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Old 01-08-2013, 07:12 PM   #176
Mercutio
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It was weird. I started reading the series as a kid and by the time it finished I was at the point of literary awareness when I could tell that something was poorly written. This is he exact reason that I stopped reading Harry Potter for pleasure at around book five.
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Old 01-08-2013, 09:48 PM   #177
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I am rereading LotR because it is my favorite book.
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Old 01-08-2013, 10:17 PM   #178
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Starting the Song of Ice and Fire series. Bought the first book and am afraid it's going to crush me.
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Old 01-09-2013, 04:00 AM   #179
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Got some cash to spend on Christmas so I went book shopping and got me a pretty decent haul.

Spoiler: show


I'm rereading my Rurouni Kenshin manga all the way through. I forgot how great that series is.

Afterwards I'm going to get into Brave New World and then Guards Guards. Sorry about the ridiculous size.
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Old 01-09-2013, 06:24 AM   #180
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BNW and Guards Guards are both great choices, though I dislike BNW personally.
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Old 01-09-2013, 10:32 AM   #181
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Reading The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. Pretty cool so far, but my progress into the book has been slowed because I'm becoming lazy.
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Old 02-03-2013, 01:54 PM   #182
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kusari View Post
Starting the Song of Ice and Fire series. Bought the first book and am afraid it's going to crush me.
I just finished book 3, and don't worry- it will. God, I don't know you, but if you need someone to talk to after you get through book 3, I'm here =(

Aside from that-

A discussion with Kaisa reminded me of my deep affection for the fiction of Lovecraft. I know that some here find it tedious or uninteresting, but good lord it's shaped so much of my adolescent appreciation for literature and writing that I don't think I'd even look twice at a library or give a thought to picking up the proverbial pen without having encountered it.

People like to laud King and Koontz as being good- I shall never, even when denying their abilities, bestow the honorific great- but compare Koontz's repetitive plots and King's inability to write a good story AND a good ending, only one or the other, against Lovecrafts insistence of the underlying truth that humans aren't the best and brightest, or the first, or the greatest- merely an afterthought, a speck sand in the endless beach that is space and time and creation and the Universe- a terribly fragile thing, stepping betwixt the feet of those infinitely our greater. Building our cities above and around places where things slumber, buried, trapped, but not dead- never dead- just watching, and waiting...

Listening...

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Old 02-22-2013, 09:07 PM   #183
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I'm not reading this, but a friend is. Figured I'd pass it along for all of you huge LotR fans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer . It's basically a Russian fanfic that a) takes place after The Return of the King and b) presupposes that Tolkien's tale was history written by the victors and that the reality was that Mordor was a peaceful kingdom of pre-industrial men on the verge of their Industrial Revolution. If you're the sort who likes tales like these and you also can stomach the verbose world-building of Tolkien himself, then you may quite enjoy this. My friend is 10% of the way through so far. He seems intrigued by the ideas the author puts forward but hindered by the difficult-to-follow text.
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Old 02-22-2013, 09:46 PM   #184
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Thanks for the heads up, Talon.

I'm not going to read it because that sounds awful, and also fanfics are bad in general... but good for them?

Might pass this on to my friend who is learning Russian...
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Old 02-23-2013, 12:27 PM   #185
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Looks interesting. I'm a real sucker for alternate histories and universes, though less so when the baseline is fictional in the first place. I shall add it to my huge to read pile.
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Old 06-26-2013, 08:09 AM   #186
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80% done with Game of Thrones, and I have all the rest of the books still to come. This will be quite delicious...
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Old 07-02-2013, 08:22 PM   #187
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So, after deciding to crack open the book of Edgar Allen Poe stories and poems I decided to read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

This was a pretty good story all things said. It started out really confusing at first, with an atmosphere of almost literally stupor. Things seems to swim by in the beginning. And the end of the book(by end I mean the last five or so chapters) was incredibly intense. I thanked something that I had white walls in my room.

