ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Or maybe a book like the game Full Throttle? I'm re-playing it, alongside Grim Fandango. I am in such a biker gang/tough guy mood right now.

I assume you've already done The Lost and Damned?

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I assume you've already done The Lost and Damned?

Nah. I never bothered with GTA IV. Maybe I should.

Thanks for trying, though!

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My stupid brain:

James M.

"Hey, that's me!"

Cain

"Oh wait."

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Zing! I just read that book. (Woo! I got a literary reference!)

I have that book!

Although I only ever got about 30 pages in...

I'm still attempting to read;

Rime of the Ancyent Marinere - Coleridge

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

Small Island - Andrea Levy

One of many Robert Browning poems.

yay for Literature!

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I have that book!

Although I only ever got about 30 pages in...

yay for Literature!

I'll save you a lot of grief. The moral of the story is don't go swimming after the love of your life does vehicular manslaughter against her husband's lover with your automobile.

Anyways, good luck on all that reading! The only thing that looked even remotely familiar to me was rime of the ancyent marinere...

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Just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and really enjoyed it. It remembered me of a Fallout many ways, especially

when father is researching abandoned houses(the thrill from the book was missing in F3's houses

.

Other book that I recently read was V gaju življenja(In Grove of Life) by Ciril Kosmač. I don't know how it would hold up to ones that don't have at least some knowledge of certain topics, but if you find somewhere translation of him I sudgest you at least try it out.

Currently reading:All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria)

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I'll save you a lot of grief. The moral of the story is don't go swimming after the love of your life does vehicular manslaughter against her husband's lover with your automobile.

Anyways, good luck on all that reading! The only thing that looked even remotely familiar to me was rime of the ancyent marinere...

Rime is fantastic. One of my favourite pieces of literature ever.

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Just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and really enjoyed it. It remembered me of a Fallout many ways

Lots of people have said similar, and it's obvious why, but the two have completely different tones for me. Fallout 3 is, if anything, almost too optimistic for me. For an apocalyptic wasteland, there's loads of people. It makes complete sense from a gameplay perspective, and I guess the idea is that humanity is possibly starting to recover a little, but I find it softens the impact a little. The Road, on the other hand, is the most uncompromisingly bleak situation I've ever encountered. It does contain an element of hope on some level, though, somehow, so reading it wasn't quite as draining an experience as American Psycho, which was really depressing (although ultimately worthwhile, I think).

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The Road is also written in a very disturbing and unconventional way as well. Constantly referring to, "The Boy and the Man" and it's lack of traditional chapters, and of course the ending.

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I have that book!

Although I only ever got about 30 pages in...

It gets fucking amazing at about page 90 if I remember correctly. Please complete the book, you will be happy afterward and it's not that long, anyway.

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The lack of quote marks on any speech made it feel incredibly numb and cold, too.

A thousand times this. How sterile and honest the dialogue was just gave me chills all over. I haven't read any of McCarthy's other books yet but I've heard his western trilogy is supposedly just as bleak, so I'll have to check them out soon.

Not reading anything at the moment, but I ordered This Gaming Life off of Amazon, by Jim Rossignol (one of the Rock Paper Shotgun writers) which I'm really looking forward to. I also got the first three Scott Pilgrim paperbacks to prepare for the movie, Nineteen Eighty-Four (no, I haven't read it, yes, I'm horrible) and the second Phonogram.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (no, I haven't read it, yes, I'm horrible)

Me too(though i have a decent accuse of not finding a decent/any translation).

Also, about The Road. I didn't mean that book was very to Fallout, just it had some things that constantly reminded me of Fallout

(road thieves, burned bodies, individual villages organizing themself).

And while you mentioned the simplenes speech, did anybody appart from me connect that to the fact that they were alone for a quite a long time. I mean the man at the end was talking quite compact sentences, probably duo to the fact that he was leaving in a society of more than probably a dozen people

Edited by Sleepdance

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:tup: to all of those. Scott Pilgrim is fairly mindless but very, very entertaining fun, and The Singles Club is really excellent :)

Single's Club:

Love how it builds up all of the schemes and agendas that kind of relate to Rue Britannia, then just cuts loose for the last issue :)

Last week I finished The Voice of The Fire by Alan Moore, which has a dozen or so chapters, each one devoted to an inhabitant of Northampton at a different time in its history. The first chapter is really difficult as it's 50 or so pages of broken English (life narrated by a neolithic boy), but it's an excellent book. The chapters paint some very different characters and have very different themes, but often relate to each other in small ways too. A lot of it is quite sad and horrific, but it simultaneously made my head swim with a wide angle perspective on history.

