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The "life isn't fair" part of the book starts pretty early in. Besides, it's fairly open ended so if you want it to be a happy ending it still can be!
Still, huge. Intimidating. Ishmael is a doofus. It's gonna be a long ride.
Next up I'll be reading either the first Elric of Melnibone book or Assassin's Apprentice.
So yeah, if you ever read YA, read that series.
I'm reading The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho now. It's interesting. It kind of feels like character was sacrificed in the name of cramming as much mysticism as possible into the book -- which is odd, considering the book is supposed to basically be a character study. Maybe it's just me not relating, the main character seems pretty flat at the moment.
The Dexter series?
's about a serial killer who hunts other serial killers. Black humor, moral ambiguity, weirdness in the third book which most people like to ignore.
I'm reading Dark Places by Gillian Flynn now.
That's what your authoritarian overlords want you to think. Fight the power!
(The prose is a bit dry, but I've read it twice and found it pretty compelling each time. Different strokes and whatnot.)
I just finished Child of God (I am on a McCarthy kick) and it was dark and seriously fucked up and really cool. Picked up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and I really wanted to like it. It was interesting. The idea of pretend-magicians in 1800s England running into a real thing and then those magicians being involved in the war is cool. But the writing is so dry and encyclopedia-like that I just can't read it for more than 10 pages at a sitting, and it's not so cool that I want to be reading this book for the next 3 months.
So I started All the Pretty Horses instead. We'll see how that goes.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
In the past month I've reread Relic, Reliquary, and Cabinet of Curiosities as well as gotten through Brimstone, Dance with Death, and Thunderhead for the first time. I am currently reading Still Live With Crows before moving on to Book of the Dead.
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Man, if you cut everything that was a total tangent, it'd be a novella.
Cut everything that wasn't the main plot, you'd have five pages. Still, worth reading.
I have that to start too... which I will if my friend never gets back to me before the weekend. We are supposed to simultaneously read Perdido Street Station since she saw it on my shelf but I haven't heard from her for a week.
Behance Portfolio I Amazonian I PSN- Subtle_Ties | 3DS: 3840-5210-2008 (Subtle)
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"Woe be to him that defies the tree"
It's probably because I'm over-analyzing things as I'm reading it I'll admit.
Just finished.
That was the first sci-fi I've enjoyed since Dune. I'm a really hard sell on sci-fi. I was ready to go right to the next one but they only have Kindle versions of books 1, 3 and 4, but not 2. Odd. I guess I'll have to get the paperback =)
WiiU - vamenn (MONSTER HUNTER!!!)
XBL - dachishbudoka
PS3 - dachish
"Woe be to him that defies the tree"
I just finished reading the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie and I enjoyed them quite a bit. Its definetly not a happy go lucky kind of story though. Then ending left me feeling kinda sad and angry at the same time.
It's amazing how surprising and scary the world was when all you have to work with on your person was a pager. Cell Phones really did change everything.
— Robert Heinlein
People tend to be polarized by the rest of the Hyperion cantos. I think a safe rule is to read the 2nd book (basically the second half of Hyperion) and then if you're really digging the whole thing, go for the Endymion books but try and keep an open mind. I think a lot of people get turned off by the Endymion books.
It's a weird series, to be sure. Simmons can be an infuriating writer. You'll be chugging along devouring the dense deliciousness of his story and then he'll send you a brief telegram explaining 'my brain has decided to deviate from pattern and go this way, sincerely, fuck you.' It's sort of like reading Neil Stephenson's written history but catching that shift in the middle of a series or book as opposed to over the course of various series.
I still really like all four books, and I also would suggest his more recent books that I have now totally forgotten the names of (Ilium maybe). They're very fun and very smart and very bendy. I'll edit this with the names unless someone remembers them before I get back. My brain is a colander with quarter sized holes when it comes to book details sometimes.
I would probably find it hard to read either 1984 or Brave New World anymore because those books get co-opted by complete idiots to score political points.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
I found it a bit, I dunno, melodramatic? Like Orwell actually though what he wrote would come about and he has this mortal fear of it, but from our perspective his fears seem overwrought. Similar to HP Lovecraft in that way, actually, in the way that his books are based off his terror regarding mixing of the races etc, and now they seem overwrought in the same vein.
Newest Discworld. So excited.
For me it's more the fact that a third party nation like "The Party" or whatever it's called would be crushed in a matter of weeks if not days if they were constantly waging war with the entire rest of the world, or what I assume is the rest of the world. That and a bunch of things in the book are outdated, like the telescreens that constantly watch and hear everyone forever would require some huge monitoring force and could in no way address a single individual by name and have them do things on command during programs made for everyone at the given time of day. The whole anti-sex league thing is a bit silly too, seeing as no abstinence program has worked ever.
But that's just me nitpicking things in an otherwise well written, if not as you said, melodramatic book.
Besides, Huxley is a better writer.
You plowed through it compared to me! Took me about three months... But yeah, definitely not a book to read straight through for the sake of the narrative alone (although the narrative is outstanding). Somehow the digressions are what I loved most though. It felt like an entire universe was presented, and in the midst of it all, the search for that legendary whale.
I think modern culture (at least American) is actually an amalgam of the two. You have a lot of tune-in-turn-off stuff going on and, as you said, instant gratification. You also have a real push for increased security with little concern for how it effects personal freedom as long as it's perceived as someone else's personal freedom. The intelligence programs implemented over the course of the past decade certainly have a Big Brother flair. Not that I think we're close at all to the upshot of either author's vision, but I think they were both fairly prescient in their own ways, at least in the way they each established how individuals' drive for Goal X can lead to some pretty terrible results.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Brave New World resonates more now because it is an easy, hands off approach that (one could argue) is already being used on the digital generation (Social Media is the soma of all teenagers right now, you could blow up a car next to them and they would tweet about it before helping people). Globalization makes for a more plausible distopia.
— Robert Heinlein
Yeah. The paranoia in, say, Pattern Recognition feels more modern.
Not that The Government is tracking you, actively. But that people could.
Not even influential people or summat. Random jerks.
Late to the party but I LOVE THAT SERIES! Wanted to pick up the hardcover book on the old spook's adventures too but have not yet.
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— Robert Heinlein
— Robert Heinlein