You know the drill.
Was excited to read my first Ian Banks book in the culture serie:
The player of game.
Disapointed.
The culture is a cool concept for a book. What we have are an uninspired personnage saying hello and goodbye before and after every conversation. A fist half dealing with the uninspired protagonist and his insipid conversation with personnages who will totally diseapear in second half when the conflict really begin.
The conflict is okayish. The alien civilisation feel alien. The dig at autoritative society isnt event too on the nose.
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One cool short James Ellroy novella (he is always cool):
Shakedown
It is ellroy: misogynist, racist , republican, but he do it with panache.
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Some bad french Sci-fi (my favorite genre tend to do bad book 99% of the time) , and one cool Sci-fi:
Salvager of Time (Wesley Chu 2015)
Fun premice: human society is in shamble, they only survive by going in the past salvaging ressource. Well written. Unfortunatly nothing is resolved, we are waiting for a scond tome, which didnt come yet. Still a good read.
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The killing Joke (A.Moore)
What a deception. I discovered that comics could be epic with Moore (Vandeta, From HEll, Watchmen...)
The killing joke, is just a short story, 40 page, where nothing interesting happen. Joker back story is bland. Batman doesnt do anything remarquable. Joker tell him where he is, and batman come and kick his ass, end.
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Next will be 2 James Ellroy (I'm closing on having read all his books now). One of which is in English.. and as I feared, I realized after the 1st few pages , that my english is not good enough for that level of slang.
My life is now pretty much deal with email, work on the house until 3, pick up my kid, deal with email, take my kid to swimming, collapse in a puddle and "work on the house until 3" and "take my kid to swimming" involves a good 7 hours a day for audiobooks.
We last did this 327 days ago?
Library
- You have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix. The mechanics of MLK's march on Birmingham. Progress is a bitch, and it isn't guaranteed. Recommended.
- Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Robert Heinlein. I decided to do some of the junior Heinleins because my life is a bummer. This one is cute. Very Golden Age. Recommended.
- The Door Into Summer, Robert Heinlein. I don't even remember this one. I think it was an archetypal "I'm Heinlein, you're stupid" Heinlein.
- Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein. Eh. Hunger Games before Hunger Games. Definite indications of Heinlein's protofascism on display.
- The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels. This takes 45 minutes and is still a waste of time.
- A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine. This is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire which I torrented because I'm impatient. It's f'n GREAT but more on that below.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. Arendt makes much of the fact that historically, antisemitism is fairly recent. She's big on the ordinariness of it all, which tracks.
- The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has become insufferable. His principle schtick at this point is "if your research disproves my research it's because you're doing it wrong." His recommendations aren't all that tough, though - monitor your kid's internet and keep them off social media until they're sixteen at least. Having seen the drama erupt on chats with my f'n 11-year-old I totally get it. Parenting is a full time job and I guess some people forget that?
- The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson. This book is mostly a lie, at least according to everyone supposedly in it. It's still pretty awesome and i recommend the shit out of it. It's about a punk-ass kid who hustles hard enough to trade Swiss Francs for Citibank and then decides he's a socialist, basically. He spends half the book pickaxeing his bonus out of Citi in a glum and punk-ass way. What fucked me up pretty hard is I've made more money by buying and holding crypto than this poor asshole did hustling 90 hours a week trading gilts or whatever over the same amount of time. I probably shouldn't admit that.
- Battle Cry Freedom, James Mcpherson. I was looking for a decent reference on the Civil War that isn't Shelby Foote's paean to racism. This isn't it. Much like Mary Beard's SPQR, it's a full-throated textbook that feels no compunction whatsoever to make you want to read it.
- Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt. Did you know that Hanna Arendt really really regretted using the phrase "the banality of evil?" Eichmann in Jerusalem isn't about "banality" so much as it's about normalcy; her whole point was that the Holocaust didn't start with a bunch of people going "let's be evil" it was a steady slide of "I guess we're doing this" where each step further was justified by the step directly behind. She basically paints Eichmann up as the Walter Mitty of the Nazi Party, an unremarkable, boring bureaucrat whose focus was on successfully executing bureaucracy, not Jews. She points out more than a few times that Eichmann expressed stress, guilt and severe misgivings about what he was doing but he kept doing it anyway because ultimately, it was his job.
- SPQR, Mary Beard. Much like I wanted a Civil War book, this is the book on the Romans and it's boring AF. There's a breed of historian who assumes that if you're reading their shit it's because you already find it unrelentingly fascinating and I don't. I think the Romans are overblown compared to pretty much every other contemporary culture which means Team Beard has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to say to me. I think I made it 4 hours in?
- Red Plenty, Francis Spufford. This is a weird one because it's kind of a dramatization of soviet economics as told through the eyes of access characters. So it's not really true but it's based on true events? And it's worth it for the insight into another culture and another set of values, I guess?
- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackon Bennett. This book is dope. Imagine Middle Earth except the ocean is full of monsters, magic has been replaced by genetic engineering and everyone is gay and neurodivergent. Now go follow Holmes and Watson as they solve a Whodunit. Watson is an autistic savant and Holmes is agoraphobic. And.... GO
- Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich. I couldn't finish this. Not because it wasn't good but because it's terrifying. It's an oral history of the Soviet Union, in which a bunch of Muscovites celebrate totalitarianism, deprivation, mass murder and oppression because at least the rest of the world feared them. There's no introspection in it anywhere. Several anecdotes about the wall coming down and White Russians discovering holy shit we better get outta Dagestan because they'll murder us otherwise I never realized these people we oppressed and treated as third class citizens might actually resent us. "Weren't things great under Stalin?" Weren't things great under Trump? Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature for this book and others. She's Belarusian, currently living in exile in Germany.
- The Olympian Affair, Jim Butcher. So Butcher wrote a book about a steampunk magical universe where everyone flies around on airships powered by magic and wind and nobody lives on the ground and also cats can talk for some reason. This book is its sequel. I won't say it makes sense but I will say it's a fun little swashbuckler, just like the last one, and that Jim Butcher can write himself a pithy cat.
- The Mercy of Gods, James S. A. Corey. Our Dynamic Duo has decided to write an apocalyptic alien invasion saga to follow up The Expanse and it's fair-to-middlin' good. It's promising.
- The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler. I think this was a NikolaiFyodorov recommendation? It's funny I've read the influences that made this book and yeah, I guess that's one way to go with it. It's kinda fun. It pretty clearly owes its existence to My Octopus Teacher, The Outlaw Ocean and Wind Up Girl.
- Masters of the Air, Donald L. Miller. This is not the snappy Apple series, which is great. This is an intensive study of the logistics and history of the European air war and I am glad to not be fighting it.
Torrents
- Sundown Towns - a Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Grim AF. A great book. Written by the same guy who wrote "what your teacher didn't tell you about American history" or whatever that book is called. I didn't finish it. My diet of grimness is grim.
- Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism. This is the second book by Yanis Varoufakis I've tried to read and they both suck. Economists have this nasty tendency to go "I understand economics, therefore I understand everything" when even the first half of that statement is pretty questionable. Varoufakis ended up being in charge of the Greek economy during the crisis so I guess he's got some credibility? But also he's an idiot.
- The first three Clavell books. Holy shit these are long. I made it halfway through Whirlwind a few years back and quite honestly the best part about Clavell is you can not understand a word he's saying for half an hour at a time because you're hammer-drilling into concrete and you'll change a battery and won't have missed anything. I'm cool with long books but Clavell needed an editor. These things are easily 250% too long.
- The INfinite Game, Simon Sinek. This could be a pamphlet. "If you focus on long-term goals rather than short-term goals your business will last longer." kthxbye
- The Key to Rebecca, Ken Follett. Ken Follett is a much better writer than James Clavell. But like Clavell, he's orientalist AF. These audiobooks are old enough that the narrator does that bullshit Charlie Chan accent and it's really cringe.
