Books, books, books...

[ThunderPeel2001]

Those "Making of" Star Wars and Indiana Jones books are supposed be amazing.

[Argobot]

Since there's not a thread yet for Cloud Atlas, I guess I'll put this here.

Aleksandar Hemon interviews the Wachowskis on the making of Cloud Atlas: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon

The whole interview is really about the Wachowskis film career overall, but it has nice little tidbits about the process of adapting a seemingly unfilmable book. It's interesting, if you're into the whole 'how your sausage gets made' aspect of movies. Also, now we know that Natalie Portman is the one who recommended Cloud Atlas to the Wachowskis, so if the movie is bad, we know who to blame.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Great read, thanks for the link! Looking forward to watching that now.

[ejay25]

I finished reading Alicia My Story. I'm not sure if she is well-known. However, her book is autobiograhy. It was all about her experienced during WWII at Poland.

[Frenetic Pony]

So, desperate for a book that would fit my overly critical criteria I happened to remember that Douglas Adams had written other things besides The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which starts off great and then goes downhill). And apparently the best of those books was called Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency.

I started it yesterday and am done today, and it was worth every page and word. While it's got the same sense of humor in parts certainly, it's also a different sort of tale from Hitchhikers. A lot smarter about things for one. And now that I'm done with it I'm back to the grind of finding complex (in the sense of ideas, not literary function) and/or fun and original material to read again. Based on whatshouldIreadnext.com's suggestion I took a look at "Sharpe's Tiger" based on enjoying the Master and Commander series, and then immediately put it down and went to look for something else. But such is life and books I find.

[ThunderPeel2001]

There's always the Dirk Gently sequel...

[pabosher]

And, of course, Last Chance to See.

[Laxan]

Is it worth finishing the Hitchiker series? I finished the third one years ago and never felt like I should go back. Also, is the Eoin Colfer continuation any good? I got a copy as a gift a while back but haven't touched it.

[pabosher]

Yes, and yes. The former because - despite its decrease in quality from the earlier books - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless are pretty interesting in their own right; and the latter as an intellectual curiosity,

[Frenetic Pony]

I would disagree with continuing Hitchhiker's, but that's me.

Also, there's a sequel to Dirk Gently??? Book found! Thank you very much.

[Thyroid]

I read The Book Thief. That was a good, engrossing book, albeit one filled with odd prose. What are "swamp-filled eyes"?

[Scrobbs]

DNA still has written some of my favourites lines in books that stay with me for years:

"The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of burly policemen, and did a lot of what's-all-thising around the room."

[Takhea]

Reading The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe now. Some 100 pages in and liking it alot, you can really see that this is from where the strange fiction of Lovecraft originated. Also I have always loved the setting of Early 1800s, the world is pretty much all but discovered but there is still alot of mystery left, also if you want to travel be prepared that it might take you half a year to get there.

[Argobot]

Has anyone read anything by William Vollmann? I keep hearing his name pop up as an author to read, but I don't really know where to start...

[vimes]

Just finished what I think is my first Balzac ever, Le Père Goriot. It's a good book, but Balzac's tendency to only describe things and event with the lens of the book's message irritated in some places; mainly because he does it very explicitly.

For that reason, it took me a good 5 attempts to get through the first 20 pages of the book, which lay out in that style a lengthy description of the crummy residence most of the characters live in.

The final act is similarly excruciating (maybe on purpose) as it drags on and on about how terrible everything is, focusing on how each event, each detail comes to confirm that Society defiles humanity, and how many characters consciously accept and embrace that model.

The rest of the book is fantastically cynical both about thisand romantic notions of dedicated love, desire and passion. Those are expertly embedded in Vautrin a sort of merry Jean Valjean, who act as the Mephistopheles and protector of the main character, and Goriot, a father whose blind dedication to his family earn him terrible hardships and the respect of nobody.

So I guess

[savdec449]

Has anyone read anything by William Vollmann? I keep hearing his name pop up as an author to read, but I don't really know where to start...

I've only ever read (and liked) his journalism, but Europe Central and Rainbow Stories are both spoken pretty highly of. For what it is worth, DFW loved Rainbow Stories according to his biography. Which, by the way, I uh would not recommend.