The ending was disappointing however. I honestly expected...a real ending. But, it was pretty good reading all things said. Interesting how it was a good portion Hollow Earth theory in there, something I had never heard of before so that was cool as well.
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Old 07-23-2013, 11:38 AM   #188
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Was on holiday for a week, so naturally I read stuff. Specifically, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal and Mark Haddon's The Red House.

Going Postal is right up there with Small Gods amongst the finest Discworld books and I really can give it no higher praise than that. It follows a former conman forced by Vetinari to run the ailing Ankh-Morpork postal service, and is just as weird as it sounds. The main character is an excellent and audacious addition to the Discworld cast. Basically, read it. Read it right now. And then do what I've just done and go buy the sequel, Making Money.

The Red House is typical Haddon fare - if you enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and A Spot of Bother, you'll enjoy this. It follows a pair of adult siblings bringing their families together to a holiday house in Wales for a week. Style takes a bit of getting used to (scenes are often shown from multiple viewpoints simultaneously so we get a good look at what everyone's thinking and feeling switching every few lines), but is a great way of avoiding overcentralising our sympathies behind any one character (as often happens when you have a single protagonist). This works well because he's a fantastic writer of people, and the novel is entirely character driven. Will annoy you if you like things to be neatly wrapped up at the end of the book though - it only takes place across a week so far from all of the personal and interpersonal problems bought up are resolved. Overall though a very good read.
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Old 07-23-2013, 01:11 PM   #189
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Going Postal is what my friend used to get me in to Discworld. Fantastic book, everyone should read it right now. I need to read Making Money, though.
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Old 07-23-2013, 01:14 PM   #190
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Having read all the books, I can't help but think of both of you as a bit late to the party.

On a Pratchett note, currently reading The Long Earth, a collaborative effort between everyone's favourite book-writing Knight and Stephen Baxter. It's pretty good so far, though I'm only a quarter of the way in, if that. I can definitely feel Pratchett's humour in there, and it's a nice change to read some more relatable Sci-fi.
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Old 07-23-2013, 01:19 PM   #191
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Well yes but I'm on my fourth year of reading 100 plus pages a week in journals and laws so my reading for pleasure is... limited.
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Old 09-26-2013, 10:36 AM   #192
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Just finished The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.


I need a 15 hour long hug.
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Old 09-26-2013, 10:47 AM   #193
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Just finished The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

I need a 15 hour long hug.
I was really surprised to find that the man with such a cheery disposition on Mental Floss was the author of the most popular emo teen drama of our age. And not just emo teen drama: drama that goes to some rather dark and twisted places! Will never look at Mental Floss the same way again.

Have you read any of his other books? Apparently he sold the movie rights to Paramount for Looking for Alaska and they've just been sitting on it for years.
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Old 10-01-2013, 11:51 PM   #194
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Been wanting to re-read Chingbirok: The Book of Corrections by Yu Songnyong for a long time now. Several weeks ago, I turned my apartment inside out looking for the book. Couldn't find it anywhere. I ended up borrowing a copy from one of the local libraries, so hungry was I to re-read this classic. I was thinking about maybe doing audiobook-style recordings for you guys ... and then, after I spent ~40 minutes recording the introduction, I reached Chapter 01 and rediscovered that this is a book which really is best read rather than listened to. ^^; Stuff like this happens pretty often:

Quote:
At the end of this book, I have attached documents such as official reports, memorials, documents, and miscellaneous memoranda of those days.2 Although they may seem trivial, they represent what really happened, and therefore should not be dismissed lightly.









2 The documents mentioned here are not included in this translation. Although I believe them to be important, it seems that they are neither interesting nor essential as far as the general readers of the present age are concerned.
where you get this (unintentionally?) hilaaaaarious snarky commentary from the translator masked by scholarly professionalism.

