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The "What Are You Reading" Thread

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Posts

  • KlykaKlyka DO you have any SPARE BATTERIES?Registered User regular
    I started reading "Escape from Camp 14". It's the story of a North Korean born in a prison camp who then escaped and told his story.
    The things he describes are pretty amazing/insane/horrible.

    SC2 EU ID Klyka.110
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  • Simon MoonSimon Moon Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Anyone read the Night Angel Trilogy?

    Yeah, it was okay-not-great. I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone, but if someone said in conversation that they were reading it, I'd probably say something like "yeah, I read those, they weren't bad." Liked The Black Prism better.

    Simon Moon on
    Steam: simon moon
  • Harry DresdenHarry Dresden Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Anyone read the Night Angel Trilogy?

    I have. I enjoyed it, might not for everybody though.

    Harry Dresden on
  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    Started Hot Water Music (Bukowski) and Blood Meridian (McCarthy) a few days back.

    Digging HWM a lot, not looking forward to the morbid depression that will no doubt follow finishing Blood Meridian.

    I recommend leavening Blood Meridian with another book. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever read but it's a bit much to do straight through.

    rRwz9.gif
  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    Blood Meridian is fucking intense. I'm perpetually terrified of the next atrocity, while reading it. I barely got through a third of it so far.

    Steam: Stormwatcher | PSN: Stormwatcher33 | Switch: 5961-4777-3491
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  • pyromaniac221pyromaniac221 this just might be an interestin YTRegistered User regular
    Put in an order for Hyperion, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, On Stranger Tides, and The Man Who Was Thursday. Not sure which to read first. But I'm excited.

    psn tooaware, friend code SW-4760-0062-3248 it me
  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Anyone read the Night Angel Trilogy?

    Everyone I know loved it.

    It's high octane crazy grim dark rule of cool action nonsense nerd porn in a pretty interesting world (I think there's a lot of room to write more stories in the same setting - even contemporary to the story).

    So, it's not very deep, but a lot of stuff and action happens making it a bit of a page turner. But it isn't very cerebral.

    Edit: there's also a Black Prism thread which @Lady Eri started that briefly touched on the Trilogy. Both series are good.

    Apothe0sis on
  • DashuiDashui Registered User regular
    Apothe0sis wrote: »
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Anyone read the Night Angel Trilogy?

    Everyone I know loved it.

    It's high octane crazy grim dark rule of cool action nonsense nerd porn in a pretty interesting world (I think there's a lot of room to write more stories in the same setting - even contemporary to the story).

    So, it's not very deep, but a lot of stuff and action happens making it a bit of a page turner. But it isn't very cerebral.

    I remember enjoying most of it, particularly the directions he took certain characters, but was left disappointed with the overall plot/threat by the end.

    And I'm about to finish up Fall of Hyperion now. God damn. The twists and revelations just keep coming, and they're brilliant. I love this book.

    Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    Dashui, I felt the same at the end, partly because there was lots to be explored and unfinished stories throughout.

  • Mike DangerMike Danger "Diane..." a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered User regular
    Put in an order for Hyperion, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, On Stranger Tides, and The Man Who Was Thursday. Not sure which to read first. But I'm excited.

    daaaaamn son/daughter

    If it were up to me I would do:
    Man Who Was Thursday (because I haven't read it :P)
    On Stranger Tides (yessss Tim Powers)
    Hyperion
    Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

    Steam: Mike Danger | PSN/NNID: remadeking | 3DS: 2079-9204-4075
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  • Mad King GeorgeMad King George Registered User regular
    Put in an order for Hyperion, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, On Stranger Tides, and The Man Who Was Thursday. Not sure which to read first. But I'm excited.

    On Stranger Tides was fun, weird, and the writing was a little..off...if that makes sense. The Man Who Was Thursday is a sharply written little book of ecclesiastical paranoia, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is my favorite fantasy book of all time.

  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    I found Virtual Light for 50 cents at the library, so I am rolling on with the William Gibson thing. I have Burning Chrome waiting for me at home, so I think that I might just pick up Zero History and All Tomorrow's Parties off of Amazon and then I will own the complete oeuvre.