[Argobot]

I just finished the DFW biography! Were you really not a fan? I'll admit, I did not particularly enjoy the Mary Karr sections, but otherwise, I thought the bio did a fair job of summing up his whole career.

[savdec449]

I just finished the DFW biography! Were you really not a fan? I'll admit, I did not particularly enjoy the Mary Karr sections, but otherwise, I thought the bio did a fair job of summing up his whole career.

It's a decent summary, but it's also super cursory and DT Max is just not a careful writer. For example, the book is just kind of filled with lines like one where Max mentions that Wallace both hated the prep atmosphere of Amherst and joined a frat. Those two bits of contradictory info are in the same sentence with no other explanation, which just kind of boggles the mind. Or the bit about Wallace needing an undergraduate math major's help in writing his thesis. Is Wallace a logic-whiz like we're lead to believe elsewhere or isn't he? Modal logic is different but would it really have been that alien to someone trained in regular old symbolic? And a lot of the book feels like that to me, just kind of not-gracefully-thought-out info dumping. I'm dreading the post-Infinite Jest sections, because I've only heard bad things about their skimming of the later Wallace, which is where I feel he wrote some of his best work.

[savdec449]

For the record, I'm also maybe doing a thesis on Wallace, so what I want from that bio may not be what everyone wants.

[Argobot]

Yeah, the post-IF section is fairly short; it's mostly about the Pale King with little discussion on Oblivion or Interviews. Most of the reviews I read for the bio described it as a 'jumping off point' in learning more about DFW, so I enjoyed it as a cursory glance at a complicated man's life. Obviously, cursory is not the word you want to use when looking for thesis material, so I can see why you'd be frustrated. If you haven't already found it, you should read Conversations with David Foster Wallace, maybe that will give you more of what you're looking for. (Also, thesis on DFW, that is so exciting! Do you have a topic yet?)

[savdec449]

Thanks! Yeah, I've already been directed to that, as well as a new book that came out recently that discusses Wallace's legacy ed. by Lee Konstantinou. And um I'm looking to do it on either Wallace or Pynchon and ethics, though what particular area of ethics is kind of up in the air at the moment.

[SuperHarman]

Been a while since I've had a chance to post in this thread. Since last posting I believe that I was reading Pamuk's Snow which I thought was a great examination of a character willing to forget morals for desire, even when those morals can get people killed. Also great was Jose Saramago's The Stone Raft. This one was an author recommendation from a friend who has yet to miss and damn if I don't want to go out and buy all of his books now. An incredible big idea that is both contained to a driven narrative while also taking into account the impact of the situation on the world at large, all done without seeming at all out of place. His writing style is also unique but in no way is it hard to penetrate.

Currently finishing off the David Foster Wallace short story collection The Girl With Curious Hair.

[Henroid]

So, I have a really weird question. I mean, weird for me, because I am very much not a person who reads. But I do it once in a while when I am super passionate about something or another.

At the moment, I crave the topic posthumanism (whether it be transhumanism or antihumanism, etc). The problem is, I wouldn't know where to begin, and I wouldn't necessarily know who to trust on the topic since people are given to write in favor of their biases and it's not as though that's something you see at face value. And I'm not a philosophy student at all. So basically, I need baby books to start me off on this. Does anyone have any good leads?

[Nappi]

I assume you are looking for non-fiction? Can't help you there.

As for fiction. The only books on transhumanism that I have read are the first two thirds of the William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. I can highly recommend checking out Neuromancer.

[gregbrown]

So, I have a really weird question. I mean, weird for me, because I am very much not a person who reads. But I do it once in a while when I am super passionate about something or another.

At the moment, I crave the topic posthumanism (whether it be transhumanism or antihumanism, etc). The problem is, I wouldn't know where to begin, and I wouldn't necessarily know who to trust on the topic since people are given to write in favor of their biases and it's not as though that's something you see at face value. And I'm not a philosophy student at all. So basically, I need baby books to start me off on this. Does anyone have any good leads?

Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near would be a good way to get transhumanism as explained by its most popular adherent. Critiques are easy enough that no one's really done it book-length, outside of persistent treatment in sci-fi. (Really, you can just think about the poor while reading Kurzweil and that'll do it.)

There are also some great treatments of specific post-human futures in sci-fi, and my personal fave is the Dune series. (AVOID BRIAN HERBERT'S PREQUELS AND SEQUELS.)