Now Reading

  On 12/31/2013 at 11:07 PM, baph said:

Annoying as shit post incoming, soz:

 

Not sure what the fuck to read next. I've got these unreads clattering around:

 

The Recognitions

Some Remarks (Neal Stephenson)

The City and The Stars

Bleeding Edge

American Gods

The last couple installments of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, may need to re-read The Black Dossier first, I unno

About half of the "Complete" works of HP Lovecraft

 

WATMM, please select, I'm having a shit of a time deciding.

 

Or recommend something. Something not Cormac McCarthy. I've got 10 bucks left on an amazon gift card.

 

Autechre, please name my kindle.

I chickened out of The Recognitions a while back, but now I'm nearly through with A Frolic of His Own and really enjoying it, so Gaddis gets my vote.

I know lots of people liked American Gods, but it was a bit gimmicky for me. I do like Gaiman, but he's almost got the storytelling thing down too pat; his stuff can feel overpolished in some ways, like reading an AMC drama.

The wise mans fear by Patrick Rothfuss. Love his style, enjoying this as much as name of the wind so far.

just finished the son by phillip meyer. it's sort of a panoramic of a texas family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. most of the storylines aren't that interesting but the eli story, of a boy who is captured by comanches and eventually comes to live like his captors, is probably the best thing i've read in a couple of years. i found myself speed reading through the other chapters to get back to his story, which is a good sign for that part of the book and a bad sign for the book as a whole. but it's worth checking out for that.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate - Stewart Lee. It's essentially three of his routines transcribed with numerous footnotes. A written dvd commentary I suppose. Anyway... I'm laughing. A lot. The Ang Lee bit never fails.

Just finished Chapterhouse: Dune, and the whole Dune series for that matter (I won't read anything by Brian Herbert): very enjoyable. pretty dense at some parts. I'll probably revisit it in the future!

Next up: Lolita. I've been looking forward and dreading this all at once: I wonder how it will pan out.

  On 1/19/2014 at 8:50 PM, Phoenix said:

Just finished Chapterhouse: Dune, and the whole Dune series for that matter (I won't read anything by Brian Herbert): very enjoyable. pretty dense at some parts. I'll probably revisit it in the future!

 

Next up: Lolita. I've been looking forward and dreading this all at once: I wonder how it will pan out.

Lolita is def worth reading imo. It's very very well written, in that you don't feel like the author's chosen a contraversial subject for the sake of contraversiality. It reads like a memoir of sorts (in a good way).

I'm in that nice 'reading two books' place:

The World According to Garp

and the Preacher comics - my first real comic dip.

On the second Preacher now, so Garp is being neglected a little.

reading revival, comic book. pretty good, not great yet.

also reading empire of illusion by chris hedges, which i like so far. also reading three stigmata of palmer eldritch by philip k. dick. i'm not sure how to feel about it. as with all of his work, i admire the conceptual ability but the writing is often stale, sometimes incomprehensible. i feel like pynchon does this whole paranoid/acid trip thing better and you don't have to read forty novels to get to maybe two books worth of actual strong writing. also don't have to read his crackpot theological ideas. i do enjoy the sometimes surreal imagery that pkd's novels conjure up in my mind, but i have yet to read one (i've read twenty so far) that coheres into something worthwhile.

started 1q84, didn't get far. boring as fuck, badly written, goes absolutely nowhere. murakami really went downhill since wind-up bird.

  On 1/22/2014 at 10:22 PM, zaphod said:

 

started 1q84, didn't get far. boring as fuck, badly written, goes absolutely nowhere. murakami really went downhill since wind-up bird.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was a great read. The only other I've read by him is Norwegian Wood, which is considered his most accessible I suppose. I'd like to read others, so is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the place to go first?

i would start with wild sheep chase, actually the whole rat trilogy is pretty representative of his work. wind up bird is his best though. hard boiled wonderland is interesting. i actually started with his short story collection "the elephant vanishes" which is as good a place as any.

Anyone read any China Mieville? Might give him a go when I finish Lynch on Lynch.

yeah he's good. just avoid iron council and kraken. he's also pretty evenly split into two phases. perdido street and the scar are his "weird fiction" and offer very imaginative, almost purple prose fantasy worlds. they're also very political in nature, although it's hidden behind metaphor. iron council is just a straight up socialist novel and basically shoves his political beliefs down the reader's throat in an unsubtle way.

i think city and the city and embassytown are his strongest works. city and the city is a kind of political detective story, very minimal and restrained. embassytown is fairly indebted to ursula le guin and deals with language. it's definitely his only real science fiction novel.

Thanks, I was considering Un Lun Dun but I'll give either of those a try.

Waiting for Brave New World in the library.

Just remember to read the "revisited" after it!

  On 1/23/2014 at 12:55 AM, Philip Glass said:

Just remember to read the "revisited" after it!

please expand... i'm reading the "normal" one (I guess)... what's in the revisited?

  On 1/22/2014 at 10:52 PM, Sprillian said:

 

  On 1/22/2014 at 10:22 PM, zaphod said:

started 1q84, didn't get far. boring as fuck, badly written, goes absolutely nowhere. murakami really went downhill since wind-up bird.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was a great read. The only other I've read by him is Norwegian Wood, which is considered his most accessible I suppose. I'd like to read others, so is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the place to go first?

 

I read the end of the world and hard boiled wonderland and I find it really awesome... not impressive, but it blends surreal, drama,love and cyberpunk shit pretty well.

