What Are You Reading Now.

Discussion in 'Discussion of Published Works' started by Writing Forums Staff, Feb 22, 2008.

  1. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    I've just now finished The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. This book has been on my to-read list for years. Well, I finally read it, and... I have notes. Benjamin Hoff would say that I'm not supposed to have notes though, because that would require thought. How convenient is a philosophy you can't question because questioning anything is wrong according to that philosophy? I learned a couple of things from this book, namely that Taoism is not for me, and that the author HATES EEYORE. He kept calling him names and misquoting him from the books. In fact, he was extremely unkind to pretty much everyone but Pooh, because Pooh, "a bear of very little brain," was the only one without a thought in his head.

    I don't know how faithful this book is to the writings of Lao Tzu. I can only speak to what I read, but this was one of the more pompous and judgemental philosophies I've ever come across, which is odd, because judging things requires some amount of analysis, and analysis is a sin according to this book. Learning and questioning were also cardinal sins. Basically, the only way to be that doesn't disgust Benjamin Hoff, is to turn off the brain God gave ya and never think a thought again, never learn another fact and never question anything you're presented with.

    I can appreciate some of what was said. Yes, there is beauty in simplicity. Yes, one should live in harmony with one's surroundings, but the rest? Nope. Not for me. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Benjamin Hoff emphatically disagrees. Also, he hates Eeyore!
     
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  2. w. bogart

    w. bogart Contributor Contributor Blogerator

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    More detail than I can absorb with a single listen. I am glad I got the whole set, less storynomics, which is on the list for the future. I plan on at least two more passes of each audio book. You can't absorb it all in a single pass. I am still floored by the breakdowns he does of subtext, and how word count and the number of syllables of the words used are factors in the subtext of dialog.

    How to write dazzling dialog is also good, but it lacks the depth of McKee.
     
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  3. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Oh absolutely!! I read Story twice, and need to read Character again. In fact to really get the most out of it you'd need to create a course for yourself, with review questions and little tests and stuff. There should be workbooks! The first read-through familiarizes you with the ideas and a little sticks, but without much context. On the second a lot more sticks, and you feel like you're starting to get it. Luckily there's a lot of overlap between his books, you keep running into the same ideas in each. That helps. But I feel like if you can really understand and remember McKee, you almost don't need anything else (ok, not true really).
     
  4. J.T. Woody

    J.T. Woody Book Witch Contributor

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    I finished the first story.
    It was more emotional and sad, which makes sense after reading her Intro and the reason for this specific story. Its also very "Monkey's Paw"... Like i was holding my breath waiting for the other shoe to drop (so to speak).
    But the imagery and story telling is up my alley. Its exactly what i like to write
     
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  5. Not the Territory

    Not the Territory Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    Nothing too exciting other than a few more books read.

    Crome Yellow is timeless and has a few comedic moments. I appreciate Huxley's dismissal of faux sophistication and the cultural notions that surround post-modernist art (and of which don't seem to have changed too much in 100 years). The best character is this woman who's entirely shackled to pretense. Here's a quote that illustrates. Warning: it's long.
    For context, she badly wants to rut, and there's another amazing passage where she explains that fact while using anything other than honest language, but I'll stop here. Anyway, there were a few laugh out loud good passages like that, but at the end I was still left thinking: is that it? I didn't see the benefit in the novel format to get the ideas across. I think it should have been shorter, or perhaps richer.

    I read a few of his short stories too, but frankly it grew tiresome that many of the characters were entrenched in ritzy academia and at odds with its culture all the same. Write what you know, I guess? Though Happily Ever After did stand out by how it tackled a certain kind of war time angst. Quite memorable.

    In sum I'm not yet done with Huxley. Going to keep plodding towards Brave New World. For a break, however, I continued going down my to-reads of contemporary fantasy.

