ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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The Raw Shark Texts, 1000 Miles just got finished.

Raw Shark Texts is brilliant and I would strongly recommned it to anyone who likes.... well... Books.

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Well, I finished Homicide and I highly recommend it. It's very different to The Wire, but I feel as though it's fleshed out that world for me now. I think watching the next season is going to feel a little different, as I understand the world in which it takes place a lot better.

Actually, in comparison, The Wire feels like a very small slice of police work, and a very unusual slice at that. If anything, it's shown me just how much The Wire actually focusses on examining institutions. I know David Simon always said that that was what the show was about, but I can see it more clearly now.

It was gruelling in places, but nowhere near as it bad as it could have been -- the book does not revel in or glorify its darkness. Thankfully, you see the crimes through the eyes of the police investigating them, which creates a bit of a professional distance. This isn't to say that the crimes couldn't be shocking, though. Even for a homicide detective, there are crimes that get under your skin, that you need to see solved.

Ultimately, the book takes you on a trip into the psyche of a homicide detective, and as a result, you find yourself developing the same sort of hardness that must be required to do that job. Yet, it never feels cold or unfeeling.

The book often spends chapters explorers different aspects of the work. Court trials, autopsies, office politics - all are given some focus at one point or another. The book also talks about how TV has essentially ruined the court system. Thanks to TV juries expect there to be prints on every weapon, a perfect motive, a signed confession and zero doubt. Unfortunately real life is nothing like TV, and the ignorance of expectations or misguided belief that any doubt is "reasonable", often derails a jury, and hard fought investigations.

In the end, I ended up loving the people in the book (I can understand how Simon did, too). They weren't immediately likeable or loveable or funny or endearing, but somehow I ended up loving them anyway.

Now I'm onto The Corner, which I feel should be an excellent companion piece, exploring the opposite end of the criminal sphere, as it does.

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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I have been dorking out with books even more than usual lately.

Here's a lot of text you won't read about some dorky-but-sweet books:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I love this guy (his most well known book is Snow Crash) and am slowly working through everything he's done. Anathem is highly recommended.

Dune. I had never read it and my dad told me I should, so I did. It's good. I'm wary of all the sequels, however. It reminds me of Ender's Game in that regard -- it's a good read, and you can see why it is so well regarded, and how its presence shaped future genre literature, but you can also feel the luck, or the once-in-a-lifetime coming together of hard to repeat great ideas when you read it.

Nation by Terry Pratchett. Good! I read it right after Anathem and, though it's far more Young Adult, and obviously infinitely more Pratchett and infinitely less super-dense math-fueled hard sci-fi/parallel world/fantasy than Anathem, it was a great companion read. My brain ended up sort of repeatedly trying to mush the two together as I was reading, and seemed to enjoy the process.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Woo by Junot Diaz. Recommended by Steve H.S. Gaynor ages ago on Twitter, this book is good. Yep.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Bought this to test out Kindle on the iPhone. I immediately regretted it, not because the book is bad (it's pretty enjoyable if you are the sort of person who finds YA-style Gaiman-style fiction pretty enjoyable), but because I now have this "book" which I "own" and can "read anywhere," but really I have a "license" to "content" which I can "read on a Kindle approved device until I can't anymore, for whatever reason." It immediately made me wish that I instead had a physical book in my hands which I could put on a shelf and retrieve at any time in the future at my leisure, loan to friends, pass on to future family, whatever. Instead I paid like 8 bucks for some text on my iPhone. The instant delivery of a book into my hands was fairly amazing, but not worth the tradeoffs that come with it. I wish Amazon would somehow offer physical/ebook combo packs, where you could buy the physical hardcover or paperback of a book, and then add a Kindle copy onto your order at a discounted rate. I would probably buy a shitload of content if that were the case.

The Dark Tower! Someone at work recommended this series, and I am currently in the middle of the third book (of seven). I'm liking them, but like most genre works which start out good and then just continue existing, I am wary that it will start sliding downhill the further in I read. We'll see.

