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Post by berkley on Dec 9, 2016 22:45:57 GMT -5
That's what I plan to do as well, once I get started on them. I read 2 or 3 of the earlier ones back in the 70s but nothing since then.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 2, 2017 18:43:41 GMT -5
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart This is probably the third or fourth time I've read this book. It's one of the earlier post-war, post-apocalyptic SF novels and it won the first International Fantasy Award for Fiction (the very first SF award that I can find). Interestingly Stewart isn't really an SF writer. He was an English professor at Berkeley and a historian whose writing was all over the place both in non-fiction and fiction. But this book alone, both for quality and for its position in the SF pantheon makes Stewart an important genre writer. The book centers on Ish Williams who survives a plague that wipes out the vast majority of the human population on Earth. What follows is almost a travelogue of Ish's journey through a world with few humans and what happens to him...but also to Earth after humans. There are short interludes talking about the fate of various animals, structures, etc. How accurate they actually are is not for me to say, but it's a very interesting and thought provoking device. It's probably been a decade at least since I last read this one. And while I remembered a fair bit of it, there are things I didn't remember and things I'm sure I gleaned from it that I didn't before. Highly recommended.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 3, 2017 17:28:30 GMT -5
The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman Selected essay, speeches, forwards,etc. from Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is always a good read. Probably better in smaller chunks. And there are definitely things in there I wasn't remotely interested in...like his wife's career. But overall a good read as always.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 4, 2017 21:21:48 GMT -5
Earth Abides sounds really interesting... that's definitely going on my list.
I never posted on it, but I read I am Number four last week. Not too bad... if clearly written to be a movie franchise. Nothing deep and meaningful, just a hit you on the head with a sledgehammer environmental theme.
City of Stairs is for our sci-fi library book club...
First, a warning... the first chapter of the book is massively boring and pointless.. and introduces a bunch of characters that are never seen again.... it's just to set the stage of the world (and could have been done much better).. once Shara is introduced, the book actually starts.
This is really a fascinating world.. one where gods are real, and produce miracles, and conquer the world. That's in the distant past, though, and the conquered are now the conquers, opressing their former masters to the point of making mention of their culture illegal. I can't help but see the Middle Eastern conflict taking to a massive extreme here.. with first one side winning, then the other. It's a really intriguing set up.. can one actually kill a culture?
Once the story begins, Shara, an intelligence operative with a secret legacy and a student of the forbidden history, goes searching for her former mentor, who was killed while being the only man allow to study the old Divinities.
Shara is a great character... rather than make her a super spy or a Black Widow, she's actually a scholar, and acts like it.. it's quite a refreshing change. Her body guard, Sigrud, however, is right out of central casting for brooding loner with an obvious secret past.. and ends up being a walking Deus Ex Machina.
Much like the world it portrays, the book is full of extremes and contradictions.. great world building... but not enough of it to make sense (though there are in story reasons for that).. the city itself seems amazingly interesting, but we never really get to see it other than when people are destroying it. Then there's Mulaghesh, the general-turned-military governor that just wants to retire, yet somehow is always in the thick of things. I'm not ever totally sure I liked the book, yet. but with the ending (or lack thereof) I'll almost certainly read the sequel.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 9, 2017 12:12:25 GMT -5
Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell The fourth book starring Uhtred of Bebbanburg finds London occupied by Norsemen and Uhtred has been charged by Alfred to recapture the city with the aid of Alfred's ineffectual son-in-law Æthelred. The book follows with an attempt to rescue Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd, who has been captured by Norsemen. Probably the weakest book so far, this one was long on battle scenes and short on much of anything else. Did get some good character development on Æthelflæd. Overall it's a good readable historical novel, it's just not as interesting as what we've seen before.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 9, 2017 16:14:33 GMT -5
I wasn't sure whether to put this here or in the Politics thread... Powell's Books asked their employees and customers to recommend some books for Barack Obama and Donald Trump to read in the next few months. Here's what they came up with: For Obama: A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety Jimmy Carter The Undoing Project Michael Lewis The Sellout Paul Beatty The Empathy Exams: Essays Leslie Jamison Commonwealth Ann Patchett Born to Run Bruce Springsteen Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine The Soul of an Octopus Sy Montgomery My Beer Year Lucy Burningham When Breath Becomes Air Paul Kalanithi And for Trump: Washington: A Life Ron Chernow Tribe Sebastian Junger The Fire This Time Jesmyn Ward The Boys in the Boat Daniel James Brown Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson Team of Rivals Doris Kearns Goodwin The Sixth Extinction Elizabeth Kolbert All the Single Ladies Rebecca Traister Shoe Dog Phil Knight Before the Fall Noah Hawley More details: www.powells.com/presidential-reading
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Post by brutalis on Jan 13, 2017 8:08:03 GMT -5
Wednesday night finished up the 5th book in the Tour of the Merrimack: The Ninth Circle by R. M. Meluch and what a ride this one was. Where the previous 4 books were very slight character gung ho military bug slicing Earth versus Rome science fiction war this ones flips over to intense personal characterization to tell 2 intertwining stories. There is less emphasis on war and fighting and more in depth searching into the origins of life and the universe and what/how a person does/chooses creates the persona and aspects of that person.
