ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Definitely.

Empire of Cotton is jammed packed with information, but the way it's written, fact after fact after fact, makes it a tedious read. I love my non-fiction to be told through characters. The characters used to ground the reader while using them to parse out information. Roger Crowely's Conquers did a great job of giving the reader larger than life characters while using them to tell how the Portuguese started the first global economy and took over the Indian Ocean trade.

I have The Half Had Never Been Told on pre-order and I'm excited to read it. There's been a lot of great books on slavery and its repercussions.

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I'm starting to read openly gay fiction for what might be the first time...

In case one or more of these books are misguided or blown away by books of much higher quality I'm all ears for suggestions.

I do recommend anything by Samuel Delany, who is a gay black man, and whose books really push against traditions of gender and sexuality (Attack on Triton, especially). 

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Just finished The Devil in the White City and......eh

 

It really felt like it should have been split into two books to me because the stuff about the world's fair barely felt related to the serial killer stuff.

 

Currently trying to finish The Innovators before the next Idle Book Club selection since I loved the Steve Job biography by the same author. It's not bad so far but I found the Steve Jobs book more captivating, maybe because it's more focused?

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now i'm reading 11.22.63 written by Stephen King
and that's amazing!!! i like it very much!

 

http://www.amazon.com/11-22-63-Stephen-King/dp/1451627297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464009446&sr=8-1&keywords=11.22.63 

 

there is also a serial, but i've watched few episodes and i didn't like it:(
the book is much more interesting

if you like history, science-fiction and detective genres, than this book is for you
 

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I'm reading Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell and it's brilliant. Like Jane Austen but good and with magic (treated in a mundane, scientific way).

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Attention science-fiction and fantasy authors: I am hereby banning the use of bards, harpers, and troubadours as representatives of the authorial presence in your novel. No exceptions! Also banned are passages about playing instruments that use literary, rhetorical, or carnal terminology to describe the resulting music (or vice versa). You have been warned.

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I wormed my way through Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, I believe on a recommendation from these forums.

Pretty much what I was expecting in many ways, already having read and enjoyed several of his novels. Still, intersecting with a more current-day world adds a whole new dimension to his cordiceps-punk brand of horror. Very cool, though nothing revelatory.

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Jeff Vandermeer (along with his wife Ann Vandermeer) was in Holland last month! Visited one of his lectures and at the Harland Awards he did a wickedly funny, half-hour oration about fresh-water squids. Seemed like a really good-natured guy.

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I just finished 2001: A Space Odyssey and really liked it. I guess I should read more 60s and 70s sci fi. 

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I am reading HHhH (Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich) by Laurent Binet and it is destroying me. It's a 2010 historical reconstruction of the events surrounding the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi top intelligence guy (and de facto orchestrator of the Holocaust), but it's so much more than that. For starters, author Binet, using every ounce of his French, sardonic sense of ennui, often injects his own (mis)adventures into the tale - which turns out to be told by an unreliable narrator. In a history book.

 

He'll often recount some super interesting detail about Heydrich, only to correct himself a few chapters later on - wait no, it didn't happen the way I said it. I read a new historical document and it turns out I was wrong. Then he'll give us a literary impression of a scene between two figures, getting frustrated afterwards that no one believes this actually happened. Only to follow up with another writerly scene that he admits is totally his own imagination!

 

He does this again and again, and the effect is intoxicating. For some reason it doesn't even hurt the story, but helps cement the living, breathing, elusive nature of history. Written in ultrashort chapters (hundreds of them), skipping back and forth between times and places and styles with the apparent intention of painting a picture composed of whatever strikes the author's fancy - HHhH is unlike any history book I've ever read. And I'm only halfway. It's gotten so bad I don't want to read for fear of ever finishing this delight.

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Interesting. Binet's style started to grate on me a lot after a while. I did not find his struggle in reconstructing historical narrative, or the balancing act facts and engaging storytelling particularly interesting (or more precisely, I did not find his vocalization of this struggle particularly interesting), which is why constant "I obviously don't know what they said to each other behind closed doors, but I invented some dialogue for your benefit. Or maybe I shouldn't have?" type of interjections felt so distracting to me. All authors working with historical material have to deal with the same issues as Binet and come up with their own solutions to these problems, and in many cases the reader can see those choices, whether in the text itself or in between the lines, without the author having to take center stage so forcefully every couple of chapters. My annoyance was amplified by the fact that struggles within actual historical subject of the book were so much more interesting for me than the authors own strife. Maybe in the context of another historical event, I would have appreciated the meta elements more.

 

I just finished 2001: A Space Odyssey and really liked it. I guess I should read more 60s and 70s sci fi.