- Joe Haldeman, The Forever War. I read this because I needed to get the taste of Starship Troopers out of my mouth and it doesn't really hold up. I've read this book maybe four times, in four different versions, and I should have stopped at three twenty years ago.
- Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein. This is a shit book, on every level, in every dimension, and people who like it should feel bad.
- Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown. For some reason I felt like reading 75 facts about Princess Margaret. I think I'm really into the idea of the British Monarchy as the canary in the coal mine of the British Empire and Princess Margaret is definitely that.
- Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto. This is the City of Quartz analogue for the Bay Area. It's worth a read. Republicans suck, and always have.
- Raven, Tim Reiterman. Yeah I read a 500 page book on Jim Jones. I am none the wiser.
- SM Stirling, the first book of the Emberverse, at least 4 hours of it. Total shit.
- The Age of Grievance, Frank Bruni. Frank Bruni is an asshole.
- What we Owe the Future, whatever jackass wrote it. This is the Communist Manifesto of the TESCREAL posse and it's just as bad. Longer, though.
- Your Face Belongs to Us, yadda yadda - could also have been a pamphlet. "there is a company. It is bad."
Not gonna lie. Day after the election I poured some scotch and watched a couple episodes of Land of the Lost.
They were really fun. Oddly enough they were a recommendation of the BlueSky Book Club, back in that 2-month period where BlueSky wasn't so apocolyptically leftist that I couldn't stand it anymore.
It's funny - I'm reading Walter Jon Wililams' The Praxis right now and there's a huge difference between "space opera written by a dude in his 60s" and "space opera written by a lady in her 20s." What's really funny is they both live in and around Santa Fe, NM so both of them have absolutely no problem with bleakness and poverty? But with Arkady Martine, the problem is violence. With WJW, the solution is violence.
Added a few of these to my gotta get to reading list!
Surprised to see you read Simon Sinek.
I contain multitudes
The way this works is I look up what's freeleech and if it's at all interesting I add it. Then I'm looking for a book and I go huh. This is why I spent a good 20 minutes querying the internet with "should I read Mein Kampf" (answer: no).
The book that Infinite Game could have been is The Man Who Broke Capitalism. It's not full of platitudes, it's full of facts, anecdotes and narratives.
Of that pile, the recommendations are
- Tainted Cup
- Memory Called Empire
- Mercy of Gods
- Mountain in the Sea
- Red Plenty
- Secondhand Time
- Trading Game
- Have Spacesuit Will Travel
- Ma'am Darling but only if you give the first fuck about the British Royal Family, which I do for reasons of longitudinal perversity
After a hiatus of more than a decade, I'm back on the Iain M Banks train. Currently two-thirds of the way through Matter. This is on the back of The Hydrogen Sonata a few months ago.
After this, I'll probably get onto Dr No by Percival Everett. I've well and truly become a fan of his work over the past 12 months.
I finally read Lord of the Rings in full. Between translations (both Polish and German, back when I could read German) struggling to capture the tone and Tolkien requiring a certain mindset, I still can't blame myself for dropping the book time and time again, effectively reading via spaced excerpts until recently. Still, it's good, but probably suffers from the same problem GEB does: because it's the first one to do its thing, it means a lot of the stuff it inspired have a better flow even if they only tackle one of its themes/aspects. It's appreciated, there's value in reading it as a classic/progenitor of sorts, but it probably will never become one of those books I can just pick up and enjoy. It did deepen my appreciation of the movies, though, and they don't require much of a setup.
Słowo jest w człowieku (The word is in the man/person) by Jan Miodek - a famous Polish grammarian writes about common/public mistakes, word usage evolution, and linguistic oddities in a fun way. I liked his TV program (yes, seriously) as a child, and seeing his name on a prominent place at my local library made my day. Unfortunately, it's one of those books that are not only untranslatable (or at least in a way that'd preserve his flair, cf. Tolkien above) but likely unapproachable without, like, C1 level of comprehension in Polish... which, as in most languages, includes a lot of natives.
