What are you reading right now?

[Mr. Manchester]

I'm about half way though Hyperion and just got done with the Poet's story and so far I'm enjoying it. Sometimes the set up to a story drags a little bit but overall it's a pretty good mystery about a spooky future planet. It's enough where I'm looking for clues in each of the short background stories. Don't know if I'll move on to the next book afterward but for now it's pretty cool stuff.

 

[ScurvyRat]

I'm about half way though Hyperion and just got done with the Poet's story and so far I'm enjoying it. Sometimes the set up to a story drags a little bit but overall it's a pretty good mystery about a spooky future planet. It's enough where I'm looking for clues in each of the short background stories. Don't know if I'll move on to the next book afterward but for now it's pretty cool stuff.

Man you're really in for a treat. I highly recommend sticking out the full series, as it sheds light on many of the strange events in the first book.

I certainly have my criticisms of Simmons, you can scroll up in the thread if you're curious.

I'll give you one piece of info for the rest of the books: The cruciform sticks around. Make of that what you will.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

Man you're really in for a treat. I highly recommend sticking out the full series, as it sheds light on many of the strange events in the first book.

I certainly have my criticisms of Simmons, you can scroll up in the thread if you're curious.

I'll give you one piece of info for the rest of the books: The cruciform sticks around. Make of that what you will.

I'll take your recommendation then. The Poet story was so good that I'm pretty hyped to keep going, The part where he withdraws into the internet to complain about politics until he realizes that he probably shouldn't become a pathetic shut-in was pretty insightful for being written in 1989. In fact all of the stories have been great so far, looking forward to sitting down with later.

 

[DiggieSmalls]

Real World Cryptography by David Wong. Its been a pretty good read considering technical books tend to be pretty dry

 

[ScurvyRat]

I'll take your recommendation then. The Poet story was so good that I'm pretty hyped to keep going, The part where he withdraws into the internet to complain about politics until he realizes that he probably shouldn't become a pathetic shut-in was pretty insightful for being written in 1989. In fact all of the stories have been great so far, looking forward to sitting down with later.

It's so hard to pick a favorite.
However I think Sol Weintraub has the best story in the first book.

The situation with his daughter almost made me cry. Almost.

Also, lmao @ the jews having their own planet in this story. It's too perfect. Jews fucking WOULD make a galactic Israeli state in a post-space future lmfao

 

[Big Miss Steak]

I'm reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time am kinda surprised how much praise it has received given its shoddy portrayal of autism.

 

[ScurvyRat]

I'm reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time am kinda surprised how much praise it has received given its shoddy portrayal of autism.

Haven't read it but autism is very hard to write, if you don't have it yourself.
Found a quote from the book:
“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them"

lmfao
Seems like the author has an incredibly basic understanding of autism and also suffers from a small vocabulary.

 

[Big Miss Steak]

Haven't read it but autism is very hard to write, if you don't have it yourself.
Found a quote from the book:
“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them"

lmfao
Seems like the author has an incredibly basic understanding of autism and also suffers from a small vocabulary.

Here's the full passage that quote is from. The entire book reads like this. Apparently the author taught special ed at some point. In his own words:

unsurprisingly, i'm often asked to talk about asperger’s and autism or to become involved with organisations who work on behalf of people with asperger’s and autism, many of whom do wonderful work. but i always decline, for two reasons:

1) i know very little about the subject. i did no research for curious incident (other than photographing the interiors of swindon and paddington stations). i’d read oliver sacks’s essay about temple grandin and a handful of newspaper and magazine articles about, or by, people with asperger’s and autism. i deliberately didn’t add to this list. imagination always trumps research. i thought that if i could make Christopher real to me then he’d be real to readers. i gave him some rules to live by and some character traits and opinions, all of which i borrowed from people i know, none of whom would be labelled as having a disability. judging by the reaction, it seems to have worked.

Frankly insulting.

 

[ScurvyRat]

Frankly insulting.

