504 replies to this topic

[Kopekemaster]

In the same book as The Time Machine was in, there were 3 other shorter stories by H.G. Wells (gosh that sentence was so poorly worded), The Empire of the Ants, The Country of the Blind, and The Man Who Could Work Miracles.

The first and last of those three were great. The first was quite gory (yus), and the last was just pretty awesome and funny. The middle one....

Meh.

I didn't see anything scifi or fantasy in it, and, really, not much of a plot. It's an interesting idea, to be sure, but still...

Also, he says that the valley of the blind had been secluded for 30 generations, which would be around 900 years (give or take a hundred). There's practically no way that their language would still be similar enough to Spanish that they would be able to speak to uh derp what's his name the guy they call Bogota.

But yeah. Continuing with The Great Hunt, now.

Edited by Kopekemaster, Jun 28 2014 - 08:07 AM.

[Hodor]

Been on a Harlan Ellison kick lately, especially his essays,and just finished Xenogenesis.

[Goddess of the Dark Sun]

over the last two weeks i read:

 

- Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

- Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare

- Book I of the Night Angel trilogy (I forget the title of the book in question, since I bought the three volumes written as one) by Brent Weeks

- Started Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare

- Started A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

- Started Game of Thrones (My sister owns the book, so I haven't finished it) by George R.R Martin

 

also wanted to reread The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde but can't find the book anywhere, might start Paradise Lost by John Milton soon (though that's an epic poem, but it's bound like a book and published on its own so there). 

[Vorahk1Panrahk2]

Walt Disney's Fantasia- John Culhane

 

Like the 'Art of' books published by Chronicle, this one tells the stories and shows concept art for all sections of Fantasia. If Art of Tangled was a 4.5/5, then this book is a 6/5. It's much longer than Chronicle's books (by forty pages), which means there's much more room for the author to write paragraphs on paragraphs of details like symbolism in the film, how the music was adapted to Fantasound, how characters were designed, and he even gets into criticism of certain elements. It probably has less art than Chronicle's books, but I think that's forgivable due to how comprehensive the material is. This is what an 'Art of' book should be, and any fans of Fantasia should definitely read it.

 

Up next, The Illusion of Life.

 

EDIT: Totally lied. Up next was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney's Classic Animated Film - J.B. Kaufman

 

It's basically an Art Of book that just wasn't published by Chronicle. It's longer (by almost 90 pages), but at the same time the amount of interesting or information is probably on par with their books. For one, the text resorts to a lot of summary of the film. Books such as these are meant to be written for someone who has already seen the film, and for that reason summaries are unnecessary. Aside from that, the concept artwork (which fills most of the book) is nice to look at it, but I also feel like there are too many examples of just cel backgrounds. I've seen the movie and I know what the backgrounds look like. They occasionally make them interesting by showing the different cel layers that make up a shot, but the book would have strongly benefitted from showing actual concept art. It's entirely possible that, as a result of how old the movie is, that this material didn't exist anymore. But, still, a note on that would have been nice.

 

Overall it's not as good as Culhane's Fantasia book, but still interesting. 

 

Up next: The Illusion of Life (for real this time) and an audiobook: Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

Edited by Vorahk1Panrahk2, Jul 10 2014 - 03:49 PM.

[Sumiki]

I read John Cage, a biography of the remarkably eccentric avant-garde American composer by Rob Haskins. It wasn't too long, but really gave me a sense of Cage's musical philosophy. He's perhaps best known for 4'33" - known as "The Silent Piece" - but he was a excellent mycologist (except for the time he accidentally poisoned himself and a group of friends), used coin flips and ancient Chinese books to determine parts of his compositions, and painted canvases with as abstract a mindset as he composed with.

 

(I got a bunch of composer biographies for my birthday - I'm about halfway through Ravel: Man and Musician now.)

 

I also read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I wrote a blog entry about this - in a word, meh. But I gave Green's writing another chance and read An Abundance of Katherines, and it was much better. If I were given both of those and didn't know their publication dates, I would have said that Katherines came after TFiOS, just because it's ... better.

