Anybody read a good book lately?

[PhillyPhreak54]

http://longform.org/

Its not a book but a site that has collections of long form articles collected from newspapers and magazines.

Great site

[ice grillin you]

got this book for xmas....if you like this kind of stuff (the hot zone for example) its phenominal

[rjs246]

just finished The Passage...it was crazy good. it's vampires but none of this Twilight bullshtein...these things are legit badasses. probably going to start the second book, The Twelve, shortly.

I just finished Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. It would be impossible to comment on this book without sounding like an even bigger, even more pretentious douche, so I'll refrain, but for anyone who wants to read something completely different by one of the most gifted writers of the last century, it's worth the time.

The Twelve is next for me.

[SunMo]

what's it about, guy?

[rjs246]

Drug Abuse, futuristic French Canadian separatists, familial strife, experialistic foreign policy, tennis, infidelity, the nature of entertainment in society...

See? Don't you hate me just a little bit more for typing all of that?

[SunMo]

i checked out after futuristic french canadian separatists

[rjs246]

Good boy.

[rjs246]

Finished The Twelve. It was amazingly good.

[General_Failure]

I don't know if this has come up before, but you can borrow ebooks and audio books from your local library, which you can find via overdrive.com. So here I've been, rereading books and not reading new ones.

Also, if you don't have an ebook reader, get one. They're like $30 now.

[Diomedes]

Just finished Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.   It was a fun romp, on par with Gibson's best stuff, but with more intellectual substance.  Which is another way of saying, long passages of namshubbery.

I tried to read Quicksilver a while ago but couldn't get into it after two hundred pages or so.  Maybe now that I've chewed on a smaller work of his, I can try it again.

GF, I assume you've read all of his major works....worth it to read the whole trilogy?

I think I'll read a "serious" book next.  I've never read any Thomas Mann.

[General_Failure]

Definitely worth a read. And Cryptonomicon when you're done those, which has both aged a little poorly and become more relevant. The only book of his I haven't reread a dozen times is Anathem, but that one jumps straight in to the bad writing idea of making up bullshtein words for things that already exist so they sound alien.

The thing with Stephenson novels to keep in mind is they're going to ramble on. You can get a couple hundred pages in and not know where the story is going, but it will eventually get there. You'll probably have to wade through some parts that are caused by whatever part of the autism spectrum he sits on, like a chapter about how to properly eat Cap'n Crunch.


In my own reading, I've read all the Shadowrun novels between last August and now. They're mostly terrible, as you'd expect nerdshtein tie-in novels to be, but two of them were actually good books.

Last week I got around to reading Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. The book says it was written by him, but you wouldn't know that just from reading it. Alzheimers has farged him up pretty bad. His books have been getting worse in quality, but even then they were still better than most things you could read. This one, though, is depressingly bad. Characters he's been writing for up to 30 years who had amazing personalities are unrecognizable. Characters just deliver monologues at each other to advance the plot. Bad things are supposed to be happening, but there's no tension because it isn't happening to the main characters. When bad things might happen to those characters, they solve it immediately because suddenly they can do no wrong. I wish I'd never read it.

[Don Ho]

Not sure where to put this but an incredible American Masters on PBS tonight about J.D. Salinger.  Absolute must see if you get a chance.

[phattymatty]

this is awesome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

[General_Failure]

In my own reading, I've read all the Shadowrun novels between last August and now. They're mostly terrible, as you'd expect nerdshtein tie-in novels to be, but two of them were actually good books.

I've finished these awful things. All of them. I hate myself even more, and more strongly wish I were dead than usual. Six farging months of reading nothing but the shteintiest tie-in fantasy novels this side of Star Wars. This isn't hyperbole, these books have made me less of a human being.

I read about so many Asians Orientals. So many stoic Native Americans Amerinds. So many trans-dimensional magic insects coming to enslave humanity. So many middle age white guys who are the most blatant author inserts. So many page-long descriptions of the outfits these characters are wearing. And so very many shamelessly stolen ideas from William Gibson that even he stopped writing about twenty years ago because he understood that reality had turned out way more bizarre an interesting than he had dreamed up in the early 80s.

Look at this farging garbage.

Luppas steered the sports car with one hand, aiming it down I-5 at the Spike Wheels clustered near the crash-and-dash. The gangers were ready to buzz turbo from the scene. If Norris Caber had left anything behind in the wreck, Luppas wasn't going to let it be taken. A feral grin split his face as he drew fire from the go-gangers, closing on them as they tried to get away.

Six months of that! I'm going to reread some older Terry Pratchett books to remember what good writing looks like until I can find something decent to read.

[hbionic]

 

I can't stop laughing. Pretty funny stuff.