Author Topic: Rate the last book you read.  (Read 194383 times)

BlueVoid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1820 on: March 28, 2018, 08:53:30 AM »
Storm Front
Firs time reading a Butcher book. I liked this one and it was very easy to speed through. I'm not entirely sure I love the characterization of Dresden, but it didn't take away from the story either. I think I will give the next book in the series a go at least.
3.5/5
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Teproc

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1821 on: April 04, 2018, 03:29:44 PM »
It's been a while since I've read for pleasure, because I had to read a lot for my studies in the past five years... and I found it hard to pick the habit back up actually. But this really gave me that feeling of getting lost in a book back, and I'm excited to get back into reading because of it.

The Three Body Problem (Liu Cixin)

My sister recommended it to me, but really "Chinese sci-fi" was all I needed to be intrigued. I was very curious to see what it would feel like, and, as one might expect, it's familiar in some ways, but still very distinctively Chinese in other ways. Well obviously it takes place in China, so there's that, and the history of China plays an important role in the story, both the recent (though most of the action is contemporary, the first chapter takes place during the cultural revolution and hangs over an important character) and the ancient, through one of the story's main threads: the VR game which gives the book its title. Funny I should read this as Ready Player One is coming out... somehow I don't think anything in that film will be quite as memorable as what goes on here, and hearing that Amazon is thinking of adapting this into a TV show makes me cackle... because this book gets progressively crazier as it goes on, in ways that I have no idea how you could possibly portray on screen. Maybe it's because, again, it's my first new non-fiction book in a while, but it really reminded me of the tremendous power the written word has over one's imagination.

To get back to it's Chinese-ness, there's a lot there that I don't know how much I should get into, both in fear of spoliing things and because I certainly don't have that firm a grasp on what Liu is doing overall... but one of the main threads going through the film is the concept of ideology: where it comes from, what forms it takes and how it affects societies.

I am a little worried for the next two books in this trilogy (only one of which is out here at this point), because the last hundred pages or so did feel a bit rushed to me. What goes on towards the end is very exciting but I did lose sight of some of the core characters a bit, and founds myself questioning some of the choices Liu made in structuring his story, with certain reveals seeming to come both a little fast and... in the wrong order, somehow ? Hard to discuss without getting spoilery again, but certain flashbacks felt like they would have played better had Liu taken more time to build up some mysteries.

Still, I did find that the basic genre stuff worked alongside the deeper philosophical stuff, which is all I can ask from good sci-fi. To get back to the reason I got interested in it in the first place (well, beside my sister's impeccable taste in such things), the Western author I was reminded of the most was Asimov, partly because of its interest in history and wide view of humanity/the world, but a wilder Asimov, who goes more for mind-blowing setpieces than the clock-work precision of Asimov's narrative. I'm not sure he'll be able to keep it up in the next two, but I'm excited to see him try.
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BlueVoid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1822 on: May 11, 2018, 01:45:01 PM »
Treasure Island
I have vague memories of this being the first chapter book that I read/was read to me. Revisiting it I really enjoyed it and admire its influence on pirate stories that followed. The audiobook with a full cast narration was phenomenal. The voice acting of Long John Silver by Owen Teale is particularly great.
4/5

Artemis
I loved 'The Martian' and I might love Artemis even more. The world building by Weir is phenomenal. This story is about a smuggler on a moonbase who gets herself caught up in some shady business with highstakes. I don't love all the character choices that Weir makes and have issues with how things are wrapped up-- but I had such a great time in the world that he has created that I can overlook them.
4/5

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
This says little about Trump and more about Comey and his views on leadership. He comes off a bit holier than thou and a bit like he views himself as an even more boyscout version of captain America. that said, I still enjoyed this and learned about how the head of the FBI interacts with the president. If you had read the book before his memo's were leaked than nothing new was revealed.
3.5/5

How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success
I generally have issues with broad self-help books since they necessarily have to be overly broad. This is doubly true for books that are telling people how to raise their children. This book appears to be mostly geared towards very wealthy heli-copter parents trying to get their kids into Yale. It makes a lot of assertions based on anecdotal examples. The entire premise is based on something that "feels" true. Kids these days are over-parented and don't know how to handle the real world. This may be true, but the reality is probably a lot more murky-- which the book brings up, but doesn't actually explore much. There is definitely a generational bias that taints the entire book. Look-- parenting is hard. Being a kid is hard-- especially in this new world where everyone is connected, has a college degree and is willing to work for free. Lets not pretend that making your kid do chores is going to solve every issue.
2.5/5

The Complete Sherlock Holmes
This was an audiobook of every Holmes short story and novel read by Stephen Fry. At first I had a problem with the character of Holmes being unbearable, but he grew on me like House (from the TV show) did-- not surprisingly that character is based on Holmes. The collection is broken into 6 manageable parts which is needed otherwise it would get too repetitive. I read a different book in between each part. Even at that some of the stories seemed too similar. However, they are still fun reads and easy to get through. Really enjoyed the experience of reading them all.
4/5
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oldkid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1823 on: May 13, 2018, 12:33:48 PM »
I'm glad you mentioned that Sherlock Holmes collection.  I bought it, and then realized how daunting the project is to listen to all that.  I usually listen to audiobooks at work or driving, and Doyle, like Chesterton's Father Brown series, might prove to be too dense for work.  But I am still looking forward to it.