Also read: A book all about web form desgn, some suspect John Grisham novel when staying at my parents' house for a couple nights.

On order: Stack-o-Chandler. I love Raymond Chandler (though I have only read a few Chandler books, I've enjoyed them all), and cheesy old design, so I ended up paying too much to import this five book set. Of these I've only read The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, so I'm looking forward to the other three.

Things I'd like to read soon: Most books recommended in this thread, most books recommended to me on Twitter the two times I've asked, but haven't yet picked up.

Thanks for this thread, its a good idea.

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Thanks for reminding me to read more Stephenson and Pratchett! Man, hardcover books are cheap here compared to Finland... I've paid 25e for a paperback System of the World, and now paid around 9£ for a hardcover Anathem.

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In two weeks I'll be visiting Paris and one of my goals is to visit the legendary bohemian bookstore Shakespeare & Company. There, I plan to buy one or more books that I expect to find there, the kind of book that you can't get anywhere else. Something obscure, and crazy. I don't know what yet, but it's a feeling. Maybe some of you here can recommend something, if you grasp the nature of my desire?

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Woah, Terry Pratchett sounds exactly like a character from Discworld. More so than the people from the Discworld miniseries'.

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If you're going to read just one Pratchett book make it Nation. I totally love that book.

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Just finished Einstein's Dreams by MIT professor Alan Lightman, a book consisting of 30 time related thought experiments (such as, "What if time was a sense?" and "What if time moved backwards?"). As someone who is somewhat interested in these kind of things, I must say I was reasonably surprised by how disappointing this book was for me.

First thing I noticed was how Einstein's dreams weren't dreamlike at all. That didn't bother me too much and it was probably a better way to go than a poor attempt at surrealism would have been. What really bothered me was imagery of his dreams. At least a half of them involved either two lovers holding hands or a father unable to express his love to his child. A dream in which time stood still consisted entirely of a very very long list of those kind of touching pictures. I can see why the author put emphasis on emotion with this kind of subject matter but it all soon became overwhelming.

On the other hand, and this is my biggest issue with the book, only a few of the 30 thought experiments were at all interesting. Of those, only one or two were actually "thought provoking".

And, he missed the opportunity to make people crawl into their mother's vagina in the chapter where time moved backwards.

I'll probably go with a Pratchett book next.

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I'm reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose right now, and it's fantastic so far. I'm 150 pages in, which is about a third of the way.

The conceit is that it's Eco's Italian translation of a French translation of an original Latin text written in the 14th century (obviously, I am reading the English translation of it), and it's really cleverly done. Despite being fiction, the amount of obscure historical religious detail is really impressive, and the characters are really well-defined -- both elements of which really highlight the shittiness of Dan Brown's cheesy ripoffs in setting and plot.

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I'm reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose right now, and it's fantastic so far. I'm 150 pages in, which is about a third of the way.

Brilliant book, and Umberto Eco is excellent. I love how he manages to squeeze in so much detail without it ever becoming overbearing or diverting from the plot.

really highlight the shittiness of Dan Brown's cheesy ripoffs in setting and plot.

:tup::tup::tup::tup::tup:

I want to slap anyone when they start gushing about how good Dan Brown is, and usually end up suggesting Foucault's Pendulum to them (<-- the only good take on conspiracies and conspiracy theories I've read).

Here's the exact point I stopped reading Angels and Demons, and an example I sometimes use to illustrate just how shit Dan Brown's book are. The scene is that this woman is being introduced to the reader. Her father has been murdered in the preceding chapters, and she's flown back in a hurry:

A moment later, Vittoria Vetra emerged from the fuselage. Robert Langdon realized today was going to be a day of endless surprises. Descending from the chopper in her khaki shorts and white sleeveless top, Vittoria Vetra looked nothing like the bookish physicist he had expected. Lithe and graceful, she was tall with chestnut skin and long black hair that swirled in the backwind of the rotors. Her face was unmistakably Italian-not overly beautiful, but possessing full, earthy features that even at twenty yards seemed to exude a raw sensuality. As the air currents buffeted her body, her clothes clung, accentuating her slender torso and small breasts.

