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Post by Deleted on Mar 31, 2020 11:23:16 GMT -5
Just finished the second Spenser novel by Richard Spenser-God Save the Child; from my Goodreads review... -M
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Post by berkley on Mar 31, 2020 16:05:19 GMT -5
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper FfordeFollowing the events of The Eyre Affair, SpecOps Agent Thursday Next finds herself wanted by almost everyone. SpecOps wants her for her celebrity, though they don't want her to actually use it for anything useful. Goliath Corp. wants her to retrieve Jack Schitt from "The Raven" and are willing to get really personal to attain that goal. And Jurisfiction (a group that polices the internal working of literature) want her as an agent, a job she's thirty years overdue for. As a Prose Resource Operative inside books she is apprenticed to the redoubtable Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. The book is so plot heavy that it's hard to talk about much without getting into spoiler territory. But Fforde continues to build a truly unique world and populate it with interesting characters of his own and that he's plucked from other sources. Fforde gives us a Miss Havisham that will never let you look at Dickens the same way again. He also makes it clear that things are not always going to work out exactly as Thursday or the readers want them to work out. The ending is a bit of a cliff-hanger. But then life is a cliff-hanger. And when you're dealing with people who can read themselves into books, travel through time and reintroduce dodos and neanderthals to the world things are going to get messy and take a while to sort out. A rare sequel that's not even a smidge of a let-down.
I'm a bit torn over whether or not I want to try these: they sound like fun, but then there's always a little voice in the back of my head asking things like, "Will I appreciate all the references or character appearances if I haven't read the books being referenced?" or "Do I want to encounter any given character for the first time in Fforde's novels rather than in the original?"
But of course you can never read everything, so I'll probably try at least the first one at somepoint without worrying too much about any of the above questions or others of the same sort.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Mar 31, 2020 19:59:06 GMT -5
I find that sometimes those sort of references will motivate me to go read the original (or at least look it up on the internet for more info)... I consider it a learning experience The Last Good Season by Michael Shapiro While the book is well written and very well researched (perhaps TOO well)... it's not really much about baseball. The purpose of the book was clearly to paint Walter O'Malley as a victim of the evil Robert Moses. That narrative gets a bit in the way.. there are very few details on the actual move of the team, nor does it set any context (the Giants move at the same time is only mentioned twice in passing). While the book does also document the 1956 season, it does so in a rather joyless, business-like way. The author clearly is a Sal Maglie fan (which, having read Ball Four, is hard for me to be), but otherwise there's really not alot of baseball here.. lots of Brooklyn city politics, and a few random short stories of random Brooklynites, but sadly lacking in baseball.. I guess it fits what's going on in the world at the moment.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Mar 31, 2020 20:37:34 GMT -5
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper FfordeFollowing the events of The Eyre Affair, SpecOps Agent Thursday Next finds herself wanted by almost everyone. SpecOps wants her for her celebrity, though they don't want her to actually use it for anything useful. Goliath Corp. wants her to retrieve Jack Schitt from "The Raven" and are willing to get really personal to attain that goal. And Jurisfiction (a group that polices the internal working of literature) want her as an agent, a job she's thirty years overdue for. As a Prose Resource Operative inside books she is apprenticed to the redoubtable Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. The book is so plot heavy that it's hard to talk about much without getting into spoiler territory. But Fforde continues to build a truly unique world and populate it with interesting characters of his own and that he's plucked from other sources. Fforde gives us a Miss Havisham that will never let you look at Dickens the same way again. He also makes it clear that things are not always going to work out exactly as Thursday or the readers want them to work out. The ending is a bit of a cliff-hanger. But then life is a cliff-hanger. And when you're dealing with people who can read themselves into books, travel through time and reintroduce dodos and neanderthals to the world things are going to get messy and take a while to sort out. A rare sequel that's not even a smidge of a let-down.
I'm a bit torn over whether or not I want to try these: they sound like fun, but then there's always a little voice in the back of my head asking things like, "Will I appreciate all the references or character appearances if I haven't read the books being referenced?" or "Do I want to encounter any given character for the first time in Fforde's novels rather than in the original?"
But of course you can never read everything, so I'll probably try at least the first one at somepoint without worrying too much about any of the above questions or others of the same sort.
It wasn’t a problem for me. I’ve never read Jane Eyre. And knew going in there was no chance I ever would. Not my cuppa. I have read most of Dickens over the years but I know a lot of my classics from comic books or cultural osmosis.
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Post by berkley on Apr 1, 2020 0:02:06 GMT -5
I think it's possible you might be surprised by Jane Eyre if you ever do give it a try. I first read it back in the early 80s and found it entertaining enough but it didn't leave any deep impression. Then I read it again just a few years back and had a completely different reaction, finding it one of the most deeply powerful reads I'd experienced in a long time. I think the difference was partly due to me being older and partly that I was kind of immersing myself in the English writing of the period when I read it for the second time. All the Brontës' stuff that I've read is really strong, including the less famous things like Charlotte's later novels or Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I rank them near the top English novels of all time.