Intense concepts and totally enthralling characters hook you from the start and carry this story. It's totally different from the other books, more like a continuance of other characters within the same universe but it works well and entertains and educates and makes you think, which good science fiction should always be capable of doing. There is such fun and creativity in all the aspects of it and disavowed Roman Pirates in space who are not completely the evil ruthless stereotypical villains is worth the reading!
Make time to sit back and read what could be an incredible movie series if Hollywood had the courage to develop it and not mute the subversive whimsy and fun interlocked with space opera and military action.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 13, 2017 12:25:29 GMT -5
Dig Ten Graves by Heath Lowrance. Short story collection by Heath Lowrance, who is probably best known for his weird western tales of Hawthorne, but writes in a number of genres. This one was mostly noirish tales, when I was expecting a bit more in the way of supernatural as I mostly know Lowrance from that type of thing. While I don't think there's a stand-out great story here, every single on is well worth reading. There's not a bad story in the lot. And that says a lot for any collection. Definitely recommended.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 15, 2017 0:45:37 GMT -5
"Do you want to: Form realistic goals and live a meaningful life? Boost your creativity and eat more broth? Chop wood like a Norwegian and discover the happiness of a Dane? Be cleaner? Be messier? Be a badass? We have the books to get you started — all on sale for a limited time! Offer good on new (full-priced) copies of select titles, in the featured edition only." www.powells.com/new-year-new-you
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 19, 2017 15:23:52 GMT -5
The Bloody Moonlight by Fredric Brown The third book chronicling the detective adventures of Ed Hunter and his uncle Am, find the boys having left the carnival and working for a detective agency in Chicago. This one is almost all Ed as he is sent to the sticks to get information on a new radio for an investor and gets embroiled in a murder. Not as good as the first two books, but still a decent read.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 19, 2017 16:57:26 GMT -5
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart This is probably the third or fourth time I've read this book. It's one of the earlier post-war, post-apocalyptic SF novels and it won the first International Fantasy Award for Fiction (the very first SF award that I can find). Interestingly Stewart isn't really an SF writer. He was an English professor at Berkeley and a historian whose writing was all over the place both in non-fiction and fiction. But this book alone, both for quality and for its position in the SF pantheon makes Stewart an important genre writer. The book centers on Ish Williams who survives a plague that wipes out the vast majority of the human population on Earth. What follows is almost a travelogue of Ish's journey through a world with few humans and what happens to him...but also to Earth after humans. There are short interludes talking about the fate of various animals, structures, etc. How accurate they actually are is not for me to say, but it's a very interesting and thought provoking device. It's probably been a decade at least since I last read this one. And while I remembered a fair bit of it, there are things I didn't remember and things I'm sure I gleaned from it that I didn't before. Highly recommended. Not positive, but this may have been the first post-apocalyptic novel I ever read, I believe back in 9th or 10th grade. I need to revisit it one of these years.
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Post by berkley on Jan 19, 2017 20:00:23 GMT -5
I've been re-reading the Philip Marlowe novels that I haven't looked at in a long time and the last one I finished was The High Window, 3rd in the series. I read Farewell My Lovely a couple months ago and will probably get to The Little Sister in a few months (the others The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye, I've read within the last 10 years or so, as opposed to these three, which I hadn't read in 30+years).
Reading Chandler's Marlowe books is like taking a master-class in how to write a hardboiled detective novel, to me. But it isn't as easy as just following a formula, as IMO some of his imitators have demonstrated by their less than successful (to my taste) efforts.
