#930

Books

I need to learn to type.

#931

I said booms booms booms let me hear you say folktales (folk tales!)

I am reading 3 books too, but one of them is being read very slowly at the pace of a formerly-weekly-now-whenever-they-get-time podcast.

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#932

Her new one, The City We Became, has just come out. It’s very good, completely different to the Broken Earth books in just about every way you could imagine, but still just as readable.

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#933

How are you finding the Chabon book? I really enjoyed the two of his I read this year, and they were a big part of why I chose the Yiddish folktale book as my next choice in my continued quest to read this particular collection of folktale collections (along with also having read a Primo Levi book recently).

#934

Here she comes with her trash books…

I finished The Return and throughly enjoyed the levels of trash mixed with some light gore and horror.

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#935

Yeah well I found it a bit tough at first. I like it in general but I wouldn’t rush to buy another of his without reading a sample: he has this habit of sticking far too much description into a sentence. It’s like trying to read someone’s idea of ‘compact’ computer code that is obviously pared down and beautiful, but it takes you three times as long to understand the meaning than the verbose form.

I posted about it here:

But obviously I assume the old man is Sherlock Holmes and given the time it’s set, it may be he is deliberately writing in a style that evokes that sort of period. Hence, I’d need to read something else.

It’s good writing I just don’t enjoy this kind of over-wordy style that forces me to re-read sentences to be sure I understood their meaning. Reading The Testaments was so good because Atwood never does this, she is clear and precise and yet incredibly good.

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#936

Finished The Final Solution and just started in on The Third Policeman @anon19035908 @Icarus-Smicarus. Could only read a few pages due to tiredness last night but I liked the style of the prose.

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#937

Reading Dune atm, what’s the consensus on it here? I sort of have to read it all out of social shame because I was lent it by somebody at work a long time ago so now I have to read it to justify having held onto it for so long. Fucking tedious. I mean I’m about a quarter of the way through and things are starting to pick up and it’s becoming interesting, but fucking hell the first few chapters were bullshit. I am somewhat hoping that the foreign coloniser will not actually turn out be the Messiah of the indigenous peasant class but I’ve seen footage of Kyle McLaughlin riding a big worm soooo…

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#938

There was a brief discussion of it in the sci fi thread not long ago. I recently read it. I think I mostly enjoyed the first half, but kinda became a bit of a slog to read for me.

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#939

I added it to my wishlist a few weeks ago…I will promptly remove

#940

I mean what happens on PornHub stays, or something.

But yes, @paulo13 is right, you should read the Sci-Fi thread:

#941

good lad

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#942

It’s good. Second is rubbish. Third is ok. Fourth is also ok. I feel liked I have to read the last two Frank Herbert written ones because I got this far. Definitely put up with the first though as it is worth it.

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#943

I read Dune a few months ago, after being told by various friends I needed to. Got very bored and didn’t like the messiah stuff. Still kinda interested in the new TV series that’s being made. Unless I imagined that that’s actually a thing.

#944

Oh - didn’t imagine it. There’s a TV series and a film coming.

#945

There’s a prophecy :sleeping: There’s endless exposition :sleeping: All the characters are men apart from like one or two women who are tangential to the men’s stories and get iced :sleeping:

Although funnily enough the last thing I read was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which also has those three things, but the difference is it’s fucking excellent. The prophecies are ambiguous as to whether they’ll come true or in what form they’ll come true so they’re interesting, and their origins are interesting and central to the plot. The worldbuilding is all done in such an entertaining way that the ostensibly unrelated tangents to events that happened 300 years ago containing characters never again mentioned would make a perfectly enjoyable book of short stories even if you removed them from the wider book. And one of the central themes is that although everything is run by white men, they’re demonstrably the worst and ruin everything for everyone.

I read it as a teenager and thought it’d probably ruin my rosy memories of it going back to it now but it would be a nice ropy nostalgic read. Nah, it’s wonderful, miles better than I remembered it.

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#946

The sequels to Dune pretty much torch the ‘Messiah saving everyone’ thing to be honest

#947

I think I will have to wait for Lynch’s film adaptations of those. Although I did like that cover of a person inside a giant dildo a few posts back.

#948

Just finished Burn - by Patrick Ness. Good YA fun. Best of his for a while, really enjoyed it. Climax was a bit predictable and less interesting than the set up.

Wolf Hall next + the Mark E. Smith book that’s been recommended in the Fall thread on the music board for some light relief.

#949

went on a Yukio Mishima binge

my god he lived a fascinating life

(TW: quite graphic suicide)

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