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Post by Duragizer on Apr 3, 2020 17:24:05 GMT -5
Ubik (Philip K. Dick) Didn't care much for the first half. A solid chunk of the satire rings true, but Dick's distant future of 1992 is too gaudy to take seriously; it serves only as a noisome distraction, taking me out of the story. But by the halfway point, once we enter into the mind****ery, the narrative gets engrossing. Overall, it's the second least impressive PKD novel I've read. 6.5/10
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 4, 2020 20:15:11 GMT -5
Invasion from Space (Perry Rhodan #4) I'm not sure if this one was better, or reading them not back to back is better, but I definitely enjoyed this one more than #3. Also, great cover! 'Invasion from Space' is the first story, and the Mind Snatchers (which were seemingly destroyed previously), are back. Luckily, they one of the people they snatched was the wrong person, so the Third Power figured it out and was able take action and defeat them, despite the Archonides telling them it was completely hopeless. The 2nd part 'Base on Venus', finds Perry and his X-Men going to Venus to explore the possibility of establishing a 3rd Power base there. There were definitely some fun things in these books, we get an explanation of what happened to Atlantis (which I was not expecting) and a fun Burroughs-ian Venus with intelligent seals and giant dinosaurs. I don't love the trend of re-use plots (They once again got to the Archon' s wrecked ship for salvage, even though they already did so, and again have to contend with Americans tried to get there first). The main theme continues to be that the human race is simply so inherently awesome they can overcome aliens once they have the tech to do it, which is a nice uplifting message. Ellert's adventures in time were interesting... it's a LONG time for his story to get resolved (based on the fact that he has a story way down the road), but it should be fun when it does. Still not much character development... Reg Bell has been established as impulsive, but that's about it. The mutants are still just names and power sets. The venus story would make a great comic... while I love the cover, I'm sad it's not Venus.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 6, 2020 5:22:16 GMT -5
D is for Deadbeat, E is for Evidence, F is for FugitiveSue Grafton (1987, 1988, 1989 respectively) Man, with this pandemic and then the earthquake we had here in Zagreb, I really needed some literary comfort food; crime/mystery books generally fit this bill, and Grafton's 'alphabet' mysteries do so in particular. For those who may not be familiar with them, all of these books follow the cases of Kinsey Milhone, a private detective who lives and works in the fictional coastal town of Santa Theresa, California (a thinly disguised Santa Barbara). In 'D', Milhone is hired by the titular deadbeat to find someone a young man and deliver a cashier's check to him. A few days later, said deadbeat is found dead washed up on the beach, so Milhone now finds herself caught up in a possible homicide investigation. In 'E', Milhone helps out in an insurance investigation of a burned-down warehouse, and then gets ensnared in a frame-up (which leads to several people getting killed). In 'F', a fugitive from justice is caught after 17 years on the run under an assumed identity. His father hires Milhone to investigate the original crime for which he was accused, the murder of a teenage girl, but as she begins poking around, she ends up re-opening a lot of wounds and gets into jeopardy herself. Reading these is like watching episodes of Columbo or the Rockford Files. They're light, engaging, and very soothing for the brain. Otherwise, UK publisher Pan published a lot of Grafton's books in these omnibus editions which can now be found dirt-cheap online.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 6, 2020 11:05:39 GMT -5
Down There (aka Shoot the Piano Player) by David GoodisIt's been eons since I've read David Goodis. And it's been eons since I've seen Truffaut's adaptation of this novel. Eddie is a piano player in a small saloon in Philadelphia. He plays his tunes a quiet, neutral observer content to let the small, seedy world go on around him. That is until Turley comes in to the bar fleeing a beating from two professional thugs. Turley, it turns out is Eddie's brother, and though Eddie tries not to become involved he ultimately does (in the most fleeting of ways) and that sends Eddie into the kind of noir nightmare that we expect from paperback originals of this vintage. Of course there's a femme, but it's really Eddie's past, which we find out about in a very slow burn, that is the fatale here. The road to redemption is that, but the pull of the past and the innate animal inside all of us mean that that road is hard to follow. Goodis wrote about the seedy under-belly of Philadelphia. The people who had been discarded and lived a marginal existence rather than a life. He knew those areas because he haunted them during the nights. There seems to be a fair bit of Eddie that is autobiographical. Goodis grew up in a good home, graduated from Temple U., wrote short stories which led him to writing in Hollywood. And then it all went away and he returned home to grind out pulp novels and prowl the Philadelphia underbelly until he died early from the effects of a beating during a robbery exacerbated by alcoholism. Goodis uses some interesting literary devices, occasionally moving into the first and second person to give us a better look into the working of Eddie's mind. This is a classic piece of literary noir.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 7, 2020 17:20:01 GMT -5
Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, et. al. On the surface this is an artbook looking at the art history of Dungeons & Dragons. And as an art-book it is incredible. It covers all eras. Hits all the art you remember and some you don't. And the presentation is excellent. But it also serves as a history (albeit somewhat cursory) of the game and the companies that have produced it. And while there wasn't a huge amount that I learned it was nice to have that info in one place. So it's also a history...and an art-book. But for a guy who started playing as AD&D (aka 1st Edition) was coming into its own, who bought the Fiend Folio when it first hit the hobby shops, this is nothing less than a love letter to a formative piece of my past. The first half of the book is simply a flood of memories from the covers to the interior art to the advertisements to those things that slipped away (I should have bought that lonely copy of Eldritch Wizardry at Al's Hobby Shop). This is just a beautiful book as is as much fun as I've had reading in a very long time.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2020 17:41:24 GMT -5
Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, et. al. On the surface this is an artbook looking at the art history of Dungeons & Dragons. And as an art-book it is incredible. It covers all eras. Hits all the art you remember and some you don't. And the presentation is excellent. But it also serves as a history (albeit somewhat cursory) of the game and the companies that have produced it. And while there wasn't a huge amount that I learned it was nice to have that info in one place. So it's also a history...and an art-book. But for a guy who started playing as AD&D (aka 1st Edition) was coming into its own, who bought the Fiend Folio when it first hit the hobby shops, this is nothing less than a love letter to a formative piece of my past. The first half of the book is simply a flood of memories from the covers to the interior art to the advertisements to those things that slipped away (I should have bought that lonely copy of Eldritch Wizardry at Al's Hobby Shop). This is just a beautiful book as is as much fun as I've had reading in a very long time. It's comfort food for a gamer's soul, as well as a beautiful art book and summary history. I simply love this book. -M
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Post by Deleted on Apr 8, 2020 3:20:11 GMT -5
Getting back to some classic sci-fi... Foundation by Isaac Asimov I remember reading the Foundation trilogy my freshman year in high school. I remember liking it. I didn't remember a single thing about it. So I recently turned up used copies of a couple of the Foundation books, including the first one and decided to revisit it. For someone looking for modern sci-fi and fantasy standards of character and world-building, they will be disappointed, but damn this book is good. It is "smart" sci-fi, built on philosophy of thought and understanding of social systems rather than on individual actions. The first book consists of five shorter pieces, longer than short stories but not quite novelettes or novellas really. Each features a different protagonist, each set in a different time period, all focused on the same ongoing conflict of the Foundation's struggle to persevere and stay on course to complete it's mission-(borrowing on some currently relevant lingo) to flatten the curve of a galactic dark age that follows the stagnation and decline of the galactic empire and sow the seeds of the renewal/birth of a new Galactic Empire a thousand years hence. The first story deals with the struggle of psychohistorian Harry Seldon's attempt to establish the Foundation and each subsequent story follows a crisis faced by the Foundation resulting in a turning point in the nature of the Foundation itself but overall keeping it on course for the long haul. Each offers glimpses and insights into the sweep of history and how societal forces (religion, economics, warhawking, etc.) shape and are shaped by the course of events. If you are looking for slam bang action or space opera, you won't find it, neither will you find "hard" science fiction that extrapolates from technological advances and hard science, instead you get a sweeping, broad examination of a future society that says a lot about our world in the early-mid-20th century and the forces that shaped and continue to shape it. It's an interesting read, and each episode has something somewhat gripping about it, but it is the sweeping scale of the whole, which is greater than the sum of its parts, that makes this an enthralling and thought-provoking work. -M
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 8, 2020 8:20:24 GMT -5
I've always thought (at least since I read Foundation for the first time) that Psychohistory should be a real thing... why can't we predict crowd based trends? Seems like math should be able to. I think that's why I liked it so much.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 8, 2020 9:38:13 GMT -5
Getting back to some classic sci-fi... Foundation by Isaac Asimov I remember reading the Foundation trilogy my freshman year in high school. I remember liking it. I didn't remember a single thing about it. So I recently turned up used copies of a couple of the Foundation books, including the first one and decided to revisit it. This is due for a re-read soonish. It's been probably 20 years. The SFBC omnibus of the Foundation Trilogy was ubiquitous when I was in high school. That thing was everywhere. And when Foundation's Edge dropped in '82 it was enormous.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 9, 2020 23:59:33 GMT -5
Falconer's Knotby Mary Hoffman This book had been hanging around my house for a while, and I was quite sure who was reading it... it had library stickers on it, but had been around far too long to actually have been borrowed. The title kept grabbing my attention.. I kept thinking perhaps I would give it a try. It turns out to be a very good period book.. all the characters are well developed and seem like read people (if a bit idealized), and the mystery was pretty good.... I definitely went for a red herring . A couple things (like the ease of which a couple of the female characters navigated the world) seemed a bit off historically, but it was still a quite enjoyable book that had a rare happy ending.
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