Staying at home is the norm... What are you reading?

[Johnny Novgorod]

Reading El entenado by Juan José Saer. The title literally translates to "The Stepson" but the book is usually printed as The Witness in English.

It's about a cabin boy who sails for the New World in the early 16th century (they make land in Río de la Plata) and is taken in by the local cannibals after they slaughter the rest of the expedition.

(Incidentally, I never really put together that cabin boys might just be glorified **** toys during those long restless voyages at sea. Google only addresses the British Royal Navy, because of course, and talk of "peg boys".)

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Laid up recovering from hip replacement surgery, so have had enough personal downtime to delve into some books again. I often wind up buying books as souvenirs from trips. Just finished a warmup, Conversations With Lincoln, which I picked up at a museum in St. Louis. It could moreso be considered a collection of anecdotes but nevertheless, learning more about how his true nature extended to the average person in need was heartwarming (as well as heartbreaking), and had me welling up about once a chapter. There were also some lighter-hearted parts though. One in particular I especially got a kick out of, involving a young girl who traveled to the White House with a petition to release a Union man imprisoned by the Rebels,

When I told the president I was afraid I wouldn't be admitted to his office in the morning, Lincoln responded, "Oh, the usher is only a slender little Irishman. If he refuses to let you pass, slap him down the steps, and walk in as you did just now."


I also got The Journals Of Lewis And Clark at the same time, but will probably switch it up with a shorter true crime novel I picked up at the Willis (Sears) Tower Skydeck last month, The Devil in the White City, about a serial killer at the 1893 World’s Fair.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Damn this book goes hard describing late 19th century Chi-town.

Spoiler

As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal turnaces were in full roar. The ceaseless passage of trains, grip-cars, trolleys, carriages-surreys, landaus, victorias, broughams, phaetons, and hearses, all with iron-clad wheels that struck the pavement like rolling hammers-produced a constant thunder that did not recede until after midnight and made the open-window nights of summer unbearable. In poor neighborhoods garbage mounded in alleys and overflowed giant trash boxes that became banquet halls for rats and bluebottle flies. Billions of flies. The corpses of dogs, cats, and horses often remained where they fell. In January they froze into disheartening poses; in August they ballooned and ruptured. Many ended up in the Chicago River, the city's main commercial artery. During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city's drinking water. In rain any street not paved with macadam oozed a fragrant muck of horse manure, mud, and garbage that swelled between granite blocks like pus from a wound. Chicago awed visitors and terrified them. French editor Octave Uzanne called it "that Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic." Paul Lindau, an author and publisher, described it as "a gigantic peepshow of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point."

The city’s still got its fair share of problems like most of course, but nothing that would need the term “shithole” so thoroughly redefined.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Read a couple books.

Little Women. I liked it, but the writing was pretty sappy and I kept tearing up, even in the parts that weren't sad. Maybe it was how the audiobook was read.

Starship Troopers. Not really what I expected. More than anything it seems like Heinlein's proposal for a new political system, but with cool mech suits. I get the feeling, not having actually watched it, that the movie has little relation to the book. The few clips I've seen never seem to contain anybody in a mech suit jetpacking around firing mini-nukes.

Siddhartha. A book about a person achieving spiritual enlightenment through Buddism, written by a German man in 1922. I don't actually remember how this got on my reading list. It wasn't bad, though.

And I almost forgot Barnaby Rudge. Another Dickens novel, this time about an idiot and protestant riots. I liked it more than Martin Chuzzlewit, but I don't think it was close to being his best work.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Starship Troopers. Not really what I expected. More than anything it seems like Heinlein's proposal for a new political system, but with cool mech suits. I get the feeling, not having actually watched it, that the movie has little relation to the book. The few clips I've seen never seem to contain anybody in a mech suit jetpacking around firing mini-nukes.

The power armour was in later movies. The first one was made by someone who gave up early on on the book, and made it into a satire of fascism (which didn't quite land as intended, because so many movies are like that anyway).

 

[Drathnoxis]

The power armour was in later movies. The first one was made by someone who gave up early on on the book, and made it into a satire of fascism (which didn't quite land as intended, because so many movies are like that anyway).