  On 1/22/2014 at 10:52 PM, Sprillian said:

 

  On 1/22/2014 at 10:22 PM, zaphod said:

started 1q84, didn't get far. boring as fuck, badly written, goes absolutely nowhere. murakami really went downhill since wind-up bird.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was a great read. The only other I've read by him is Norwegian Wood, which is considered his most accessible I suppose. I'd like to read others, so is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the place to go first?

 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was the first book of Murakami I've read, and I really love it

I'm also obsessed with this cover, can't stop looking at it

  On 1/23/2014 at 1:22 AM, logakght said:

 

  On 1/23/2014 at 12:55 AM, Philip Glass said:

Just remember to read the "revisited" after it!

 

please expand... i'm reading the "normal" one (I guess)... what's in the revisited?

He wrote a 100 page non-fiction analysis of the book thirty years later called "Brave New World Revisited". A lot of the versions of the book actually have it attached to the end of the original.

Currently reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. About half way through and I like it even if the verbosity is sometime annoying, which I am familiar with reading a couple of his later novels. Planning to read his Baroque Cycle later and Reamde. But I sometime wish he had an editor, but I guess it's his style.

  On 1/23/2014 at 3:16 PM, azatoth said:

Currently reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. About half way through and I like it even if the verbosity is sometime annoying, which I am familiar with reading a couple of his later novels. Planning to read his Baroque Cycle later and Reamde. But I sometime wish he had an editor, but I guess it's his style.

The Baroque Cycle is full of insight, colorful characters, items of historical interest, modernized excesses of baroque-era prose (NS doesn't really try too hard to hew to historical grammatical or literary convention) and digressive thought, passages of tedium and reward, parodic absurdity, anachronism, humor, &c.

Reamde, in contrast, is honestly about as straightforward as a 900 page beach-reading technothriller complete with underdeveloped islamic terrorist villains and a 100-plus-page shootout sequence gets. The quality of the sentence-by-sentence prose is certainly a step up from, e.g., Tom Clancy, but it's honestly missing most of what makes NS at least idiosyncratic/problematic/interesting. IMO. It's just a bit of fun, I guess. It's sort of just: ooh, more guns. Going from, say, Anathem to Reamde is like you've just gone from watching a full season of the Wire with all of its complex characterization and threading and concern with the function and dysfunction of inescapable institutions to watching some HBO-requested spinoff series in which Brother Mouzone is the central character and just look at how nonchalant and badass he is, wow.

I'm probably being too hard on Reamde because I did have fun reading it. But I was a little disappoint.

That's the impression I've also got when reading reviews about Reamde. Maybe he wanted to do something more simplistic after the rather heady Anathem, but in that NS style. I am looking forward to that 100 page shootout.

  On 1/23/2014 at 8:56 PM, azatoth said:

That's the impression I've also got when reading reviews about Reamde. Maybe he wanted to do something more simplistic after the rather heady Anathem, but in that NS style. I am looking forward to that 100 page shootout.

You can even read a deliberate thematic/ self-parodying structure into it without having to be over-generous, as there are certain ideas touched on initially in the book that raise expectations of typical Neal Stephenson spec-fic world building to come, and then Neal seems to go "fuck this shit, pewpewpewpew" and the characters just have to survive. It's pretty funny, actually. I mean, he always clearly loved writing the pewpewpew bits but this becomes more or less about pewpewpew. If I remember correctly, the afterward thanks folks for help with ballistics copy editing.

  On 1/23/2014 at 6:20 PM, baph said:

 

  On 1/23/2014 at 3:16 PM, azatoth said:

Currently reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. About half way through and I like it even if the verbosity is sometime annoying, which I am familiar with reading a couple of his later novels. Planning to read his Baroque Cycle later and Reamde. But I sometime wish he had an editor, but I guess it's his style.

 

The Baroque Cycle is full of insight, colorful characters, items of historical interest, modernized excesses of baroque-era prose (NS doesn't really try too hard to hew to historical grammatical or literary convention) and digressive thought, passages of tedium and reward, parodic absurdity, anachronism, humor, &c.

 

Reamde, in contrast, is honestly about as straightforward as a 900 page beach-reading technothriller complete with underdeveloped islamic terrorist villains and a 100-plus-page shootout sequence gets. The quality of the sentence-by-sentence prose is certainly a step up from, e.g., Tom Clancy, but it's honestly missing most of what makes NS at least idiosyncratic/problematic/interesting. IMO. It's just a bit of fun, I guess. It's sort of just: ooh, more guns. Going from, say, Anathem to Reamde is like you've just gone from watching a full season of the Wire with all of its complex characterization and threading and concern with the function and dysfunction of inescapable institutions to watching some HBO-requested spinoff series in which Brother Mouzone is the central character and just look at how nonchalant and badass he is, wow.

 

I'm probably being too hard on Reamde because I did have fun reading it. But I was a little disappoint.

 

Indeed, Reamde had so much wasted potential, I still think that his prose was wasted with this book. But like you, I finished the book and told myself "ok that was still a fucking nice roller-coaster!"

i'm just over halfway through Gravity's Rainbow (~p. 460 in my edition), and i'm thinking of taking a break from it. it's been a slog, and i'm not sure how much i'm enjoying it at the moment. the central narrative is interesting and i'm keen to see where it's going, and at times i think it's one of the funniest books i've ever read, but there are just so many chunks (basically chapters) that are more or less totally lost on me. i've been reading with my tablet by my side to occasionally go online and check out references or look for some pointers about the significance of certain extended tangents, but i have to say that i'm finding GR a bit of an ordeal. i think i might go and read a short novel or two and try returning to it.

btw - first Pynchon, first attempt.

First Pynchon and it's GR? That's not the good way, but still good job being at half-way point! Most first-reader won't make it pass page 45 or something similar.

GR should be the end of a journey through Pynchon.