knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I am loving How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?
So far I’ve read stories about a culture where selfishness is the only sin, the birth of a great city, a bargain with the Fae, the alchemy of cooking, and a revolutionary Haitian spy in a proto-steampunk (i.e. there are dirigibles but none of the silly hats with gears stuck to them) New Orleans.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Still only 70% of the way through, but all I can think about now is how much men would lose their minds if a high school made this required reading.
When I finished it my first thought was "Yup, that's humanity."
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
0
Options
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
So, just finished The Power. I really liked it. I didn't realize the opening bit was actually part of the novel, and so I think I kind of skimmed it/didn't really grasp what it was talking about, and then ofc it jumps straight to "mordern" times, so I went back and read that, and now I'm flipping through looking at all the Cataclysm artifacts again.
Holy shit I feel like such an idiot for missing the bit about "Bitten Fruit" artifacts. On rereading it feels spot on
I feel like its if nothing else an excellent critique of any and all power structures. The voice thing is still a little weird to me, I'm not sure if I care for it. I feel like it somewhat removes the weight of some of the characters actions.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
she's insane, or at least slightly. That's it. So it didn't particularly bother me.
I think the author was going for some Joan of Arc allusions there too.
I think at the end Margot hears it as well. Most of the story I thought maybe Allie is just a little crazy, but at the end the voice starts talking about previous encounters, and it started to seem more like an outside force. It's just an aspect of the story that I felt it could have done without, and not really missed anything.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I’m reading The Slynx, by Tatyana Tolstaya. It’s a post-apocalyptic (post nuclear) story about a community of people living on the grounds of what used to be Moscow, except it’s a forest filled with huts and mostly everyone has the sophistication of a 15th century peasant. It’s third person but completely limited/in the head of one of the simple peasants.
I don’t like reading a book from the point of view of an innocent/simpleton; that’s a fine concept for a short story, but a couple hundred pages of this is just not actually interesting any more. Yes, we get it, he thinks eating mice is normal and stealing stuff from your neighbors is normal and having grotesque mutations is normal and all good from his village’s cult leader etc. I suppose the one interesting thing is that he has a melancholy temperament kind of common to a lot of Russian lit, but he has no idea how to process it, so there are some interestingly innocent descriptions of ennui.
The translation/editorial choices made in the edition I’m reading are pretttty bad. There are tons and tons of fragments of poetry (I recognize...none of them, because I am uncultured af) and I think that a good translator would put a footnote saying what poem it is and what the cultural connotation is of the poem. Some Russian words are used frequently and left untranslated for no reason that I can tell—why leave izba as izba instead of using the word hut? Why not translate golubchiks to dearies, or maybe even doves or something like ‘lovies’, which has the same meaning and evokes the phrase ‘lovey dovey’ which gets you back to dove (golubchik is a term of endearment meaning, literally, little dove, and for whatever reason this is what the villagers are called). Total mystery as to why you’d keep it in Russian and just put a glossary at the front.
Similarly, chapter titles are just left transliterated (with no glossary)—the chapter titles are a letter of the alphabet and a word starting with that letter, but if you’re literally going to leave it as г - glagol, please at least put a footnote saying that glagol means ‘verb’.
I think this is probably not a great book to read in translation, in general; there’s clearly a really distinct voice playing a lot with language (there’s a lot of misspellings, for example, of words unfamiliar to the peasant guy, and a lot of misappropriation of vocabulary to mean something new, a lot of colloquial language and stream of consciousness) and a lot is certainly being lost. But I’m not particularly enamored by the concept or the book and am just reading the rest of it to see if it ever goes anywhere and get it off my plate, so I don’t think I’ll be looking at the original text.
Steam, LoL: credeiki
+1
Options
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Six Wakes was interesting. The final twist actually kind of got me, and the dive into cloning ethics was something I found interesting to think about.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Just finished:
The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life by Rick Ankiel
If you have a modicum of interest in baseball or just how a professional athlete has to deal with pressure, i highly recommend this book.
Just started Black Leopard, Red Wolf and I can already tell it’s going to be a doozy. The dramatis personae section is like four pages long!
Hmm. This was on my list but that puts me right off. I don't want a big block of telling rather than showing up front
I wouldn’t let it deter you, it’s not indicative of the narrative style in the slightest.
psn tooaware, friend code SW-4760-0062-3248 it me
0
Options
The_SpaniardIt's never lupinesIrvine, CaliforniaRegistered Userregular
Hmm would the book thread be a good place to talk about eReaders?