    Virtual Light is one of my favorite Gibsons and I think is massively underrated. The sheer ordinariness of the main character really spoke to me and felt in many ways much more authentic and fleshed out than the sexy criminals of his earlier work.

    rRwz9.gif
  • Harry DresdenHarry Dresden Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    Apothe0sis wrote: »
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Anyone read the Night Angel Trilogy?

    Everyone I know loved it.

    It's high octane crazy grim dark rule of cool action nonsense nerd porn in a pretty interesting world (I think there's a lot of room to write more stories in the same setting - even contemporary to the story).

    So, it's not very deep, but a lot of stuff and action happens making it a bit of a page turner. But it isn't very cerebral.

    Edit: there's also a Black Prism thread which @Lady Eri started that briefly touched on the Trilogy. Both series are good.

    IIRC Weeks will write more stories in the setting.

    Harry Dresden on
  • EntriechEntriech ? ? ? ? ? Ontario, CanadaRegistered User regular
    Just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch which was fan-fucking-tastic. Interesting characters, great world building without things dragging or getting in the way of the plot, a whole pile of twists and turns. This book kept me up late several nights just wanting to know what happened next. If you're a fan of the fantasty genre at all, don't hesitate to dig in.

    The next book in the series is checked out by someone else at the library, so instead I'm going to move on to The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett.

  • poshnialloposhniallo Registered User regular
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    I found Virtual Light for 50 cents at the library, so I am rolling on with the William Gibson thing. I have Burning Chrome waiting for me at home, so I think that I might just pick up Zero History and All Tomorrow's Parties off of Amazon and then I will own the complete oeuvre.

    Virtual Light is one of my favorite Gibsons and I think is massively underrated. The sheer ordinariness of the main character really spoke to me and felt in many ways much more authentic and fleshed out than the sexy criminals of his earlier work.

    Virtual Light has my favourite opening after Neuromancer.

    Giant first-chapter-entire spoiler follows:
    The luminous flesh of giants

    The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

    Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down L C flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night’s barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.

    The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.

    Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.

    He opens his eyes.

    Mexico City is still there.

    The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

    On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather gloves. Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high old ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.

    Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.

    He opens another of the little bottles.

    Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of Soviet industrial cinema.

    His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.

    He drinks the vodka.

    He watches television.

    After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.

    And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.

    He’s thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.

    An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink, reminding him of the gunship’s lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?

    Trembling, he watches the thing pass.

    “That car…” He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing the broad brown neck of the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall reproduction pottery offered on the hotel’s shopping channel.

    “El coche” says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems to notice the courier for the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected ruby of a nightclub’s laser, then gone.

    The driver is staring at him.

    He tells the driver to return to the hotel.

    He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of departure.

    Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.

    The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.

    He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he knows of peace.

    And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured since Prague.

    Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn’t think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now, sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.

    He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged hillscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation of both.

    She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon road. The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake’s belly up her tensed thigh.

    Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.

    Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.

    “Yes?”

    “Confirming your reservation to San Francisco” someone says, either a woman or a machine. He touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and closes his eyes on the tenuous light sifting from the dark borders of the drapes.

    Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.

    He sleeps.

    I love the Sprawl books, but it's the Bridge books that really impressed me. I especially love Idoru, not just because of the weeaboo. Like Espedair Street by Iain M Banks, the supergroup stuff just resonates with me. And Blackwell! Little Yamazaki!

    Hmmm... in order of ridiculously brilliant prose:

    Neuromancer
    Idoru
    Virtual Light
    Pattern Recognition
    Count Zero
    All Tomorrow's Parties
    Mona Lisa Overdrive
    Spook Country
    Zero History


    I don't think the Blue Ant stuff was able to sustain a triad, even though Pattern Recognition is excellent. I am still optimistic about his next book, glad Zero History is done.

    What's your order Jake?

    I figure I could take a bear.
  • DynagripDynagrip Break me a million hearts HoustonRegistered User, ClubPA regular
    I'm reading An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro for a book club. I'm enjoying it. It's a quick read, kind of wistful tone. The style reminds me a little bit of Gene Wolfe's Peace but there is no murder (as far as I know).

  • Evil MultifariousEvil Multifarious Registered User regular
    Blood Meridian sort of frontloads the atrocities in the first third of the book, I think

    the rest is just mild atrocity, and the phantasmagorical mythical landscape is so surreal that it kind of undermines your visceral horror

  • SmoogySmoogy Registered User regular
    Blood Meridian is fucking intense. I'm perpetually terrified of the next atrocity, while reading it. I barely got through a third of it so far.

