Agreed. I am also disappointed and angered by the World Science Fiction Society which administers and presents the Hugo Awards. Turning a blind eye/ Supporting crimes against humanity is no way to promote interest in science fiction.
ETA: WSFS has ignored the 100+ scifi writers' letter protesting Chengu, China as the venue for 2023 awards. This is despite China banning books & prosecuting writers, poets, editors, publishers, & booksellers.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
It's a comic that breaks down and analyzes comics as a medium, from how it manages closure, to the abstractions it presents, to how time is depicted spatially.
Very good so far, gives me a window into the deeper artistic world of a medium I care for. Would heartily recommend if you care to assess comics and manga mechanically.
I used to assign segments of this book to students when I taught a Graphic Novel class. McCloud does a great job of explaining the medium using it as a vehicle throughout.
If you like books in a similar vein, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" by Thomas Foster is a solid book to check out as well.
Fantastic, I'll check it out! I do want to learn to engage more with entertainment media of all forms on a more mechanical level, so this might be just for me
Great book. I do love the world he creates, it still holds up even now. His other books are just as good. I wish there were more cyberpunk books, I do love that genre.
I'm about to finish the second book in the mistborn series. Have you guys heard of fictionaries. They are supplemental dictionaries you can load on to your Kindle. So like I have one for Brandon Sanderson's cosamer series. Which is super helpful. I can like click a characters name and get a little synopsis, which with his love for character back stories is helpful. There are like different ones you can download so you don't get spoilers. It is made reading any of these books that have so much character, backstory and exposition way easier
Oh that's neat! I have trouble remembering smaller characters and their descriptions so that would help! Recently finished the first Mistborn book, myself.
For me, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the best Agatha Christie. Go in blind. For non-Poirot books, Crooked House and Murder at the Vicarage are also top shelf.
If you like Christie, I would also recommend Louise Penny. She's very stylistically and thematically similar. Still Life is a great mystery and also a nice window into a cute pastoral Canadian town.
For something off the wall, Leech by Hiron Ennis. A detective is dispatched to a snowbound manor house to investigate the death of his predecessor. However, the detective is a sentient parasitic leech hivemind and the killer he pursues is an alien fungus body snatcher.
I'd second all the recommendations here, but I'd also want to know what reading level you'd be interested in, and also why you haven't ever read a book for fun before? It would be helpful to know to be able to point to books that would avoid whatever your sticking points may have been. As far as introductory fun books I'd recommend:
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (Not too long, it's a classic and is one I've read multiple times over the years)
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (While it's a YA novel, it was very formative for me as I read it in like 3-4th grade, is basically something that could have happened in reality but is a fictional account.)
Cradle series by Will Wight (A bit off the path from traditional fantasy, it's more properly in the subgenre of progression fantasy, which is basically what the genre of Dragon Ball Z would be, the unifying premise of these stories is that the MC starts fairly weak and then gets stronger over the course of the series, with generally an unlimited upper cap to how powerful characters can get through various kinds of training/levelling up/finding new gear/items/spells etc)
Do you know why Terry said to skip the first 2? Personally the only one I've read is the colour of magic and I loved it as an introduction to the world and can't wait to read more (I read new books very slowly 9/10 unless my adhd decides to hyperfocus on them like it thankfully did with Dune)
Like any artist, as he improved his craft, he grew embarrassed about his early work, and felt it wasn't up to the quality of the later books. There are also some inconsistencies; most notably, Death is actively trying to claim Rincewind, when in later books He just facilitates the process of crossing over.
Notably, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic both directly parody contemporary fantasy, and if you're familiar with the books he's making fun of, it's pretty obvious. Equal Rites is where he went more into the allegory, satire, and social commentary which people tend to associate with Discworld.
No idea, but tbh I'd always bounce off Color of Magic when I tried to get into it from there. I haven't read the Rincewind novels yet so I can't compare them to others, but for me Guards! Guards! was a much better intro.
I want to use something other than goodreads, but I've tried most of the others and their management of lists just isn't tolerable for me. I've tried migrating to several (and the fact that most of them allow you to import from goodreads export is awesome), but I like to have a list with the nonfiction sorted out, a list I care more about of 50-60 I consider high quality about or adjacent to what makes us tick, and a few smaller ones, and rebuilding those lists is just too brutal to accept. They're also significantly worse in terms of quality of their database of books.