Well, it looks like my 3rd Gen Kindle has given up the ghost after not using it for a year or two (long story short I got an entire box of books on clearance and hadn't touched my Kindle while I was working through them). It won't charge now, the charging light comes on and turns off after a charge cycle, but the screen won't turn on. After I try to turn it on it will start charging all over again and go through a full charging cycle again failing to charge another time. I'm going to try this for a bit more hoping that it will eventually get enough charge into the battery to start up again and start charging for real, but I'm starting to lose hope.
I'm looking at the All-new Kindle Paperwhite (2018) and wondering if I should go for 8gb WiFi or 32gb Cellular. Do the new Kindles still let you access Wikipedia for free over the cellular connection?
There are some hard reset button codes that might help you Spaniard.
Also the gbs of storage sounds just so weird. I do guess I have like 1.5 gb on my paperwhite but I've had it for a few years now and never erased anything from it.
The storage size and the cell service seems weird to me but 1: I don't really use PDFs/Audiobooks/Big Files on my Kindle and 2: I'm pretty comfortable turning my phone into a mobile hotspot for a few minutes if I need to update at a weird location. YMMV and all that.
There are some hard reset button codes that might help you Spaniard.
Also the gbs of storage sounds just so weird. I do guess I have like 1.5 gb on my paperwhite but I've had it for a few years now and never erased anything from it.
The storage size and the cell service seems weird to me but 1: I don't really use PDFs/Audiobooks/Big Files on my Kindle and 2: I'm pretty comfortable turning my phone into a mobile hotspot for a few minutes if I need to update at a weird location. YMMV and all that.
I've already tried holding the On button for 15-40 seconds, and I've also tried quickly pressing & holding the Home key afterwards. The screen hasn't shown a single sign of life, the only indicator I get is from the little amber charging light and that's it. It comes on when I plug it in, it shuts off after a few hours, and then after I try to turn on the device the charging light comes back on and charges for a few hours again.
Finished The Dispossessed, enjoyed it. Reminded me of Russian lit, in the sense that there are many scenes where characters will just be in a room together, and talk philosophy at each other for pages and pages and pages, and then the scene ends. This is not a complaint! But if you like your sci-fi action packed, this ain't it. Compared to The Left Hand of Darkness, I think the themes explored in The Dispossessed are more interesting to me personally, but I liked the story and structure of Left Hand more. I liked the bits and pieces of lore sprinkled throughout Left Hand as well as the various perspectives. But I think The Dispossessed explored anarchism and collectivism more deeply than Left Hand explored gender.
I just finished Skyward, the new Brandon Sanderson book.
It's pretty great if a little predictable sci-fi fighter pilot action book. I'm sure there will be more but I like that it pretty much works as a self contained story. Plus it reads fast (I have no idea how long it actually is) I'd recommend it.
There are some hard reset button codes that might help you Spaniard.
Also the gbs of storage sounds just so weird. I do guess I have like 1.5 gb on my paperwhite but I've had it for a few years now and never erased anything from it.
The storage size and the cell service seems weird to me but 1: I don't really use PDFs/Audiobooks/Big Files on my Kindle and 2: I'm pretty comfortable turning my phone into a mobile hotspot for a few minutes if I need to update at a weird location. YMMV and all that.
I honestly just use the kindle app on my phone at this point. I have one of the older ones w/o touchscreen, just a button on either side and the old center button with arrows up down left right around it, but it takes so much effort to update it when my android will just automatically check every time I open the app.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Started reading Quantum Magician. It's okay so far but it feels a bit like an episode of Sherlock, which I don't really care for. I do appreciate the main character's clumsiness offsetting at least some of his ubermensch abilities, and the idea of bio engineered people in the future is always neat.
There are some hard reset button codes that might help you Spaniard.
Also the gbs of storage sounds just so weird. I do guess I have like 1.5 gb on my paperwhite but I've had it for a few years now and never erased anything from it.
The storage size and the cell service seems weird to me but 1: I don't really use PDFs/Audiobooks/Big Files on my Kindle and 2: I'm pretty comfortable turning my phone into a mobile hotspot for a few minutes if I need to update at a weird location. YMMV and all that.
I honestly just use the kindle app on my phone at this point. I have one of the older ones w/o touchscreen, just a button on either side and the old center button with arrows up down left right around it, but it takes so much effort to update it when my android will just automatically check every time I open the app.
The newer ones are way better about updating themselves to your reading position but that sorta assumes you get routine access to wifi. The paperwhite screen is also nice in that it is much gentler on your eyes than most phones though I gotta admit I have to be pushing pretty hard on screen time before that's really any kind of issue.
