ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Right now I'm reading "My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey" by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. It's an amazing true story about Bolte's experience of having a massive hemorrhagic stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. The book recounts her stroke experience in detail, her full recovery and the insights she gained. On YouTube there's a

Bolte gave at the TED conference in Montery, CA in February 2008. Fascinating stuff.

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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.

This series took an amazing dump on itself. It got worse at what seemed to be an exponential rate, until by the end I actually stopped reading. There's a point a few pages from the end of the final book where Steven King stops the story, and steps in to say that its okay to stop now if you're not a fulfillment-needing continuity dork. I took his advice and put the book down immediately, and still haven't read the last 10 or so pages. The first book, maybe the first three, are pretty interesting, fun and unique genre stories, but where it goes as the series progresses is so ... off ... that I wouldn't recommend bothering with the series at all. Disappointing!

I've been reading a bunch of public domain stuff off of Project Gutenberg via an ebook reader on my iPhone. Lately this has included a bunch of Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" anthology), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. Both are recommended. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court reminded me of the Discworld books (especially the more recent "civic improvement" arcs, for obvious reasons) only written a century earlier, and more excited about passively proclaiming how awesome and capable and intelligent the American worker/craftsman is.

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Following my recent excitement over Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, as documented in this thread, I've been reading Foucault's Pendulum. It has a lot of similar qualities to the other, in that it's almost a blend of the novel and the essay, but it's interesting seeing how the drastically differing time periods (medieval versus modern day) affect not just the characters but the actual style and structure of Eco's writing. It's pretty impressive in that respect. Anyway this guy continues to rule.

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I tried to get a hold of Focault's Pendulum, but Amazon.com was all like "We don't have it."

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I tried to get a hold of Focault's Pendulum, but Amazon.com was all like "We don't have it."

IN THIS COUNTRY, it is stocked on Amazon, where it ranks #10 in translated Italian literature. Number 3 is The Name of the Rose, but #1 is The Divine Comedy. I expect that's mainly due to people reading up in preparation for VISCERAL GAMES' DANTE'S INFERNO: THE RECKONING.

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If by "THIS COUNTRY" you mean THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and by "Amazon" you mean HTTP://WWW.AMAZON.COM, do you have a link to an in-stock version? I only get "Used & new" and "Currently unavailable" search hits.

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If by "THIS COUNTRY" you mean THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and by "Amazon" you mean HTTP://WWW.AMAZON.COM, do you have a link to an in-stock version? I only get "Used & new" and "Currently unavailable" search hits.

This in-stock version is the first search result:

http://www.amazon.com/Foucaults-Pendulum-Umberto-Eco/dp/015603297X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248081880&sr=8-1

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Just starting The Great Gatsby. Looking forward to it.

I hear it's great.

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I just finished Saturn's children by Charles Stross. Which, in a way, is about AI. http://boingboing.net/2008/11/10/saturns-children-str.html You might like it.

I also finished Cory Doctorow's Little brother last week. I read that book in one evening/night. So suffice it to say I really recommend that book!

Big Stross fan! What'd you think of _Saturn's Children_? Much as I love him, nothing's really topped _Singularity Sky_ for me.

And Doctorow...excellent blogger and digital rights thinker. As a novelist...?

And, Remo, when you finish with _Foucault's Pendulum_, you plan on reading more? I really liked _The Island of the Day Before_, all about the search to try and figure out how to measure longitude. It tones down the bibliographic overload of F'sP, and mixes the drama with the philosophy much more smoothly, imo. Also just an odd premise for a book that really works.

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I've been reading a load of articles by Lester Bangs lately. He's good, by which I mean he manages to be both interesting and intelligent, and he's also very funny.

I love this article he wrote about The Shaggs, and this one, a takedown of Lou Reed's disastrous Metal Machine Music, is great.

I have one of his two anthologies (Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste), and I can highly recommend it. I'd go so far as to say Lester Bangs was the best damn writer of the 20th Century. <-- OMG. Can't believe I wrote this.

