So! You Are Reading What? v. 2018

Discussion in 'Books' started by Ismitje, Jan 1, 2018.

  1. Val1

    Val1 Member+

    Arsenal
    Mar 12, 2004
    MD's Eastern Shore
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    download.jpg

    Autumn Killing -- Mons Kallentoft

    Sometimes, it pay to judge a book by it's cover. I should have done it here. The synopsis on the back begins, "Malin Fors, the brilliant but flawed star of the Linkoping police force...." Well, this is Scandi noir, so one guess as to what constitutes this "flaw". I am sooooo tired of alcoholic detectives. But if that wasn't enough, the blurb on the front is: The Swedish crime-writing phenomenon. That's it. It's missing a verb. Obviously, something was missing in translation, and it should have tipped me off because this may very well be the worst translation I've ever read. I was going to copy a couple of egregious paragraphs as illustration, but I just can't be bothered. Bah.

    Now this, on the other hand, has been a complete joy:

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    The Book of Basketball -- Bill Simmons

    Simmons was my favorite sports read, ever. It helped that I am also a Celtics fan, but he wrote with more energy and passion than anyone I've ever read. 15,000 word mailbags? You could spend an hour and a half reading him. Then he got too big for his britches and discovered podcasts, which you know, are easier to do because there is no editorship, no craft. And his work suffered. But if you like professional hoops, this book is simply fun. The perfect antidote to depressing Swedish detectives.
     
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  2. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
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    The Moviegoer, a novel which won the National Book Award the year I was born, and which I read in college and in grad school at LSU but not since them, by Walker Percy.
     
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  3. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    For the two classes I'm teaching: From World Literature....
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    My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Nigerian novelist and David Byrne/Brian Eno inspirerer Amos Tutuola.

    And for the contemporary American poetry classes, the Juniors and Seniors are reading (most of them anyway...)

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    My Life, and My Life in the Nineties, a prose-poem hybrid memoir by Lyn Hejinian.
     
  4. Val1

    Val1 Member+

    Arsenal
    Mar 12, 2004
    MD's Eastern Shore
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
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    Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

    Douglass wrote several monographs on his life in slavery, including My Bondage and Freedom and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, but this was the first.

    This is hard to take. Douglass is a fine writer and of course this is a gripping story, much of which takes place less than 20 miles from my house. But it's hard on the psyche. Well, mine anyway. I think Hannah Erendt got it right: evil is often banal. The casual brutality visited upon slaves in America was.... unremarkable. It was accepted, tolerated, condoned. It was normal. As I said, I've been plugging away on this book for over two months now; I read it ostensibly in preparation for Olaudiah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative (one of several out-of-slavery narratives from pre Civil War America), but I don't think I have the stomach for another such narrative. Maybe over the summer...
     
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  5. EvanJ

    EvanJ Member+

    Manchester United
    United States
    Mar 30, 2004
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Would you like to read a short essay I wrote using multiple books including that one for a History class I took in Fall 2004?
     
  6. chaski

    chaski Moderator
    Staff Member

    Mar 20, 2000
    redacted
    Club:
    Lisburn Distillery FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Turks and Caicos Islands
    The Chickamauga Campaign: A Mad Irregular Battle – David Powell

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    First of 3-volume history of one of the Civil War's biggest battles.
     
  7. EvanJ

    EvanJ Member+

    Manchester United
    United States
    Mar 30, 2004
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I've read a lot about the Civil War, but I don't want to read that much about one battle.
     
  8. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    [​IMG]

    The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966 an interesting piece of cultural history tying together the UN-overlapping lives of Catholic monk Thomas Merton and just-gone electric Bob Dylan, with cameos by Joan Baez and the Dalai Lama, by a guy named Robert Hudson
     
  9. song219

    song219 BigSoccer Supporter

    Apr 5, 2004
    La Norte
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Vanuatu
    But a good Uncle Tupelo song and much shorter.
     
  10. Val1

    Val1 Member+

    Arsenal
    Mar 12, 2004
    MD's Eastern Shore
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    Something about the way I read "by a guy named Robert Hudson" made me want to look him up. His wiki page doesn't list this work, but both Barnes and Noble and Amazon link this work to The Monk's Record Player:

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    Part of what makes White and Strunk's Elements of Style so effective is it's brevity. Those guys practiced what they preached. This guy's style manual has ballooned up to north of 425 pages. Yikes.
     
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  11. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Those things do seem to grow. The newest Chicago Manual of Style is twice as long as the ones floating around when I was in college. Speaking of Strunk and White, there was an interesting book published about Elements of Style about a decade back.

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    Pretty good, IMO, but keep on mind I read books about the history of dictionaries, too.
     
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  12. chaski

    chaski Moderator
    Staff Member

    Mar 20, 2000
    redacted
    Club:
    Lisburn Distillery FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Turks and Caicos Islands
    Well, the battle lasted three days. :geek:
     
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  13. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    3 days? Damn, compared to the Battle of Stalingrad, that's nothing.
     
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  14. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I picked this up wile on a trip to New York not too long ago. Initially I put it down because it was challenging to read on the plane/waiting in the airport. But I kept thinking about it and eventually got it out of the overhead bin to dive back in. It is a biotech-laden post-apocalyptic novel - not really sci-fi because the biotech element means there's no attempt to adhere to scientific norms. The main characters are a late-20s scavenger, a department store-sized flying bear (no wings; he just flies) that rules the city (and which apparently was human once upon a time), and the titular Borne, pictured on the cover below. Borne is a great character; he is scavenged off of the side of the sleeping bear early in the story when he is still quite small.