    The Black Iron Legacy: The Gutter Prayer (Gareth Hanrahan) gets in line for the semi-recent trend of grim fantasy, the kind with sex and cursing. It's a knife's edge to walk, even sharper than normal with it being epic fantasy to boot, and I did roll my eyes when a foul-mouthed saint is introduced, but 400 pages later I was on seat's edge about her fate. Ultimately it was just so well executed with earnest bold steps that have appropriate time between setup and payoff. In plotting he ensured that every victory had a dire cost, that desparation was maintained right up until the end, that one lead did not overshadow another, and that Gods, Germs, and Steel can coexist with almost no overt plot holes. Anyway it had good prose as well (though too reliant on sentence fragments and over-explaining plot). I'm even tempted to continue the series at some point, though I'll say I began the book with a general dislike for present tense and that hadn't changed by the end, but that's just me.

    Next up was Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, but it's not on the KOBO store, so I settled for another of his named The Black Tongue Thief. This one was harder to pick up. It leaned too hard into the superficial trappings of dark fantasy—the aforementioned sex and cursing—and its setting's feature of a public thief/assassin guild and vague 'goblin war' came across ridiculous and low-effort, an immiscible cobble that justified the genre's derision. Well, initially.

    I don't know if the novel itself finally found its step, or I finally found its step. It happened approximately half way through, when the hero and entourage get on a boat. What followed was so chaotically absurd that it was entirely believable. Everything fell into place. I went from wincing at the hot bathwater to falling right in, and sped through the rest of the story in a few days. Suddenly the coarse language, the cruel world, the cruel people, constant stream of genital-derived slang, and the wry first person narrator all fit cohesively. Good setup and payoff too, which is nice; I can't dislike a tight plot.

    Buehlman played with the idea of war taking most of the land's men, which lead to women having to take on masculine roles such as sailors, captains, soldiers, guards, so on. Frankly he handled it well and it's largely due to follow through: they take on the traditional men's roles but the dangers too. They get stabbed, flattened, speared, maimed just the same. At the end I realised it had nothing to do with recognition of competence among the sexes, as that's established well enough today. The point was that it was sad. It was sad that so many women had to go out and take up axes and fight bloody battles and perform dangerous, shitty labour. The point was that the society was limping, wholly brutally damaged by the war, but that notion was massaged in via normalcy, a reality long ago accepted by the characters.

    To short a long, I ultimately enjoyed both of the dark fantasies, and I'm at least finding some nuggets in Huxley. Looking forward to Brave New World.
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2023
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  6. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    Just finished Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky and am starting Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi.

    These guys are treasures as authors, I just wish their surnames were easier to spell :)
     
  7. Catriona Grace

    Catriona Grace Mind the thorns Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Last night I finished rereading Sharon McCrumb's The Rosewood Casket. I'm not allowed to read anything else until I make a good start on a photography project for an embroidery textbook I'm writing. My attitude toward this project sucks, I'm procrastinating all to hell, but it has to be done. Blecch. It's too wet to garden, anyway.
     
  8. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    I've read some short stories of Bacigalupi's, plus one novel, The Windup Girl. I liked them all, Windup Girl was very interesting. It's almost, kind of, post-apocalyptic, his world.

    Haven't read Tchaikovsky, although I do have one book of his on my list.

    (I have to look both those guys up on Google when I'm writing about them).
     
  9. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    The Windup Girl got a Hugo, along with The City and the City by China Mieville (dual Hugos are rare but do happen, both earned them IMO). Tchaikovsky's SF series Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory are pretty amazing, as are his SF novellas (although I didn't like CoM as much as the first two). He's written a bunch of fantasy, but I'm allergic to that. I'm sure it's good within the genre, but I picked up one o his fantasy books, something about "black and gold" maybe (late, insomnia, not gonna google) and it just hit all the tropes I hate so I binned it.
     