I'm also trying to read the Vulgate Bible, and it's an uneven ride. There are whole chapters that go in smoothly only for me to stop and go "holy shit, future imperative outside a textbook or Cicero!" or "which of those comes first?" or be otherwise confused. Annoyingly, even though I was never religious, went through confirmation mostly because 'it can matter to certain people' advice from my priest... I didn't realize how well-catechized I ended up being. There are disturbingly long passages where I don't read Latin but recall Polish, and I haven't been to a mass in, dunno, 12 years?
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Sherlock Holmes in SPAA... I mean, medieval HRE. Though I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the book nearly as much if I didn't have The Autumn of the Middle Ages in fresh memory considering all the 'change in the air and passing/ending of ages' themes. The whole story within a story within a story recursive framind device was a bit distracting, but I can't help but think people focus too much on it? I mean, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein dips down to what, a flashback in a dream in a memoir in a letter in a letter, all as hazy and unreliable as in Eco, and nobody who read Franky bitches about that? Dunno, I liked it.
- Still, it's good, but probably suffers from the same problem GEB does: because it's the first one to do its thing, it means a lot of the stuff it inspired have a better flow even if they only tackle one of its themes/aspects.
There's this idea that LoTR was "first" that has no basis in truth. Tolkien no doubt grew up reading Dunsany. Jon Bauer was a celebrity decades before Tolkien sat down to write The Hobbit. While Tolkien was writing it, Robert Howard pumped out 21 stories of Conan the Cimmerian (and died). The magic system in Dungeons and Dragons isn't taken from LoTR, it's taken from (international bestseller) The Dying Earth, which was published four years before Fellowship of the Ring.
The problem with everything else, though, is it's all dangerous. People die. Blood is shed. Endings aren't always happy. A place without civilization is a tricky place to live and wizards tend to fuck up your shit.
Lord of the Rings persists because it makes everything cozy. Frodo is Pooh. Sam is Eeyore. Aragorn is Christopher Robin. My wife loves it? She had a pair of Pound Puppies named Frodo and Bilbo. Me? I'd read Dying Earth, a few Conans and the whole of Vardeman's Cenotaph Road series before taking on The Hobbit in 4th grade which is probably why I've never been able to see LoTR as anything but trite bullshit. It's the era's Harry Potter - "let's make everything cute and British but also inescapably about the English caste system."
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Sherlock Holmes in SPAA... I mean, medieval HRE.
Then I'll get back to you once I read Dying Earth. It's not unknown to me, Vance especially the D&D magic system is even called 'Vancian', but iirc his books were nigh impossible to get in Poland. Still are, even though there (apparently) was a 2010 translation reprint.
- I mean, Name of the Rose is entertaining up to a point. And it's interesting up to a point. And I'm sure it's all metaphorical and shit.
That's honestly a good summary? I was entertained, but ended up confused by both detractors and praises. I liked it because Eco has clearly put a lot of effort towards authenticity and made the 'heady' meanings of meanings of the book digestible and, for a lack of a better word, plain to think about. Contrast it with, dunno, Salman Rushdie, with whom I honestly don't know if I'm too uncouth and uncultured to glimpse his brilliance or intuitively caught on the wink meaning of 'magical realism' as 'flat, meandering story'.
No comment on Dean Brown; that thing practically fizzled out by the time I was in 4th grade.
I had Reddit sockpuppets in the names of every major character in The Dying Earth. In my opinion, Jack Vance and American fantasy are the Bauhaus if Itten didn't leave. Don't get trapped into thinking there's a lot of it; the original Dying Earth is an anthology of short stories written prior to 1950, and then there are two legit Sagas written in the '80s. They're okay but not relevant.
- I was entertained, but ended up confused by both detractors and praises.