Wild Seed
I am proud of myself because I actually read a new fictional book all the way through-- not audiobook.  My depression for about a decade has been pretty severe and I stopped reading new fiction. :(  But I think I'm back on track.  And, of course, it is Octavia Butler, one of my favorites.

This is a love story in an alternative seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, with characters having to deal with the odd personality quirks of living eternally.  On the other hand, it has some of the same beats as a romance, apart from the occasional murders.  It is dark and deep and addictive. And I am diving into the next volume now.

4.5/5
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BlueVoid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1824 on: May 14, 2018, 08:54:42 AM »
The good thing about the Holmes collection is it is very easy to flit in and out of because the stories are pretty short. You can just come back to it whenever you want a little dose.

Congrats on finishing the book! Wild Seed sounds interesting.
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BlueVoid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1825 on: May 15, 2018, 10:16:36 AM »
Ready Player One
I know that a lot of people despise this book, but I really enjoyed it. I have some major issues and recognize all the faults people have with it. It's not the best written book, but I couldn't put it down. It was a lot of fun. I didn't want it to be over.
4.5/5
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oldkid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1826 on: May 16, 2018, 01:01:57 AM »
Brave New World

Audiobook read by Michael York.  I loved the book more than the reading.  I can see BNW's influence all over 20th century dystopia novels, especially Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, but it still felt pretty fresh and the themes fascinating.  It allowed me to delve a bit into the psychology of utopia-making, which is a subject that interests me.  It's a bit talky, rather than action-oriented, but I like that.
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DarkeningHumour

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1827 on: May 16, 2018, 06:23:38 AM »
First Huxley?
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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1828 on: May 16, 2018, 06:33:55 AM »
Artemis
I loved 'The Martian' and I might love Artemis even more. The world building by Weir is phenomenal. This story is about a smuggler on a moonbase who gets herself caught up in some shady business with highstakes. I don't love all the character choices that Weir makes and have issues with how things are wrapped up-- but I had such a great time in the world that he has created that I can overlook them.
4/5

I liked Artemis. Weir's writing is as basic as it gets, but he's put a phenomenal amount of thought into all the science in the book, and I love that. The worldbuilding is anything but subtle but things like figuring out water would have to boil at a lower temperature make up for that. This is exactly what I wish other sci-fi writers dedicated more time to.
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Junior

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1829 on: May 21, 2018, 01:46:55 PM »
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

A year and a half ago I read Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner and found within it one of my favorite passages of all time:
Quote
Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
The passage is about a young man growing up in the Reconstruction South where everybody was still obsessed with their "lost cause" and the lengths they went to in an effort to retain their right to own other people. The "back-looking ghosts" are an amazing image for that desire to return over and over again to a battle that was already fought and rightfully lost, and that Quentin is literally constructed as a place to hold these ghosts in the logic of the sentence is something that has stuck with me and will continue to do so. It changed the way I think about ghost stories, the Civil War, the American South, the passage of time, and race. I guess I have been looking for a story that would strike me as much as this one part of a paragraph did.

15 years ago, I read The Shining by Stephen King and saw the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation. In it, I found one of the best ways of conceptualizing empathy I had come across to that point. The book takes its title from a supernatural power that a little boy, his father, and the caretaker of a large ski resort have that allows them to see, hear, and, most importantly, feel what others (or even places) are experiencing. The most benign manifestation of this power is the fun little chat that the caretaker and the boy have with each other telepathically about the power itself. The most dangerous manifestation is the way that the hotel's deeply disturbing past comes to life and infects the father, seducing him to either join the ghosts remaining within the ornate halls or blow the whole place up, depending on whether you're talking about the film or the book. But there is another scene (from the film specifically) that has stuck with me all these years. The boy experiences some kind of terror and the film cuts to a point-of-view shot from the caretaker's perspective. The shot starts close to a TV and zooms out to reveal first the caretaker's feet then the rest of his body to show that he is slowly becoming less focused on the TV he's staring at. The next shot starts on a closeup of his face and then zooms out to indicate that he's feeling beyond himself. Then the last shot (after another shot of the TV) is a repeat of where the non-pov shot began that zooms in on the caretaker's face again as he starts to experience the horror that the boy is going through. You can read it all over his face, his eyes get wide and his mouth goes agape. It's a short scene that (re)explains a supernatural type of empathy that just might save a little boy's life. I have been looking for a something that good at depicting what empathy can be those 15 years.