And I said
And she said
And I said
And she said
And I said
Is ''said" even a word anymore? What the fuck is this? This is genuinely atrocious writing. I'm flabbergasted. Stunned. Deeply shaken to my core that this is a successful writer who has a smaller vocabulary than the contents of this singular page in the thread.
How did you find this steaming pile of re-digested garbage?

 

[innocent jogger]

I just finished The Autopsy: Best Weird Stories of Michael Shea


I had never heard of him before until a friend sent me this. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys horror/sci-fi/weirdness.

I don't have another book queued up yet but I have a stack of old Savage Sword of Conan magazines keeping me company in the crapper.

 

[Womble of Wimbledon]

Started The Silence of the Lambs. Enjoying it so far but it's very close to the film so I can't really separate the two. Sometimes I wish I could unsee films so I could read the book in isolation, then see the film for the first time all over again.

 

[glass_houses]

And I said
And she said
And I said
And she said
And I said
Is ''said" even a word anymore? What the fuck is this? This is genuinely atrocious writing. I'm flabbergasted. Stunned. Deeply shaken to my core that this is a successful writer who has a smaller vocabulary than the contents of this singular page in the thread.
How did you find this steaming pile of re-digested garbage?

I enjoyed Curious Incident, but the author was correct in not specifying that the main character was autistic. I enjoyed the story but it wasn't an accurate one. The somewhat simplistic vocabulary and prose was effective at conveying the main character's intellectual impairment. The father was a dick, though. His not quite girlfriend realised that she didn't want to spend the rest of her life as a carer for a disabled person she wasn't related to, so the father kills her dog and leaves the corpse for her to find. Charming.

 

[Big Miss Steak]

Started The Silence of the Lambs. Enjoying it so far but it's very close to the film so I can't really separate the two. Sometimes I wish I could unsee films so I could read the book in isolation, then see the film for the first time all over again.

I remember the novel being surprisingly well-written, but this was years and years ago. I do recall it being very close to the film. I seem to recall that Hannibal is much more different from its film adaptation, especially the final act.

And I said
And she said
And I said
And she said
And I said
Is ''said" even a word anymore? What the fuck is this? This is genuinely atrocious writing. I'm flabbergasted. Stunned. Deeply shaken to my core that this is a successful writer who has a smaller vocabulary than the contents of this singular page in the thread.
How did you find this steaming pile of re-digested garbage?

TBF overusing synonyms for "said" is the sign of a weak writer, and the narrator is an autistic 15 year old. That said (hahaha) this intentionally robotic and dry style gets old. Reading it for a book club (the club is almost all female Christian schoolteachers and has been going on for 10+ years). The theme for this year's books is banned books.

I enjoyed Curious Incident, but the author was correct in not specifying that the main character was autistic. I enjoyed the story but it wasn't an accurate one. The somewhat simplistic vocabulary and prose was effective at conveying the main character's intellectual impairment. The father was a dick, though. His not quite girlfriend realised that she didn't want to spend the rest of her life as a carer for a disabled person she wasn't related to, so the father kills her dog and leaves the corpse for her to find. Charming.

Christopher is an annoying little shit who is self-aware enough to behave better than he does, and his parents are both shitty. if someone speared my pet like that I would burn his house down with him and his sperg spawnling inside.

 

[🔪Cold Steel Brand Rep🔪]

I got a really nice collection of American poetry from Dickenson, Frost, and Emerson that I go and read on the local community college campus to get pussy

 

[Gangstalker #32194]

I'm starting the Valis trilogy

 

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

Started The Silence of the Lambs. Enjoying it so far but it's very close to the film so I can't really separate the two. Sometimes I wish I could unsee films so I could read the book in isolation, then see the film for the first time all over again.

I wonder if the actual "Silence of the Lambs" foster parent plot is better fleshed out in the novel.

It seems really shoehorned in the movie simply to give Lecter a device to manipulate Starling.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I want to watch Dune, both the 1980's movie and the recent two movies. So I recently read the actual book.