Edited by Kroms

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I've been reading a load of articles by Lester Bangs lately. He's easily as good as Tim Schafer or Raymond Chandler, by which I mean he manages to be both extremely interesting and intelligent while also being very funny. I have a feeling even Chris Remo would like his stuff (I always imagine Chris being nitpicky about writing, for some reason, and reading books by Dave Eggers and Thomas Pynchon in the same way I imagine Paris Hilton would read Danielle Steel).

I love this article he wrote about The Shaggs, and this one, a takedown of Lou Reed's disastrous Metal Machine Music, is classic in every way possible, assuming you know what MMM is all about.

I have one of his two anthologies (Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste), and I can highly recommend it. I'd go so far as to say Lester Bangs was the best damn writer of the 20th Century.

Good article at PopMatters about whether games need a Lester Bangs of their own:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/66256-do-video-games-need-a-lester-bangs/

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I love this article he wrote about The Shaggs, and this one, a takedown of Lou Reed's disastrous Metal Machine Music, is classic in every way possible, assuming you know what MMM is all about.

He's got a brilliant essay about Van Morrison that's floating around the internet somewhere. I think it's kind of absurd to call him the best writer of the twentieth century (I know, it's subjective, but calling something "the best" suggests that there's some semi-objective criteria). I feel like he belongs with the group that includes Hunter Thompson and Jack Kerouac, which is to say, those guys that are exciting to read when you're young, but ultimately seem to coast by on their hipness, and don't stand up well to close-reading.

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If you enjoyed the film Moon, READ THIS FUCKING BOOK (Don't read reviews around the interweb, they're full of spoilers and this is one book really worth not spoiling).

The plot centres on an anomaly on the moon that kills anyone who enters it. Like all the best SF it's about people not gadgets, in particular why some fairly screwed up people might be motivated to put themselves in some horrible situations. It uses some similar narrative techiques to Moon, but without the trope of an evil corporation.

The title Rogue Moon is nonsense inflicted on the book by the publisher, and the authors preferred title was "The Death Machine". It's a pleasingly ambiguous title that could refer to a number of things in the book.

Algis Budrys has a very compact writing style, unusual for fiction, but there's a great deal of interaction between the characters that has significance later, and their words are quite carefully chosen. It is, really, one of the best books I've ever read.

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I'd say Tim Rogers of ActionButton.net fits that bill nicely.

To answer the previous post: The reason I like Bangs isn't because of his Benzentine writing; it's because there's some really interesting ideas in there. Bangs was someone who cared very passionately about very cool and interesting things, and his writing reflected that.

As for whether or not he was the best writer of the 20th Century, well. I'll say he's better than most novelists. Most great writers aren't writing books anymore.

Tim Rogers is OK, but not great. He's written some decent articles, but...yeah. He's too much of an internet age writer, for starters, but more to the point he doesn't have any real, original insight. No, he's leagues from Lester Bangs.

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To answer the previous post: The reason I like Bangs isn't because of his Benzentine writing; it's because there's some really interesting ideas in there. Bangs was someone who cared very passionately about very cool and interesting things, and his writing reflected that.

As for whether or not he was the best writer of the 20th Century, well. I'll say he's better than most novelists. Most great writers aren't writing books anymore.

Tim Rogers is OK, but not great. He's written some decent articles, but...yeah. He's too much of an internet age writer, for starters, but more to the point he doesn't have any real, original insight. No, he's leagues from Lester Bangs.

Ok. But someone who's a rally good writer is always going to be better than most novelists. There aren't a lot of great people in any field, ever, as far as I'm concerned. Relative to the rest of the population, or even just the rest of the individuals in their field whose work is inferior, their number is extremely small. Yes, I agree that Lester Bangs was a great writer. I'm just trying to fight against hyperbole.

And, fine: whether or not Tim Rogers is as good as Lester Bangs is up for debate. I don't understand what being an internet age writer means and why it is inherently bad. If you we born in the 30s or 40s, would you have considered Bangs too "television-age?"