I have found both a story that strikes me like that passage from Absalom, Absalom! did as well as a vision of empathy like the one in The Shining in Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. I'm not the first to compare Ward to Faulkner, it's a similarity she acknowledges and leans into, but she takes her modernist ball and runs with it into the modern day to make it her own. She, like King, is interested in both the positive and negative outcomes of empathy, and she also superpowers the empathy to make the implications grander and more meaningful. Ward's novel is not a ripoff of these two works (nor of Shakespeare, though she also uses tons of nature metaphors and descriptions to link the humans to their surroundings, she does so to show that the link goes both ways), it is its own thing. But damn if I didn't think of those two a lot while reading it.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a novel about three generations in a Mississippi family. The youngest generation is comprised of Jojo and Kayla, children of a mixed race couple who live with their black mother's parents while their white father is in jail. Jojo, a tween, is stuck in that middle time between wanting to be more adult and wanting to stay relatively carefree as a child. He takes care of his little sister because their mother, Leonie, can't find it in her to love them and take care of them. Their grandfather is important, too. River did time in the jail that currently houses his son-in-law but currently takes care of his wife, who is being depleted more every day by cancer. They live with plenty of farm animals and, though not in ideal circumstances, their lives are generally fine. Then they get a call from the Jojo's father, Michael, who is getting out of prison in a few days. The younger two generations, plus Leonie's coworker who also has a husband in the same jail, make a trip upstate to retrieve Michael. Their trip reveals more about the past and the present than they expected.

Sing, Unburied, Sing isn't a horror novel exactly, but the key elements are there when a ghost appears once the family arrives at the penitentiary, one who was imprisoned alongside River decades earlier. Ritchie is the most obvious supernatural element, and Ward doesn't shy away from depicting him as such. Ritchie, like Jojo and Leonie, gets to narrate a few chapters in the course of the novel and Ward uses these brief interludes to change things up dramatically. Gone are the realist descriptions of events and in their stead come lyrical passages about time and place. At the end of a paragraph about the time between his life at Parchman penitentiary and his appearance in the story, Ritchie tells the story of decades in a few short sentences:
Quote
Men left, men returned and left again. New men came. I burrowed and slept and woke in the milky light, my time measured by the passing of all those Black faces and the turning of the earth, until the scaly bird returned and led me to the car, to the boy the same age as me sitting in the back of the car. Jojo.
The juxtaposition of this conception of time to Jojo's, who experiences each new thing in its newness, and Leonie's, who tries to get away from experiencing her life in its fullest by taking drugs, is powerful. But Ward is careful not to give Ritchie a sense of omniscience, even if he sees farther than either of the other narrators. She knows that even the unburied sing their own songs for themselves, and that those songs are not universal.

What Ward's book is really about is the act of storytelling. Jojo's chapters are full of stories about River's time in Parchman, but as Ritchie acknowledges later, "The story of me and Parchman, as River told it, is a moth-eaten shirt, nibbled to threads: the shape is right, but the details have been erased." River also doesn't want to tell the end of that story and so the book becomes about the difficulty of facing trauma. There's trauma in the past and trauma in the present, trauma of racism and drugs and sickness and life, and each character deals with it in their own ways. What Ward does best is understand that each of those ways of dealing with trauma is comprised of telling the story of the trauma in a way that is understandable to the teller. Jojo's perspective is different from Leonie's, and Ward doesn't indict either of them for that fact.

She also often turns that telling into singing. I underlined every time somebody sang something, or when their voice sounded like singing, or when the insects outside sang, or when a character wailed. The book is riddled with this singing. Ritchie might be the titular unburied, undead character who is implored to sing, but it might also refer to Jojo and Leonie and River and Kayla. Each of them is unburied in that they are alive, but they also become unburied from some thing that is covering them. Perhaps they grow to see things they hoped to avoid. Perhaps they rediscover old connections. Perhaps they just sing because they are joyful, or sorrowful, or full of life. Ward's book is under 300 pages but is packed with amazing scenes, sentences, ideas, characters, and stories. Though it reminded me of Faulker and King, it also reminded me a lot of Toni Morrison. I've only read her Paradise so far, but like that book, Sing, Unburied, Sing is not exactly happy-go-lucky but it is a book that resonates with the melodies of the living and the dead.
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