I think the more an egghead likes a book, the more they make it "important." I've never wanted to bother with Salman Rushdie; prior to his fatwah nobody really gave a shit so all of a sudden his work had to take on enough meaning to support an East V West clash of ideals. What was that shit newspaper in France? Charlie Hebdo? Ain't nobody said anything nice about Charlie Hebdo until AQAP started shooting cartoonists.
My go-to is Margaret Atwood. She's a shitty author (shut up, she is). She's self-important. She's, by all accounts, a dreadful person. But because she writes pulp sci fi along the lines of "fear the Republicans" the eggheads support her in her assertion that she doesn't write sci fi, sci fi is grubby and she's important. Lather, rinse, repeat for David Foster Wallace. Meanwhile, Stephen King was out getting rich in the literary wilderness for 40 years, bane of English teachers everywhere, until he started dissing Trump on Twitter. All of a sudden his shit's literature.
- No comment on Dean Brown; that thing practically fizzled out by the time I was in 4th grade.
He's a terrible writer and you don't need to read him ever. All you need is the following:
1) Anthony Burgess' review of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1980 was "someone should make this into a novel"
2) Dan Brown did exactly that
3) The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail sued him for plagiarism
4) Dan Brown argued "holupaminnit, you said yours was non-fiction" and the authors came back with "well... but nobody really believed that, did they"
5) Things went as well as expected
Holy Blood, Holy Grail? A breathless pseudoacademic conspiracy theory. Da Vinci Code? An Encyclopedia Brown mystery. If you ever come across a copy, voice Robert Langdon as Bullwinkle the Moose and Sophie Neveu (yes, really) as Rocky the Squirrel.
Still, Dying Earth sounds interesting, and I prefer it as short stories. Some authors and works are just better that way, and this seems like it'd be the case, going by intuition.
- All of a sudden his shit's literature.
You're probably right. Dunno if it's better or worse that I almost never read the stories about the books/authors I read. On the one hand, I can at least argue little bias/influence apart from the source of recommendation. On the other, I guess it ends up with me looking clueless most of the time.
- He's a terrible writer and you don't need to read him ever.
"You read Brown, liar!"
"No?"
"Remember that book about NSA being attacked by mutating cryptogram double-teamed by two one-note nerds, with superfluous murderer and 'muahaha'-grade office intrigue in the background that led nowhere? That was Digital Fortress."
"Oooooh. God, I'm so sorry you have to remember it."
"Your rant was the best part of that road trip."
Now we're watching Rocky and Bullwinkle.
- What was that shit newspaper in France? Charlie Hebdo? Ain't nobody said anything nice about Charlie Hebdo until AQAP started shooting cartoonists.
Couldnt resist the chance to correct you. Charlie Hebdo was well revered in France before the shooting.
Not only for its carton but for a lot of articles who proved some corruption in France politicians, and ruined some career.
Very local corruption affair, and very french newspaper , but revered in the country.
Your point stand, never heard about Rushdie before the Fatwa. Still he probably was revered in his home country
I think LotR was the first to have elves and hobbits and dwarves and orcs in the way that's instantly recognizable.
I agree that its a cozy story, and 1000% caste system, though imo LotR is a lot more thoughtful and I'd argue that the whole 'magic is fading and evil will eventually win but we'll fight while we can' tone makes it not all twee feel-good fluff.
- I think LotR was the first to have elves and hobbits and dwarves and orcs in the way that's instantly recognizable.
And I would argue that counts for less than you think. One of the things I like about modern fantasy is the trope that Elves are assholes. Tolkien was basically at "look how cool this lost race of ubermensch are" while modern fantasy is basically "elves love the smell of their own farts."
- I agree that its a cozy story, and 1000% caste system, though imo LotR is a lot more thoughtful and I'd argue that the whole 'magic is fading and evil will eventually win but we'll fight while we can' tone makes it not all twee feel-good fluff.