[Primis]

Finished reading a few of the Psych tie-in novels: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read, Mind Over Magic and Call of the Mild. They were all pretty good, definitely felt like episodes of Psych, probably because the author was also a writer on the show.

 

Just started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone today. I've been meaning to read the Harry Potter books for awhile now, but I just never got around to it until now.

Edited by Primis, Jul 19 2014 - 12:20 AM.

[Vorahk1Panrahk2]

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
 
Spoilers abound within the tag

Spoiler

Gone Girl is about a man (Nick) whose wife (Amy) disappears. As the community rallies to support him and help find her, clues start to emerge that point to himself as the kidnapper.
 
There are definitely some very interesting things going on in this novel. What I love about it is how Flynn uses the first person. Like a good storyteller, she only delivers the information when we, the readers, need to know it. This ups the tension as the reader can't tell what's going on in the head of the lead character. When he tells lies, the reader may or may not know depending on what the author has chosen to reveal. And like every one else in the investigation, the reader is allowed to put their own theories as to what is exactly going on.
 
The plot twist -which is also the middle of the book- is also extremely well done. Admittedly I have limited exposure to the mystery genre, but I've never seen a book filled with diary entries that later turn out to be completely fake. After we learn this in the second half, and that Nick's wife set him up to be blamed for her murder despite the fact that she is alive and well- the book turns into an incredibly tense game of cat and mouse as Nick tries to convince others of his innocence, while Amy is doing whatever it takes not to make herself look like the bad guy. Amy actually reminds me a lot of classic noir femme fatales, and I wonder if that's what the author is going for.
 
Overall, a very good, very tense book. I enjoyed it immensely.

 

I'm also almost half way through The Illusion of Life. I swear it's getting worked on.

Edited by Vorahk1Panrahk2, Jul 22 2014 - 10:38 PM.

[Velox]

Recently finished The Alchemist, by Michael Scott. It was . . . okay. Not as good as I was hoping, and I wasn’t really a fan of the writing style, but overall it had some enjoyable moments.

 

But just before that I read Jokers Wild, edited by George R.R. Martin, the third book in his Wild Cards anthology/mosaic novel/etc. series, and it's really quite awesome. Obviously with this series you have your highs and lows with all the different authors working on the Wild Cards series (my two favorite collaborators so far are by a long shot Martin himself and Robert Zelazny), but overall it's really well done. After reading A Song of Ice and Fire and Sandkings, I just had to read more from Martin, and with TOR slowly coming out with re-issues (the first was re-published in 2010, the second in 2011, and the third in 2014), it was a perfect chance to start picking them up. As with pretty much any Martin project it seems, one should expect a lot of adult content, but otherwise the series really is incredibly enjoyable, and I can't wait for the re-release of the fourth book in January. 

 

I'm not sure if this is my favorite so far (there's definitely downsides to each one), but it's the first full mosaic novel, as the other two had been anthologies of individual short stories sort of loosely strung together, and this format definitely worked really well. The only downside in this novel compared to the others is that Zelazny didn't contribute to this one at all, except for a character that is mentioned only briefly. In the other two, he had his own stories, with one of the coolest and most interesting characters (not to mention, easily one of the best writing styles). 

 

Definitely recommended to those who love Martin and superheroes. One shouldn't expect ASoIaF, but Martin's ingenuity and writing ability is still very obviously present. 

 

And now, I've (finally) just begun The Eye of the World, after meaning to start this series for years. 

[Kopekemaster]

And now, I've (finally) just begun The Eye of the World, after meaning to start this series for years.

Yessssss. I'm currently reading The Great Hunt (I would already be long done with it, but hash tag slow reader), and I can assure you, the series is great. Have you read New Spring?

 

Also, I just read Animal Farm in a shockingly (for me) short amount of time. That was seriously great.

[Baltarc]

The Fault in Our Stars: Because people like it and it's Now A Major Motion Picture. Pretty good.

 

The Metamorphosis: Didn't want to start summer reading yet; knew this was a classic and that it was short. It was weird. Like, weird.