It was pretty good. There is a very specific feeling of this being a truly foreign culture you are reading about with the oblique references and alien worlds, though I wish I had paid attention to the table of contents at the start so I could have thumbed to the end of the book to the terminology appendix to understand a few words. The deep thought given about how precious water is and how to save it makes for a fascinating setting. It would have likely sounded even more alien if Islam wasn't more prevalent nowadays so that a lot of words and mentions aren't as mysterious to us as they were for a 1960s WASP american.

I also find it funny how in 1966 Frank Herbert considered being "just" over 200 kilos to be "grossly and immensely fat" and a sign of how much of a glutton and a hedonist Vladmir Harkonnen is. If only he knew about the death fats of the 21st century he would have made it so the Baron would actually need the suspensors he uses to even move.

Gonna read Dune Messiah soon.

 

[cold comfort]

I read When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a collection of progressively more fictional stories about non-fictional scientists, and liked the first story, but none of the others. That first one, Prussian Blue, starts with how the creation of this beautiful blue pigment led to the discovery of cyanide. We then segue into the origins of chemical warfare, pioneered by a Jewish chemist, who developed a process that saved millions from starvation but was also used to produce gunpowder and explosives that killed millions in WWI. After the war he succeeded in developing a super effective new pesticide, a slightly modified version of which would later be used in the gas chambers as Zyklon B. The story brings all these strands and juxtapositions together in an elegantly flowing narrative, and ends strongly on that final moment of irony.

The other stories all revolve around a famous scientist and play out pretty much the same: they're struggling with a scientific conundrum, they go crazy or take drugs (Heisenberg) or molest a teenage girl at the sanatorium (Schrödinger), this episode helps them solve the problem but they don't understand quite how they arrived at the solution, and because of the implications of their discovery an existential crisis ensues. As a Ligotti fan, that idea appeals to me in fiction, but that kind of woo-woo mysticism didn't mesh well with using actual real-life people and theories.

 

[melty]

What is the deal with foucault? Does anybody actually understand his writing? I tried reading him awhile ago and didn't get it but some people insist he's a genius. Today I picked up madness and civilization, and was actually pretty friendly to the concept. I thought I read enough books people consider hard, and this topic seemed to be at an intersection of things I thought I understood. But again I found that it's mostly gibberish. He bounces from topic to topic, he uses big words to obfuscate what he's talking about, he invents new meanings for things that already have meanings to argue for something, etc. The book seemed to have a lot of citations, but when I looked at them, they were all to stuff like a line of music, not like, a study or something credible. I don't know, does anybody understand this stuff? Why is he so popular?

 

[Womble of Wimbledon]

What is the deal with foucault? Does anybody actually understand his writing? I tried reading him awhile ago and didn't get it but some people insist he's a genius. Today I picked up madness and civilization, and was actually pretty friendly to the concept. I thought I read enough books people consider hard, and this topic seemed to be at an intersection of things I thought I understood. But again I found that it's mostly gibberish. He bounces from topic to topic, he uses big words to obfuscate what he's talking about, he invents new meanings for things that already have meanings to argue for something, etc. The book seemed to have a lot of citations, but when I looked at them, they were all to stuff like a line of music, not like, a study or something credible. I don't know, does anybody understand this stuff? Why is he so popular?

Welcome to all philosophical writing. The entire genre is notorious for being intentionally obscure, grandiloquent and repetitive so it requires years of study just to get a handle on what the fuck the author is on about. You think Foucault is hopelessly obscure, try Derrida. Even lifelong academics who've spent years reading him can't decide what he was on about.

I studied Foucault to an extent in university, he is considered the father of modern sociology and sexology. So you can thank him for ideas such as gender and sexuality being socially constructed. One theory he had which I found enlightening was that sexual relationships between adults and children are not inherently harmful, it is society's reaction to them that causes harm. That alone is enough to dismiss his ideas in my opinion.