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  10. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    I'm looking forward to my second Adrian Tchaikovsky some time soon, and I've read everything (I think) by Bacigalupi except for the Ship Breaker trilogy. Let me know how they go. I admire his work for the most part. He does range, though, from brilliant to brilliant with a heavy dose of preaching. Have you read The tangled Lands he wrote with Tobias S. Buckell? It's my favorite. They take turns with four little novellas, and it's fantastic fantasy.
     
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  11. w. bogart

    w. bogart Contributor Contributor Blogerator

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    I started watching Amazon's new series the terminal list since I loved the book so much.

    It left me questioning if the person who did the adaptation to the screen had read the book.
    The inciting incident of the story was completely changed. Characters and events were completely changed.
    The end result is they are making the MC look like a mentally unstable military type.
    While I strongly recommend the book, as an excellently written thriller. I question how much of the amazon series I can choke down.
     
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  12. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    That happens so often it's not even funny. I resolutely avoided reading The Peripheral because Amazon were showing the series; glad too, as they are quite different. Saying that, I really enjoyed their adaption; sometimes they do get it right, even if they often change an awful lot of the books content.
    Of course, the truth is they are quite different mediums, and would be nearly impossible to film accurately, not the least because the series would take several episodes just getting past the first chapter. :D

    Allergic? :D
    I will definitely keep AT in mind for my next read, and it will be CoT. I'm on The Peripheral at the moment so, time to think about the next one.
     
  13. Le Panda Du Mal

    Le Panda Du Mal Contributor Contributor

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    You would probably get a better overview of Taoism from asking a random person on the street than from Benjamin Hoff. No, really, completely forget about this book. There were a few decades where Taoism was a vague subject in the west so writers could get rich by publishing any sort of nonsense about "the Tao" and this book was a prime example. Thankfully that trend seems to have petered out and much better material is available in English. Daoism itself is a really complicated topic- it is sort of like Hinduism in that it is a really broad tapestry of different threads running through Chinese history, mixing together and mutating over the centuries into lots of different tendencies. It's got all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff. But if you're interested in the more "philosophical" current (the philosophy/religion dichotomy doesn't really work in ancient China, or anywhere else, really) I think the book of Zhuangzi is a ton of fun to read and, IMO, a lot more interesting and substantial than Lao Tzu. I recommend The Essential Zhuangzi by Brook Ziporyn because it also comes with selections from lots of old commentaries which adds a lot of value.

    I also think Confucianism gets short shrift in the west- Mencius/ Mengzi is a great read too.
     
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  14. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    It doesn't surprise me a bit to know that Benjamin Hoff is full of crap. If you watch the news, you're a bizy backsun? He preaches against education but studied architecture, music, fine arts, graphic design and Asian Culture, according to his Wikipedia page and Goodreads bio. I will not be reading The Te of Piglet.
     
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  15. Le Panda Du Mal

    Le Panda Du Mal Contributor Contributor

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    I remember skimming through the Te of Piglet- it's even worse, as I recall. He uses the Piglet persona as an opening to further indulge his misanthropy, rail against feminism, etc. Sometimes "don't overthink things!" can be a cover for a lot of unexamined ideology.
     
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  16. Beloved of Assur

    Beloved of Assur Active Member

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    Herodotus.

    I'm planning and drafting for a story about a figure from Greek mythology, possibly expanded in the future to include his descendents, and in so doing I'm finding all kinds of interesting little notes and stories that touches on this mythological figure in Herodotus' "History".

    Good stuff.
     
  17. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    [​IMG]
    Lots of fantastic books mixed with duds suited for birdcage liner. Make sure your parrot cannot read.

    "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Vol 1)" translated by Richard Burton (★★★★★)
    "The Plague" by Albert Camus (★★★★★)
    "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen (★★★★)
    "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (★★)
    "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin (★ 1/2)
    "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman (★★★)
    "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks (★★★★★)
    "Dubliners" by James Joyce (★ 1/2)
    "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum (★★★)
    "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy (★★★)
    "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens (★★★★★)
    "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf (★)

    .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.

