ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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I started reading the first book of Brandon Sanderson's new series and I'm having a hard time getting past the bad dialogue and annoying characters. I don't know if I'll be able to handle 900 more pages of this let alone 9 more thousand page books.

 

 You can do what I am doing and follow this blog that has a chapter by chapter reading of both Sanderson's new book and the Terry Goodkind's Wizard first law rather than wasting reading time on their epic shit

 

Also just finished Wages of destruction by Adam Tooze which was close look at the making and breaking of the Nazi economy and how Hitler's view that the US would be the world  power to beat was a major drive for him wanting to takeover Eastern Europe.. Very interesting and an unexpected page turner.

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Terry Goodkind's Wizard first law

uncontrollable projectile vomiting

 

(as opposed to controllable projectile vomiting)

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Today I finished Tenth of December, the most recent short story collection by George Saunders and the first work of his I'd read. It was really excellent. Nearly all of the stories are fairly tragic, but they all contain a great deal of humanity and levity as well. And the prose is wonderful to read. I highly recommend it.

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Today I finished Tenth of December, the most recent short story collection by George Saunders and the first work of his I'd read. It was really excellent. Nearly all of the stories are fairly tragic, but they all contain a great deal of humanity and levity as well. And the prose is wonderful to read. I highly recommend it.

How is the prose? I hear that Saunders is someone you have to become acclimated to, like Pynchon or Wallace.

 

Also, I read two books recently, one non-fiction and one fiction. The non-fiction was Nothing to Envy, a look at the lives of the people of North Korea. More journalistic than sociological, this was a heartbreaking book that followed the lives of a few individuals and their internal conflicts (that is their utter devotion to the Great Leader and the blatantly dire circumstances around them) that ultimately cause them to defect. The author, Barbara Demick, expertly weaves in the political and historical causes for the indivual hardships, so this book serves as a good primer as to the formation and fall of North Korea. Demick also dispels a lot of myths about the region, such as that the residents are stupid to believe their absurd propaganda, and those suffering in a communist regime lack initiative because they are so used to depending on government. Pretty much required reading.

The fiction book was Gardener from Ochakov by Andrey Kurkov. It was a light, fun novel that mixes hard drinking and time travel. The characters were delightful, and Kurkov has a wonderful, economic prose, but the story struggles spreads itself thin between being an inner journey for a fuck-about protagonist and a comment on Soviet nostalgia. It's like Murakami decided to cut all his breakfast scenes and every second sentence. While the writing itself is so focused, as Kurkov has a tendency to describe a scene so vividly by describing one detail, this ends up harming the book's themes and plot.

I'm now reading Voices from Chernobyl, which is an oral history of the nuclear disaster of 1986. It is better than any science fiction you have ever read. The people are so expressive, so poignant, and each with a different perspective of the disaster, the government's role in its clean-up, and how to deal with such a catastrophe. The author put the whole book up on his website here, but I'm reading the paperback.

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How is the prose? I hear that Saunders is someone you have to become acclimated to, like Pynchon or Wallace.

 

I've also only read Tenth of December, but I don't remember the prose being particularly challenging. Certainly not the kind of learning curve you face the first time you read Pynchon or DFW.

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I've also only read Tenth of December, but I don't remember the prose being particularly challenging. Certainly not the kind of learning curve you face the first time you read Pynchon or DFW.

Yeah it's definitely not challenging in any way. There's a range of styles over the course of the various stories but none of it gets particularly esoteric or anything. I liked it a lot though. There's a bit of the affectation and dissonance that is almost inevitable when trying to capture on the page dialogue as it is truly spoken in life, which I feel like just comes with the territory of contemporary literary fiction, to some extent, but what can you do?

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Made the mistake of reading the final story on a plane and had to hold back from sobbing. I remember there was a live Comedy Bang Bang podcast where Neil Campbell plays a character that finishes 10th in a coffee shop and some teenagers make fun of him for tearing up.  Any of you break down?

 

I loved that the stories in 10th of December were all thematically linked.  I get a bit exhausted reading short story books because you're constantly starting over in accumulating where/who/when, etc.  Once you read a few of them in 10th, though, starting the next story had more momentum because it was a question of when/how the theme would be incorporated.

 

Also echoing the comments on prose. Delightfully not challenging or obtuse.

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I have a really limited experience with short story collections, but most of the ones that I have read had a consistent tone or theme. Alice Munro is really great at doing this in her collections, but my favorite example is DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Some people call this a novel, but I've always seen it as a string of short stories that are connected by the same idea (men are terrible).

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How long could it take to get fluent in not just Spanish, but metaphysical philosophical sci-fi Spanish?

 

Thanks though! I know they've talked about it on the podcast, and the recent death of Umberto Eco's translator, but it's wild to imagine how much or how little I've really experienced stuff, based on translations. 

 

I take solace in the fact that my friends that speak Spanish seem to think the translations of Bolano are pretty good.

 

But yeah, translations are awkward.

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I'm reading Mo Yan's Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, which is a great title for a weird book. Dude pleads his way out of hell to be reborn as a donkey, and he watches the effects of Mao's agricultural reforms from the perspective of an animal. It's very cool, and does some interesting things with the historical setting and narration, but can verge on confusing as it switches between voices, perspectives and characters on a whim. 

