Thyroid

Can I read Company of Liars without a solid knowledge of history?

Sherlock Holmes is fun. It's hard for me to take Penny Arcade's insights into books seriously; Gabe doesn't read anything besides Star Wars novels and Tycho over-writes beyond the point of saturation. I find it a bit weird that people take this as this "geek authority". In fact, I find that whole "geek culture" thing weird, but let's not get into that. My point is that I've never taken Penny Arcade's opinion any more seriously than I've taken anyone else's, and I find it bemusing that others do. I do have Perdido Street Station to delve into, though I suspect it'll be a few years before I actually read it.

They want to censor porn sites in Jordan. They think they morally corrupt youth. Because god knows having a libido is two steps away from being a gun-wielding psychopath. And people wonder why I hate it here.

You are. It's good now, but gets better as it goes along.

I've read two Murakami books: A Wild Sheep Chase ("weird" is the word that comes to mind) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (which I can't be objective about, since it closely mirrors something of my old life; but Murakami has a gift for capturing mood and feeling, which he takes to full advantage here).

Is Rome (HBO) worth watching? I heard it got cancelled, so I'm wondering.

I saw Shades of Grey on a shelf yesterday, but didn't go for it. Do you think it's worth going for in hardcover? Edit: Hey, I found it in mass market paperback. So I got it.

I seem to remember finally getting the world and the politics on page 300 or so. It was a breathless ride from thereon.

Some of these pictures are great. I especially love the one with the old lady on the chair; it's so well-framed, and perfectly timed. The one of the old man on the chair has a beautiful paleness to it.

The Walking Dead? I think. 2001: A Space Odyssey, though that was a unique case.

Yeah, the TV show made things a little, I guess, standard. A Hollywood reproduction of the middle ages. I enjoy it, but in a popcorn-y way; the books I take quite seriously, though.

Also, I envy anyone reading A Storm of Swords for the first time. That book is something.

Only in British paperback. Dance suffered the same fate. In America and hardcover, it's one volume. We know. The three released excerpts from book six - plus a lot of foreshadowing - give a pretty good indication as to how this will happen. In fact, everything ties together in the first two chapters of book six.

I think their quality varies but within limits, in the sense they all go from A- to A+ quality (in my opinion, books 1, 2, 4 being A, 3 being A+, 5 being A- because it takes time to get going). It's depressing in the same way that The Wire is depressing; not the social issues (although there's parallels to the real world), but the way you feel about characters having bad things happening to them. Do you remember how you felt at the end of season three of The Wire? Like that. A few months on, I haven't started season four yet, but I understand that feeling that horrified pain was part of what it made the show so good. ASOIAF is like that. I love those pairings in ASOIAF. The shenanigans in Clash are a good example of that. In very minor ways. Ros will have a cameo appearance in book six, and apparently will be given a slightly larger role to play. The show and book are different, even down to character motivations. It's generally the same "path", but all the details are changed.

It's true; this series is very much for people who do not typically enjoy fantasy. I find most fantasy rather boring. But this was the first book in years to grab me like that, slowly getting better until, on page 300 or so, it took over my life and ceased all productivity until I finished it. This series is excellent, and I found mysielf being completely immersed in it. Characters grow and plots continually twist and turn while always remaining addictive. It has its flaws - the prose is a bit clunky, and a lot of characters are initially not very well-defined, their fleshing-out saved for later volumes post-Game - but I still highly recommend it. It's pretty dark and can be depressing, though. I love that these books usually have a second layer of things going on that are never explicitly spelled-out. You can figure-out who Jon Snow's mother is, for example, by the time you finish the (I'm going to add letters so you can't guess which number I'm spelling) book. Ben, your friend is wrong; it is, as you said, , though that it's one of those things that Martin hasn't explained and expects you to be able to figure out on your own. He does things like that sometimes, as necessitated by the POV chapter structure of the books. You should be able to watch the first season, but don't delve into season two until you've finished A Storm of Swords. Trust me on this.

I have two different suggestions. The first is the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which is a short but absorbing read. You don't need to know much context to hop right in. I could wax lyrical on how much I liked it and how much you need to read it, but I don't need to because this is Benjamin Franklin we are talking about. The second is the Mistborn trilogy, by Brandson Sanderson. Whattaturnaround. It's fun, simplistic, and well thought-out. It's not A Song of Ice and Fire. It's not deep, or reflective, or particularly special. It starts slow, gets better, gets good, then addictive and fun. It's the closest thing to a video game I've ever seen a novel go. If I had to pitch it, I'd pitch it as thus: "Mistborn is Final Fantasy IX set in Morrowind, minus all the dark elves." If you need good escapist fiction, without heavy language, especially-three-dimensional characters but a very fun plot and story - lots of twists in this one - go for Mistborn.

Using the same methodology that created Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we now have this. To quote: Oh, hell yes. God knows I've always wanted to know all the crazy Victorian rompy-pompy going on between Holmes and Watson. All that Freudian pipe-smoking smut. -- I guess I don't mind these existing, because maybe someone will end-up picking-up the classics and hey, that's good. Simultaneously, I find it infuriating. Maybe because someone will make money by writing paragraphs into something someone wrote 200 years ago and these paragraphs are essentially the HBO treatment. (Some minor Game of Thrones season 2 spoilers.)

Aww, I'll be in London maybe two weeks after that.

That "excerpt" was funny, but "I was insanely ready" takes the cake. Good job!

I don't mind. Anyway, I didn't see your last post, but, again, it was just one of those days where every other "literary" book I picked-up at the bookshop seemed about families. It was just frustration. I live in Jordan, too, so while we have a number of fairly good bookstores, they're all small compared to, say, Waterstone's, and so the probability of things being one way and not the other is slightly higher. Thanks for your informative post on the NYRB books.

I've been interested in them though, in all honesty, I will read their pre-1923 works off of Project Gutenberg, but you're right in saying they put out uniquely-looking books. Are there any you specifically recommend, apart from Stoner? Here's a list of the books, if anyone wants a peak.

AreThe Great Gatsby or Lolita sufficiently interesting and short? I've wanted to read those for ages.

(Edited for reasons pertaining to personal safety.)

When you say "I found Franzen's portrayal of his characters to be humane and generous", do you mean that he presented them truthfully and as objectively as he could? Because he did do that in The Corrections. I know what you mean about things being reminiscent of your own life. For example, the eldest son in The Corrections, Gary, struggles not to be like his father, but finds himself being like that anyway. This struck home for me; and, every once in a while, I feel the notch of that particular arrow still quivering. You know, if you like characters so alive they breathe off the page, you would maybe like noir. Jim Thompson (who I discovered through Tim Schafer from an interview he did years ago) write some of the most believable characters in any fiction I've seen, and dissected them gleefully to show things about human nature most people would rather not think about. The Grifters is the best book I've read so far this year. I know. It just feels like the literary equivalent of, say, spaceships in sci-fiction. Not all sci-fi has spaceships, but there are days when it feels like it does. The day I wrote that, I came home frustrated because everything I'd looked at had somehow been about dysfunctional families.

The Corrections is well worth a read as well, though it's a bit pretentious in places (why use "diurnal" instead of "daily" I'll never know). I did enjoy parts of How to Be Alone. I do kind of wish these more modern high-brow(ish) books talked about something besides a dysfunctional family, though. It seems that half the meatier stuff I run into is about that. It makes me happy that "genre fiction" (whatever the hell that means) is finally getting its due. It's not like Jim Thompson doesn't write characters like the best of 'em.