 

The Kite Runner: Read this one for school. A good read, but man, that was rough. Interestingly, one of the reviews on the back noted that the narrative contains "no frills, no nonsense, just hard, sparse prose" (The Washington Post Book World). Personally, I felt there were a number of points where Hosseini went overboard on the diction - not necessarily in a way that detracted or distracted from the narrative, but not exactly fulfilling the review's description.

 

Currently rereading The Great Gatsby because AP Literature yaaaay

I liked it the first time but taking notes and making charts isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

[Akuna Toa of Sonics]

I finished reading Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy a couple weeks back, before I left for Germany. Currently, I'm reading The Once and Future King for English next year and am nearly done The Sword in the Stone/the first 208 pages.

Hopefully I'll have more time to read Executive Orders when my summer work is done.

[Velox]

 

And now, I've (finally) just begun The Eye of the World, after meaning to start this series for years.

Yessssss. I'm currently reading The Great Hunt (I would already be long done with it, but hash tag slow reader), and I can assure you, the series is great. Have you read New Spring?

 

No, not yet. I searched around a bit and it sounded like people suggested reading the books in publication order the most, since New Spring gives background information to things you don't see until up to book 10 or something like that. But who knows how long it will take me before I get that far in the series. =P I've got mountains of books on my to-read shelf, but TEotW was pretty good, so I'm looking forward to reading more eventually; I'll probably try to read one here and there, but I'm not in any particular rush so who knows. Still, definitely glad I finally read it . . . I've kept saying "I'll definitely read TEotW soon" for over two years now haha. And while it'll be a pain to get through, it is nice knowing that there's so many books in the series so that if I do keep liking it, I'll be satisfied for quite a while.

 

Anyway, currently reading The Princess Bride (again, like with TEotW: finally) for the first time. One of my all-time favorite films, it's about time I read the book. =P And my sister just bought me the new, beautifully illustrated hardcover edition a month ago for my birthday, so that was just all the more reason to finally read it now. Really great so far, as expected.

[Kopekemaster]

Well, I guess it does sort of let you know deeper into Moiraine's motives and such, but I already had known pretty much all of it from a friend who enjoys talking about WoT. XD

[Baltarc]

Enjoyed rereading Gatsby and didn't have to do a ton of analysis on it so that's always nice.

 

I was about to start The Count of Monte Cristo before realizing I had an abridged translation; naturally, I wanted to read the whole thing. Instead I started with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court which I regrettably haven't had much time to work on yet.

 

Also reading the Iliad for school - not the whole thing, though. I'm enjoying it, so I'll probably pick up a complete copy at some point.

Edited by Baltarc, Aug 24 2014 - 07:31 PM.

[randomreviewerbros]

Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian for like the 3rd time, my favorite book series of all time

[Mr. House]

Going on a dystopia binge. Reading The Handmaids Tale currently, and am liking it. Read The Giver a week ago, and found it surprisingly dark for a Newbury book.

[Kopekemaster]

Blazed through (for my regular reading speed) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I had read the first two a long time ago, but didn't go any further for "reasons".

I liked it. I'm disliking Harry Potter (the character) more and more, though. Or, I guess, viewing him more in a "meh" manner, at least.

[Sumiki]

Speed-read John Green's Looking for Alaska and from what I can tell - though LfA has what can only be described as a manic pixie dream girl - Green's writing has actually atrophied over the years.
 
Still working through the composer biographies I got for my birthday - Erik Satie, a short book my Rollo Myers about the eccentric French composer who wrote pieces with titles like "Flabby Preludes for a Dog" and "Things Seen From the Right and Left Without Spectacles." After that I read Paul Roberts' Claude Debussy - Satie's somewhat less eccentric contemporary.
 
Then: Stephen Budiansky's Mad Music, about the career of the millionaire insurance salesman and wildly novel musician Charles Ives, whose music was only discovered after he went into a reclusive retirement, followed by Michael Broyles and Denise von Von Glahn's biography of Leo Ornstein, Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices, which follows the Russian-American in a hair-raising escape from his homeland and into considerable fame as a fantastic pianist and brashly modern composer. His music is only now being discovered after he ceased touring in the mid-20s.
 