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This isn't that surprising, they've had at least on ebook bundle, right? Apart from Salman Rushdie and Piers Anthony, I know nothing of the other authors here. :|

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I just finished Blood Meridian, via Audible. The narrator has a great voice and delivery. Brilliant novel with no likable characters and at times really shocking in it's violence. I love the way he manages both a biblical style of description but almost never providing any interior or emotional content for the characters. 

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I just finished the Roald Dahl child book collection (I still have the auto-bio ones, but I'm not counting those).

 

There is a reason some of his books weren't turned into films. although I could see The Twits and the Marvelous Medicine made into films... I'm VERY surprised Danny the Champion of the World was turned into a movie, it was one my least favorite since it glorified poaching and barely had an excuse, the villain only exists so the poaching seems justified, but still taking your kid poaching? That's just crazy!

 

Matilda was my favorite, although I'd hate to admit it, the movie was kinda better, it cleans up the "good" characters by doing things like turning pranks into accidents, which I'm not sure I like, but I do like the extra stuff they added, the ending seems more believable with extra scene at Trunchbull's house.

 

It's a shame that the Esio Trot was the last one in the collection, specially after Matilda, while I don't hate it as much as Champion of the World, the moral is probably WORSE... It's about who tricks a woman into marrying him... Wow! That's just dreadful...

 

I'm thinking I'll be reading the Oz Collection next, after the Wizard of Oz and whatever the second movie was based on, it's unknown territory to me.

 

PS: Has anybody read the Great Glass Elevator? Am I the only one who thinks Roald "chickened out" of the Space Hotel scene because either he didn't want it to be cooler than the Wonka Factory or because he didn't know how to top the Wonka factory?

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I just finished Blood Meridian, via Audible. The narrator has a great voice and delivery. Brilliant novel with no likable characters and at times really shocking in it's violence. I love the way he manages both a biblical style of description but almost never providing any interior or emotional content for the characters.

Which narrator was it? There are two versions on audible, was it the same one as the version in the bundle?

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I just finished A Confederacy of Dunces. What an absolutely hysterical book. One of the few things I've read that I was embarrassed to read in public, as I would just burst out laughing after some scenes. A joy to read.

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I just finished the Roald Dahl "bio-graphies", I can understand why he splits them in two, the first one is about his childhood and is child friendly, the second one is... World War II, and yet... it was still part of this children's book collection. It has a scene where Roald Dahl's African man-servant steals his sword to DECAPITATE a German civilian and Roald Dahl thought it was OK because every German civilian would become a soldier soon enough.

 

The first book has the phrase “I only use hot-bottomed fags…” (a term for college freshmen in his time and college) and I kinda spent several minutes laughing uncontrollably... ¬_¬U

 

Also you can see the seeds of his future books being planted by his early life... He really did love his sweets!

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Roald Dahl is a national treasure and yes I am aware that he is not from my nation but even so.

 

Yeah, he wrote quite a few not-good books, but I think a lot of the fun of Dahl is that he is not afraid to be really cruel and nasty, and kids of the age to be reading Dahl are a little sick of the seedier sides of life being hidden away. In the US that appears to be handled via kid-friendly scary stories like Who's Afraid of the Dark, etc. but in Britain (and Australia) that's not usually the case.

 

Dahl wrote some really twisted adult-oriented stuff, as well.

 

 

So I'm trying to compile a reading list for 2014. I'd like to get some literature on there, but my tastes are not particularly well-developed, as I was poorly served by the local library growing up and stayed on the pulp maybe a little too long. I'd love some relatively accessible literature to broaden my palate (as a guide, I devoured Cryptonomicon, got most of the way through Yiddish Policeman's Union before losing interest, and couldn't stomach Infinite Jest) and some thought-provoking non-fiction, as my list is a little light on both.

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I don't mind the darker tone Raold Dahl's takes, but I don't like the moral they have in the end. I would read a story about poaching to a kid, the fact that it makes poaching look like a GOOD thing is what upsets me. I also don't mind the deaths, because only an adult could truly how awful of a death they would be. Shrinking into nothingness? Horrible! But I don't think I kid would even get it.

 

What I really don't get is the WWII book in my kid book bundle, that's seriously messed up. The rest I would read to a kid, but Going Solo? No way! 

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I still have a copy of Skin on my bookshelf that I borrowed when I was in middle school. I actually keep meaning to return it, but I never do.

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Going through my reading list of Nobel Prize winners, I'm stalling on Mo Yan's Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. This book is all over the shop and the tone of voice falls in and out of character. I'm liking it, but it can be hard to hang on.

 

Mo Yan Mo Problems.

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Over New Year's, my friends and I went up to a beautiful part of the world and stayed in a holiday house five minutes from the beach and ten minutes from three other beaches. Beautiful. One of the games we played was 'random reading', where we'd take a book from the shelf, turn to a random page, and then read a passage. We soon settled on an enormously turgid and pompous book called And Quiet Flows The Don - which, we discovered to our mortification on the last day, was a Nobel Prize winner and a classic of Russian literature.

 

In our defence, it did work very well for random readings.

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