    Blood Meridian is by far Cormac McCarthy's best work and it definitely has intense in spades. Getting into the whole "who is the Judge" debate is interesting too and there are some great articles out there about him and Gnosticism, etc.

    Currently I'm reading The Last Argument of Kings, book 3 of Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy. A great read for those who enjoy gritty, adult fantasy like George R. R. Martin. Next up, Patrick Rothfuss.

    Smoogy-1689
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  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    I love Rothfuss. I hate him because book 3 is not out, though. Yeah, his 2 books have some flaws, but I can't stop loving them.

    It's almost like he took the classic Harry Potter template of wish fulfillment (which is obviously a lot older than Potter books) and makes it fun and adult.

    Steam: Stormwatcher | PSN: Stormwatcher33 | Switch: 5961-4777-3491
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  • BlazeFireBlazeFire Registered User regular
    I picked up Ringworld at a used book store as I had never read it. I am at the point where:
    Louis realizes the puppeteers manipulated the Birthright Lotteries on Earth. Turns out their name is very apt.

    It is a fun book so far. I can definitely sympathize with Louis not being able to comprehend the ring because sometimes when Niven is describing the orientation of the shade squares or the directions things are moving I get all confused.

  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    Smoogy wrote: »
    Currently I'm reading The Last Argument of Kings, book 3 of Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy. A great read for those who enjoy gritty, adult fantasy like George R. R. Martin. Next up, Patrick Rothfuss.

    Only Abercrombie actually manages to maintain a coherent plot narrative and a relatively small cast of characters. Also, Rothfuss is great.

    Started reading The Demon and the City by Liz Williams last night. It's her second Detective Inspector Chen novel. They aren't great books, but I'm a fan of the urban fantasy genre and I enjoy how unique her world is. I don't know that any of it is even sort of accurate to real Chinese mythology, but it at least feels fresh and different.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • SeptusSeptus Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    I'm not too far in, but I was not expecting to get a feeling of "kindly" misogyny so similar to Stranger in a Strange Land.

    It probably doesn't help that it's on audiobook, and I feel like it's the same narrator.

    Septus on
    PSN: Kurahoshi1
  • StraygatsbyStraygatsby Registered User regular
    Just started Alistair Reynolds' Terminal World. Pretty good, so far. I'm mostly a fan of his revelation space stuff, but he's really a wonderful space opera writer. Speaking of opera, Corey's Leviathan Wakes was just nominated for the Hugo, and it is a truly excellent book in that vein. I can't rec that enough.

    Re: the above Gibson chat, I've always held the Sprawl closest to my heart, with the Bridge close behind. While I devoured the most recent cycle, they just never held me. I'd have to put Neuromancer and Idoru as my #1 and #2 with...probably, All Tomorrow's Parties after that.

  • GrudgeGrudge blessed is the mind too small for doubtRegistered User regular
    Speaking of opera, Corey's Leviathan Wakes was just nominated for the Hugo, and it is a truly excellent book in that vein. I can't rec that enough.

    Ooh, thanks for the tip. Looks like it's right up my alley.

  • SeptusSeptus Registered User regular
    Speaking of opera, Corey's Leviathan Wakes was just nominated for the Hugo, and it is a truly excellent book in that vein. I can't rec that enough.

    I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters didn't particularly impress me, but I found the setting very intriguing. For one thing, the science is either relatively feasible, or it's easier to trick myself that it is than in other sci-fi, and I particularly liked the nature of the human conflict, set against a backdrop of something really alien.

    PSN: Kurahoshi1
  • mere_immortalmere_immortal So tasty!Registered User regular
    Put in an order for Hyperion, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, On Stranger Tides, and The Man Who Was Thursday. Not sure which to read first. But I'm excited.

    Man I've wanted to read The Man Who Was Thursday from the first time I played Deus Ex.

    Just ordered it, no excuses now.

    Steam: mere_immortal - PSN: mere_immortal - XBL: lego pencil - Wii U: mimmortal - 3DS: 1521-7234-1642 - Bordgamegeek: mere_immortal
  • Simon MoonSimon Moon Registered User regular
    Entriech wrote: »
    The next book in the series is checked out by someone else at the library, so instead I'm going to move on to The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett.