    "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Vol 1)" translated by Richard Burton (★★★★★)
    Delightful! These books were notorious back in the day when the famous English translation was done by Burton. It wasn't the first translation, but it gained serious traction. Wanton sex, violence, magic. Pretty scandalous. There are 10 volumes done by Burton, which he then added another set of supplements to (6 or 7 volumes, depending on the edition). This being an age of new puritanism, the books will probably return to notoriety for other reasons . . . I find myself laughing at it all, people being "chopped in twain", sometimes in quarters, dudes scoring with hawt princesses, genie mischief and bawdiness. Tales within tales within tales. I don't find the reading difficult, and it surprises me that people complain how it's hard to understand.

    "The Plague" by Albert Camus (★★★★★)
    A French city in Algeria suffers the bubonic plague. The city is quarantined, and officials try to stop the spread. Chaos ensues.

    On the fourth day the rats began to come out and die in batches. From basements,
    cellars, and sewers they emerged in long wavering files into the light of day, swayed
    helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of the horrified onlookers.
    At night, in passages and alleys, their shrill little death-cries could be clearly heard. In the
    mornings the bodies were found lining the gutters, each with a gout of blood, like a red
    flower, on its tapering muzzle; some were bloated and already beginning to rot, others
    rigid, with their whiskers still erect. Even in the busy heart of the town you found them
    piled in little heaps on landings and in backyards. Some stole forth to die singly in the
    halls of public offices, in school playgrounds, and even on cafe terraces.​

    Beautifully written (of not a beautiful subject). Absolutely brutal in the deaths. The importance of the story is the reactions of the characters. Camus is similar to Kafka, but has many finished novels, and so for that reason, I like him better. Kafka is rad though (and so is Chekhov, their distant cousin, as he were). Remember Camus is French, so it's Al-BEAR Ca-MYOO. Did Alex Trebek teach us nothing? Pronunciation is important.

    "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen (★★★★)
    Unmarried girls seek husbands, the richer the better. That Mr. Darcy sure is a jerk, who would ever give him the time of day?

    I really liked the dialog. There are snarky characters, rude characters, condescending characters, rambling characters. Their banter is excellent and quite amusing. I thought the first half of the book was much better than the second half though. And Rhett Butler would have destroyed Darcy in a fight.

    "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (★★)
    Faust wants knowledge and a fine woman. Mephistopheles is happy to help out.

    I wished I liked this one more. The plot sounds exactly like what I enjoy, but I found it silly. Some of the lines were pretty clever, even so. There are two plays. Part 2 is like some sort of fan fiction with Faust chasing after Helen of Troy. There's also a "Dr. Faustus" play by Marlowe, but I don't know if I can bring myself to read this subject again. Marlowe's might be better though. The problem wasn't the skill of the lines but the seriousness of the story. I don't know. There are so many other stories to read.

    "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin (★ 1/2)
    A wealthy woman who does absolutely nothing isn't satisfied with life. She has all the responsibilities of a house cat, yet she would prefer to be a parakeet. That would be oh so much nicer.

    Yuck. This one wasn't for me. After about 100 pages it improved, but not by much. I just can't relate to this. She never did really become independent. She just devised new ways to leech off of others. She always had funds from some man (husband, father) on hand and just idled about pretending to be "liberated." In itself, that's a cool plot (have her spiral into disaster), but I think I was supposed to actually accept this as a woman striking out on her own. I think this is held up as a great work only as a token to the gender which wrote it. Sorry, I know that's not PC, but it's not very good.

    "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman (★★★)
    It's just like the movie. Or vice versa. They are amazingly close in scenes. I think if I were younger I would have liked it more. It was pretty good, but the movie shines brighter.