Started reading Quantum Magician. It's okay so far but it feels a bit like an episode of Sherlock, which I don't really care for. I do appreciate the main character's clumsiness offsetting at least some of his ubermensch abilities, and the idea of bio engineered people in the future is always neat.
There are some hard reset button codes that might help you Spaniard.
Also the gbs of storage sounds just so weird. I do guess I have like 1.5 gb on my paperwhite but I've had it for a few years now and never erased anything from it.
The storage size and the cell service seems weird to me but 1: I don't really use PDFs/Audiobooks/Big Files on my Kindle and 2: I'm pretty comfortable turning my phone into a mobile hotspot for a few minutes if I need to update at a weird location. YMMV and all that.
I honestly just use the kindle app on my phone at this point. I have one of the older ones w/o touchscreen, just a button on either side and the old center button with arrows up down left right around it, but it takes so much effort to update it when my android will just automatically check every time I open the app.
The newer ones are way better about updating themselves to your reading position but that sorta assumes you get routine access to wifi. The paperwhite screen is also nice in that it is much gentler on your eyes than most phones though I gotta admit I have to be pushing pretty hard on screen time before that's really any kind of issue.
I was going to go with the base model, but then I got a 25% discount + another 15% discount + a 5 dollar credit as a cherry on top, so I went for the high end Paperwhite.
The later books just keep on piling on more weird half explained ideas.
Which I more or less enjoyed.
It's JARGON OVERLOAD but I'm just letting it wash over me like a wave of nanobots or something, eventually I'll absorb it
The author is really good about giving you a lot of exposure to his words of choice and then explaining them contextually or explicitly; it's a very well-done rollout, or at least a style of rollout I enjoyed quite a lot. It feels a bit forced when a word is explained the first or even second time it's used. I never felt like it got in the way of the feeling of the book--we are in the far future and you need new words for radically new modes!
Also I finished the book Slynx, and while there were some poignant scenes and an interestingly grim plot arc, I didn't really find it an enjoyable book. It's definitely Literary af though.
And turns out there is a list of all the poems in the book and they're half Pushkin and I recognized literally none of them. Oops...
Not totally sure what to read next; I think I'll have to reread something because I don't have anything new lying around. I just bought two new bookshelves for my new place so I'm currently arranging my library, which is always a pleasure. I put Philip Pullman and CS Lewis on the same narrow little shelf so they'll be happy next to each other, heh. Well, for a given value of happy...
Re: The Quantum Thief: I think the problem with heavy jargon like that is that its high risk proposition. I liked that, when I came around to grokking the particular idea/term, it does feel good, but on the other hand, there were certainly some terms in the novel that, even towards the end, could have just been replaced by the word "magic" and it would have made about as much sense. Certainly for somethings, that is ok, but I definitely felt at points that I was supposed to figure out some piece of the mystery by understanding how the system worked, and it just sailed over my head. I thought it was a good book, but it didn't really motivate me to read the sequel.
chrono_traveller on
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
Posts
That book wrecked me, I love it
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
So far I’ve read stories about a culture where selfishness is the only sin, the birth of a great city, a bargain with the Fae, the alchemy of cooking, and a revolutionary Haitian spy in a proto-steampunk (i.e. there are dirigibles but none of the silly hats with gears stuck to them) New Orleans.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
When I finished it my first thought was "Yup, that's humanity."
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I think the author was going for some Joan of Arc allusions there too.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Harrumph!
I don’t like reading a book from the point of view of an innocent/simpleton; that’s a fine concept for a short story, but a couple hundred pages of this is just not actually interesting any more. Yes, we get it, he thinks eating mice is normal and stealing stuff from your neighbors is normal and having grotesque mutations is normal and all good from his village’s cult leader etc. I suppose the one interesting thing is that he has a melancholy temperament kind of common to a lot of Russian lit, but he has no idea how to process it, so there are some interestingly innocent descriptions of ennui.
The translation/editorial choices made in the edition I’m reading are pretttty bad. There are tons and tons of fragments of poetry (I recognize...none of them, because I am uncultured af) and I think that a good translator would put a footnote saying what poem it is and what the cultural connotation is of the poem. Some Russian words are used frequently and left untranslated for no reason that I can tell—why leave izba as izba instead of using the word hut? Why not translate golubchiks to dearies, or maybe even doves or something like ‘lovies’, which has the same meaning and evokes the phrase ‘lovey dovey’ which gets you back to dove (golubchik is a term of endearment meaning, literally, little dove, and for whatever reason this is what the villagers are called). Total mystery as to why you’d keep it in Russian and just put a glossary at the front.
