Tocky on 27/2/2016 at 05:42
The Stars My Destination! Bester is Best!
Yakoob on 6/3/2016 at 22:09
So I just finished Part 1 of The Stars My Destination and, frankly, its not quite doing it for me :/ It has enough interesting ideas (Jeunting, Scientific tribesmen etc.) and I'm far enough into it that I want to finish but I'm not sure if I'd consider it one of my favorite SciFi books. One major issue is the protagonist is utterly unlikable and driven by a single motivation, yet not complex or unique enough for me to find interesting. I'm also finding it tad unnecessarily long in places (like the trekking through the pitch-black caves only to land in even more caves for ~10 pages straight) and some parts confusing as to what is going on/who's saying what (altho that could be my own distraction).
bjack on 7/3/2016 at 06:17
Not reading it, but heard/read recently that the Dark Tower (book #3) is going to be released as a movie in early 2017. I've read a lot of King. I do not think the Dark Tower and the Gunslinger can be done in one movie. But, so be it. They will do it. I still have my imagination and the books. It has been so long since I read the whole series. I was actually happy to read the opinion of someone commenting on making this new movie. It brought back memories of the story. Long forgotten. Troubling somewhat that the memory fades so quickly, but I have the books, in a brown cardboard box, with all my Stephen King paperbacks. I guess I have at least 100 LBS of King. I refuse to throw him away. He keeps company with Orwell, along with some others.
Thirith on 7/3/2016 at 07:41
I've been rereading and greatly enjoying Kieron Gillen's comic The Wicked + The Divine. When I got the third volume and read that one, I was rather confused since I didn't remember everything that had happened in the earlier volumes, but going through all three volumes I can see the many ways in which Gillen's setting things up. I definitely also like how the comic handles its central metaphor of gods=pop stars.
faetal on 7/3/2016 at 08:32
Been reading (
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/94979.The_Complete_David_Bowie) The Complete David Bowie since January (it only covers to about 2008 unfortunately) which has been a really great and interesting read, though it's not for anyone for isn't very into Bowie since it isn't a narrative book so much a chronological look at everything he's done - first chapter is every song he was involved in, listed alphabetically, the second is all of the albums, the third is compilations - all very in depth, but gives a really fascinating insight into the processes, the relationships with other musicians and is light on the facets of his personal life (they're in there, it just isn't central). As a musician, it's made me think a lot about my own writing and recording processes. One of the things which really struck me and makes me realise is a vital component to his overall sound over the years is his impatience in the studio with doing loads of takes. I've always thought in spite of the talent and professionalism, there was always something vaguely rough cut and carefree about his recordings and now it's apparent why.
R Soul on 10/3/2016 at 23:20
Last night I finished reading the last of the Discworld books. :(
nicked on 11/3/2016 at 07:02
I finished Raising Steam a couple of months back. I've not read many of the ones for young adults, so I think there's one he wrote after that but just before he died, but it definitely made me sad. It also felt really different to his earlier books - quite dark, not as funny or meaningful. I feel like the Discworld series slowly petered out toward the end, which is a real shame, as it's my favourite series of books, and the best ones are among the best stories ever written.
demagogue on 11/3/2016 at 08:31
Right now, a book called
Soul of a New Machine.
Quote:
The Soul of a New Machine is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction[1] and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
I started it because it was the inspiration for the tv show
Halt and Catch Fire, which I like. It still holds up really well because it focuses on the personalities and the special situation history presented them with... And I have to say it's fun to read about the computer revolution from the perspective of the late 70s/early 80s. On the one hand, it's funny to read how cut throat they were considering the state of the tech, and the pecking order of the industry at the time (some companies are still big now, some have long since disappeared), but on the other their energy for it still feels perfectly proportional considering they were pulling this whole new industry up by its bootstraps out of practically nothing, out from the IBM suits. They thought they were already in the heat of it & changing history--although it doesn't seem like much compared to what we know was to come--but the perspective of this book doesn't know that and in a way, from its perspective, they were right in the sense that even then they knew (correctly, although not for this company itself, but the scene it was a part of) that they were on the ground floor of a big sea change, setting the stage for everything to come afterwards, and it ending up just as big as they'd imagined it would be.
And it's the 80s. What's not to love about the 80s? The excesses and egos and style are all here. I'm just starting, though, so I haven't gotten to the part where things become insane, where you have young designers sleeping in their cubicles and the like. But it's definitely giving a sense of the period as only someone actually writing in that time could, as opposed to what people would write about it now.