    "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks (★★★★★)
    Okay, here we go! Imagine "A Farewell to Arms," with a WW1 setting and a soldier falling in love with a woman, but ramp the violence up to NC-17 levels and then throw in some shocking sex scenes too. This dude scores! Holy smoke. I wish that lady wasn't so flighty. She sure couldn't commit to the bit, but that gives the story tension. I cannot stress enough how horrible the war is. You'll get to see lots of tunnel rats being destroyed by enemy mines. The point of the book is to show you this hell and then demonstrate how it's all been forgotten. The author's skill on the page is profound. Dialog, description, action, romance . . . all of it is cranked as high as it will go. Really impressive.

    "Dubliners" by James Joyce (★ 1/2)
    One of those village novels where a place (Dublin, duh) is explored by small stories. I felt everything was too subdued. The chapters trail off with all the impact of a nerf gun. You realize they're over and done but you don't feel much. I liked one story from it, and that was the story where the guy is fired for being insolent and ends by beating his kid. I understood the parallel and thought the way he tried to act nonchalant in the middle with his friends at the bar was very well realized. His kid's later desperation mirrored his own and he didn't see it. That story could be pulled from the book and stand out as great fiction.

    "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum (★★★)
    You already know this one. The movie leaves off the last third of the book. The idea of making the adventure a potential dream was an improvement too. The slippers were silver in the book. I think they changed them to ruby just for the visual (and newly color) medium, which makes sense. Another story I was too old for. I thought Alice in Wonderland was a much better young-girl story. At least it was more interesting to me as an adult.

    "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy (★★★)
    Jude wants to be a parson/scholar. He's got woman troubles though.

    The title relates to this point where Jude just wants to live out of the eye of society. He's obscure. That's because he's living a Jerry Springer lifestyle. Get this . . . (plot follows because I know you're not going to read this book) . . .

    Jude meets a girl. He wants to kiss her. He apparently manages more because now she's pregnant. He's forced to marry her and then discovers she wasn't really pregnant. Too bad divorce isn't really allowed. The two of them split up while still being married. Jude falls in love with his cousin (which is okay in those days, I guess). He tries to keep her around by getting her a job with his old teacher. His old teacher marries her! She and Jude cheat and then the woman threatens to kill herself unless the old teacher lets her go. The teacher does. Now both Jude and his cousin-wife are married to others while they're pretending to be married to each other. The first wife shows up and she has a kid. It's Jude's! Turns out that their final days did end in a kid. Jude and his wife adopt the kid, who then proceeds to murder their other kids and then hang himself. The 2nd wife is distraught and goes back to her true husband. Jude is tricked into re-marrying his first wife. He dies alone and when the wife discovers him, she can't be bothered to do anything about his corpse because she wants to watch a parade with a potential new guy.

    It's all very Springeresque, but it's told dryly. So, high-impact plot, weakly realized.

    "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens (★★★★★)
    “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

    I can't do this one justice. It's a tale of Paris and London, mainly Paris, and the coming Revolution. All aristocrats will be hanged or beheaded. Really something else. There are so many parts of it that speak to the human condition. Dickens sides with the aggrieved underclass but then they become a force of destruction too. The most famous opening in history? (It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.) And I guess I never realized what the ending line was about, though I've heard it before.

    A man proves his love for a woman by taking the place of her condemned husband and volunteering for the guillotine. It was the only way to rescue him. He wasn't kidding when he said he loved her. He gave her her happiness with another because he could give her nothing else.

    Compare the impact of that event and what it says about life to the nothingness of story which follows in . . .

    "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf (★)
    A family of neurotics wants to go to a lighthouse and give the keepers there a treat. Whatever.

    Terrible. There's actually a point where a woman dwells upon the nature of tying shoes. There is another where a girl freaks out (in her mind) because she had set up a table centerpiece and (gasp!) somebody ate one of the fruits off it, destroying its careful artistry. Twenty years later, as an adult, she AGAIN dwells on that centerpiece. What a bunch of wackos. They are all as moody and petulant as teenage girl-goths. This existential novel is my existential nightmare. Go read Kafka, Camus, Dostoevsky, and you'll find much better. I will say that Woolf is an expert at shaping a sentence, but not much else. This isn't real life. I don't mind the characters being weird. I just don't like them stuck in one gear.