An adaptation made by someone who didn't read the source material. Somehow I think that's more common than one might expect.

 

[Ezekiel]

A third into "Children of Dune." This series is impossible to adapt. I often have to read sentences over and over. It's too introspective and metaphysical for film.

The game they played with Duncan Idaho in "Messiah" was a good one.

 

[Thaluikhain]

An adaptation made by someone who didn't read the source material. Somehow I think that's more common than one might expect.

Not just didn't read, read part of and hated the source material and everything it stood for, and decided to make an adaptation satirising. Though, they say Abrams hates old Star Trek.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Finally I know the origin of Ice-nine 10 years after first seeing it referenced in 999. The book was really good, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the real world eventually met a similar fate to the one in the book.

Dropped A Clockwork Orange. After listening to nearly incomprehensible slang descriptions of a gang of teenagers going on a spree to mug, assault, rob, and rape for about an hour I figured this wasn't for me and I was getting no benefit from hearing it. Instead I'll finish up The Art of War, which I started last year.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Finally I know the origin of Ice-nine 10 years after first seeing it referenced in 999. The book was really good, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the real world eventually met a similar fate to the one in the book.

Kurt gets very little credit for calling things exactly what they are.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished El entenado/"The Witness".

True to the only other Juan José Saer novel I ever read, it's about exactly one moment in the life of its protagonist (the slaughter and cannibalization of an expedition, followed by a banquet and subsequent orgy, whose rich description takes up almost half the book) and the intense metaphysical cross-examination that lasts the rest of his life as he tries to assign it meaning to that moment. Memory, identity and he power and limitations of language are a big deal too. Good stuff.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Started The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. You're kinda just dropped in the thick of it and asked to roll with all the alien names and cities and planets and embrace them like a warm blanket of "You're reading sci-fi", which is just as well. I think I got the gist of it. And I like that the main dude is already a few years into his mission and that there's a history to all the places and characters in play.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Today I read Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. I'm tempted to excuse it as simply not for me, even if I can connect with it on some shallow level (who hasn't bemoaned the loss of childhood innocence or lived through a bad breakup at one point?), but ultimately I can't get over the fact the poetry itself is so hoky and so rooted in Instagram performance, styled as it is into a series of lower case koans thick with buzzword lingo (toxicity, co-dependence) that read like the average blogger's vaguepost. Real r/im14andthisisdeep stuff. Taken straight from the book:

the thing about writing is
i can't tell if it's healing
or destroying me
***
how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you
***
there is a difference between
someone telling you
they love you and
them actually
loving you

 

[BrawlMan]

I am reading Street Fighter The Novel: Where Strength Lies (2016). It is published by Udon, and is each chapter is more so a vignette focused on two fighters, and not an overall narrative nor plot. WSL is based off of Ultra Street Fighter IV. What sets it apart from most other game to novel adaptions is all of the artwork is done by Yusuke Murata. The manga sketches in the book are amazing! I've barely started and will add my own thoughts as I go on each day. For those interested, just get hardcover book and not the paperback. I stuck with hardcover, and it is how I prefer reading stories like this. At least the hardcover has a fold out artwork of the paperback cover, so it evens out. I normally don't do many novel adaptions of games, but I decided to take an interest and try this one out.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished The Left Hand of Darkness. It's a remarkable science fiction novel and it's almost a disservice to hole it as such since it shies away so carelessly from the cliches that typically define science fiction - the aliens and the robots, the tech and the lasers, the need for a quest or some grand operatic scheme to tie everything together. It's a thought experiment (what if society wasn't shaped or defined by gender roles) and a tale of friendship/survival that is endlessly smart and curious and wonderfully evocative. And I know Ursula has a whole bunch of other books set within the same 'cycle' but I appreciate that a story would create such a big, compelling world riddled with myth and history and then have the gall to end it once you're done telling the story you wanted to tell.

