What are you reading right now?
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BEOWULF... Wish I could edit out the trashy Christian banter some monk threw in so it wouldn't get burnt :/
The Dresden Files, for like the sixth time. Specifically, White Night. Also, Flashman and the Redskins, for the first time.
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente.
That woman can fucking write.
I hadn't realised how seldom I read books with truly astounding writing just in the sense of diction and word-play. Certainly I read a lot by authors who are great story-tellers, but it's very rare to find people who write with anything even beginning to approach the style of Valente.
She also nails the modern-day fairy tale better than any author I've ever seen, including favourites like Gaiman. There's a description of a myth (the characters in the fairy tale are telling each other fairy tales...) about Japanese trains that will blow your fucking mind within the first few pages. She's the only author I've ever seen that manages to create fairy tales that sound as breathtaking and profound as the best real-world fairy tales always are. And these are not children's fairy tales, they're the good, real-world sort free of child-friendly sanitation. The sort that adults tell to each other and dream about rather than the sort that exist only to instill particular values in children.
(Palimpsest is a word for re-used manuscript pages where the old writing was scraped off or otherwise removed, it isn't some weird sex thing.)
That woman can fucking write.
I hadn't realised how seldom I read books with truly astounding writing just in the sense of diction and word-play. Certainly I read a lot by authors who are great story-tellers, but it's very rare to find people who write with anything even beginning to approach the style of Valente.
She also nails the modern-day fairy tale better than any author I've ever seen, including favourites like Gaiman. There's a description of a myth (the characters in the fairy tale are telling each other fairy tales...) about Japanese trains that will blow your fucking mind within the first few pages. She's the only author I've ever seen that manages to create fairy tales that sound as breathtaking and profound as the best real-world fairy tales always are. And these are not children's fairy tales, they're the good, real-world sort free of child-friendly sanitation. The sort that adults tell to each other and dream about rather than the sort that exist only to instill particular values in children.
(Palimpsest is a word for re-used manuscript pages where the old writing was scraped off or otherwise removed, it isn't some weird sex thing.)
I'm hopping between two books right now. 'The Neuromancer' by William Gibson and 'The Tyranny of the Night' by Glenn Cook. I just started those two the other day so I'm only about a chapter into each one.
"Twilight" by William Gay. It's actually pretty good. It's for one of my college classes.
So...yep. While it isn't something I'd pick up on my own volition...I ain't mad at it. Haha.
So...yep. While it isn't something I'd pick up on my own volition...I ain't mad at it. Haha.
I stumbled upon her "Girl who ..." yeah the one with the long title. She seems interesting. I'll have to check out Palimpsest.Jaime_Wolf said:
Nothing. As soon as I have money, "Red Years/Black Years: A Political History of Spanish Anarchism" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence."
The Dresden Files, Changes I think it was. The one with Aztecs.
It's decent. Not the best. The author kinda pulled the "how much luck does this guy have" too many times.
It's decent. Not the best. The author kinda pulled the "how much luck does this guy have" too many times.
It always helps to remember that books don't necessarily hold their appeal over time and, much more importantly, that a book need not be enjoyable or even good to be important. And knowledge of important works is useful both in understanding where contemporary works and attitudes come from and in making people part of a shared society.Ham_authority95 said:
For instance, Citizen Kane is, by most estimations, trite and boring. But it's trite and boring because it paved the way for more or less every movie since then. It radically reinvented what movies were and did a lot to inform our present popular understanding of a very big social issue (the accumulation and effects of enormous wealth).
To Kill a Mockingbird isn't racy (lol) or interesting anymore for the most part. The issues it deals with seem commonplace or seem like common sense now, but that wasn't always the case and knowing how those ideas came into society is both useful in and of itself and interesting in that it gives you a better idea of what things were like before things changed.
Suggestion: keep a dictionary handy.CyprisVeil said:
I have an enormous vocabulary and haven't had to use a dictionary when reading a novel in probably close to a decade, but this one sent me to the dictionary several times within the first few pages. And it's usually worth knowing what the words mean since most of the book is written with very figurative language such that it's hard to know what's going on if you're missing pieces of her analogy and metaphor. Luckily, I've been reading it on a Kindle, so that's made it somewhat easier.
For Paperback books currently re-reading some lovecraft
For electronic just started reading/playing however u want to say it a VN a friend reccomended Demonbane
For electronic just started reading/playing however u want to say it a VN a friend reccomended Demonbane
Just finished reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - basically a book that explains Marxist principles a lot more clearly than in the Communist Manifesto. It took me a while but I really enjoyed it. Last night I ordered Mogworld so I'll be getting onto that soon.