The Great Gatsby was rubbish, but then I did read it at school. I doubt the passage of time or the absence of pressure to ANALYSE it would make it better, however. The 'roaring twenties' is just a very dull era, although one can reconcile oneself to it knowing that all these rich people end up bankrupt by the end of it.
Has anyone read the new Harry Potter book? I'm halfway through at the moment and it's actually really enjoyable.
No I'm an adult.
Bought it for my sister for her birthday and it only arrived yesterday. I flicked through it before giving it to her but didn't look at it properly. Will probably check it out at some point, or just go to see the play.Originally Posted by Adamski
Maybe in the literal sense
I think I read that the play is fully booked for months, definitely would like to go and see it. It's gotten some great reviews.
Is the new Harry Potter book, which is a play, actually readable as a book - since it is a play? Most plays I've read, always for some literary assignment in class were quite dull/weird to read. Admittedly, they were always either Shakespeare or Becket / Ionesco / Some other abstract fucker.
Also, is the new Harry Potter book that is in fact a play actually about Harry Potter himself, or some random Troll a gazillion years ago that nobody cares about?
No, it's not readable that's why I'm halfway through in a matter of hours.
and no, it's called Harry Potter & the cursed child but it's not about Harry Potter.
Well that's a great title then.
Started reading that Irish history book, it's actually very good and non-biased, though I'm sure the extremists could tell me it's loyalist/unionist shite.
What is it?
Loyal to the Core? Orangeism and Britishness in Northern Ireland
How can you tell that it's unbiased?
I'm just joking.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I'm only at the mid-14th century. But the way it's written it's argued so far that Ireland was crying out for stability, be that Ard Ri, the English via MacMurrough/Strongbow alliance, or Edward the Bruce and the Irish Kings.
It wouldn't have argued in favour of Henry the II if it was biased surely, or in favour of the Scots/Irish alliance.
Wait, what one are you reading?
There's not really such a thing as an 'unbiased' history book anyway.
The one I linked to.
Oh right. Never heard of Mike Cronin. That other one you mentioned actually looks good. Two of the authors of it (McAuley and Tonge) are big dogs on NI.
Reading Absalom Absalom by Faulkner because I'm a sophisticated intellectual.
Shit is dense but delicious.
I'm starting The Outsider, a sort-of-but-not-really autobiography thing by Frederick Forsyth.
It seems to be off to an interesting start but I might just be glad it's not Blood Meridian.
Is losing a book you are half way through possibly the worst feeling in the world?
Was it The Big Book of Divorce Metaphors?
lol
Are you still knee-deep in the Balkan mud, Magic?
I'm reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. It might just be that I'm not doing anything else with my life, but I'm tearing through it.
Irish history now. I think I left it on my car roof in an orange part of Glasgow and drove off lol.
I'm reading The Passage by Justin Cronin. It's excellent. It took me about forty years to get through less than 400 pages of Blood Meridian and I've done about 300 of this (it's 900 or so in total) since the weekend.
Has a bit of the Stephen Kings about it (I've seen comparisons to The Stand but it's so long since I've read that I'm not sure whether those are accurate) and some parts are almost like World War Z as well. Loving it.
Gents,
I'll probably have asked before, but I'm looking for another 'epic / high fantasy' series to get into. I've re-read ASOIAF over the summer, but I need a proper series to get into over the next few months.
Any suggestions? I wouldn't be interested in anything with a sci-fi element, if that's of any help.
The Bible.
How does it compare to the Book of Mormon?
Oh shit.
Malazan.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26233572-i-see-you
Bought that so I could get free delivery on my self-help book. Seems to get pretty good reviews and will give me a break from history/serious bookage.
What's the background / premise and number of novels in the series?
Ten books, of which I've read four (and as I've harped on about before, it's actually fucking finished unlike ASOIAF.) Wikipedia has it as "epic fantasy" and certainly it's aimed at the same target audience as the likes of ASOIAF are. The premise is a touch more difficult to pin down because from book to book he'll change a large number of the characters from book to book and he doesn't always tie the story of an individual novel to the existing, overarching narrative until later in the book. Which makes it sound like he's jumping about and it all feels disjointed and haphazard but it's not, he does a brilliant job.
I suppose the short version would be that the Malazan Empire is very large and powerful but is face threats on multiple fronts. Some on a typical, fantasy-esque potential-end-of-the-world type scale, some just the threat of it collapsing in on itself, one story strand focuses in a revolution of sorts taking place elsewhere. One big difference is that as fantasy stuff goes Malazan is more overtly magical. It's just people running about lobbing lightning bolts at each other but it is there and it's very different to ASOIAF on that front.
From what I've read I personally prefer them. It has loads of characters and a lot of them are excellent, it has a lot of story threads but even early on you feel like there's an actual purpose to them and he knows where he's going.
I feel like I've waffled a bit here and probably not sold them very well but I'm sure there have been four or five of us on here now who've read at least some of them and nobody's given them a poor review that I can recall.
How's the first novel stack up? If it's difficult to get into, I suspect I'd struggle to maintain enough interest to get past the first one.
Also, what POV is it written in?
He doesn't spend too long setting stuff up in the first one. He sets up what he needs to and then fairly quickly gets the story rolling with the initial core of characters.