    Word of warning: The Warded Man is great. The Desert Spear is not. Especially if you stop to think about it. My advice is, if you enjoy the first, and want to continue the story, plow through the second at top speed and do your best not to think about it, because the minute you stop and say "wait, what, really?", it's over.

    Also, Lynch, Brett, Weeks, Abercrombie, Rothfuss, and Strange and Norrell, all on one page? It's a fantasy renaissance in here.

    Steam: simon moon
  • WappaduWappadu Registered User regular
    I've been looking for a new series to jump into, and two authors caught my eye at B&N. Wolf's Farseer Trilogy and Butcher's Codex Alera. Any thoughts on which one I should try first, or neither if I've skipped over someone terrific.

    For reference, I thoroughly enjoy Martin and Sanderson, like Cook/Erickson/Abercrombie for breaking some of the normal rules, and thought Weeks was solid.

  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    Wappadu wrote: »
    I've been looking for a new series to jump into, and two authors caught my eye at B&N. Wolf's Farseer Trilogy and Butcher's Codex Alera. Any thoughts on which one I should try first, or neither if I've skipped over someone terrific.

    For reference, I thoroughly enjoy Martin and Sanderson, like Cook/Erickson/Abercrombie for breaking some of the normal rules, and thought Weeks was solid.

    I haven't read the Farseer Trilogy, but if you jump into Alera be aware that the first book is shit. I own the first four and am given to understand that it's a great series, but the first book left me so soured on it that I haven't brought myself to actually read the rest.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • Mike DangerMike Danger "Diane..." a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered User regular
    edited April 2012
    poshniallo wrote: »
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    I found Virtual Light for 50 cents at the library, so I am rolling on with the William Gibson thing. I have Burning Chrome waiting for me at home, so I think that I might just pick up Zero History and All Tomorrow's Parties off of Amazon and then I will own the complete oeuvre.

    Virtual Light is one of my favorite Gibsons and I think is massively underrated. The sheer ordinariness of the main character really spoke to me and felt in many ways much more authentic and fleshed out than the sexy criminals of his earlier work.

    Virtual Light has my favourite opening after Neuromancer.

    Giant first-chapter-entire spoiler follows:
    The luminous flesh of giants

    The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

    Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down L C flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night’s barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.

    The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.

    Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.

    He opens his eyes.

    Mexico City is still there.

    The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

    On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather gloves. Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high old ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.

    Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.

    He opens another of the little bottles.

    Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of Soviet industrial cinema.

    His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.

    He drinks the vodka.

    He watches television.

    After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.

    And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.

    He’s thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.

    An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink, reminding him of the gunship’s lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?

    Trembling, he watches the thing pass.

    “That car…” He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing the broad brown neck of the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall reproduction pottery offered on the hotel’s shopping channel.

    “El coche” says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems to notice the courier for the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected ruby of a nightclub’s laser, then gone.

    The driver is staring at him.

    He tells the driver to return to the hotel.

    He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of departure.

    Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.

    The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.

    He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he knows of peace.

    And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured since Prague.

    Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn’t think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now, sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.

    He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged hillscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation of both.

    She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon road. The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake’s belly up her tensed thigh.

    Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.

    Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.

    “Yes?”

    “Confirming your reservation to San Francisco” someone says, either a woman or a machine. He touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and closes his eyes on the tenuous light sifting from the dark borders of the drapes.

    Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.

    He sleeps.

    I love the Sprawl books, but it's the Bridge books that really impressed me. I especially love Idoru, not just because of the weeaboo. Like Espedair Street by Iain M Banks, the supergroup stuff just resonates with me. And Blackwell! Little Yamazaki!

    Hmmm... in order of ridiculously brilliant prose:

    Neuromancer
    Idoru
    Virtual Light
    Pattern Recognition
    Count Zero
    All Tomorrow's Parties
    Mona Lisa Overdrive
    Spook Country
    Zero History


    I don't think the Blue Ant stuff was able to sustain a triad, even though Pattern Recognition is excellent. I am still optimistic about his next book, glad Zero History is done.

    What's your order Jake?

