ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Ayo I am about to finish Gravity's Rainbow (finally, it's been real), and I think I will read Charles Portis next. Probably Masters of Atlantis.

 

Also, that guilty feeling you get when  you are enjoying are book but secretly excited to be done with it so you can read something new: I have that feeling a lot.

 

 

it's the weirdest feeling! like being excited to start something new and then having it turn into the same thing. i guess some books transcend that, but unless you are some kind of super genius GR can't reach that immersive clip.

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I have been reading The Story of a New Name on the bus to work everyday this week. I've also missed my stop everyday this week.

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it's the weirdest feeling! like being excited to start something new and then having it turn into the same thing. i guess some books transcend that, but unless you are some kind of super genius GR can't reach that immersive clip.

When I read Gravity's Rainbow, I am reading it in one of the three ways:

 

  • Following the plot, enjoying the banter, jokes, and situations.
  • Moved by beautiful, very human moments (Pokler at the camp, the dream about Tantivy, Pointsman and Mexico walking across the beach talking about cause and effect)
  • Confusion at what is happening, what is metaphorical, the rocket specifics, which character is which and what Pynchon is trying to get at with some of his more abstract asides)

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I'd like to think I groked a fair amount of it, and agreed about the first two, but it really clicked with me the extent of the depth I was missing out on, when I looked up something on the Kenosha Kid chapter, and it turned out to be a reference to Slothrop meeting Malcom X in a Chicago bar. 

 

I'll also add:

 

• being a little shocked at the degree of transgression, coprophagia and pedophilia.  

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Tad Williams also wrote the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, which basically defined what I thought about post-Tolkien fantasy as a teenager. I reread it once at the end of college and still liked it quite a lot, but I've lived nearly the whole decade since then afraid of recommending it anyway, because who knows why fantasy holds together and fantasy falls apart. I'm glad to hear that his other life-destroying series of monster tomes holds up, even at a glance!

 

I am actually planning on re-read that series (or more accurate reading the first two and re-reading the last one) cause I heard he is working on a equal series called the last king of osten ard. I also have the first two volumes of another series he did sitting on my shelf for years - shadowmarch is the name of one of them.

 

Also only read the final book of the otherworld series as well so might go back and properly go through that series as well which reminds me - how many people here who read SF&F started series a number of books into it and then just back fill ?

 

I have it with Williams books, the malazan series where I read books 2-4 before book 1, a wheel of time where I started on book 7,8 and a song of ice and fire which I started on the second book and never read the first. Also Kate elliot's crown of start where I read 2 and 3 before book 1 and Simon Green's deathstakler series about half of which I read out of order.

 

The one benefit I can think of from all this is I don't mind a work of fiction stating in the middle of something without explaining what is going on  cause I have done it to myself so much.

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I'm reading the appalingly-titled Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman which is an easy one for the commute, and interesting enough so far, but it doesn't half read a bit like that book Alan Partridge put out in the second series. There's an infuriating smugness about him.

 

I'm going to read that actual Alan Partridge book that exists next.

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I finished Otherland book one and decided to try another book from forever ago that I liked at the time but now know nothing about.

Jeff Noon is not a good writer. I should have quit while I was ahead.

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I have kind of a weird request. I'm looking for a book from my childhood.

 

It was a YA novel about MUDs. I don't remember much about it, except that it was about a young woman who gets introduced to online roleplaying on some kind of fictional fantasy MUD, and is totally entranced by the experience, and I think there's some kind of, like... cyber-intrigue surrounding a burgeoning online romance and breaking into a college's server farm or something like that. The only thing I remember about the book (I think) was that the cover was red.

 

Did anyone else read anything like that? Am I just going crazy?

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I don't have the answer to your question, and this is completely unrelated, but for some reason I suddenly remembered a book I read a lot when I was a kid, but don't know if I ever fully grasped it: The Ear, the Eye and the Arm. That book was fucking weird, if I recall correctly, and I kind of want to read it again now, It'd probably not take long, since I know it's a YA book. Wonder if it's on Kindle...

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Well, in other news, I've been working my way through Discworld a book at a time, and I've reached Guards! Guards!. The realization that this book is literally just Hot Fuzz in Ankh-Morpork makes me want an Edgar Wright Discworld movie more than I've wanted just about any book adaptation ever made.

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Finished Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Big thanks to the Idle Thumbs Poster who's name I sadly forgot that told me it would be a fine audiobook. You were totally right. 

 

It's spectacular, and fills me with righteous anger, and also a sense that we are fucked beyond repair. 

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Finished Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Big thanks to the Idle Thumbs Poster who's name I sadly forgot that told me it would be a fine audiobook. You were totally right. 

 

It's spectacular, and fills me with righteous anger, and also a sense that we are fucked beyond repair. 

 

The two claims that form the basis of that book are filled with factual and logical holes that this essay does a very good job of exploring it. It is 55 pages long through. This post sums up some of it's points.

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Since a lot of us here read Cloud Atlas, I'm hoping that the David Mitchell interest will carry over to his newest book, The Bone Clocks. It's in the same vein as Cloud Atlas -- fragmented narratives that span across time -- except there is a single protagonist who connects each of the different narrators. Mitchell is truly wonderful at writing characters and that's what I enjoyed most in this book. His downfall, I think, is the need to bolt on what feel like superfluous fantasy subplots to his novels. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet fell victim to that and so does The Bone Clocks. The fantasy story is supposed to represent the struggle between Good and Evil, but Evil in this book is represented by people who actually kill innocent babies. That's such a facile approach to a weighty subject, and it's made weaker in comparison to the complexity of the writing that surrounds it in the novel.

