Started reading 'Dune.' Not into it yet, but I really want to like it. I find it a bit intimidating and feel stupid for not getting all the information dump stuff at the beginning.
I think it gets quite a bit better when they actually get onto Arakis, and that does take a little time. The book becomes a bit more accessible at that point as well, and the political intrigue stabilizes at a manageable level.
Still reading Confessions of a Mask, the Meredith translation. Hardest book I have ever read, no doubt. I read 10 pages at a time, understand maybe 40% and I just put it away. At this rate, my current to-read list will last quite some time.
I'm starting Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. I'm not entirely satisfied with a scene I wrote that was supposed to be a furniture-smashing, eye-clawing fight to the death, so I'm looking for inspiration. I hope my blood phobia can handle it. It doesn't engage when I'm writing, for some reason, but when I'm reading, it's worse than real live blood. An audiobook almost knocked me out while I was driving last year.
Is that the Mishima one? It's a great book. I like the temple of the golden pavilion the best of the stuff of his I read. Some of it is so clearly the writing of a man utterly trapped in his head in a society that only further encourages that. Makes for difficult reading for me sometimes. I just wanna get out of that head space. The movie 'Mishima' by Paul Schrader is an excellent encapsulation of his life work and themes.
I've been starting one book after another and getting bored, irritated or, worst of all, pedagogical with them, a few pages in. Not their fault - I just haven't found the right note for this mood. (What do you call it when your whole brain itches?) If Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde doesn't hold my attention, I'm going to re-read my favourite William Gibson book, Spook Country.
I once started reading Jasper Fforde's The Jane Eyre Affair. I really liked the series up until book five or so, when they just felt a bit silly, or something. Fforde's a good writer though.
The Finklestein effect! That's what a brain-itch is called. From Nightmare Before Christmas - which, incidentally, is our traditional yuletime movie.
Yes, that is the one. I think I might shelf it and start on another book. It's not what I expected and I feel like it's one of those books I'm just not ready for.
I started to re-read Starrigger by John DeChancie, which I remember liking when I was a lot younger. It's almost all telling and endless conversations where people get together in large groups and discuss everything to death, resurrect it and kill it again. Endless details about things that don't seem to matter at all. After a while I couldn't take any more and closed it without a bookmark. That's when I'm just done.
Isn't it odd, how boring things seem now that were fascinating when we were young? I suspect it's that, then, we were encountering these ideas for the first time and didn't mind an author chewing them over at bum-numbing length. Now, all those ideas have been presented to us in so many media and styles and version, they're so familiar as to be cliche. We wonder how we could have admired such mundane writers -- until we realize that every cliche was an original, once.
Lol yep—when we're young we're pretty dumb. The brain doesn't finish growing until somewhere in your late 20's or early 30's, and the last part to come in is the neocortex, home of intelligence and abstract thought. At the time I was fascinated by the surface trappings of science fiction; robots, ray guns, crystal dome cities on faraway planets etc. And I knew nothing about showing versus telling or too much exposition.
Yes! I'm more into it now. At the beginning my brain just could not process everything or filter what was important. But I've got a handle on it at least I think so, and I'm digging it.
https://bookriot.com/2017/09/07/medieval-historical-fiction/ I scrolled down this list, and paused at 'The Wake.' Bought it, ten quid, tho'.. :/
The Indomitable Hornblower...a 3-novel hardback of the Horatio Hornblower series by C.S. Forester. I loved the movie series and the book is even better!
That' s what puts me off buying new books, when they've been out a while they come down in price, especially the digital ones. I often buy second hand books for that very reason; Amazon are pretty good for that, despite the delivery charges.
just finished re-reading The Song of Achilles after a long time. it's still as wonderful as i remember it
Linda Pastan's poetry collection Waiting for My Life. It's a bit on the confessional side, but I do enjoy of a few of them, mostly the section title poems. The style I really like though. Free-verse with often clever line breaks that allow the poem to roll through to completion almost effortlessly. There's nothing very experimental here, just refined, and that's perfectly okay with me.
This book is fuuuuuuuucking awesome. One of my best friends here gave it to me for Christmas ... last year? Whenever it was. We gave each other our favorite books (I think I gave him a different favorite because I can't ever pick just one, and my favorite favorite is ... not something I think he'd enjoy), and he gave me this. I wasn't too sure I could follow it because it's one of the first translated editions and there are a ton of similar sounding names, but once I got in the groove of it, holy shiiiit. It hits the fan almost immediately and I was ready for all of it. One might find the violence a bit gratuitous, but I mean... it's called Battle Royale. Going into that expecting it to be PG is kind of dumb. So many people say Susanne Collins ripped off the premise for Hunger Games, but nah. Nahhhh, you can't compare the two.
It's great so far. I found it utterly useless to try and keep the names strait at first, but a quarter through, the characters are different enough (and fewer by the minute) that I can remember who's whom even without remembering half the names. We haven't gotten into much hand to hand brutality yet, but I saw the movie a few years ago. Even if it's half as bloody as that, I think this will definitely help me figure out the fight-to-the-death scene in my WIP. If anyone knows of any more claws and knives and broken glass death scenes in books, let me know. Battle Royale might end up do the trick on its own, but more examples couldn't hurt.
Haha I doubt it's helpful, but this reminded me of the scene near the end of Michael Chrichton's Jurassic Park when Grant fights the raptor in the freezer hand to hand with needles and poisonous chemicals. Pretty brutal if I remember right.
I didn’t think the book was derivative and cliche at all but interesting and adventurous. The whole book was my sort of story. I now have the second book in the collection and I’m looking forward to starting that also. I thought I liked reading the story from the point of view of the child and there were some beautiful and descriptive moments in this one - in particular concerning descriptions of the aurora that were very vivid and clear. The relationship she has with her parents is an incredibly interesting one as you don’t see it in most books that they are in conflict against one another. Although they love and protect her, they still want to kill all the innocent children and she’s obviously not going to let them. It’s a great little story, with beautiful descriptions and a very relatable child. I’m looking forward to reading on and discovering what happens next.