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The lack of quote marks on any speech made it feel incredibly numb and cold, too.

I was going to post about this on my phone at work, but apparently I forgot to hit "submit". Anyway, yeah, that definitely adds an eerie quality. The rationale behind omitting a lot of the apostrophes was less obvious to me, though, particularly since it didn't appear to be entirely consistent. Not a knock on the book by any means – I'd be crazy to criticize it for something so cosmetic – but it was an observation I made. Also, was it just me, or was the choice of prepositions a little unusual at times? I may be misremembering, but I think phrases such as "at the floor" rather than "on the floor" were used. I wasn't sure whether this was meant simply to add a slightly alien quality, or to represent the gradual loss of language through underuse, or if it was a simple matter of dialect (possibly not even deliberately unusual).

Anyway, a fantastic book. Much more effective than the film, which was good itself.

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It could be for any of those reasons, I'm not sure either.

I hven't seen the film. However, true story: My housemate and his girlfriend wanted a romantic evening out, so went to see a comedy, but it was sold out. They then picked The Road at random with no idea what it was about... :tmeh:

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It could be for any of those reasons, I'm not sure either.

I hven't seen the film. However, true story: My housemate and his girlfriend wanted a romantic evening out, so went to see a comedy, but it was sold out. They then picked The Road at random with no idea what it was about... :tmeh:

I hope they weren't planning on having a baby in the near future.

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All of McCarthy's novels are like that. Also I highly recommend All the Pretty Horses. Also Blood Meridian is absolutely incredible, the infamous Comanche scene is one of the best things I've ever read. Basically, if you ever thought you'd read/seen/heard something violent, read Blood Meridian to have your concept of violence turned on its head. Also, apparently the overarching story of the gang in it is 'historically accurate' to the 'memoirs' of one of the gang.

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I'll check those out Squid, I've read the Road, but need to check out the other mcormac stuff. Right now I'm switching between a Brief History of Time, and Ayn Rand's the fountainhead.

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All of McCarthy's novels are like that. Also I highly recommend All the Pretty Horses. Also Blood Meridian is absolutely incredible, the infamous Comanche scene is one of the best things I've ever read. Basically, if you ever thought you'd read/seen/heard something violent, read Blood Meridian to have your concept of violence turned on its head. Also, apparently the overarching story of the gang in it is 'historically accurate' to the 'memoirs' of one of the gang.

Is Blood Meridian easier to read than the Border Trilogy in your opinion Squidley?

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No. Blood Meridian was written earlier and the first 50 pages or so are really weird to get into. Basically NO time/space continuity. I'm not sure what you might be having 'difficulty' with in the Border Trilogy. All the Pretty Horses was probably his easiest book that I've read, and by far the least weird. The 50 or so pages of the Crossing I've read are similar but much slower going. I also read the one about the creepy hermit-necrophiliac in Appalachia who wears womens' clothes. It's short and much weirder than that description makes it seem. It's like if a real human being was turned into Gollum. And if there was no ring. And he shotgunned a lot of people. And raped their dead bodies.

McCarthy's appalachia books are pretty damned weird.

Edit:

I should probably say why AtPH is his easiest that I've read.

The Road is weird in its time/place continuity and the language exacerbates that, but it's not outrageous. Probably his second most accessible book after AtPH.

No Country for Old Men is pretty philosophy heavy with Chigur that can make understanding the point of the book a little weird at times. I think the movie does what the book was trying to do, only better. However, the action scenes (of which there are more) are better in the book because of his amazing prose.

Blood Meridian combines the two, with extreme philosophizing and no continuity early on. It takes a little for the two to even out. It took probably 4 false starts of reading the first 40 pages for me to finally plow through, but I'm also not a big reader, so take it as you will.

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So i recently finished reading Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

I've always enjoyed his writing style, but the way he crafted the two stories in the book really drew me in.

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I still say that Charles Willeford's Miami Blues is one of the best things ever. It's probably as good as The Big Sleep, though maybe not as funny.

I should get the sequels.

So i recently finished reading Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

I've always enjoyed his writing style, but the way he crafted the two stories in the book really drew me in.

Someone once told me that book is a total mindfuck. I don't know. I remember reading A Wild Sheep Chase a few years ago, being confused like an illiterate tourist in Manhattan but still liking it enough to buy another book or two of his (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and South of the Border, West of the Sun, I think). I haven't had time to read anything yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

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