 

I'd recommend Stanisław Lem's Solaris. It is one of my all time favorite sci-fi novels. New, supposedly much improved English translation was released recently in different formats.

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Maybe I just saw Binet forcefully, wistfully drawing smoke from a cigarette whenever he did it :)

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Haha, yeah, maybe in another context or a different state of mind I would have actually enjoyed it. It is very hard for me to arbitrate what makes some things feel annoying/pretentious and others thought-provoking/fascinating. Probably a bunch of little things. This is why I find the idea of me writing something so terrifying.

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But hey, maybe it's also my relative ignorance of the genre that I think BInet's approach is super novel and interesting. It wasn't until reading this book that I ever spent a thought on the struggles and process of writing a history. In that respect, it's a job well done for babies like me.

 

(Having said that, last evening I did come across a passage I didn't much care for. In it, Binet slags off a certain book for using flowery prose, saying he'd never write like that, except that he does all the time. Alright, Frenchy, your pluck can bring you only this far.)

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Ah, I remember quite enjoying HHhH - I wrote this about it on goodreads. Good and worthwhile, though flawed.

 

It was a while ago now, but I too remember finding the author's intrusive narration quite irritating. In a different novel that might have been all right -- or something like a Knausgaard* book, perhaps -- but in that context it felt like a poor match for the straightforward historical fiction which, for the most part, he really nails. The aftermath of the assassination attempt is just fantastic, and all the more unbelievably heroic for being (AFAIK) a true story.

 

* - though I don't really like him either but, y'know.

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(Having said that, last evening I did come across a passage I didn't much care for. In it, Binet slags off a certain book for using flowery prose, saying he'd never write like that, except that he does all the time. Alright, Frenchy, your pluck can bring you only this far.)

 

Hahaha.. while writing the previous posts, I tried to check something on Wikipedia and came across this sentence:

 

The editor also requested the cut of about twenty pages criticizing Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, another novel about the SS in World War II that was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHhH

 

So, it could have been much worse (or perhaps better, but even more out of place). :)

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I've been told for years that you either "get" Guy Gavriel Kay or you don't, but I just read the beginning of Under Heaven and, despite plenty of the cod-purple prose that's way too common in fantasy writing, it has easily the best single-chapter hook of anything I've read in years. I guess I "get" Kay!

 

The second son of a famous general in fantasy China was tired of life in the capital and used the requisite mourning period to withdraw to the countryside. For two and a half years, he has lived as a hermit on the battlefield where his father won his greatest (and bloodiest) victory, burying the dead of both sides to appease their ghosts. When he is about to depart, a messenger from fantasy China's rival, fantasy Tibet, arrives gifting him two hundred and fifty "heavenly horses" from fantasy Arabia for his service to the dead. In fantasy China, one such horse is the sign of a successful man and five such horses is the sign of unimaginable wealth. The question, going forward, is not just what he does with a fortune that makes him as rich as (if not richer than) the emperor, but how he is even going to survive in order to spend it.

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I think Tigana started to warm me up to his stuff, then A Song for Narbonne got me all the way on board, and then whatever books came after (I want to say something about a middle eastern analogy?) kind of blew it again for me. The highest of high drama has a place but boy does it get wearisome at times.

His Tolkien ripoff doesn't really bear mentioning.

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I think Tigana started to warm me up to his stuff, then A Song for Narbonne got me all the way on board, and then whatever books came after (I want to say something about a middle eastern analogy?) kind of blew it again for me. The highest of high drama has a place but boy does it get wearisome at times.

 

I mean, that's the foundational flaw of almost all fantasy, isn't it? It's always high drama unless it's doing low grit. Anyway, I'm excited to find out if Under Heaven holds its promise together.

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Well, most fantasy does situational drama (the world's about to end!), Kay is pretty unique in that he does character drama (like everyone has the strongest feelings and is just the best at everything, including the 'antagonists').

Adventure vs. romantic tragedy I guess?

Sidestepping much of this is one of the things that makes the New Sun books sooo good for me.

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Got a library card today for the first time in 10 years... Felt good lol

 

It does! I just did the same a couple of months ago. My local library is really cool, has a big selection of books, and has small almost office-like self-study areas that are great for when I want to get out of the house to do work on my laptop but don't want to sit in a coffee shop.

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I started reading The Remains of the Day and I adore it so much and I realize, between this and The Sense of an Ending, I am totally enamored with British first person novels based mostly in memories and re-examinations of vital moments in their past. Are there other novels like this? I suppose the English setting isn't mandatory but it'd be a plus. 

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