Goodreads lacks some things I'd like, too. Primarily, I'd like to be able to treat a series as a first class citizen so I can provide a couple paragraphs and ratings on the series as a whole, with the individual books kicked down to a lower layer of my reading hierarchy. Also, despite allowing you to manually order your lists (my version would allow for tiers), it doesn't display that ordering when you share a list with others. Eventually I'm probably going to roll my own and set it up so I can randomly suggest some of my favorites on a page, but I haven't got around to it.
I like the idea of bookwyrm, but I think it's too much mental overhead to implement the features I want for now, and ended up not doing so.
I was oblivious to the racist passages in Huckleberry Finn growing up, but I can definitely concur now that it, too, is hopelessly dated and better left in the past. Not to mention that it’s not a very constructive book to read about the concepts of childhood or boyhood. Coupled together with the casual racism, it’s probably best to choose something else other than Huckleberry Finn.
I’m torn on this.
On the one hand, I don’t want to force nonwhite students to read and analyze those stories that are entrenched in and dependent upon the pain, injustice, and deliberate mass malice that is American chattel slavery.
On the other hand, I think we lose something by not looking it in the eye and through the eyes of contemporaries to see how normal it was, and to use that as a springboard to examine the ways we view and wrestle with ethical issues of today. There is a value to remembering that, at every period, people oppose and reject elements of their societies, as Twain did over the course of his life.
As an aside, here is a link to a blog post that contrasts Huck’s decision not to turn in escaped slave Jim as an act of grace to the Left Behind characters’ unerringly selfish acts, written by one of the few evangelical Christians I can respect (and as a staunch atheist that means a lot) which has had an impact upon how I view the story of Huckleberry Finn.
I’m left-leaning, and I’m sure the right would call me “woke,” but I agree that we shouldn’t change or forget dated books. It’s for a few reasons, but primarily because it’s important to remember historical figures as they were, not who we want them to be. Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer. Dahl was anti-Semetic. Wilson actively segregated the federal government. Those things should be confronted. Whitewashing them doesn’t help.
I'm slowly (although understandably, I believe) going through Ulysses by James Joyce and I'm trying to find a balance between the massive notes and engaging with the text itself.
I know that, especially in the English speaking literary world, it is customary to stand in the former camp but I can't really gel with that, it feels like I'm reading something other than the book, and I didn't really have this problem with Dubliners.
When I end up reading all of it I suppose I would then be ok going back to it later on reading all of the notes, but I've tried doing that as a first read and it didn't really work for me.
It's 's too early to even connect some thoughts, so I'm more looking for recommendations than able to give some to others!
How approachable is Dubliners? I read some fairly dense stuff but I've always avoided Joyce (and most modernist stuff like Woolf, Proust, etc) because it's intimidating.
Out of the three authors you mentioned I think Joyce is the least approachable to be honest: Proust's one difficulty is his very slow rhythm (and if you manage to adjust to it there's a nice payoff on the other side, I loved the first book of the recherche) and I generally find Woolf quite pleasant to read so I'm not the right person to ask on the account of any difficulties in reading her work.
To ge back to Dubliners you may encounter some difficulties with the things left unsaid or only to be understood thanks to a wider context; it is however a much simpler writing mechanism than all that happens in Ulysses. I got by with some introductory notes that didn't bog me down that much and I enjoyed the effect Joyce was aiming for in those works.
I hope I was helpful and I gave you enough context to judge my point of view relative to what your tastes may be.
I tried reading it once for pleasure (didn't get far) and then had to read it two years running for entirely different university modules.
The refreshing way it was taught was that it skipped around from chapter to chapter, and was read out of order. Because really the plot such as it is doesn't have much bearing on it. But I wouldn't say it made it more enjoyable to read just easier to understand. And, honestly, it just let you skip out the really boring bits.
Martin Amis made a very good point about Ulysses - it's read and analysed and dissected by academics but who actually just curls up and relaxes with it for fun? The answer is not many. If you're looking for something which doesn't need a lot of footnotes to understand don't feel guilty about dropping it!
RECOMMENDATION: Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. An Irish near contemporary of Joyce's, with a similar love of messing around with language but who is actually readable and very funny in an absurd way!
I resonate with a lot of what you're saying, and yeah, I don't think I'll feel too guilty about taking a break or two since I can get back on it whenever I want.
