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What are you reading? (October 2017)
- Thread starter Maklershed
- Start date
Oh man, I made a spreadsheet of Nobel Prize in Literature laureates recently with the goal of reading them all. How have you found the project? Has it been a worthy, or at least interesting, endeavor so far?
I finished Blood of Elves, which starts off the Witcher Saga. I enjoyed it, even if it was fairly unconventional in its storytelling. I will pick up the next book at some point (I have so many started series on the go...)
I moved on to Solaris by Stanisław Lem. I guess I am on a Polish fantasy/sci fi streak (By complete coincidence).
I moved on to Solaris by Stanisław Lem. I guess I am on a Polish fantasy/sci fi streak (By complete coincidence).
SciencePilot
Member
I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
It sure is disturbing. Kinda hard to get through, honestly.
It sure is disturbing. Kinda hard to get through, honestly.
It's definitely been interesting. There's of course authors that don't do much for me (foreign poets, especially, are a crapshoot, given the difficulty inherent in translating poetry and my own lack of general interest in 20th century poetry trends), but there's been plenty of interesting subjects I wouldn't have covered otherwise.
Depending on what authors you've already covered, I'd offer a few recommendations for non-English-language authors:
- Knut Hamsun, Hunger
- Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen
- Halldor Laxness, Independent People
- Nelly Sachs, In the Habitations of Death
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, any of his short story collections or The Slave
- Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Modern
- Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997
- Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Funyarinpa
Member
The Dispossessed, perhaps?
I hated it. As edgy as it sounds, my favorite parts were the ultra violent ones lol. Even those were pretty lacking in number compared to what I was expecting, though.
There's always the Empire trilogy by Feist and Wurts. It technically takes place in the same universe as the Riftwar books, but it feels completely different. I've always preferred it over any of the regular Riftwar novels as well.
DeviantBoi
Member
I loved this book.
I read it a long, long time ago, but the line about the duck still makes me laugh to this day.
The Culture Vulture
Member
Finished The Handmaid's Tale this morning. Damn good book.
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a lot of my threads involve me fucking up somehow. Perhaps I'm a moron?
Finished Borne by Jeff Vandermeer.
It was cool, I love his world-building and how the "company" and the "city" were basically nameless and ambiguous.
However, as with the Southern Reach Trilogy, I feel his biggest weakness is endings and wrapping things up. It's paced so well and fun until the last 1/4 and then it's kinda meh.
It was cool, I love his world-building and how the "company" and the "city" were basically nameless and ambiguous.
However, as with the Southern Reach Trilogy, I feel his biggest weakness is endings and wrapping things up. It's paced so well and fun until the last 1/4 and then it's kinda meh.
arts&crafts
Member
Just finished Annihilation on the subway today. If it really enjoyed it, should I continue on the series and pick up the next one?
Maklershed
Member
The whole trilogy is good until the last 50 pages or so.
arts&crafts
Member
Awesome, I will move on to the second then. I really enjoyed the ambiguity of it, reminded me of Roadside Picnic in a way.
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a lot of my threads involve me fucking up somehow. Perhaps I'm a moron?
The first one I enjoyed immensely, the sequels I thought were awful.
My recommendation is always to read the first and leave it at that.
You're not missing anything. The first book works great as a standalone.
i've read and love them. maybe worth a reread.
Liu Kang Baking A Pie
Member
I kind of felt the same. I loved the book, but the ending was so "that's it?" after all that world-building.
Finished reading The Black Tides of Heaven. It was pretty great, super interesting world building and tackling of issues like gender. I found the pace to be a bit off though. The constant timeskips made it just feel like you were missing a lot of context for why Akeha had changed so much.
Going to try and read something a bit out of my usual comfort zone next, with The Loneliest Girl In the Universe by Lauren James.
It's a YA book about Earth's first colonisation mission to another solar system. The two commanders of the operation have a kid en route, everyone except the kid dies somehow and she's now the only person left on the ship, autopiloting through space towards a new homeworld. Her only source of social interaction being the emails she send to NASA (and early into the book, a second ship) but those take months to arrive at their destination so have to be written with lag in mind.
It's an interesting concept
but also leans a bit more into the YA romancy stuff that has never really interested me, so we'll see how it goes.
Going to try and read something a bit out of my usual comfort zone next, with The Loneliest Girl In the Universe by Lauren James.
It's a YA book about Earth's first colonisation mission to another solar system. The two commanders of the operation have a kid en route, everyone except the kid dies somehow and she's now the only person left on the ship, autopiloting through space towards a new homeworld. Her only source of social interaction being the emails she send to NASA (and early into the book, a second ship) but those take months to arrive at their destination so have to be written with lag in mind.
