ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Man, I've been finding so many ebook bundles lately I wonder if we should start an eBook sale thread?

 

Speaking of which I found two bundles with two books in common, so I can only get one. One has George Orwell's 1984 and the other has two books from "The Ancient Earth" trilogy, I can't really choose which to pick. :|

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I'm reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and it is a fantastic look at race through the "us versus them" dynamic. It's a social war in which the division is obvious, but not its members. The protagonist wants to ignore this war and forge himself a life within his own constraints, but the social clash keeps trying to recruit him. Touches a lot on 'white man's burden', 'white gaze' and the otherness. 

 

I'm only 300 pages in, about halfway, so if any of this sounds like a premature evaluation that will be usurped by finishing the novel I apologise. 

 

Also, the prose is touching, yet distant. Its descriptions are vivid except when discussing the protagonist, which I feel was deliberate.

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I started "I Captured the Castle" by Dodi Smith on my partner's recommendation, and so far I'm totally charmed. It's really well-written and has a lot to say about reading, writing, and  (I think) philosophy, but it's also packed full of sympathetic characters put through amusing circumstances.

I finished "I Captured the Castle". Super, super charming book. The narrator is about as lovable a character as I can imagine. It reminded me quite a lot of Jane Austen, in that much of the book turns around the lives of young British women, but to me it felt a lot deeper. It also had a lot to say about the difficult and joy of writing. There is a passage at the end where characters discuss the impossibility of capturing a particular sense of being head-on; instead, we have to go at certain concepts obtusely, through poetry, puzzles, song, and art. Pretty existential for a romantic comedy about a seventeen-year-old girl!

Basically if you have any affection at all for Jane Austen or the Brontes, I really recommend it. Even if you don't, it's short, funny, and beautifully written.

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Man, I've been finding so many ebook bundles lately I wonder if we should start an eBook sale thread?

 

Speaking of which I found two bundles with two books in common, so I can only get one. One has George Orwell's 1984 and the other has two books from "The Ancient Earth" trilogy, I can't really choose which to pick. :|

 

Link to the 1984 one? :)

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Link to the 1984 one? :)

It's here. I think I'll probably get this one. There is also this one with books from relatively famous RPG game authors, Colin McComb is likely to be the most recognizable name?

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So, lately I've been watching a lot of Arrested Development.

I have also started reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. And I can't help but hear the Arrested Development narrator's voice when I read the narrator in Slaughterhouse Five. It's weird.

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So, lately I've been watching a lot of Arrested Development.

I have also started reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. And I can't help but hear the Arrested Development narrator's voice when I read the narrator in Slaughterhouse Five. It's weird.

 

I immediately checked audible.com to see if they had a Slaughterhouse Five narrated by Ron Howard. They don't, sadly. But there is a narration by Ethan Hawke.

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So, lately I've been watching a lot of Arrested Development.

I have also started reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. And I can't help but hear the Arrested Development narrator's voice when I read the narrator in Slaughterhouse Five. It's weird.

Now imagining Vonnegut's asides as The Wonder Years narrator, and this is amazing.

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I just picked up 'Zomerhuis met Zwembad' ('Summer house with pool') from Dutch author Herman Koch. This is the third book I'm reading from his hand and so far I'm loving everything he writes. It's just so competent and fun. His characters are all slightly on the nasty side, with fascinating inner lives (often more than a little debauche).

 

Earlier in this thread I extolled the virtues of his 'The Dinner', which is still his best work. Do pick it up if you come across it.

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If memory serves me well all you need to do is download the Kindle PC app, download the .mobi files and when you open they'll be in the Kindle app?

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The eBook version of Infinite Jest is going for $2 on Amazon today. Thought some of you might be interested.

 

Isn't it the case that this book basically needs to be read on paper because the footnotes basically tell a story in and of themselves, or am I mistaken?

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Hmm, come to think of it, I've yet to read an eBook with foot notes, but wouldn't their format make footnotes easy?

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It's not infuriating or anything, you simply click the link and then hit back up, but I imagine having to do it endlessly might become frustrating.

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I'm currently reading Infinite Jest on my Kindle Paperwhite. Touching the number takes you to the corresponding footnote at the end of the book. At the end of each footnote (and sub-footnote) there is a link that takes you back to the main text. It has worked very well for me so far, but I can imagine it being quite tedious without a touch screen.

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I found flipping to the footnotes in the paper book to be infuriating so I imagine an ebook can only improve.

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Is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution worth reading?

 

A typical experience of this book for me was as follows;

 

- I'd become engrossed in some biological concept which Dawkins has an undeniable talent for explaining beautifully and clearly. 

 

- This would then be quickly followed by some labored broadside on the Creationist view on the matter.

 

It just seemed unnecessary to me. Dawkins outlines this scientific evidence so clearly that I was already 'on his side'. I didn't need to have this followed by a four-page rant about how silly creationists are. 

 

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That's what turned me off about his later works in general. Reading The Selfish Gene, which is almost purely about biology, is the strongest advocate for atheism of them all. I guess they're for a different audience.

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I really must check out The Selfish Gene. I've always been a fan of Dawkins but I've somehow sidestepped his most noteworthy book. I'd look forward to it all the more if the focus is, like you say, more on the science. 

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I found it to be a very strange read, coming to it as I did relatively late in life, having been interested in biology all that time. The book is written in such a different historical context, ie. it really feels the need to hammer home every point and make every argument as ironclad as possible. This is of course one of the reasons it has been so influential, but precisely because of its far-reaching influence it reads as overly-defensive and redundant in places. I caught myself thinking "well duh,everyone knows that" a lot, forcing me to recognise that, no, a lot of this stuff was far from mainstream when the book was written.

 

That said, it's an excellent book and well worth the read because of its clarity of writing and the importance of the ideas. Especially amusing are the newer editions which contain Dawkins' complaints about his ideas being misused by Thatcher.

 

 A link on the latter:

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/04/did-richard-dawkins-invent-thatcherism-and-environmentalism.html

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The Selfish Gene may become progressively less readable as a book as time passes, much like how I found The Origin of Species incredibly hard to get through. The combination of exhaustive details on all manner of marginally interesting things (for a general public) and information that is entirely common knowledge at this point makes it more of an interesting historical document, rather than a great read.

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