    If I were putting them in order (I haven't read Zero History or All Tomorrow's Parties) from most to least favorite:

    Idoru
    Neuromancer
    Count Zero
    Mona Lisa Overdrive
    Pattern Recognition
    Virtual Light
    Spook Country

    I agree that Idoru is fucking incredible. I read it all in one glorious go on a long flight from Florida to New England. Just great writing, and a great story.

    Edit: Just to be clear, I did like Virtual Light, I just liked everything else...more. I'm moving on to restarting The Stress of Her Regard now so that I can read the new Tim Powers, although God only knows how much time I'll have for that with all the work I have to get done.

    Mike Danger on
    Steam: Mike Danger | PSN/NNID: remadeking | 3DS: 2079-9204-4075
    oE0mva1.jpg
  • Harry DresdenHarry Dresden Registered User regular
    Wappadu wrote: »
    I've been looking for a new series to jump into, and two authors caught my eye at B&N. Wolf's Farseer Trilogy and Butcher's Codex Alera. Any thoughts on which one I should try first, or neither if I've skipped over someone terrific.

    For reference, I thoroughly enjoy Martin and Sanderson, like Cook/Erickson/Abercrombie for breaking some of the normal rules, and thought Weeks was solid.

    Codex Alera is brilliant. Takes a few books to get going. It has a very interesting mythology.

  • KanaKana Registered User regular
    Wappadu wrote: »
    I've been looking for a new series to jump into, and two authors caught my eye at B&N. Wolf's Farseer Trilogy and Butcher's Codex Alera. Any thoughts on which one I should try first, or neither if I've skipped over someone terrific.

    For reference, I thoroughly enjoy Martin and Sanderson, like Cook/Erickson/Abercrombie for breaking some of the normal rules, and thought Weeks was solid.

    Codex Alera is brilliant. Takes a few books to get going. It has a very interesting mythology.

    The mythology IS really fun, unfortunately Butcher never really spends much time exploring it. He's such a plot-centered writer that you never get a chance to see how different characters would interact with each other, or reactions to the main characters' nonhuman girlfriend (who's awesome), or basically any kind of conversation that can't be jammed into a quick rest during an action sequence.

    And then he falls into DBZ-plotting, where each book is just facing an enemy with a power factor an order of magnitude larger than the last books. It's still worth a read, has some fun characters, but goddamn I wish Butcher was a bit more ambitious in the stories he wants to tell, every time I read one of his books it feels like there's so much unrealized potential in his ideas.

    A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
  • Harry DresdenHarry Dresden Registered User regular
    Kana wrote: »
    Wappadu wrote: »
    I've been looking for a new series to jump into, and two authors caught my eye at B&N. Wolf's Farseer Trilogy and Butcher's Codex Alera. Any thoughts on which one I should try first, or neither if I've skipped over someone terrific.

    For reference, I thoroughly enjoy Martin and Sanderson, like Cook/Erickson/Abercrombie for breaking some of the normal rules, and thought Weeks was solid.

    Codex Alera is brilliant. Takes a few books to get going. It has a very interesting mythology.

    The mythology IS really fun, unfortunately Butcher never really spends much time exploring it. He's such a plot-centered writer that you never get a chance to see how different characters would interact with each other, or reactions to the main characters' nonhuman girlfriend (who's awesome), or basically any kind of conversation that can't be jammed into a quick rest during an action sequence.

    And then he falls into DBZ-plotting, where each book is just facing an enemy with a power factor an order of magnitude larger than the last books. It's still worth a read, has some fun characters, but goddamn I wish Butcher was a bit more ambitious in the stories he wants to tell, every time I read one of his books it feels like there's so much unrealized potential in his ideas.

    True. That said, I enjoyed the various plots regarding the politics, conspiracies and battles with armies. He said he's going to return to the universe again later on, we'll probably get a broader view on the mythology with that now Tavi's story is over.

  • SmrtnikSmrtnik job boli zub Registered User regular
    Been reading David McCullough's The Great Bridge (all about the Brooklyn bridge). I really like how in depth he goes about all sorts of things and it's all backed up by research, yet it is still a fun read. His best book (and I've read most of them) for me was The Johnston Flood by far. Took it to a beach weekend on Cape Cod a couple of years ago just to have something to read and ended up being gripped by it and unable to put it down. Beats any Hollywood disaster movie I've seen, and it actually happened to boot. I also have his Panama canal building book waiting on my shelf.