I've finally gotten around to Bone Clocks and I found the fantastical stuff much, much more irritating there than in Thousand Autumns. The way there's an entire 'chapter' basically just dedicated to exposition and an ultimately not very interesting battle acting as a giant roadblock in between otherwise excellent character work was just super irritating. In contrast, in Thousand Autumns a lot of this stuff was handled via the introduction of a new location and a bunch of characters took a lot of the sting out of what is to some extent the same problem. I also think I'm just more tolerant of mystical mumbo-jumbo in novels set in the past rather than the present, unless it just goes all-out alternate reality instead of trying to get all secret society about it.

As a parent of young children the themes of societal collapse and loss are very, very hard to read. Well done though.

Finally I think the single-character focus on Holly does not work nearly as well for me as the bigger distance between subplots seen in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas.

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I mentioned this earlier, but for me the fantastical stuff works a lot better in The Bone Clocks because it's so much more central to what the book is about, whereas in Thousand Autumns it felt more tangential and thus sillier. I agree about that chapter, though, osmosisch. Mainly, I think Marinus was the wrong character to have as a POV there. One of the younger Horologists, or even their non-immortal helper, would have been a much more interesting viewpoint to look through.

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Well, I'd say that if Bone Clocks is about the conflict between Horlogists and Anchorites, a gigantic chunk of the book (for example the Crispin chapter) is entirely superfluous. The superfluous bits are then my favourite ones, making it an even worse failure of a book.

Overall I enjoyed my time with the book but it felt like a hot mess to me in a way that none of Mitchell's other books did.

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I can't remember how I was recommended the Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. but it's really good. It absolutely nails some of the internal monologue of being a modern, liberal, intellectual male in relationships with women, and the bizarre ways you can find yourself slipping into horrible thoughts and behaviours. It's especially noteworthy for being so acutely insightful about men due to the fact that it's written by a woman.

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Just finished Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I had some trepidations because I found N-W depressing as hell but was intrigued enough to give this a shot, and I'm glad I did. So much more positive, and I'm a sucker for generational/growing up novels.

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Just finished Flowers for Algernon. An excellent book. It took me a while to get in to it, I think primarily because of the style of the early chapters, but looking back those set up the rest of the book really well. A challenging look at intelligence in a few different forms.

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Just finished The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. I really enjoyed it and it reminded me about what I get from video games; why I usually play them at least.

Anyway I'm off to read a trashy warhammer novel (although the last one I read felt genuinely good) before jumping into The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss.

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Just finished Flowers for Algernon. An excellent book. It took me a while to get in to it, I think primarily because of the style of the early chapters, but looking back those set up the rest of the book really well. A challenging look at intelligence in a few different forms.

 

I should read that again sometime. That was the first book I read in school where we really delved into symbolism, metaphor and all that stuff. It was the first time I thought "hey, it's pretty interesting to think about books in a critical way."

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Almost at the end of The Story of a New Name, the second Neapolitan novel of Elena ferrante., I am enjoying it but not as much as My Brilliant Friend(the first one). Went to local book shop today to order the next one! Fortunately I'm a slow reader so the wait til September, when the final one is released, won't be too bad.

Edit: Finished it. These books have really surprised me. They aren't like anything I've read before. I really, really, like them. They irritate me, they make me laugh and they make my heart hurt.

Thanks to this thread for bringing them to my attention.

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I've been reading The Familiar: One Rainy Day In May by Mark Z Danielewski. I'm about halfway through and I'm really enjoying it on one level and really not on another.

It's really good to see Danielewski playing with the way text is put on the page in interesting ways again, even if some of it is a little literal. There are a lot of good ideas too, and they're being explored in interesting ways. I'm interested in all the disparate stories, even if sometimes there's text in Chinese with no translation and I don't even know how to Google that. But the stories all feel too separate. I guess I have to have faith that they'll come together in some way, but I'm starting to flag a bit. I enjoy the stories independently, but since they seem so disconnected it's hard to really feel any momentum in the book. I get into a story set in LA and suddenly I'm in Singapore with a different character, different text layout, different voice, different themes... Just different everything. It's jarring, and it keeps taking me out of the story.

Is anyone else reading it?

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Just about finished Diane Ackerman's The Human Age, which covers a lot of really important issues but smothers them with optimism and poorly chosen similes. She seems self conscious she won't get the sense of wonder through to the reader, so each aspect about history and future of the planet is propped by a lot of picture words that don't quite fit. She does a neat job of showing what a dire situation we are in as a planet, and how the natural world is basically screwed. She tries to point at technology as being the answer to all of our problems, but she is unconvincing, as she doesn't address fundamental political, economic and social issues that will hinder their success. Her use of the royal "we" is very loose, which is also very annoying.

 

Next up on the Max Ernst book club: I'm about to read Calvino's Invisible Cities, and after Gravity's Rainbow, it's nice to not be reading a tome.

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Reading this article about long novels I saw a mention of William T Vollmann series on the colonising of the US and has anyone read any of the books and if so are they worth reading. I have his non-fiction book on Imperial county but haven't actually read it yet.

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I can't remember how I was recommended the Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. but it's really good. It absolutely nails some of the internal monologue of being a modern, liberal, intellectual male in relationships with women, and the bizarre ways you can find yourself slipping into horrible thoughts and behaviours. It's especially noteworthy for being so acutely insightful about men due to the fact that it's written by a woman.

I read this recently and also found it pretty convincing although I have to admit that by the time I was done I was pretty ready to be done with those people. I think I'm crossing the age line where there's only so much Young Urban Sex Angst I can take at once before my eyes threaten to roll out of their sockets. (This also applies to much current dramatic television.)

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