What are you reading right now?

I'm still trudging through Empire's End by Cuck Wendig. I expected it to be bad, and it is, but I wasn't ready for how BORING it is. It's a slog to get through. Pages and pages of dialogue reiterating things that already happened, and the prose is so awful. It's very repetitive. Redundant, reiterative, it says things over and over again. Did I mention it's repetitive?

The author also has the faggiest way of writing ever. It's trying to go for "epic" by using this weird theater-kid cadence that sounds so fucking retarded. Here's a little excerpt that shows this and the redundancy:
Waroo smells Dessard, yes. He smells the man’s sweat. He smells the Imperial’s willingness—no, his eagerness—to kill.

Then another scent.

A Wookiee scent.

A scent oddly familiar, one that stirs within Waroo a sudden lift of his blood and spirits—
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Smell smell smell scent scent scent

It was a smelly smell. That smelly smell that smells... smelly. Wookies.

This book is awful, it was written for idiots and Cuck Wendig should be bullied for eternity. I will continue this act of self-harm until I finish the book, or until I black out and commit an atrocity.
 
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Jewthulhu said:
Took a break and am reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson. Kinda meh so far. My experience with Gibson is that he can have good ideas (like with Neuromancer), but something about his writing just doesn't do it for me.
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Yeah I agree, Neuromancer is one of my all time favorite books that I've read at least 20 times, but his other work is just kind of boring.
 
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Biggie Smalls' Taint said:
This book is awful, it was written for idiots and Cuck Wendig should be bullied for eternity. I will continue this act of self-harm until I finish the book, or until I black out and commit an atrocity.
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It sounds like he's a Wookie furry who wants to get fucked up the ass by a Wookie.

He should eat a BOOT. A BOOT covered in SHIT.
 
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argopilled said:
and the band played on
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I read And the Band Played On in 1994, so about age 19 for me. At that time and age, most of it was quite a revelation. I'm going to guess it's tremendously dated now, but when I picked it up, it was the most accessible and comprehensive history you could find, and I'd still recommend it if you keep that in mind. Might be some history in it that's fallen by the wayside.

Currently doing some light reading after finishing Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Fall 1945...right after reading Stalingrad. My go-to reset is any of the classic British chick crime writers; currently anything I can find by Patricia Wentworth. Her main creation, Maud Silver, is inevitably compared to Miss Marple. I do love Miss Marple, but Maud Silver makes me think of Jane Eyre as an early 20th century detective.
 
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I'll tell you what I'm not reading. American Midnight.

I'm seriously pissed because I was anticipating it a lot. I'm very interested in that period, and while I know there's a great danger in trusting anything a Communist says, I think they are right in that this country was seriously fucked up in the 1910s-1920s (it's actually hardcore libertarians and paleoconservatives that are the other group that recognizes this), Wilsonian America. This incredibly dangerous period of mass unrest, basically a proto-fascist movement that threatened to overturn liberal democracy in this country.

But right off the bat Hochschild started to piss in my mouth by ranting about Trump. The funny thing is that I believe this stuff is extremely relevant to modern life (I actually teach some of this for a college course) in that you have these Klansman pieces of shit trying to terrorize a populist (socialists then) movement, trying to throw its leadership (Debs/Trump) in prison, trying to censor and terrorize people with corporate-government collusion, using Wars to Make the World Safe for Democracy as a cudgel against the public.

It could not be more obvious who the Wilson is in the modern day, down to him being physically sick and incapable of fulfilling his office, but numbnuts has no self-awareness that he'll go on about outrage propaganda being used to try to sucker people into supporting entry into a world war... and then blame Trump more.

Where I got off was little jabs at the South, not because that pissed me off enough by itself, but it started to trigger my Jewdar. I start thinking, this guy sounds like a real kike. I can just sense extreme kikery afoot. So I look it up and Hocschild is a New York City kike, and then I see he also did King Leopold's Ghost, something else that I wanted to read but have heard people say has severe problems.

It's a lot like my experience with picking up 1877: America's Year of LIving Violently and not realizing until it was too late that it was written by Michael Belisarius (name meant nothing to me, but the story behind him did).

I can't even read the thing now because I have to assume everything he says is tainted with dishonesty. That's what happens when you play fast and loose with the truth in ANY of your works, they're ALL suspect now.


FML
Waste of a good topic
Fuck off back to Yiddishland, kike
 
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Saw the name Hochschild when you picked up the book and it took that long for the Jewdar to go off?