And it's written third person. It does generally stick to a character or group of characters for the course of a given chapter but you're not getting into their heads all the time the way you do in ASOIAF. Some characters you get it more than others, other characters you just get more stuff revealed through their conversations.
Although they're quite complex in places I don't think them to be difficult reading at all. There's a lot going on but Erikson knows what he's doing and it hasn't threatened to become an unwieldy mess from what I've read.
Originals are always better than the remake.
Keep at it babes, I wanna see the real knockout punch
Allan Moore gave a very positive review of a book written by my ex-lodger in the New York Times. Deffo gonna milk that minor vicarious achievement.
I'm on the third instalment of the Clifton Chronicles, quite a nice read without been amazing. Anyone else reading them?
Beyond Freedom and Dignity - BF Skinner
Proper WTF territory, this. He basically espouses the kind of society set out in 1984. There's some really jarring phrases in there too, like 'we work on the assumption that people's behaviour often stems from their motivations, intentions and desires.' He says it as though he thinks differently, but he hasn't yet explained what he does believe. From what I know about him, it'll be something related to us basically being the sum of all our conditioning and fuck all else. So I imagine he's going to espouse the kind of conditioning by which everyone can be controlled completely.
He's pretty serious about it too. He regards society as a machine and laments the fact that we can change gear in a car and be very precise in the adaptations we can make to a car, but can a government do that with people's behaviour? No. Our social policies are very inefficient, and he wants society to be controlled in such a way, I think.
Edit: I think it's largely because he's a behaviourist, he thinks we're all just forms of genetics and conditioning and that we have no freedom anyway, that he justifies this kind of stuff. It's an interesting read so far.
I picked up a Hemingway collection for about £9 earlier in the year, and have now read seven of the eight books therein. On balance, I'd say he's overrated. For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Moveable Feast are probably the two strongest, the latter especially being a surprise in that I wasn't expecting it to be overly strong. It's similar to Orwell's "Down and Out" in that sense, which I also enjoyed a lot more than it's more well-known counterparts Homage to Catalonia and Road to Wigan Pier (the latter being tedious).
The Old Man and the Sea is the novel(la) he won the Nobel Prize for, and I just can't see it. It's a nice fable, sure, but it's nothing special. A Farewell to Arms is also not strong, and you can basically boil it down to "war, love, it rains, everyone's miserable". The Sun Also Rises, in my post-reading research, is described as a "masterpiece". I don't see it in the slightest, but perhaps I'm being unfair. Bull-fighting in Spain between the wars should be an interesting backdrop, but most of the characters (including the main love interest) are contemptible so if they'd wound up being gored you'd barely have cared.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro had some good stories, but broadly speaking wasn't great. The Green Hills of Africa is also a bit tedious in its recounting of his time engaged in big-game hunting, and not just because of the really quite obvious racism which depicts the "natives" in your standard fashion.
Overall, there's a sense he just thinks he's a bit great and has bought into the "Ernest Hemingway" persona a bit too much. Orwell, writing at the same time, has the better novels (1984 and Animal Farm), and a comparable, marginally better, memoir in "Down and Out". Then again, the rest of his fiction is a bit shit but his piercing insight on the political scene wins him the day.
I might read the rest of Hemingway's work at some stage in the future. The book I haven't started is "Death in the Afternoon", again about bull-fighting but I'm not sure I have the patience to wade through it right now. Perhaps another time.
I've only read For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises but I much preferred the latter. For Whom the Bell Tolls was too long and boring for me. It was a relief to finish it.
I'm currently reading last year's Booker Prize winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. It's based around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976 and takes in a load of Jamaican and regional politics. I'm struggling to get into it. There are a lot of different narrators and a lot of the book is written in the Jamaican dialect. I'm trying to stick with it though as it's meant to be worth it.
I've been reading a lot recently.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano was long, strange and brilliant. Not an easy nor pleasant read but it definitely paid off in the end. To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia is a short novel about a crime in Sicily, it was enjoyable but didn't make too much of an impression. Snow Country is by a Japanese guy who won the Nobel Prize but I didn't really get it, there were scenes I liked but as a whole it went over my head. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon was great, very entertaining, the prose was really fine.
Bolaño.
Yeah Mahow, how far in are you?
Currently on the second book, about 10 or so chapters in.
Took a long break after the first so I've forgotten loads which isn't handy.
Liking the second a lot more than the first thus far.
Just ten more books to go! It does take a little while to get going (and there are some bits in later books that are a bit of a slog) but it really is worth it.
Twelve books to go, no?
I can't remember at what point it is in the series that it becomes a bit more of a slog. Was it two or three books where it took a noticeable dip before Sanderson saved the day by remembering that really it's only Rand, Mat and Perrin we really care about?
I think it was around books 7-10 that were the slowest, with 10 really peaking with the side-plot fuckery that nobody cares about. There's an argument for 9 being half decent because of what happens and the implications of it. But then after those it's on to 11, which is one of the best of the lot.
There comes a point where it feels like his plan for each book was to cut the remaining plot in half and filling the rest of the it with waffle but the actually interesting bits were still good enough to keep my interest. It made the first Sanderson book feel like such a refreshing change of pace.
He got too immersed in the mad web of side-stories and minor characters and also in building up the detail of the world he'd created.
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