Similarly, chapter titles are just left transliterated (with no glossary)—the chapter titles are a letter of the alphabet and a word starting with that letter, but if you’re literally going to leave it as г - glagol, please at least put a footnote saying that glagol means ‘verb’.
I think this is probably not a great book to read in translation, in general; there’s clearly a really distinct voice playing a lot with language (there’s a lot of misspellings, for example, of words unfamiliar to the peasant guy, and a lot of misappropriation of vocabulary to mean something new, a lot of colloquial language and stream of consciousness) and a lot is certainly being lost. But I’m not particularly enamored by the concept or the book and am just reading the rest of it to see if it ever goes anywhere and get it off my plate, so I don’t think I’ll be looking at the original text.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life by Rick Ankiel
If you have a modicum of interest in baseball or just how a professional athlete has to deal with pressure, i highly recommend this book.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
It's a retelling of the Taming of the Shrew that ends with the "shrew" yelling at everyone that men have it hard
Yiiiiiiikes
Gonna just watch 10 Things I Hate About You instead from now on
Hmm. This was on my list but that puts me right off. I don't want a big block of telling rather than showing up front
I wouldn’t let it deter you, it’s not indicative of the narrative style in the slightest.
Well, it looks like my 3rd Gen Kindle has given up the ghost after not using it for a year or two (long story short I got an entire box of books on clearance and hadn't touched my Kindle while I was working through them). It won't charge now, the charging light comes on and turns off after a charge cycle, but the screen won't turn on. After I try to turn it on it will start charging all over again and go through a full charging cycle again failing to charge another time. I'm going to try this for a bit more hoping that it will eventually get enough charge into the battery to start up again and start charging for real, but I'm starting to lose hope.
I'm looking at the All-new Kindle Paperwhite (2018) and wondering if I should go for 8gb WiFi or 32gb Cellular. Do the new Kindles still let you access Wikipedia for free over the cellular connection?
Also the gbs of storage sounds just so weird. I do guess I have like 1.5 gb on my paperwhite but I've had it for a few years now and never erased anything from it.
The storage size and the cell service seems weird to me but 1: I don't really use PDFs/Audiobooks/Big Files on my Kindle and 2: I'm pretty comfortable turning my phone into a mobile hotspot for a few minutes if I need to update at a weird location. YMMV and all that.
I've already tried holding the On button for 15-40 seconds, and I've also tried quickly pressing & holding the Home key afterwards. The screen hasn't shown a single sign of life, the only indicator I get is from the little amber charging light and that's it. It comes on when I plug it in, it shuts off after a few hours, and then after I try to turn on the device the charging light comes back on and charges for a few hours again.
It's pretty great if a little predictable sci-fi fighter pilot action book. I'm sure there will be more but I like that it pretty much works as a self contained story. Plus it reads fast (I have no idea how long it actually is) I'd recommend it.
I honestly just use the kindle app on my phone at this point. I have one of the older ones w/o touchscreen, just a button on either side and the old center button with arrows up down left right around it, but it takes so much effort to update it when my android will just automatically check every time I open the app.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The newer ones are way better about updating themselves to your reading position but that sorta assumes you get routine access to wifi. The paperwhite screen is also nice in that it is much gentler on your eyes than most phones though I gotta admit I have to be pushing pretty hard on screen time before that's really any kind of issue.
Wait for it
I just bought the third omnibus myself.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I was going to go with the base model, but then I got a 25% discount + another 15% discount + a 5 dollar credit as a cherry on top, so I went for the high end Paperwhite.
The later books just keep on piling on more weird half explained ideas.
Which I more or less enjoyed.
It's JARGON OVERLOAD but I'm just letting it wash over me like a wave of nanobots or something, eventually I'll absorb it
Jargon is the mind killer
The author is really good about giving you a lot of exposure to his words of choice and then explaining them contextually or explicitly; it's a very well-done rollout, or at least a style of rollout I enjoyed quite a lot. It feels a bit forced when a word is explained the first or even second time it's used. I never felt like it got in the way of the feeling of the book--we are in the far future and you need new words for radically new modes!
And turns out there is a list of all the poems in the book and they're half Pushkin and I recognized literally none of them. Oops...
Not totally sure what to read next; I think I'll have to reread something because I don't have anything new lying around. I just bought two new bookshelves for my new place so I'm currently arranging my library, which is always a pleasure. I put Philip Pullman and CS Lewis on the same narrow little shelf so they'll be happy next to each other, heh. Well, for a given value of happy...