment, he sent me a multi-page critique of that. I have no idea if he's even still alive, but he was/is a really nice guy and a talented writer. I just wish he hadn't become hugely bitter with the industry and quit writing altogether.
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Jul 16, 2010 20:32
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Sherbet posted:So I checked JPod out from the library based purely on the fact that it had Lego people on its cover and, what the hell? The characters are flat and boring, the plot flails wildly with no clear sense of direction, and then the author writes himself into the book as some bizarre technological deus ex machina. Several of the pages of the novel are filled with the first 100,000 digits of Pi. Now I'm a nerd and I like Pi but this is just a gigantic waste of space. Has anyone else read this? Is there something I'm missing? I think if I met Douglas Copeland on the street I would be sorely tempted to sock him because this book was just awful. Let's review: you checked out a book solely because it had lego people on the cover, and then were surprised that it was both nerdy and bad.
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Jul 21, 2010 20:53
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