Currently I'm working through Humphrey Burton's Leonard Bernstein, chronicling the adventures of the maestro that was "doomed to success" on Broadway, in the concert hall as composer, conductor, and pianist, and as a fantastic musical educator from young people to Harvard.

 

I also read The Great Gatsby and am also currently reading The Old Man and the Sea. If it counts, I also read the profoundly gory Titus Andronicus as part of an ongoing quest to read the complete works of Shakespeare.

[Chronicler06]

Brick by Brick: how LEGO rewrote the rules of innovation and conquered the global toy industry

 

Previously, I had read only the chapter that focused on Bionicle, but I recently got interested in learning more about the history of the LEGO Company, so I decided to read through the whole thing. Quite a lot of interesting facts in this book.

[Zeddy]

I think the last book I read completely was 1984. I feel like I should have read it way earlier, but better late than never, right?

 

I was almost about to finish this sci-fi book called Red Mars, but I had to leave and I left the book behind so I'll finish that some other day. It has it's moments.

 

Right now, though, I'm almost done with John le Carre's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". Excellent spy novel, not very actiony which I don't mind because not all spies are James Bond. Just good old intelligence work. I was also in Berlin recently so it was nice to have that book along, it sort of fit with the mood and history of the place.

[Kopekemaster]

(While still working my way through The Great Hunt,) Read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Absolutely loved it. Showed the darkness inside everyone so well.
I'm also reading Lord of the Flies, right now (a book I've been meaning to read for a long time). I'm enjoying it so far.

[Pohatu: Uniter of Stone]

The Great Gatsby, by Scott Fitzgerald

 

I have been trying very hard to not read it all in one day and spoil it for the rest of the class. 

[Kopekemaster]

^ That's another book I want to read soon.

If only it counted as readable-for-study for English Literature.

 

I forgot to say it, but I might read Dr. Faustus after I finish Lord of the Flies.

[Johnny Truant]

i'm working my way through Stephen King's Dark Tower series

 

 

tore through the first two (The Gunslinger and The Drawing Of The Three) in a week and now i'm on book 3, The Waste Lands

 

 

before all this it was House Of Leaves which was just amazing

[Ghidora131]

Read Macbeth a trillion times over by now.

[Iaredios the Hip Historian]

Aside from my holy text, the two books I have been reading are: The Alexiad, by Anna Komnenos; and The Thrawn Trilogy, a Star Wars graphic novel adapted from three novels by Timothy Zahn.

The first is a history book about Alexios Komnenos' life from just before his ascension to power to the rest of his life as the Emperor of the Roman Empire, which is interesting as his reign covers the events before, during and after the First Crusade, all from a different account then the Papal controlled West, not to mention plenty of drama and fracking awesome large-scale medieval battles written in vivid detail. All of this is written by his first daughter, Anna, who is surprisingly well learned and non-biased for her time. Her writing, even though it dates back to the end of the 1000's AD and early 1100's AD, reads like a novel and not a fact book.

I only have a couple more 'books' to read until I am finished (in a modern-day sense, 'book' would be replaced by 'chapter', as the entire thing is a single collected chronicle.) By the way, the edition I have includes maps and a glossary for Greek words that do not have a direct English translation.

=====================================================

The Thrawn Trilogy is so far a good book, though I hear it gets pretty awesome with the second half, with which I am in luck because I am smack dab in in the middle of the book. The story takes place about five years after the Battle of Endor as seen in Episode VI, where Luke is a full fledged Jedi Knight and is training his sister Leia as his padawan while she is pregnant with twins. In the shadows of the last teeny tiny bit of the Galactic Empire, the last of Palpatine's warlords, Grand Admiral Thrawn, planning a series of attacks that threaten the recently created New Galactic Republic and would tatake over the Galaxy under Imperial rule once more.

Even if you do not like Star Wars, one cannot help but love the titular character Thrawn, who is extremely intelligent and can spot all the tiniest of details and rip you apart from such flaws. I am curious as to how the protaginist can hope to defeat such a figure.