It's an interesting concept
and i've been told it gets a little more thriller-ish later on
Based on what you're saying, you'll like The Red Threads of Fortune a lot more.
Tragicomedy
Member
I managed to get burned out on reading (guess that's a thing?) after hitting my 50+ book goal for a few years. Got hit with the reading bug again which makes me happy.
Finished Dark Matter in a single sitting on Sunday and loved it. Has the usual shortcomings others seem to dislike with Crouch books, but I adore his style. He bites off too much and his endings feel predictable, but I love his characters and how ambitious his worlds are.
My two favorite sabermetrics gurus get to take over an independent pro baseball team and test all their statistically driven theories of the game. I've been listening to their Effectively Wild podcast for some time. Reading how they apply their empirical observations about the game in the real world is fascinating. My favorite part of baseball is the statistical underlayer explaining the outcomes of the game, and this book captures it well.
Listening to this on audio book. Noah is super interesting and relives his childhood in vivid detail. Race, poverty, and dancing Hitler.
I wonder if I could get back into this. There's a lot to love in worm, but it was just waaaayyyy too slow and padded out most of the time. I think I dropped it around arc 5 (going by a random arc summary I found: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/worm-chapter-synopsis.291627/), when that arc's fighting started reaching shounen anime levels of stretched out.
Do the fights at least get any better from there on? I'd prefer short and brutal fights, but that's not gonna happen. For reference, the
bank robbery fight
Still plowing through A Column of Fire by Ken Follett. Gooooood stuff.
Me too. 250 pages in or so.
Conflicted about it though. It reads good, and when I pick it up I easily read 20 to 30 pages without putting it down (which is rare for me these days). I also love how well researched it is, and I have to refrain myself not to look every historic character or event up on Wikipedia (which would probably spoil some later events).
On the other hand I find the characters very unnuanced. Most, if not all of them, stand for a certain worldview/faction without any wiggle room. Sometimes I even feel they react in a weird way because of this.
Margary deciding to Mary Bart after the bishop gives her a lecture feels weird when she has been characterised as rebellious. Suddenly she is super pious, because she has to stand for the Catholic faction?
And the complete lack of subtext is annoying me more and more. Having dialogue explained in the next sentence (she was being sarcastic He offcourse ment the Kings new War) makes you feel as if the writer doesnt think youre a smart reader, and I hate that.
But I still like reading it, despite this annoyances. I just dont know if after this Ill read a Follet book again, as I had the same annoyances with book 2 and 3 of the Century Trilogy.
Have you read David Eddings? The Belgariad in particular is quite similar in tone to the Riftwar saga.
I'm reading Munich by Robert Harris, and tomorrow I plan to buy Phillip Pullman's new book; His Dark Materials is one of my favourites so I can't wait.
Shit, didn't know he had a new HDM-trilogy in the works; Thanks mate, ordering it immidiatly!
I'm about 300 pages into IT, and while it's barely even begun to take off, the story thus far is fascinating. My history with King is about half of Misery left by the wayside for no good reason, and myriad movies of his I've caught in the past, like The Shining. Needless to say I'm definitely going to be reading more of him. He may not be a literary mastermind but the characters he writes are incredible. I've never read a story with so many different characters in so many different timelines where it was so easy to follow who is who.
You should really read The Shining. As great as the movie is on its own it's a pretty poor, surface-level adaptation.
King hated it.
Jag
Member
Damn. Follet had a new book out and I didn't see it. His books are so formula driven, but they are also fun and mindless.
Been hard to read because I've been editing a manuscript in preparation for NaNoWriMo, but I've been managing to slowly make my way through The Remains of the Day (as I posted earlier), and also Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols (for study of dreams for a story I'm writing).
Remains of the Day is pretty good. It's not my particular style, but the writer is pulling me into the story more and more as I read. I'm 80 pages in and I feel like I get a sense of what is happening, but I could be wrong yet.
Man and His Symbols is a good read, especially if you are into dreams and Jungian psychology. I am 110 pages in and it has given me some ideas already on what I want to expand. I used to study my own dreams back in the day, so it's nice to read more on this topic.
Remains of the Day is pretty good. It's not my particular style, but the writer is pulling me into the story more and more as I read. I'm 80 pages in and I feel like I get a sense of what is happening, but I could be wrong yet.
Man and His Symbols is a good read, especially if you are into dreams and Jungian psychology. I am 110 pages in and it has given me some ideas already on what I want to expand. I used to study my own dreams back in the day, so it's nice to read more on this topic.
ZedLeppelin006
Banned
I just started Sleeping Beauties from Stephen King. I'm only a few pages in as I only have time to read at work when it's not busy so I don't have any opinions of it yet but I love anything by SK so I've got high hopes.