I finished American Midnight; too much agenda, I agree. Trump derangement is a massive turn-off when I just want to read some history. Most people who do read a lot of history have sufficient intelligence to draw any parallels for themselves.

At least American Midnight made me want to find better reading on censorship in the Wilson years.
 
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General Emílio Médici said:
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.
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What I loved was the feeling that this is a fully lived-in universe. I really loved The Dune Encyclopedia, too, though it seems to be non-canon now, since his son flooded bookstores with his shitty books.
 
About the Dune Encyclopedia and Herbert's son's attitude towards it:
The Dune Encyclopedia reflects an alternate "Dune universe" which did not necessarily represent the "canon" created by Frank Herbert. Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert, writing with Kevin J. Anderson, IS continuing to establish the canon of the Dune universe.
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Yes, but your canon is lame and sucks. Your dad was quoted as saying nothing but positive things about it, show some respect, hack.
 
Took a break from Cuck Wendig and ended up reading an entire novella: The Night Silver River Run Red . It's a horror western by Christine Morgan. A group of kids sneak off to go see a traveling circus, and they get themselves into a heap of trouble, but they manage to avoid the real bloodshed happening in town. It's structured as a series of vignettes, peeking into the atrocities being committed by the various gangs of psychopaths that descended on the town. One about two creeps who fancy themselves doctors and their experiments was particularly hair-rasing.

It's categorized as extreme horror/splatterpunk, so if you're interested in reading it know that it contains upsetting themes and imagery. Think scary more in the way of Liveleak than somehting like Edgar Allan Poe, though it isn't as graphic as some others in this same series of Horror Western by Deadite Press.

It's a testament to how boring Cuck Wendig's writing is that I managed to finish an entire separate book as a reprieve from his garbage. Cuck's writing is scarier; I dread having to go back to reading his stuff.
 
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My resolution this week is to round up and finish the dozen odd books that I have laying around half read. I've finished The Wasp Factory and The Mirror, I'm on Perdido Street Station now. Should be done with that one tomorrow, and then the next is Hyperion. Onwards!
 
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- The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington: Mostly made up of surreal fairy tales. Quite funny and imaginative but I don’t think I’ll remember them for very long. I loved her novel The Hearing Trumpet though.

- The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson: About a xenobiologist who is stranded on a planet and rescued by aliens who communicate with patterns on their skin. It’s fun learning about the aliens’ culture, seeing Juna commit various faux-pas as she tries to earn the aliens’ respect, seeing her make some friends along the way. Unfortunately it ends on a low note, as the final 25% is much less interesting, and spent largely on a problem that has been obviously brewing since the halfway point, and is resolved exactly how you’d think.

- its sequel, Through Alien Eyes: This is like the shitty last quarter of Color stretched out to a whole book. The dialogue is absolutely dire. I guess it didn’t show as much in the previous book because it makes sense for aliens and humans learning to communicate to sound stilted. Issues are tediously dragged out, even though the solution always turns out to be quite simple. The lessons learned at the end are not only obvious, but already touched on in the first one.
glass_houses said:
My resolution this week is to round up and finish the dozen odd books that I have laying around half read. I've finished The Wasp Factory and The Mirror, I'm on Perdido Street Station now. Should be done with that one tomorrow, and then the next is Hyperion. Onwards!
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What did you think of them? I've been meaning to check out PSS / The Scar / Iron Council. It's been a long time since I read any Mieville but I remember I really liked Embassytown, but was disappointed with The City & The City.
 
cold comfort said:
What did you think of them? I've been meaning to check out PSS / The Scar / Iron Council. It's been a long time since I read any Mieville but I remember I really liked Embassytown, but was disappointed with The City & The City.
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Perdido Street Station is actually a long time favourite of mine, but it's been quite a few years since I last read it. I've always enjoyed it on reread, but I will say that I remembered it much better than I realised, and I'm not really enjoying it as much as I did in the past. I'm not sure if that's because I remember it too well to immerse myself properly or if my tastes have moved on.

Also, at least once in every page of dialogue, one of the characters "hisses" and it's aggravating as fuck. I completely understand needing a more descriptive term than "he/she said" but I have no doubt that Mieville knows how to use a fucking thesaurus. I remember that it threw me out of the reading zone all the other times I read it too.

The Scar is another favourite of mine, the world building, grubby morality and characterisation is top notch. Iron Council I've read once and rather disliked. Like you I enjoyed Embassytown but from memory The City and the City completely failed to keep my attention and I've never felt the urge to pick it up again. I've had Kraken sitting on my shelf for years and never touched it. Really need to get on that.
 
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