On the one hand, it's a bunch of children's books. On the other hand, it very clearly reflects Tolkien's understanding and trauma of The Great War. I think it's the duality that bugs me; by trying to be both it does neither well.
The thing about American fantasy of the era is the good guys and the bad guys were human. You couldn't hide your actions behind ethnic tension. America fought a war over slavery; the British didn't think it was worth fighting a war over genocide until it was on their doorstep.
I also just finally read LotR after bouncing off it a few times. I had the opposite takeaway though, at least having played a lot of D&D but not having read a lot of fantasy novels, that - wow it was so much better and more thoughtful than the modern take.
Just Dungeon & Dragons and associates, plus of course the movies.
As well as vague awareness of like, video game plots & tropes.
What struck me the most was how LotR was very anti-war in a lot of ways which absolutely does not carry over.
I can completely agree it was like Star Wars, especially in that: Star Wars (4 at least) was good! It had an incredible aesthetic that I fell in love with instantly, the story is simple and nice, every line is iconic. But more Star Wars just isn't that interesting and it did seem like everyone was trying to make their own worse version for a while at least.
I didn't say it isn't thoughtful or as thoughtful, just that it doesn't flow as well. I think most people who aren't pretentious literary students would be pro Tom Bombadil's removal, and it doesn't take a lot of digging to find it's a remnant from the time Tolkien wasn't sure if LotR would be a full-on children's book or not. The book could easily lose about 50 pages of descriptions and scarcely anyone would care? I could go on, but to me at least, it's simultaneously polished and rough as hell.
EDIT/Addendum: Maybe to elaborate and add a bit of comparison with GEB (you CS folks love it): GEB waxes poetics about recursion for pretty much its entire body, comparing recursive changes of a structure to fugue and drawing parallels. I have no doubt that, just as SICP, it was mind-blowing at its time. But today? I learned about this shit in high school CS and middle school music classes, respectively. Putting it together is perhaps non-trivial, sure, but with the benefit of GEB doing a lot of the work, people who came after can do it all in a matter of 3 hour lecture. So a lot of their impact is just lost on me: I got it in a refined version before, so the progenitors feel clunky.
- GEB waxes poetics about recursion for pretty much its entire body, comparing recursive changes of a structure to fugue and drawing parallels. I have no doubt that, just as SICP, it was mind-blowing at its time. But today? I learned about this shit in high school CS and middle school music classes, respectively. Putting it together is perhaps non-trivial, sure, but with the benefit of GEB doing a lot of the work, people who came after can do it all in a matter of 3 hour lecture.
"Cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms" being the author's summaries of not only GEB (1979) but also Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (1976), I am fully ready to argue that GEB was an intellectual's retreat from Reagan. American culture was big on trite wordplay back then. It was largely insufferable.
Yeah totally - see what you mean about the Tom Bombadil & that. I like the prose now, but especially the first chapter is very long and academic and not exactly a page turner.
Re: GEB also haven't finished it despite starting but I totally agree with you there, nothing felt like 'mind blowing'. For LotR though, I went in expecting to not be that impressed since I had all the cultural osmosis already and had seen the movies etc and, for me at least, it had a different tone and character and earnestness that I think the modern versions lost at some point. (I do still love the movies though).
Recently read some Sherlock Holmes and did get that feeling though- everything was such a predictable trope, but I suppose at the time it was a lot more new
- Recently read some Sherlock Holmes and did get that feeling though- everything was such a predictable trope, but I suppose at the time it was a lot more new
I'm not sure, but it was certainly influential. That's why we see it as trite and need its retelling repackaged.
By the way, if you like British humor (humour?) with commentary on (among others) writers stealing and redoing things, I recommend Upstart Crow.
The Swedish title is better (Men Who Hate Women). I read the Millennium Trilogy 1 1/2 times because it's super-duper engaging and really fun but my recommendation is don't overthink it because the careening, Scooby-Doo nature of the writing hides some flaws.