Funyarinpa
Member
Reading MONSTER by Michael Grant. It's the first book in a sequel trilogy to GONE (six-book YA series, last book came out around 2014 or so). GONE is a series that I've been a staunch fan of for years (it's changed my life in quite a few ways), so I was looking forward to this. I'm reading it with a perspective that I probably won't have with any other book: When I first read GONE, I was 11-12 or so- the mostly 14-year-old cast felt like people with much more going on in their heads and so it felt like a battle between smart and mature people. I reread it when I was 14. Now I knew that the cast was pretty much my age and they must not have felt very differently than I did. That gave me a completely different perspective where I could put myself in the characters' shoes. Then I tried to reread it last year, when I was 17, and it was a much more terrifying experience than I expected- now I knew what an emotional and mental mess most 15-year olds were, and given how Grant pulls no punches in his writing whatsoever (example of what happens to children throughout the series:
) the whole experience was filled with dread since now I saw the plot of the novel without the grandeur and poignancy mixed into the text by the adolescent mind. That made it all feel far more fucked up.
And now, MONSTER deals with a mostly new cast with a couple returning cast members- most of the cast is now 17 or 18, just as I was. They've grown up, in a way, along with me. Wow.
Anyways, there is far less intrigue in the setup this time around and it seems more focused on characters and how they'll be reacting- it's from a superhero story lens, which seems appropriate to me given how the ending of the series played out. Some strive to be good, some unambiguously evil, some are in the middle. Kind of nice, really. Also, there's something I really like about it already (very early spoiler):
I'm glad to see YA literature authors start to promote such characters. Rick Riordan does something similar in one of his newer books, I believe.
About halfway through in two days already (good for a 300+ page book as swamped with schoolwork as I am right now) and much of it feels like buildup, still. Not that it's calm or slow-paced or anything (quite the opposite), but plot threads are still being formed.
Besides that, it's not really living up to GONE, but it's not really fair to expect it to. Feels like a nice and respectful tie-in to the GONE series, I'm enjoying my time with it, and I'm glad it exists.
eaten by worms, hanged from a street light, eaten by a coyote, turned in great part to stone- oh, these all happen in the first two books, by the way.
And now, MONSTER deals with a mostly new cast with a couple returning cast members- most of the cast is now 17 or 18, just as I was. They've grown up, in a way, along with me. Wow.
Anyways, there is far less intrigue in the setup this time around and it seems more focused on characters and how they'll be reacting- it's from a superhero story lens, which seems appropriate to me given how the ending of the series played out. Some strive to be good, some unambiguously evil, some are in the middle. Kind of nice, really. Also, there's something I really like about it already (very early spoiler):
The sidekick to the female main protagonist (many points of view) is gender-fluid and uses female pronouns. Her conflict is an important part of her character and development, and she does deal with prejudice.
About halfway through in two days already (good for a 300+ page book as swamped with schoolwork as I am right now) and much of it feels like buildup, still. Not that it's calm or slow-paced or anything (quite the opposite), but plot threads are still being formed.
Besides that, it's not really living up to GONE, but it's not really fair to expect it to. Feels like a nice and respectful tie-in to the GONE series, I'm enjoying my time with it, and I'm glad it exists.
Been having some trouble focusing on books and while I'm still reading It and enjoying it, I keep bouncing between a dozen other books in search of something lighter, not necessarily in tone or subject matter, but length. I read the first 20 pages, drop it, start another book, rinse and repeat. What a frustrating feeling, wanting to read something fast paced (or at least faster than It), anything really, but not getting into any of the books I have.
So I decided I'd finally buy the second book of The First Law, Before They Are Hanged, and I immediately feel good about that decision. First goddamn chapter and I already feel at home. Gonna go take a quick shower and then read for an hour or two before hitting the hay.
Hahah, I see. Thanks for taking the time to answer, I think I'll try picking it up again in November-December, when I have less new games to distract me.
So I decided I'd finally buy the second book of The First Law, Before They Are Hanged, and I immediately feel good about that decision. First goddamn chapter and I already feel at home. Gonna go take a quick shower and then read for an hour or two before hitting the hay.
So, up to you really.
Hahah, I see. Thanks for taking the time to answer, I think I'll try picking it up again in November-December, when I have less new games to distract me.
AngmarsKing701
Member
Finished Joyland by Stephen King. Solid but fairly unremarkable. Entertaining enough. After reading the tome of To Green Angel Tower, it felt good to breeze through a first person perspective story that doesn't overstay its welcome.
