I'm reading the new Peter Robinson "sleeping in the ground" (well I am at home... I'm at work presently so were I not on lunch I'd be reading "Guidelines on the provision and maintenance of aids to navigation" )
I'm re-reading Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. I feel like I have to re-read Moby-Dick every so often to remind myself what a novel is.
Just finished The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchinson. It was kind of meh... the type of book that tries so hard to be disturbing that it comes off a bit puppet show. Up next is The Last Don by Mario Puzo.
Many moons since I read it (or parts thereof) at university. I've still got a copy. I must read it again someday. Another pretentious purchase that's done nothing but gather dust in the years since I bought it is Machiavelli's The Prince.
I just got a hold of The World of Ice and Fire, so I've started on that. Cracking good read so far. I'm very fond of the setting, and I like that it reads like an actual history book. It's put me in the mood for more of the same, so afterwards I'm planning to read some real world history, in the form of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I left it a couple of hundred pages in. Great book, but mighty dense. Not something to skim through.
So now you can stop pretending to be Culcha'd and read it for real? I wonder how much our difficulty in getting through classic literature has to do with formatting. I inherited my dad's collection of "The Great Books" and I pulled out Tacitus' Annals at random. The material is potentially exciting, especially since he isn't shy about giving him opinion on the failings of various emperors and their hangers-on, but the wall-o-text layout is like old oatmeal to get through. I've given up for the time being. Oh, yes, and translation makes a biiiigggggg difference. Every so often I go through a stage where I'm looking up everything I can on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. This last time I came across a recent translation Pliny the Younger's account of the disaster, and it read in the most natural, exciting, and heart-tugging way. So I went looking for more Pliny the Younger, and all I found online was stiff, stilted, and all-but-unreadable.
Thanks for your reply. Yes its a very great book that discusses all essential issues in a society; issues pertaining religion, philosophy, psychology of all living and even nonliving things. May God bless you all.
Herodotus, Rule of St Benedict, and the bible (New American bible translation). Just some light reading.
The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty. I have never read her before, but think I will enjoy. In a literary sense only, because I also suspect it has annoying characters and no happy ending.
Laundry Service Bk 1, by Stross. I am working on a story that uses coding as a magic system, kind of. This book was the closest I could find that used a similar concept. The Laundry Service is a secret gov org in the UK that keeps certain secerets secret. The secrets they deal with are math eqations that have magical powers. I want to see how it is handled by anothe writer.
I haven't been reading much lately, but I started The Demonologist last night. I'm so irritated that it's in present tense because I love everything else about it. It's so damn jarring.
Winter Moon - Dean Koontz Way too much build up to the convergance of two story lines, like the first 3/4 of the story. Mental note- get to the point.
About halfway done with book one in the series. It's decent for what it is, I guess. Entertaining. Page turner. Characters are mediocre at best. Writing style is, uh, uninspiring but not annoying. Difficult to take seriously because the ultra-violence is laughable. And the characters all have snarky, snappy comebacks when faced with a life or death situation, so there's no real tension or suspense (overall, the dialogue makes 80's action movies sound like Shakespeare). I don't know. The world is fairly well realized (in its own limited way) but also fairly generic. This is what best-selling sci-fi looks like? Does the series get better? Or at least marginally intelligent or thought provoking?
Well, after that set-up, what kind of answer do you expect me to give? I'm halfway through Babylon's Ashes. I've liked the books muchly. I enjoy the pace and the snappiness of the writing. But then, I did watch the two seasons of the SyFy version of it first, so I was already primed. To be honest, I also like its lack of pretension. I mean, I enjoyed the BSG reboot, but jebus, was it ever full of itself and its desperate attempt to make everything epic and literally the source of legend and myth. I was in the mood for something brisk, cheeky, sexy, and this series gives all of that. Amos Burton, what I wouldn't give for ten minutes with you locked in engineering. I'm not such a fan of the Belter Creole used in the books. Nice idea, but clearly they didn't hire anyone with any real feel for linguistics as a consultant. It's just... bad.
Stephen King and guns, man... For Survivor Type, he calls an MD and asks if it's possible to survive by eating your own body, but every single stinking time he includes a gun in a story, he gets something seriously wrong. Cell, where the guy flips out the barrel of the revolver to reload it. Cell, where the "illegal" hollow point bullets punch huge holes in the side of an LP gas tanker. And most recently, Doctor Sleep, where the MC gets hold of a Glock .22. Not a Glock 22, which (quick google) is a .40cal, but a Glock .22, which would be some sort of a .22cal Glock, which is only available as a conversion kit. I guess it's fitting that the guns that Roland carries in the movie version of The Dark Tower appear to have a loading lever, despite being double action and firing .45 Long Colt ammo. Which he obtained from one of New York City's many local neighborhood gun stores.
I don't know. Expectation deficit on my part, I guess. I picked it up for market research... kept hearing it was cutting edge sci-fi. Whetstone must have broken.
This one, Enjoying this one so far. Haven't read a fantasy novel in a long time though, so I've no idea if it makes "good fantasy." And this one will be arriving tomorrow, Looking forward to reading it.
The problem I have with the Belter Creole is the following: There are, at this point, at least 8 different languages that serve as source vocabularies for this "creole", but there's no kind of standardization in the use. In a real creole, a given set of words wins out over their other-language counterparts, some from Language A, some from Language B, but there are winner words and loser words. And minority languages (unless the whole Belter diaspora was a highly planned, exactly equal ratio of representation for all) are going to lose out entirely save for a word here or there. In the books, there are a few terms that all the Belters use, like sa sa, and dui, but other than this smattering of terms that everyone has agreed upon, all the other Belters have highly idiosyncratic idolects where they pick and choose at random from all the languages. For anyone else to understand this random kind of idiolectic communication, it would mean they would need a working knowledge of ALL the languages being used as source vocabularies. This would make Belters, all of them, super-mega-ultra polyglots and that kind of language gift is just not reasonable or rational in that many people.
You're much more knowledgable about linguistics than I am, despite our similarities, but that sounds a lot like Japanese. Sometimes the pure Japanese word is used, sometimes the sino-Japanese word, sometimes an archaic word... Whoever designed this language was clearly not worried about continuity errors. As an example I can remember from Korean (similar problems, similar sources), there are two different ways to count. Hana, dul, set, net, tasset, yosset, ilkob, yodol, ahop, yol (romanizations are entirely of my own devising) is pure Korean, while il, ii, sam, sa, o, yuk, chil, pal, ku, ship are Sino-Korean. However, if you say ii nyun, it means "two years," while dul nyun means "two bitches" (referring to unpleasant women, not female dogs). I might have that backwards, but the point is that Asian languages are fucked.
