I'm working on Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence. The worldbuilding is amazing, I'm enjoying it for that alone. The main character is a rather unlikeable monster but that's kinda the point. We'll see where this goes.
I was going to launch a #quotesporn thread for a passage in Momma and the Meaning of Life but I couldn't think of a good title. 123456789 123456789 123456789 12345 123456789 123456789 123456789 12345 123456789 123456789 123456789 12345 123456789 _________ 123456789 12345 Fiweof asifjwe ______ lfjoeiwjf ald fsoif aeiowa wlrjelk elk elaj ejkrr sof oifa wjf elkj ekj. Ierl fkje eo asdfj awleklej oifoij eerw weaoije. Firw oafoiaewajj akelwj. Uerl irfel fjiwoa wlekljr afljr. 123456789 123456789 123456789 12345 123456789 123456789 123456789 12345 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12 123456789 123456789 123456789 12345 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12345689 12
I'm currently a couple of hundred pages into Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (translated from the original A la recherche du temps perdu by Scott Moncrieff). It's a bit of a mammoth so it'll probably keep me occupied for a while. So far I'm quite enjoying it. There are already quite a lot of characters to keep tabs on, that Proust fleshes out as he hops backward and forward in time -where I am now, he's reminiscing about his childhood holidays and the people in the town they stayed at. The sentences are often really long and peppered with commas, so that sometimes I've had to reread them to make sense of how the clauses relate to each other. I really like the sort of long cerebral tangents he goes off on, talking mostly about the nature of memory.
Just finished iWoz by Steve Wozniak. Twas OK, I liked the nerdy electronics design parts and found it interesting how little Steve Jobs is mentioned. Woz is too nice to say Steve was just another guy who was there at the right time but you get the sense that's what he believed to some degree. Prior to that I read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell which is fantastic. The story of Thomas Cromwell, political fixer for Henry VIII and how they brought about the henrician reformation. Currently reading Bring up the bodies which is the second book in the Wolf hall series, Ann Boelyn about to meet some cold steel pretty soon... great stuff.
He gets wrapped around the wheel at times - 20 pages burned at banquets, endless wanderings by Brienne of Tarth, etc. I'd argue that the HBO dramatization of Dance with Dragons kicks the shit out of GRRM's version simply because it condenses a lot of tedious bullshit into quick, tight plot points and eliminates entire subplots that are nearly impossible to give a shit about. But yeah. Game of Thrones was the series that convinced me that fiction was worth writing.
Finished Destiny Disrupted. 'twas dope. He kind of glosses over the fact that the West dominated the "Middle Kingdom" not through war, but by buying it. Started Dawkins' Selfish Gene. It's an audiobook, largely read by Dawkins. Trying to find the controversy.
The controversy was manufactured after the fact by neo-social darwinists, who took it as scientific endorsement of their stealing from everyone. There have been scientific critiques of it too, most notably E.O. Wilson's recent rejection of it after years of endorsement. Mainly, however, it's a book about mathematical biology written to be understood by non-mathematical biologists, and many of its claims boil down to basic logic. That Wall Street corrupted it shouldn't be shocking considering what eugenicists did to Darwin.
In what book did E. O. Wilson explain his rejection of TSG? I have a copy of The Future of Life written in 2002 laying around.
In this paper he lays out some theories on kin selection that deviate from the gene-centric view. He and Dawkins have had a heated war of words ever since.
I'm finally getting around to reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles after getting a new e-reader. The old gave out on my when I was about 50 pages in.
Blindsight by Watts was really good. I finished it and a recommendation by blackbootz this morning, stayed home sick from work.
I feel that it was a canard Watts used to explain apocalyptic malevolence, rather than an actual exploration of the concept. It was also a sideshow compared to the anti-orthogonal vampires, the anti-VR trope and whatever bizarre made-up mental disability the protagonist had. Watts shuffled about five half-baked ideas into a narrative so that he didn't have to fully-bake any single one of them. It's an amateur move. Particularly as the whole "intelligence-without self-awareness" idea was spiked in the endzone by Solaris in '61 and through the goalposts in 2005 by Spin.
Hmm, so I'm just finished and I have to say my overwhelming feeling toward Anathem is that it was just really dull, too long with too many made up words. There is a pattern throughout the book that goes something like this: "Erasmus goes to a new location, he meets new people, he learns something new, that may or may not be tangentially related to the larger quest, but which also involves long side arcs where not much interesting happens". That is repeated at least 8 times if not more (interviews, apert, punishment, travel, city attack, archaeological site, new Math, space, ship, finale and probably a few more i missed). The characters seem quite one-dimensional I thought, Arcibald and Jezry are almost interchangable. We are told multiple times that Jezry is the most gifted in the group yet never see him do anything to justify the acclaim. The love story could be removed and felt like an annoying add-on with no depth. None of the characters felt like actual people, merely plot devices that deliver some new information which sweeps our hero on to the next plot point. It just seemed to me that it took an extraordinary long time to say nothing at all really, I would guess if someone had studied philosophy and was interested in a discussion about Nominalism and Platonism then it will tick some boxes but for me it didn't really work. It all just seemed a bit preachy, I'm sure there is a trope for characters who use a form of didactic conversation to withhold secrets until the student is ready but its probably used too much here. I may have drifted off a little towards the end, after the 3 way end story stuff, and missed some glorious reveal... I don't feel it come close to the scale of Cryptonomicon which had multiple timelines and multiple perspectives wrapped up in an admittedly more firework laden storyline. Anathem is a single perspective wrapped around one topic which starts to really drag when we hit long wordy chapters filled with philosophical navel gazing. Twas OK, maybe 2-3 stars out of 5. I'm coming to Anathem after reading the fantastic Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies books from Hilary Mantell, who really knows how to build a character, so perhaps I'm treating Anathem too harshly as the comparison highlights its failings more acutely.
I don't want to say you missed the point, because that sounds rude. I do think Anathem is directed very, very specifically at people who already have a given nonfiction body of reading in their past. As an ... action novel, or an adventure story, or even as an entry point into modern philosophy, it misses the mark. In the end, it's rather like Cryptonomicon, though. Smart people put into tricky situations and forced to solve them or die. My favorite genre. EDIT: good that you finished it. It lends your criticism validity, at the very least.
Oh no I even said it myself that I probably did miss the point so you're not being rude :) I knew coming in that it wasn't going to be a straight action/adventure story and I wasn't looking for one. I have read some philosophy but it sounds like perhaps not the right books... Can you tell me what you took from it?
It's the only book I've ever read with aliens -- for lack of a better word -- that adequately escaped the improbability of aliens as a plot device. Add to that the brilliant use of my favorite technique, a book set in the future gradually filling in the holes in an alternate past, and the neat explanation for the compartmentalization of pure science and engineering, which is something I could see happening in our world someday. Neal Stephenson is the best author we've got right now.
I had a really interesting dream last night about the end of the world. Very peaceful; contained a long conversation about windows and multiple dimensions. More Anathem than Cryptonomicon, but hey, I'll take what I can get. I had been rationing my Cryptoreading in order to preserve my status as someone living the part of my life where I could still experience Cryptonomicon for the first time, as wasoxygen called it. Yesterday was the tipping point, which oddly enough was the introduction of Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe -- my favorite character -- and I burned through the last 400 pages. So now I'm post-Crypt, and bereft.