3 / 5
Moved on yet another first person perspective in The Pagan Lord by Bernard Cornwell. The 7th in the Saxon Stories series. I've been away from this series for a while, after having grown tired of Uhtred.
3 / 5
Moved on yet another first person perspective in The Pagan Lord by Bernard Cornwell. The 7th in the Saxon Stories series. I've been away from this series for a while, after having grown tired of Uhtred.
I've been in the mood for horror/mistery for a while. Mostly haunted house stuff. Finished a few days ago Hell House.
Now I'm reading The Haunting of Hill House
I don't know. It's enjoyable but it felt... underwhelming? You hear people talking about it like it's one of the most frightening books ever, and it has its moments, but not that much. I guess it's the same reason why you keep seeing The Exorcist in Scariest Movies list.
Now I'm reading The Haunting of Hill House
So far, so good. It reads like it was written yesterday, amazing.
Funyarinpa
Member
I saw this recently and I'm quite interested in it, so I'm looking forward to your impressions.
Finished the first 2 sections of Gravity's Rainbow which, despite taking the time and effort of a book onto themselves, amount to less than 40% of the work on my Kindle. I've stuck it out this time(having quit once before) mostly through putting aside what I wanted it to be and Pynchon's own incessant need to impress his ability on the reader. Honestly, it was also much easier to dismiss back when I felt like there was so much on the "to read" shelf in waiting versus now. Not like I've read so much in the interim that Gravity's Rainbow and Fifty Shades of Grey are all that's left, just less profligate with good writing now(which after all this is).
I don't know who here has read it, so I won't force you to scroll by my various impressions and opinions, but it's a thing? Gravity's Rainbow is in rarefied air in quality of prose for starters, the intro is not an outlier. And it's really obsessed with sex of all kinds, from vanilla to let's call it chocolate fudge, so that's not a combination you're likely to come across often. There's a lot made of its complexity, and sure enough it is, but it's rarely insightful, thematically or otherwise. Poignant in juxtaposition as it takes turns(wildly) scene to scene and sometimes in painting a picture, but look, for however much people like to compare it to Infinite Jest, it doesn't have a 10th of the heart. Then again, not even halfway through, I don't mean to be hard on it. I'm very glad I picked it up again.
I don't know who here has read it, so I won't force you to scroll by my various impressions and opinions, but it's a thing? Gravity's Rainbow is in rarefied air in quality of prose for starters, the intro is not an outlier. And it's really obsessed with sex of all kinds, from vanilla to let's call it chocolate fudge, so that's not a combination you're likely to come across often. There's a lot made of its complexity, and sure enough it is, but it's rarely insightful, thematically or otherwise. Poignant in juxtaposition as it takes turns(wildly) scene to scene and sometimes in painting a picture, but look, for however much people like to compare it to Infinite Jest, it doesn't have a 10th of the heart. Then again, not even halfway through, I don't mean to be hard on it. I'm very glad I picked it up again.
Jag
Member
That's Uhtred of Bebbanburg!
I picked that up at the same time (it was actually you posting about that one in here that made me buy them at all) and intend on reading it next! Hopefully you're right, although I really enjoyed the first one regardless.
Continuing with Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books.
About to start Volume 3, Book 2. The second volume (Book 1) was completely different from the first volume (Book 3). Instead of continuing the weird sci-fi dystopia, it is a straightforward depiction of a young boy's childhood and adolescence. It's tied to the first volume, though, in many ways. This third volume continues where the second left off.
About to start Volume 3, Book 2. The second volume (Book 1) was completely different from the first volume (Book 3). Instead of continuing the weird sci-fi dystopia, it is a straightforward depiction of a young boy's childhood and adolescence. It's tied to the first volume, though, in many ways. This third volume continues where the second left off.
Currently having similar feelings while reading Lolita
Killed off Goth by Otsuichi and holy crap was it twisted. It was a great read with twists and turns and bloody gory details all over. So basically, perfect for a getting into the Halloween mood.
Keeping the dark theme going, next up I'll be reading Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng, which I was lucky enough to win through goodreads.
Keeping the dark theme going, next up I'll be reading Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng, which I was lucky enough to win through goodreads.
karmaforgotme
Member
I read The Haunting of Hill House several times over the years (the first time was in the late 80's), and if I made a list of my top 10 favorite books it would be on it. I read the book because it was quoted at the beginning of King's Salem's Lot. The Marsten House in that book is heavily influenced by THOHH.
The Robert Wise directed 1963 version of the book is quite excellent, but the 1999 version is bad. I would suggest watching the 63 version after reading the book. It's called The Haunting. Also I agree with you about Hell House. I love Richard Matheson, but its really not that great. Pretty average overall.