Someday I'd like to see a film-maker attempt a serious arthouse film version of Chandler, one that tried to somehow transfer the effect of his descriptions, similes, & metaphors to the screen. You couldn't do that literally, in many cases, without falling into Warner Brothers Cartoon-style slapstick comedy mode, but in some instances I think there could be a way. It would take a director who wasn't afraid of slowing down the action to focus, if only momentarily, on things that are usually left in the background but that contribute so much to the atmosphere of Chandler's stories. An experiment like this would probably be doomed to failure, but I think it would be fascinating to see someone try.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 20, 2017 1:08:30 GMT -5
I've been re-reading the Philip Marlowe novels that I haven't looked at in a long time and the last one I finished was The High Window, 3rd in the series. I read Farewell My Lovely a couple months ago and will probably get to The Little Sister in a few months (the others The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye, I've read within the last 10 years or so, as opposed to these three, which I hadn't read in 30+years). Reading Chandler's Marlowe books is like taking a master-class in how to write a hardboiled detective novel, to me. But it isn't as easy as just following a formula, as IMO some of his imitators have demonstrated by their less than successful (to my taste) efforts. Someday I'd like to see a film-maker attempt a serious arthouse film version of Chandler, one that tried to somehow transfer the effect of his descriptions, similes, & metaphors to the screen. You couldn't do that literally, in many cases, without falling into Warner Brothers Cartoon-style slapstick comedy mode, but in some instances I think there could be a way. It would take a director who wasn't afraid of slowing down the action to focus, if only momentarily, on things that are usually left in the background but that contribute so much to the atmosphere of Chandler's stories. An experiment like this would probably be doomed to failure, but I think it would be fascinating to see someone try. Like maybe a "tarantula on a piece of angelfood cake"?
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Post by berkley on Jan 21, 2017 3:00:19 GMT -5
I've been re-reading the Philip Marlowe novels that I haven't looked at in a long time and the last one I finished was The High Window, 3rd in the series. I read Farewell My Lovely a couple months ago and will probably get to The Little Sister in a few months (the others The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye, I've read within the last 10 years or so, as opposed to these three, which I hadn't read in 30+years). Reading Chandler's Marlowe books is like taking a master-class in how to write a hardboiled detective novel, to me. But it isn't as easy as just following a formula, as IMO some of his imitators have demonstrated by their less than successful (to my taste) efforts. Someday I'd like to see a film-maker attempt a serious arthouse film version of Chandler, one that tried to somehow transfer the effect of his descriptions, similes, & metaphors to the screen. You couldn't do that literally, in many cases, without falling into Warner Brothers Cartoon-style slapstick comedy mode, but in some instances I think there could be a way. It would take a director who wasn't afraid of slowing down the action to focus, if only momentarily, on things that are usually left in the background but that contribute so much to the atmosphere of Chandler's stories. An experiment like this would probably be doomed to failure, but I think it would be fascinating to see someone try. Like maybe a "tarantula on a piece of angelfood cake"? I did say metaphors and similes, among other things, but I think some of them, like the one you cite and the famous "She was a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window" would create the wrong effect if visualised literally on the screen; but I think they might work as dialogue if done the right way (not a fan of narrative voice-overs in film: don't think I've ever heard one that worked for me). But I think some other figures of speech could be re-worked for the visual medium. Take the following sentence from The High Window: "Half a block of black limousine blew me off the road with its horn and went past me making a noise like dead leaves falling." The "half a block" probably couldn't be visualised without creating a comic effect that goes against the mood of the scene, but the "noise like dead leaves falling" has more possibilities. I can see a creative director reworking that for the screen in a few different ways. Or this one, after discovering (another) dead body: "I seemed to be wading through mud as I went on into the room." Pretty simple line, but it gets across that finding corpses isn't necessarily something one gets used to, even a hardboiled guy like Marlowe. On the previous such occasion in this particular book, there's this one: "A face in the mirror looked back at me. A strained, leering face. I turned away from it quickly ..." Different method, but same idea. All this could be transferred to film - but usually isn't, because it would slow down the action, and perhaps make the hero look less tough than has come to be expected in movies of this kind. But that's just a couple examples. There are all kinds of different things that could be played with. Even straight descriptions of rooms, clothing, etc, something Chandler spends a surprising amount of time on, for a genre writer. Imagine a film that did something similar: it would be a far cry from the usual genre thriller, and therefore probably not a popular success - but possibly a creative one.
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Post by WestPhillyPunisher on Jan 21, 2017 6:57:31 GMT -5
The Wolf by Lorenzo Carcaterra In a nutshell, organized crime goes to war with international terrorism after a powerful mobster's wife and daughters are killed by terrorists and he wants vengeance. A crisply paced book, even with it's out there premise where bad guys throw down with badder guys. I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't snatched this up for a movie treatment as I think this would work on the big screen.
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