Daraan on 5/5/2016 at 19:49
Just finished the latest Metro 2035.
Now waiting for the next book from Brandon Sanderson coming next month.
Yakoob on 19/5/2016 at 21:26
I'm still reading Polish Wiedzmin: Sezon Burz, the latest of the Witcher novels by Andrzej Sapkowski released fairly recently compared to the oldies. Loving it so far, definitely one of my favorite in the series.
Also picked up another Polish book from my grampa: Tropami Powstańczej Przesyłki, an autobiographical tale from one of the Warsaw Ghetto boy handling mail delivery. Crawling through ruined trenches, getting out of German capture, and watching death and destruction spreading around. Pretty chilling, if fascinating...
zombe on 21/5/2016 at 23:55
While wandering around youtube aimlessly, i encountered "Adam Savage, Astronaut Chris Hadfield, and Andy Weir Talk 'The Martian'" : (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq3xtZ8AjPE)
And got to know, to my surprise, that the novel is free online ... well then ... why don't i just read it then?
Loved it. It does not waste readers time with any fluff and is very rich of relevant details. Pure sci-fi with little artistic license (most notably the storm that kick-starts the story and handling of radiation problems or, a different kind of artistic license, not terribly natural / believable logs).
If one has seen the movie first (as i have) then i would still wholeheartedly recommend the novel. There is, obviously, a lot more stuff going on in the novel that could ever fit on screen and has to be left out completely or simplified considerably. Not to mention all the technical details that have to be left out, both technical and mental (the martians though process as recorded on his logs).
Pirate-ninjas.
demagogue on 22/5/2016 at 04:24
I read the book first and liked how the movie played with some scenes ... like Watney's obscene text was off screen, but the readers knew what it was. And I smiled knowingly when, for the final cross-country trek, although they gutted almost everything but the essentials from it, they bothered to have a huge storm looming in the background for one bit... as if to show it all still happened like the book but they're glossing over it here. And I liked the little bits they added in the movie, like his care about little green things budding from the earth, er, from the mars.
henke on 15/7/2016 at 07:51
Currently listening to the audiobook of Stephen King's 11.22.63. Good stuff, as usual! I bought it on iTunes, because it was cheapest there, and only afterwards did I realize that the DRM on it is so intense that there was no way I was gonna get it onto my Android phone, so had to dust off the ol' iPod for this one.
Also, I just found out that Comixology are having a Summer Sale (which ends today), so I picked up Volumes 4 and 5 of Saga. I read, and greatly enjoyed, the first 3 volumes a couple years ago.
Yakoob on 4/8/2016 at 21:30
So I picked this thing for a dollar at a used book store:
Inline Image:
http://i.imgur.com/TNvma4z.jpgdespite the cover, it's actually pretty good. Interesting world with witty writing. The back reads:
Quote:
The economy is the new cold war battlefield, robots and androids do the work, and the Interstellar Sprocket Conspiracy intends to oil its gears with the flesh of humanity. Cadet Sergeant Henry Fleming enlists in the economy to save America, is joined by a hydraulic-aholic robot, an army of mutants, a wizard who cant keep on his skin, and the luscious mechanical love of Henrys life, Anne Droid. The one chance for humanity is subterranean race across the nuked-out heartland of America to find a forgotten power that can save the worldor destroy it.Tocky on 7/8/2016 at 08:31
Just finished Children of the Mind by Card. Don't bother. It is awful. Not completely but near enough. Nothing like the page turner Enders Game was.
Sulphur on 7/8/2016 at 11:40
It pretty much lost the plot by Xenocide, though that did have some interesting ideas. Ender's Shadow was a decent experiment, too.
Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead still remain pretty special, even if Card himself seems to be a questionably fundamentalist bigot.
nicked on 7/8/2016 at 20:21
Thinking about it, I've read quite a lot recently:
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - a fairly quick, easy read, but an exceptional story - told through the first-person-perspective progress reports of a man with an IQ of 68 who undergoes experimental surgery to make him more intelligent, it's a simply-told, but profound and moving look at the relationship between intelligence and emotional intelligence, and the nature of humanity. I won't lie, I could barely read the last page because my eyes were swimming with tears.
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut - another short book that makes for a quick, if not exactly easy, read. It's the story of a man mentally shattered by the atrocities he has witnessed in World War II, especially the fire-bombing of Dresden, told in equally shattered pieces as he becomes unstuck through time and lives out different sections of his life in jarring discontinuity. We are presented as fact that he is an alien abductee who exists outside of linear time, but of course we must question whether he has merely become utterly disconnected from reality because of his experiences. The overall effect is one that captures with disturbing wit the shell-shock and loss of meaning and humanity that war brings.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - almost impossible to neatly encapsulate in a synopsis, this is a Columbian epic about seven generations of one family in a tiny village in Columbia, filled with love, heartbreak, war, evil, skillfully woven-in magic and fantasy elements, and plenty of incest. It's weird and enormous and virtually indescribable, but I'd highly recommend it.
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad - a dense and difficult read, but beautifully written with exquisite prose throughout. It centres around a silver mine in a fictional South American nation, and the corruption and greed that affects everyone connected with it during a political coup. It takes a hell of a long time to get going - the first third of the book is a meandering montage of character setup before the action starts, but it pays dividends to stick with it, ultimately becoming a complex multi-layered story with bold strokes of horror and tragedy.
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie - the first part of a fantasy series, with well-drawn and lovably evil characters - the heroes are an utterly self-absorbed, arrogant aristocrat who is reluctantly training for a fencing contest, a vicious barbarian with a ludicrous body-count and rage issues, and a bitter, crippled torturer with no friends and less morals. The dialogue and characterisation is great, and you find yourself rooting for these despicable people despite yourself; my main complaint is that it just doesn't have a complete plot. It's clearly set up as the first part of a series, and doesn't hold up on it's own as a standalone story. If you can cope with the entire book being essentially "Act One", it's a fun read.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - I've read it before, but it's just as funny as I remember - an angel and a demon who have grown quite fond of human beings put aside their differences to try to stop the apocalypse. As with all Pratchett's stuff, the heart of the story is an unwavering love of humanity with all it's quirks and foibles, and the final battle between good and evil provides a marvelous setting for gently poking fun at religion, while celebrating humanity's idiosyncrasies, and with a hefty dose of Gaiman's stylish urban mythology mixed in.
demagogue on 10/8/2016 at 01:31
I'm actually reading Nostromo on my train commutes right now, maybe 50 pages in or so, and frankly finding it hard to get into just as you mentioned. Already action is happening with the coup, and his use of language is excellent as expected. The real problem is that it's not a story designed to be taken in bite-sized 30 minute chunks of a train commute, because I only get more lost in the trees with each continuation and keep losing the forest. I don't want to drop it, so I'm hoping it starts gelling, but I might switch over to some scifi pulp and then come back to it when I'm ready for the slog.
My last two books were better. The Forever War is perfectly made for reading on a commute because it's episodic as it is. And Howard's End was dense, but for some reason getting caught up in the trees worked for that story.