    Jared Diamond is also great. I liked Collapse better than Guns, Germs, and Steel because the latter is only investigative but offers no future guidance (other than don't be a racist goose, which should already be obvious). With Collapse there is some possible lessons to be learned and applied.

    I have the last 2 books (out of the promised last 3 books) of Wheel of Time sitting on shelf unread, waiting for the whole thing to wrap up before doing a full re-read. Have the latest Song of Ice and Fire in unread state on Kindle, feel like I need to re-read the others first. I have been keeping up somewhat with the latest Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (though most of it is not about Thomas Covenant so....) and I'd always enjoyed those, which continues here. I think there is one more left? Thought it was another trilogy, and realized maybe not when I was over the halfway mark on the third and realized they are nowhere close to wrapping it up.

    I also have so far read through all of the Diskworld books. I wouldn't put them on par with Tolkien or Martin, but they are fast and FUN reads, full of in-jokes if you have been reading them all along so that can be quite neat.

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  • lonelyahavalonelyahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    I am... disappointed in McCullough.

    His Johnstown flood book was good. but his 1776 book made me absolutely insane. I was so angry by the time I finished the book, and I only got angrier the more I thought about it. He's a good writer for somebody who is unfamiliar with the subject. Which while I knew about Johnstown (my mother being a self-described 'disaster nut'), I didn't know all of the details. But 1776. UGH. That book. I can see it being enjoyable for somebody with little to no background at all in the revolutionary war. But for anybody with an inkling of history of that period/war, or even somebody who had a mild interest, the book was crap. It was basically an introductory guide to the revolutionary war, given to you by following the Continental Army around for a year.

    To say that I was massively disappointed in the book would be a severe understatement.

  • SmoogySmoogy Registered User regular
    Smrtnik wrote: »
    Been reading David McCullough's The Great Bridge (all about the Brooklyn bridge). I really like how in depth he goes about all sorts of things and it's all backed up by research, yet it is still a fun read. His best book (and I've read most of them) for me was The Johnston Flood by far. Took it to a beach weekend on Cape Cod a couple of years ago just to have something to read and ended up being gripped by it and unable to put it down. Beats any Hollywood disaster movie I've seen, and it actually happened to boot. I also have his Panama canal building book waiting on my shelf.

    Jared Diamond is also great. I liked Collapse better than Guns, Germs, and Steel because the latter is only investigative but offers no future guidance (other than don't be a racist goose, which should already be obvious). With Collapse there is some possible lessons to be learned and applied.

    I have the last 2 books (out of the promised last 3 books) of Wheel of Time sitting on shelf unread, waiting for the whole thing to wrap up before doing a full re-read. Have the latest Song of Ice and Fire in unread state on Kindle, feel like I need to re-read the others first. I have been keeping up somewhat with the latest Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (though most of it is not about Thomas Covenant so....) and I'd always enjoyed those, which continues here. I think there is one more left? Thought it was another trilogy, and realized maybe not when I was over the halfway mark on the third and realized they are nowhere close to wrapping it up.

    I also have so far read through all of the Diskworld books. I wouldn't put them on par with Tolkien or Martin, but they are fast and FUN reads, full of in-jokes if you have been reading them all along so that can be quite neat.

    Collapse is indeed better than Guns, Germs, and Steel, though I'm not sure if it's only because of the future advice he gives. I just found, as many other critics have found, a lot of flaws about his environmental determinist model of why things happened the way they did. Human agency needs to given a bit more focus, but he makes amazing points and rightly won the Pulitzer.

    I find it crazy that people are still reading WoT. Robert Jordan should have wrapped them up at least 10 years ago...so many people lost interest (although I guess there are more still sticking around reading than I thought!).

    And Discworld...yes! Pratchett is awesome. There are not just in-jokes about Discworld, but about fantasy motifs in general.

    Smoogy-1689
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  • KalkinoKalkino Buttons Londres Registered User regular
    So I've finally finished a Game of Thrones. I had some misgivings mid way and put it down about page 500 or so, but resolved that I'd give it another chance and I'll say that it was worth it. I'm still in two minds about what exactly I think about it, but it certainly is good enough to keep reading the series.