My point is more that Tim Rogers is trying to do the same things Lester Bangs did. He's writing reviews in the 1st person, and is not afraid to skewer games that every other critic exalts. He looks at games within a broad context with unique criteria, like: how does it make the player feel, or how does it serve the medium as a whole, by accomplishing something that is unique to video games, etc...

Plus I find him and Lester to be grade-A snark machines (in a good way).

The only way I can see to try and dispute your statement about Tim Rogers not being insightful is to find examples and quote them. But I'm not going to do that, because I don't feel like it.

Also, I think you mean Benzedrine

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I feel like he belongs with the group that includes Hunter Thompson and Jack Kerouac, which is to say, those guys that are exciting to read when you're young, but ultimately seem to coast by on their hipness, and don't stand up well to close-reading.

Woah, woah, woah! Let's not go crazy here :) I'm not sure it's fair to say that Thompson "coasts by on his hipness". He wrote some excellent books that are still as vivid, vital and incisive as when they were written. Saying that, I do think it's useful to have an understand of WHEN they were written, too. I'm sure he did some stinkers, but I've never heard anyone say otherwise.

Just wanted to stick up for Hunter :)

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Full disclosure, I haven't read most of his work. I mostly wanted to have a triumvirate of writers to make my point, because three seemed like the best number (concise but adequate). But there will always be figures in every field who are lionized for superficial reasons, and it will always be kind of too bad that they get the limelight over more qualified individuals.

I'm not talking about Bangs with that last sentence. I think he's really great. For some reason it bothered me hearing him called the greatest writer of the twentieth century. I'm probably just being a douche.

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I'm not talking about Bangs with that last sentence. I think he's really great. For some reason it bothered me hearing him called the greatest writer of the twentieth century. I'm probably just being a douche.

I think it's quite an extreme statement to say that about any author...

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I finished the last book in The Dark Tower (just mistyped that as The Dark Downer) last night (or this morning, more like) and I'm still not sure what I think. I read Jake's comment about not reading the ending ending, but I, page muncher and resolution-wanter that I am, read that too.

I started "reading" the series as audio books quite a while back, as I had an hour walk to and from school every day. I got as far as half-way into the fourth book (Wizard and Glass) when I stopped for some reason. I thought it was amazing, and loved the story and the fantasy world with its unexplained bits of modern crap in it. Some months ago I started again, and read the whole series from the start. I finished Wizard and Glass still loving it, but it's like something changed between that and the next book (Wolves of the Calla) Ah, just noticed the three last books were published in 2003, 2004 and, again, 2004.

The metafiction stuff (which he sort of tries to "defend" in the ending ending, I don't know... It felt sort of wanky, but if that's really how he saw the story going (him claiming everything just "comes to him"), that's the way it is, but it felt like he was rushing to tie everything (everything) together by the end. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, connections between books, and I loved that there's a lot of hinting at the tower series in his other, unrelated, books, but towards the end he was just (seemingly) grabbing shit left and right and pulling them into the "main story". Especially the last character came from fucking nowhere (unless I missed some important point earlier).

It was really disappointing to have it end like this. It's almost as if it'd been better if I had just stopped when I did, and not read the last three books. Alas! I always crave endings and explanations, and had to know what happened, and I guess I got what I deserved, even though King berated me for it right before giving it to me. I don't know if the last half was a rush job, just to rid himself of having this unfinished tale lying around, or if he just ran out of juice at that point, but I guess it doesn't matter.

Luckily his "connections" are one-way, so I'm still able to enjoy IT and The Stand, which both are both awesome and great, as separate works.

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If you enjoyed the film Moon, READ THIS FUCKING BOOK (Don't read reviews around the interweb, they're full of spoilers and this is one book really worth not spoiling).

I just caught Moon yesterday and really enjoyed it (although the ending was quite weak... if only they'd come up with something emotionally satisfying it would have been an amazing movie instead of a really good one)... so I think I might just pick this book up based on your recommendation. But it better be good!!! :mock:

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