    I would rather hang out with a Rob Zombie family of murderous hillbillies than the "Lighthouse" clan. At least the hillbillies have moods that vary and aren't stuck on MAUDLIN.
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2023
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  18. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    Am I missing something about Camus? I had The Plague on my list, but I read The Stranger and found it so forgettable that I can't even tell you what was wrong with it, because I honestly don't remember. I apparently gave it a 3.5 on my book nerd spreadsheet, but again, I don't recall why. (For me, a 3.5 star didn't do it's job.)
    I thought this was a fun book. I think you graded it about right, but I also think L. Frank Baum is super creative, even if his stories and style leave something to be desired. The Tin Woodsman's axe was enchanted by a lovelorn witch (or was she hired by his ex? I forget,) so every time he swung it, he chopped off a body part and had to have the tin smith replace it, including somehow chopping off his torso. For me, the most interesting difference between the book and the movie, though, was the fact that in the film, the Scarecrow is the brainiest, the Tinman has the most heart, etc. In the book, conversely, the scarecrow really is an idiot, lol.

    ETA: Also, thanks for the warning about To the Lighthouse. It was high-ish on the list.
     
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  19. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    If you're French. Are we appropriating accents now? :p Just kidding. I know many people do that. It's just that the people I grew up with would kick your ass if you used a fake accent. I won't order a qua-sau (let the sound slide off into a half-pronounced nasal N, ignore the T completely), but I will sometimes say "Lemme git a cruss-ant." So I guess I'll go halfway there, at least on some words. Otherwise I'd be asking for a crescent or one of those little moon-shaped things.
     
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  20. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Yeah, I hear you. People can try TOO hard and become pretentious. Sometimes you've got to shortcut it and just go with the crowd.

    See, I gave "The Stranger" a 5. It's a very strange book though. The first half is a 3, or maybe a 3.5. Though succinctly written, it's just functional and has no obvious purpose, but I loved the last half where everything he did in the first half suddenly had meaning because it became evidence against him. I just found the idea of a guy who's real crime was just "going with the flow" was totally new. He didn't know when to act and be "irrational," as it were. His reactions were so subdued that society had to destroy him. Maybe I should have averaged the parts together for a 4-point-something, but I just counted it as a very slow windup to the story. I do remember approaching the middle and being confused by its purpose, but I guess everything clicked once the trial began. It's all about how a person is lost within society, which is why he's the "Stranger" and must be destroyed as an aberration. I think Kafka would have given Camus a high-five for that awesome idea.

    "The Plague" is more about a society crumbling. It has a lot of quieter, awkward sections towards the end (so maybe the first half is better this time), but what kept it elevated for me were the sections where people would lapse into profundity. The ideas they expressed were greater than the story. Like this thought:

    "All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."
    I just like the bigger messages that are there.

    Unrelated, I like this section too, because it's about writing. The guy keeps writing the first line of a story. He never gets farther:

    They entered the dining-room and Grand gave him a chair beside a table strewn
    with sheets of paper covered with writing in a microscopic hand, criscrossed with
    corrections.
    "Yes, that's it," he said in answer to the doctor's questioning glance. "But won't
    you drink something? I've some wine."
    Rieux declined. He was bending over the manuscript.
    "No, don't look," Grand said. "It's my opening phrase, and it's giving trouble, no
    end of trouble."
    He too was gazing at the sheets of paper on the table, and his hand seemed
    irresistibly drawn to one of them. Finally he picked it up and held it to the shadeless
    electric bulb so that the light shone through. The paper shook in his hand and Rieux
    noticed that his forehead was moist with sweat.
    "Sit down," he said, "and read it to me."
    "Yes." There was a timid gratitude in Grand's eyes and smile. "I think I'd like you
    to hear it."
    He waited for a while, still gazing at the writing, then sat down. Meanwhile Rieux
    was listening to the curious buzzing sound that was rising from the streets as if in answer
    to the soughings of the plague. At that moment he had a preternaturally vivid awareness
    of the town stretched out below, a victim world secluded and apart, and of the groans of
    agony stifled in its darkness. Then, pitched low but clear, Grand's voice came to his ears.
    "One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might
    have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de
    Boulogne."
    Silence returned, and with it the vague murmur of the prostrate town. Grand had
    put down the sheet and was still staring at it. After a while he looked up.
    "What do you think of it?"
    Rieux replied that this opening phrase had whetted his curiosity; he'd like to hear
    what followed. Whereat Grand told him he'd got it all wrong. He seemed excited and
    slapped the papers on the table with the flat of his hand.
    "That's only a rough draft. Once I've succeeded in rendering perfectly the picture
    in my mind's eye, once my words have the exact tempo of this ride, the horse is trotting,
    one-two-three, one-two-three, see what I mean? the rest will come more easily and,
    what's even more important, the illusion will be such that from the very first words it will
    be possible to say: 'Hats off!'.
     
    Rzero and Xoic like this.
  21. w. bogart

    w. bogart Contributor Contributor Blogerator

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    On the last book of the terminal list series. The first book was excellent with an MC you could really emphasize with. 5/5.
    The rest were good but did not have the same power as the first book. 4/5
     
    Seven Crowns likes this.
  22. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    I finished Blackwater: The complete Saga by Michael McDowell last night. It was originally serialized in six short novels/long novellas, but like The Green Mile, really needs to be read as a whole. Splitting it up just seems gimmicky, because it's one story. The book was an almost cozy but still compelling family narrative spanning several generations starting in 1919 in rural Alabama. There was an underlying element of magical realism that kept it interesting, and the "cozy" aspect randomly disappears for a page here and there when someone gets horrifically murdered, but for the most part, it was just a good drama with some likeable (and some not so likeable) characters.

    This is my second Michael McDowell after The Elementals, a decent ghost story I would definitely recommend to fans of late 20th century supernatural horror, but the two books could not be more different. The writing in Blackwater reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude in it's endless pages of exposition. The difference being, I didn't want to stab the writer halfway through this one. In Blackwater, the exposition serves to ease the reader through the passage of time and is broken up by just enough dialog to keep the book from being a thirty-hour-long info dump. Somehow, it just worked.

    I give this one 4.25 stars, and this might have been higher had there not been an increasingly glaring problem throughout the book with the treatment of the black characters. The book takes place in the deep south in a time when rich white folks had black servants. That's all fine and realistic, I guess, but the black servants were practically non-characters, which made less and less sense the longer one family worked for the other. They were there to serve and happy to do it, and that was the extent of their depth. It was especially surprising in a book filled with powerful matriarchal female characters and what would have been considered extremely enlightened treatment of homosexuality when the book was published in 1983.

    Otherwise, I quite enjoyed it.
     
  23. Adenosine Triphosphate

    Adenosine Triphosphate Member Contributor

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    Archmage by R. A. Salvatore.
     
  24. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    Reading through Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series, like I do almost every summer. It's about a Russian detective in Moscow that rides a "contemporary" wave from the Cold War, to the fall of communism, to reconstruction, then into the Putin era, as each book was written over the last 30 years. The original Gorky Park is the best one, closely followed by Polar Star and Red Square.

    Am I seriously the only person on this forum who's read these? I've mentioned them multiple times but nobody seems familiar. They're some of the best books ever, capturing Russian culture and the political zeitgeist in a familiar detective noir package. Somebody help me out.
     
  25. GrahamLewis

    GrahamLewis Seeking the bigger self Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
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    an oasis of PC midst right-wing extremism
    Currently Reading::
    Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
    Monkey Mind by Daniel Smith. A memoir of anxiety.
     

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