My one problem with the amount of footnotes is that they can be so dense and cumbersome that the stream of consciousness sections didn't even feel like a stream of anything: it was like when you repeat a word so often you start losing your grip on what the word itself is. Of course they're helpful to an extent, a considerable one on a work like this one, but if this book was so wild and innovative when it came out I want to feel some of that!
Also, thanks for the recommendation! It sounds like something I'd really enjoy
if this books was so wild and innovative when it came out I want to feel some of that!
I suspect that there was a little bit of an element of A Brief History Of Time about it, crossed in with the fact it was known to have 'dirty' bits in - lots of people bought it but how many people read it cover to cover is questionable. So I'm sure a lot of people when it came out were just skipping to the interesting bits as well, or just putting it on their shelves to show off their bohemian credentials!
It has genuinely funny passages, genuinely brilliant experimental pieces and lots of bits which are quite boring. That's the thing about experimental literature - I find the same with William Burroughs as well - you have to wade through the experiments that didn't work to find the bits that did. I've always been more interested in experimentation with storytelling devices like breaking the fourth wall and so on than the stream of consciousness experimentation which feels easy on the writer and hard on the reader.
Basically one of the first major political dystopias written in the modern sense. It's super cool too, basically the book is an old manuscript about an attempted socialist revolution, before the world was taken over by oligarchic tyrannical capitalists. There's basically two stories being told, one in the socialist narrative itself occurring in the past, and one in the footnotes, showing glimmers of some of the capitalist horrors in the "present time". Super neat way to tell a story, and I'm really enjoying it so far. It's super heavy handed, and I would maybe call it similar to a socialist version of an Ayn Rand dystopia, like Anthem, but you know... Actually good. And thematically opposite to any coherent thought Ayn Rand tried to impart onto her readers.
Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Grabar
Not too far into this one, but it's a non-fiction book about parking policy, and how parking has basically ruined American cities over the last 70 years. I've been really getting into city planning books lately, so we'll see how much I like this one. Some pretty eye opening statistics so far, and the writing style seems fine.
DNF'd recently:
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
Jesus this dude is insufferable. I read a lot of dense stuff, and have read many authors that like the sound of their own voice, but Thoreau takes the cake. Preaches self-reliance and disparages philanthropy but squats on his buddies land and lives off of gifts from friends, while doing absolutely nothing and providing no value to society. The guy just exudes a "holier than thou" attitude throughout the whole book, with absolutely nothing to back it up. I quit after 100 pages of this absolute joke contradicting himself the entire time. He would occasionally stumble upon some brilliance that I found a bit insightful, but it was few and far between, and the 98% of the rest was pure, unadulterated garbage. I really haven't had this negative of a reaction to something I've read for quite some time, I generally like everything I read.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo , a 2019 novel by Christy Lefteri. It deals with the plight of refugees from Aleppo in Syria to Europe during the Syrian Civil War. While a work of fiction, it is based on the author's experience over two summers volunteering in Athens at a refugee center.
There’s a distinct halting prosody to his twangy speech, and he has a vernacular all his own: people in general are “buds” while Tingle fans are “buckaroos.”
Is...is Chuck Tingle deep south? Idk about anyone else, my mind always pictured the actual Tingle from LoZ. A helpful, latex wearing, distinctly uncomfortable little man who means well in a fun way but is also clearly insane. Now he has a cowboy hat.
high-concept in Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt, which realizes its conceit through some unexpectedly intricate sci-fi worldbuilding.)
No. No, I am not prepared to accept anything with that title has intricate, carefully planned world building, no. There is no way this could be happening to me. I can't even read this in front of anyone to find out. Books with titles like that go deep in the attic for people to find after I'm dead.
Tingle situates Camp Damascus within the current boom of queer horror, but also within a less developed subgenre he terms “neurodivergent horror.”
The protagonist, 20-year-old Rose, is a devout member of the Kingdom of the Pine, a Christian sect famed for its conversion therapy camp. Whenever Rose’s thoughts linger too long on attractive women, she endures cold spells, coughs up insects, and witnesses bizarre apparitions.
As cracks form in her faith and she realizes her sexuality, it’s heavily implied that Rose’s ability to break through the cult’s brainwashing is due to the fact that she’s on the autism spectrum.
Really mad that this sounds fantastic. I'm considering that now. What I need in my house is another book.
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