I will continue reading.

Edited by Iaredios, Oct 02 2014 - 02:02 AM.

[Toa Of Virtues]

Life, the universe, and everything by Douglas Adams

[Hasreadit]

Just finished a Cornelia Funke and am now rereading American Gods which seems to get better every single time

[Kopekemaster]

Finished Lord of the Flies and Faustus, and loved both. I'm about to (finally!) finish The Great Hunt. (Tomorrow.)
After that, I'm going to read The Black Prism, which I've been looking forward to for a bit.

[Toa Kayn]

Halo: Primordium

 

It's an extremely engrossing but cryptic book, I was using my imagination to paint the picture a lot more than you would do with other books. Mainly because there is a lot of descriptions of things that are alien and strange. You don't have to but to get the most out of the book you'd want to know quite a bit about the Halo universe.

 

8/10 would read again

[Goddess of the Dark Sun]

A Room of One's Own -- Virginia Woolf. 

 

 

[Kopekemaster]

Yay, finished The Great Hunt. On to The Black Prism, now.

[The Skakdi Chronicler]

I'm currently reading The Scorch Trials, by James Dashner, which is Book two of the Maze Runner Series

[JAG18]

I started reading a couple of the books in the American Presidents Series to find out more about certain presidents, but now I've started trying to read the whole series from beginning to end.  

 

Books in the series that I've read so far:

 

"Calvin Coolidge": my favorite one so far; I found it well written and gave a good overview of his life before he became president.  My only real complaint was that the author likes to use a lot of long and obscure words that I found myself constantly having to look up.

 

"James Buchanan": this one, I thought, gave a pretty complete view of his life; half the book is devoted to Buchanan's lone public service career and the other half is spent on his--mediocre--presidential term.  I think the book was good.

 

"George Washington": focusing more on his two terms, this one gave only slight details of his upbringing and important contributions to America's founding.  For its length, I thought this book was informative and a good overview of Washington's legacy.  

 

All the books are rather short, which is good or bad depending on how you look at it.  My local library doesn't have "John Adams" so I'm now reading "Thomas Jefferson".  

[Queen of Liars]

Read through the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.

The movie adaptation is one of my favourites of all time, so I thought it's about time I got a copy of the original play. There's obviously some differences from the movie, so it's still an interesting read with a little bit of content I haven't seen before.

As I've expected, it's an excellent play and it's nice to see that the movie is indeed a brilliant adaptation of the original. Which comes as no surprise really, considering that it was directed by Tom Stoppard himself.

[Gravitan]

Got through Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment recently. It's a book largely about the nature of beauty and the way that our minds are set up to see reality. It also finishes his great trilogy of revolutionary philosophical works, the previous two being the critiques of Pure and Practical Reason. Reading Kant in general is a chore, but having read the other two books just mentioned, I felt I was fairly well prepared. I'm still not sure what to make of it really; I think he's probably wrong about basically everything he writes about in this book, but at the same time his ideas have a peculiar force to them, and seem to flow quite neatly from his first principles. I also think that it provides a whole lot of great material for further reflection. I feel pretty happy with myself for having gotten through it and basically finished my initial engagement with Kant's thought.

[Baltarc]

Read Hamlet for AP Lit. Pretty great. I was in a Shakespeare mood so I picked up Twelfth Night and The Tempest; currently reading the former.

[Kopekemaster]

I'm still reading The Black Prism, but have been listening to The King in Yellow audiobook. I've listened to the first... three? Yeah. I'm on The Yellow Sign right now.

They're pretty good. I'm enjoying the somewhat nebulous link between the stories, but also dreading the final three or so stories, which are apparently pretty unrelated, and mostly romance or something? Meh.

[Archer Vonn]

finished george rr martin's 'a dance with dragons'

 

...

 

:'(

[Hodor]

Finished up The Last Wish by Andrej Sapcowski. Fun read. Been reading The Gunslinger by Stephen King- really enjoying it so far.