"Ms. Vetra is a woman of tremendous personal strength," Kohler said, seeming to sense Langdon's captivation. "She spends months at a time working in dangerous ecological systems. She is a strict vegetarian and CERN's resident guru of Hatha yoga."

Hatha yoga? Langdon mused. The ancient Buddhist art of meditative stretching seemed an odd proficiency for the physicist daughter of a Catholic priest.

Langdon watched Vittoria approach. She had obviously been crying, her deep sable eyes filled with emotions Langdon could not place. Still, she moved toward them with fire and command. Her limbs were strong and toned, radiating the healthy luminescence of Mediterranean flesh that had enjoyed long hours in the sun.

Minor characters engaging in clumsy exposition: 1

Sentences devoted to often precise exposition about her body: 8

Non-specific sentences about her emotional state: 1

Times protagonist established as quite possibly being an exploitative, lecherous ghoul: 1

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Establishing how intensely fuckable a character is while also taking a cursory glance at their grief goes way above and beyond the crapness of 24 :)

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Da Vinci Code was, in my opinion, a decent book for passing time when not taken too seriously. On the other hand, I can't think of any other book right now that has left me as angry and disappointed as Angels and Demons. Such a ridiculous mess. It's somewhat interesting actually, considering that the books are pretty much exactly the same in so many ways.

Anyway, when I get done with modern physics, I'm going to start reading The Castle by Franz Kafka my sister gave me for my birthday. And after that I'll probably read Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities I gave her for her birthday.

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I ignored everybody's hard SF recommendations and ordered red, blue, and green mars instead.

As an aside, I got a copy of "Masters of Doom" on friday. Read a little over half of it so far, and I give it my seal of approval. I'm not super-well read, though, so I'm not sure how far that recommendation goes. If you like biographies and like games and like e-drama, maybe you will like this book as well.

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Brilliant book, and Umberto Eco is excellent. I love how he manages to squeeze in so much detail without it ever becoming overbearing or diverting from the plot.

:tup::tup::tup::tup::tup:

I want to slap anyone when they start gushing about how good Dan Brown is, and usually end up suggesting Foucault's Pendulum to them (<-- the only good take on conspiracies and conspiracy theories I've read).

Here's the exact point I stopped reading Angels and Demons, and an example I sometimes use to illustrate just how shit Dan Brown's book are. The scene is that this woman is being introduced to the reader. Her father has been murdered in the preceding chapters, and she's flown back in a hurry:

Minor characters engaging in clumsy exposition: 1

Sentences devoted to often precise exposition about her body: 8

Non-specific sentences about her emotional state: 1

Times protagonist established as quite possibly being an exploitative, lecherous ghoul: 1

God, what a shitty passage. I think my favorite sentence is "Robert Langdon realized today was going to be a day of endless surprises," which sounds like the ending of a children's book.

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I'm reading The Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum, who wasn't a great writer but usually had enough interesting ideas in his books to keep me pondering. His plot ideas, and the way they twist and turn and arrive at the brink of disaster always remind me of how the delicate our world is. Not exactly high or probably any kind of art, but I like them.

Recently finished:

Off Season by Jack Ketchum: my second Ketchum. A lot of people find this way superior to the other book of his that I read (Old Flames) but I have to disagree. I think this one was a bit too gory for me to breathlessly say "Buy it," but nonetheless was quite good. Not a large piece of intellect, but just a good, somewhat-B horror.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark: a little novella about a Romantic (capital r) teacher and her students, in a story that weaves fascism, love, pre- and post-World War II Scotland and a bunch of girls not coming of age, more, er, losing it. I liked it because of how well it drew its parallels between Hitler and Miss Brodie, Germany and the students, etc. It didn't do much for me, but it's OK.

Edited by Kroms

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Let's revive this thread.

So I'm officially reading my first science fiction book, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Enjoying it so far, even if there's a thing or two that I don't like. Unfortunately they seem to be staples of sci-fi, so I'm going to have to get used to them.

Edited by Kroms

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