    Freedom for the Northern Isles!
  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    Dynagrip wrote: »
    I'm reading An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro for a book club. I'm enjoying it. It's a quick read, kind of wistful tone. The style reminds me a little bit of Gene Wolfe's Peace but there is no murder (as far as I know).

    I should finish this before you and then spoil whether there is a murder or not

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  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    edited April 2012
    poshniallo wrote: »
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    I found Virtual Light for 50 cents at the library, so I am rolling on with the William Gibson thing. I have Burning Chrome waiting for me at home, so I think that I might just pick up Zero History and All Tomorrow's Parties off of Amazon and then I will own the complete oeuvre.

    Virtual Light is one of my favorite Gibsons and I think is massively underrated. The sheer ordinariness of the main character really spoke to me and felt in many ways much more authentic and fleshed out than the sexy criminals of his earlier work.

    Virtual Light has my favourite opening after Neuromancer.

    Giant first-chapter-entire spoiler follows:
    The luminous flesh of giants

    The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

    Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down L C flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night’s barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.

    The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.

    Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.

    He opens his eyes.

    Mexico City is still there.

    The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

    On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather gloves. Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high old ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.

    Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.

    He opens another of the little bottles.

    Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of Soviet industrial cinema.

    His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.

    He drinks the vodka.

    He watches television.

    After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.

    And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.

    He’s thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.

    An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink, reminding him of the gunship’s lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?

    Trembling, he watches the thing pass.

    “That car…” He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing the broad brown neck of the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall reproduction pottery offered on the hotel’s shopping channel.

    “El coche” says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems to notice the courier for the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected ruby of a nightclub’s laser, then gone.

    The driver is staring at him.

    He tells the driver to return to the hotel.

    He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of departure.

    Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.

    The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.

    He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he knows of peace.

    And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured since Prague.

    Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn’t think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now, sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.

    He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged hillscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation of both.

    She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon road. The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake’s belly up her tensed thigh.

    Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.

    Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.

    “Yes?”

    “Confirming your reservation to San Francisco” someone says, either a woman or a machine. He touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and closes his eyes on the tenuous light sifting from the dark borders of the drapes.

    Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.

    He sleeps.

    I love the Sprawl books, but it's the Bridge books that really impressed me. I especially love Idoru, not just because of the weeaboo. Like Espedair Street by Iain M Banks, the supergroup stuff just resonates with me. And Blackwell! Little Yamazaki!

    Hmmm... in order of ridiculously brilliant prose:

    Neuromancer
    Idoru
    Virtual Light
    Pattern Recognition
    Count Zero
    All Tomorrow's Parties
    Mona Lisa Overdrive
    Spook Country
    Zero History


    I don't think the Blue Ant stuff was able to sustain a triad, even though Pattern Recognition is excellent. I am still optimistic about his next book, glad Zero History is done.

    What's your order Jake?

    Yeah, that opening segment is terrific - it's Gibson in classic form. What I really love about the book, though, are Rydell's first couple of chapters - the idle reminiscences of summer in Knoxville working for the construction company turning an old Safeway store into a block of condos, his abortive police career, and then the low-rent romance of working night security in LA, and the parade of odd duck coworkers you tend to have working a job like that. Ifthe plot hadn't intervened, honestly, I could have read a whole book of just that - little Raymond Carverish character sketches of blue-collar living in the near future.

    Your list is just about right, I'd say, although I'd insert Burning Chrome (the short story collection) in the third spot there after Idoru. I love almost all of the stories in that book, even the ones that aren't set in the usual Gibson milieu. The last paragraph of the title story always gets me:

    But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else didn’t need it, because she hasn’t come back. And sometimes late at night I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye.

    I haven't read Zero History yet, and haven't really felt the urge to after Spook Country, which is a shame.

    Jacobkosh on
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  • SmrtnikSmrtnik job boli zub Registered User regular
    Smoogy wrote: »

    I find it crazy that people are still reading WoT. Robert Jordan should have wrapped them up at least 10 years ago...so many people lost interest (although I guess there are more still sticking around reading than I thought!).
    .

    Well it's like a sunk cost I feel I must follow through on. But screw reading them one by one as the remainder come out. I'll read it all when it's finally done.

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