 

[BrawlMan]

I am reading Street Fighter The Novel: Where Strength Lies (2016). It is published by Udon, and is each chapter is more so a vignette focused on two fighters, and not an overall narrative nor plot. WSL is based off of Ultra Street Fighter IV. What sets it apart from most other game to novel adaptions is all of the artwork is done by Yusuke Murata. The manga sketches in the book are amazing! I've barely started and will add my own thoughts as I go on each day. For those interested, just get hardcover book and not the paperback. I stuck with hardcover, and it is how I prefer reading stories like this. At least the hardcover has a fold out artwork of the paperback cover, so it evens out. I normally don't do many novel adaptions of games, but I decided to take an interest and try this one out.

I am already more than halfway through this book and the writing in these stories are excellent. What's cool is that you get the seed of thoughts of each of these fighters or reveals stuff about them that's only barely hinted at in certain other adaptions or win quotes, or hidden depth that never got a mentioned, until now, and all that fits a character.

Also, some of the fighters hidden thoughts on the more outrageous characters, or opponents is actually hilarious. Hakkan actually get some of the funniest lines when fighting Dhalsim. Currently at RND 8: Dudley vs. Balrog [Boxer].

 

[Thaluikhain]

Finished The Left Hand of Darkness. It's a remarkable science fiction novel and it's almost a disservice to hole it as such since it shies away so carelessly from the cliches that typically define science fiction - the aliens and the robots, the tech and the lasers, the need for a quest or some grand operatic scheme to tie everything together. It's a thought experiment (what if society wasn't shaped or defined by gender roles)

There was a time when that's the sort of thing that science fiction was. Within living memory, even.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

There was a time when that's the sort of thing that science fiction was. Within living memory, even.

Can't speak for current lit since most of what I read tends to be older stuff but my impression going off movies is that science fiction has been slowly co-opted by young adult lit. Ragtag bunch vs dystopia narratives, action with a gimmick, vibes over thought.

 

[BrawlMan]

I am already more than halfway through this book and the writing in these stories are excellent. What's cool is that you get the seed of thoughts of each of these fighters or reveals stuff about them that's only barely hinted at in certain other adaptions or win quotes, or hidden depth that never got a mentioned, until now, and all that fits a character.

Also, some of the fighters hidden thoughts on the more outrageous characters, or opponents is actually hilarious. Hakkan actually get some of the funniest lines when fighting Dhalsim. Currently at RND 8: Dudley vs. Balrog [Boxer].

I finished the book, and my god it's amazing! Each fight is different and has different types of takes or personal/mental stakes for why these fights are happening. There is technically a connected story (three chapters that feature Ryu in some way fighting the Dark Hodou), but the major theme is each fighter who is the POV character in their respective chapter, either think back to Ryu, how they feel about him, and/or how they influenced them in some way.

My favorite chapters are Chun-Li vs. Elena, Ken vs. Evil Ryu, and Dudley vs. Balrog. None of these fights are easy victories nor wins. Hell, some fights have an ambiguous ending or ends on a stalemate. A lot of these fights work, because of proper build up or tension increase. Where the impactful or more powerful moments are given the splash page or double pages in full artwork spectacle.

There is a nice little epilogue for each of the fighters featured in the story. Since this is based off of Ultra SFIV and came out in 2016, it sorta of an implied tie-in to SFV. Mainly in Chun's chapter where her reason for being in Africa is looking for someone who matched the description of Charlie Nash. Implying that the Illuminati were already active and just resurrected him. Another neat little detail is that Elena's epilouge is the beginning of her arcade mode in USFIV. Meaning her defeat at Chun's hands inspired Elena to travel the word! Brilliant!

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Reading Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick. It was his first book, or the first one he got published anyway. He's a bit green here but already banging on about corporate overlords, nutcase cults (or are they) and the fickleness of reality, all with his signature sense of cynicism, bitterness and paranoia. So I feel back home. Already read Eye in the Sky, The Man in the High Castle, Dr. Bloodmoney, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik.

The premise is, the world is ruled by a lottery that randomly picks (or does it) a leader and an assassin tasked with killing the leader. We cut between the new leader, who happens to be a member of a cult, and some schmuck (it's always some schmuck in these) who gets suckered into plotting the leader's death. I'm liking it. It's a wonder how these never got turned into a show or a movie but I guess by now enough has seeped into pop culture and other adaptations of PKD.