    [​IMG]
     
  15. phedre44

    phedre44 Member

    SKC
    Apr 1, 2008
    Kansas
    Club:
    Sporting Kansas City
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    [​IMG]

    A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

    This one was an especially big disappointment because it was recommended to me by a feminist friend.

    Diana Bishop is an academic, doing some research in Oxford's Bodleian Library in preparation for a conference. She is also a witch who rejects magic because she associates it with the murder of her parents (also witches). Then she meets Matthew Clairmont, a tall, dark, handsome vampire with a helicopter and a goddamn French castle, who proceeds to abuse and violate her repeatedly over the next 600 pages under the guise of keeping her safe from other witches, vampires, and daemons, who are interested in obtaining a magical manuscript she inadvertently uncovered and then returned at the Bodleian. Matthew orders her around repeatedly, but somehow this is okay because vampires are pack animals, and he's the alpha wolf, and he's keeping her safe or some shit. He drugs her multiple times without her knowledge or consent with his for-some-reason-sedative-property-containing vampire blood, but she is okay with this when she learns about it because she luuuuuuurves him. He literally vampire-marries her without her knowledge or consent, but this is also totally okay by her, again, because luuuuuuuuuuuurve.

    Ms. Harkness needs to learn what "agency" is, and then she needs to give her heroine some. Cuz Diana ceded hers entirely to Matthew, transforming from an interesting character with depth into Bella Swan. Never turn your heroine into Bella Swan.
     
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  16. Val1

    Val1 Member+

    Arsenal
    Mar 12, 2004
    MD's Eastern Shore
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    I'm looking at the thing, ismitje, I don't even know what I'm looking at....

    Anyway, sometimes plucking something off the remainder bin at the used book store works out. To wit:

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    The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld

    This is the first book in The Midnighters trilogy. If I'd picked up this version of the book, I would have put it down, knowing right away it was Young Adult. As the four or five regular readers of this thread know, I've read a lot of YA mostly in conjunction with the kids as they've grown up. But I'm tiring of it in general. Heck, I've disliked most of the animated movies over the past five years as I am no longer watching them through young children's eyes. The version cover I have looks more fantasy.

    Anyway, I stuck with the book, and while it has the breathless tone of YA writing, the "magic" of this world is nicely done and the author does a good job of revealing the ever-widening circles of lore appropriately. He also does a nice job of giving each of his five teenage protagonists a distinct voice while writing in 3rd person and without going parenthese mad in an attempt to reveal their inner monologues.

    Since YA reads so easily I devoured this in one sleepless night and now I'm awaiting a call from the library for my latest ILL.
     
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  17. chaski

    chaski Moderator
    Staff Member

    Mar 20, 2000
    redacted
    Club:
    Lisburn Distillery FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Turks and Caicos Islands
    The Chickamauga Campaign: Glory or the Grave - David Powell

    [​IMG]


    Turns out that the battle ends in this second book.
    The next one covers the Union retreat into Chattanooga and the aftermath
     
  18. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I recently tried Artemis from Andy Weir. I truly loved The Martian and wanted to see if he could pull the same sort of amazing thing off again. And in this case, while I really enjoyed the setting and most of the plot, I found his character development and dialogue stilted at best. I don't think an author needs to be of/from the same gender, age, or background as the character they are writing, but Weir really has no business writing for a female Saudi, because there wasn't a thing that resonated. I couldn't figure out why anyone liked her, but they all seemed to.
     
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  19. BalanceUT

    BalanceUT RSL and THFC!

    Oct 8, 2006
    Appalachia
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I loved reading this review. While a rant, it didn't feel 'ranty' so much as viscerally angry at the betrayal of expectations. Nice. I also know not to read it or accidentally buy it for my wife or daughter.
     
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  20. BalanceUT

    BalanceUT RSL and THFC!

    Oct 8, 2006
    Appalachia
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Sophomore slumps?
     
  21. Val1

    Val1 Member+

    Arsenal
    Mar 12, 2004
    MD's Eastern Shore
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    That's a great thread idea.
     
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  22. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    For the contemporary poetry class, one which the students liked a bit better than the last one:

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    Look: Poems (2017) bys Solmaz Sharif, in which are interspersed words from the DoD's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. The title for instance: Look is defined as “In mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.” The juxtaposition of personal poems and military jargon creates some pretty interesting effects..
     
  23. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Oh, and ... well, "for fun" isn't quite it. "On my own"... probably works better.

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    The Long Walk: A True Story of a Trek to Freedom, in which the author and six colleagues, including an American engineer, escape from a Siberian gulag and trek south, eventually making it to India, where the survivors are picked up and sheltered by the English consul. By Slavomir Rawicz (as told to an English Journalist named Downing). Elements of the book do strain credulity. Not so much life in the prison system, transport to the camp, and life in the forced labor camp, but the escape. Still, pretty gripping.
     
  24. Atouk

    Atouk BigSoccer Supporter

    DC United
    Apr 16, 2001
    Arlington, VA
    Club:
    Queens Park Rangers FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    [​IMG]

    I'm finishing up this page-turner as I complete my first college course in nearly 20 years.
     
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  25. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    So not the same as the dytopian novel of the same name I read back in high school, about an odd endurance contest which results in 99 dead contestants out of the 100 (two from each state) who begin? Can't recall the author, but for some reason the novel has stuck with me all of these years.

    EDIT: turns out it was Stephen King's first novel, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
     

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