Even more often is stuff like this:
Quote:
In the Pyongsul year of Wanli (1586), Tachibana Yasuhiro, a Japanese envoy, visited Korea with a letter from Taira no [Toyotomi] Hideyoshi, the ruler of Japan.1 The formal relationship of the two countries can be traced two hundred years back to the early years of the Ming empire when Genji [Ashikaga Yoshimitsu], the king of Japan, established his kingdom.2

1 Wanli is the reign name of emperor Shenzong (1573-1620) of Ming China. Tachibana Yasuhiro was originally a subject of Sou Yoshihirou, the stepfather of Sou Yoshitoshi, who was made the governor of Tsushima by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (NJD). "Taira no" is the old adopted surname of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) before he was appointed kanpaku (imperial regent) and bestowed the name Toyotomi (Bountiful Minister) by the emperor in 1586. The Taira were one of the four prominent houses that dominated the Japanese political scenes during the Heian period (794-1185). Hideyoshi, born of an obscure family, probably adopted the well-respected name of the Taira house as his surname when he began to serve Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), a powerful warlord whom he later succeeded. According to the Tenshou records, Hideyoshi was awarded the naidaijin title in the third month of 1585, and the imperial proclamation addressed him as "Taira no Asan Hideyoshi." However, according to Mary Elizabeth Berry, the author of Hideyoshi, Hideyoshi used Kinoshita during his early career and again changed his name, to Hashiba, when he served Oda Nobunaga.
Oda Nobunaga, betrayed by his own man, was assassinated in 1582, and Hideyoshi quickly seized power after defeating Akechi Mitsuhide who had killed Nobunaga. By 1590 Hideyoshi became the undisputed master of Japan, and as he took complete control of the country, which was torn apart by power struggles among ambitious military overlords, he finally invaded Korea. His ultimate goal was to conquer China through Korea, but his armies were met with the unexpectedly strong challenges of the combined forces of Korean and Chinese armies, and he temporarily withdrew some of his forces after a series of negotiations with Ming China. Deeply frustrated, Hideyoshi made his second attempt to invade Korea in 1597, but he died suddenly in 1598, bringing the conflicts to an end (NJD).


2 Genji here indicates Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), the third shogun of the Muromachi period. Born the grandson of Ashikaga Takauji, the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate, he unified two imperial families (Nancho and Hokucho), which divided the country from the time of his grandfather Takauji, and began the official trade with Ming China. In the early fifteenth century, Yoshimitsu was able (continues onto next page)
The book is one of those books where a) if you don't read the footnotes then you'll be lost but b) the footnotes are often really long and really tangential. (A man after my own heart? ^^; ) As a result, it doesn't really make for prime audiobook material, I'm afraid. But we'll see. We'll see.

For now, I think I may go back to my original plan, which was to write up a Chingbirok Abridged where I sum up every chapter in x many words or characters, making a new post per chapter. We'll see.
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Old 02-27-2014, 07:04 AM   #195
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So I feel like I'm going to be alone in this opinion, but my god Life of Pi was awful.
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Old 02-27-2014, 09:28 AM   #196
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I agree with the above statement. Had to read it as an in school book, and I don't know if I simply can't appreciate sophistication or something but it was bad.
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Old 02-27-2014, 01:04 PM   #197
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Finished Light Fantastic last night. Loved it.
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Old 02-27-2014, 01:36 PM   #198
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I liked Life of Pi. Was my favorite book I had to read in high school.
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Old 02-27-2014, 01:43 PM   #199
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My main issue was that I fundamentally disagreed with both the book's main character and it's most major theme on pretty much every level, and the book is so heavily focused on the thoughts and feelings of it's main character. It made it quite hard to read. It felt like reading through a UM post or that one time I sat through a talk by Richard Dawkins.
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Old 02-27-2014, 02:40 PM   #200
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Okay, so last week, I finished American Gods. I then read The Mark of Athena and The House of Hades, the latest two books of Riordan's Heroes of Olympus series.

I probably should have read the Riordan ones before American Gods, because although I find Riordan's writing decent and entertaining, he is not near in the same class as Gaiman. Given some similar concepts (Gods in modern America being a big one), American Gods almost spoiled me a little with Gaiman's excellent writing style. I still enjoyed the Heroes of Olympus books for their own flavours, but I likely would have enjoyed them more had I read them before American Gods.
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