What are you reading?

[venividivicibj]

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
Six of Crows (part of the inspiration for the Shadow & Bone Netflix show) - it was okay, but not interesting enough to read the second part of the duology
Started The Gray Man and just couldn't finish. Some of the writing was just painfully awkward. Too... he-man.


Have a bunch of books lined up (Will of the Many, American Gods, Aeronaut's Windlass, City of Brass, The New(ish) Lincoln Lawyer) but nothing is super inspiring at the moment.

 

[imatlas]

Finally finished Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents. It is darker than Parable of the Sower and I found it tough to get through at times. Sadly it sets up for a third book that will never be written.

 

[venividivicibj]

Sadly it sets up for another book that will never be written.

AKA the Patrick Rothfuss, George RR Martin, etc.

 

[HORNS]

Reading this, the inspiration for the HBO series The Pacific.

 

[imatlas]

AKA the Patrick Rothfuss, George RR Martin, etc.

They're dead too?

 

[SixOhNine]

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
Six of Crows (part of the inspiration for the Shadow & Bone Netflix show) - it was okay, but not interesting enough to read the second part of the duology
Started The Gray Man and just couldn't finish. Some of the writing was just painfully awkward. Too... he-man.


Have a bunch of books lined up (Will of the Many, American Gods, Aeronaut's Windlass, City of Brass, The New(ish) Lincoln Lawyer) but nothing is super inspiring at the moment.

I liked The City of Brass (and The Empire of Gold and The Kingdom of Copper) a lot.

 

[smittycl]

Reading this, the inspiration for the HBO series The Pacific.

Read that as a kid. Considered a classic.

 

[venividivicibj]

They're dead too?

I mean, they're not writing. I think a year ago, Rothfuss' editor said he hadn't seen a draft yet or something like that.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

Originally published back in 1991 somehow I missed this then. Had read Mindplayers which preceded this then the two after..classic hardcore cyberpunk, brain implants and the idea of uploading consciousness to the net which was quite an interesting (if absurd) meme back in the day which at some stage made it into the X Files. Highly enjoyable blast from the past.

 

[am55]

Reading this, the inspiration for the HBO series The Pacific.

This is an exceptional book, both as war experience and just generally speaking. In Paul Fussell's words:

In contrast, the American procedure at its best, unashamed of simplicity, is visible in Eugene Sledge's memoir of a boy's experience fighting with "the old breed," the United States Marines. His With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) is one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war, and no Briton could have written it. Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1923, Sledge enlisted in December, 1942. After his miraculous survival in the war, he threw himself into the study of zoology and ultimately became a professor of biology at the University of Montevallo, in Alabama. The main theme of With the Old Breed is, as Sledge indicates, "the vast difference" between what has been published about these two Marine Corps battles, which depicts them as more or less sane activities, and his own experience "on the front line." One reason Sledge's account is instantly credible is the amount of detail with which he registers his presence at the cutting edge, but another is his tone -- unpretentious, unsophisticated, modest, and decent. Despite all the horrors he recounts, he is proud to have been a Marine. He is uncritical of and certainly uncynical about Bob Hope's contribution to the entertainment of the forces, and on the topic of medals and awards he is totally unironic -- he takes them seriously, believing that those who have been given them deserve them. He doesn't like to say **** and he prays, out loud. He comes through as such a nice person, so little inclined to think ill of others, that forty years after the war he still can't figure out why loose and wayward straps on haversacks and the like should be called, by disapproving sergeants and officers, Irish pennants: "Why Irish I never knew. " Clearly he is not a man to misrepresent experience for the momentary pleasure of a little show business.
If innocent when he joined the Marines, Sledge was not at all stupid, and he knew that what he was getting into was going to be "tough": in training, the emphasis on the Ka-Bar knife and kicking the Japs effectively in the ******** made that clear. But any remaining scales fell from his eyes when he saw men simply hosed down by machine-gun fire on the beach at Peleliu: "I felt sickened to the depths of my soul. I asked God, 'Why, why, why?' I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of the war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust." Before the battle for Peleliu was over, with casualties worse even than at Tarawa, Sledge perceived what all combat troops finally perceive: "We were expendable! It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience." He knew now that horror and fear were his destiny, unless a severe wound or death or (most unlikely) a Japanese surrender should reprieve him. And his understanding of the world he was in was filled out by watching Marines levering out Japanese gold teeth with their Ka-Bar knives, sometimes from living mouths. The Japanese "defense" encapsulated the ideas and forms and techniques of "waste" and "madness." The Japanese knew they could neither repel the Marines nor be reinforced. Knowing this, they simply killed, without hope and without meaning.

rest is NSFW:

Spoiler

Peleliu finally secured, Sledge's decimated unit was reconstituted for the landing on southern Okinawa. It was there that he saw "the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war" -- he saw a young Marine officer select a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate into its mouth. Speaking of the "incredible cruelty" that was commonplace when "decent men were reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman's war," Sledge notes that "our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP." Unequivocal is Sledge's assertion that "we lived in an environment totally incomprehensible" -- not just to civilians at a great distance but "to men behind the lines."

But for Sledge, the worst of all was a week-long stay in rain-soaked foxholes on a muddy ridge facing the Japanese, a site strewn with decomposing corpses turning various colors, nauseating with the stench of death, "an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool." Because there were no latrines and because there was no moving in daylight, the men relieved themselves in their holes and flung the excrement out into the already foul mud. It was a latter-day Verdun, the Marine occupation of that ridge, where the artillery shellings uncovered scores of half-buried Marine and Japanese bodies, making the position "a stinking compost pile."

If a marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. . . .
We didn't talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. . . . It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. . . . To me the war was insanity.

 

[am55]

My favourite passage (possibly because one of my best friend is a Marine):

"When trucks drove along the road, we moved onto the sides, as columns of infantry have done since early times. The trucks frequently carried army troops, and we barked and yapped like dogs and kidded them about being dogfaces. During one of these encounters, a soldier hanging out of a truck just ahead of me shouted, “Hey, soldier. You look tired and hot, soldier. Why don't you make the army issue you a truck like me?”
I grinned and yelled, “Go to hell.”
His buddy grabbed him by the shoulder and yelled, “Stop calling that guy soldier. He's a Marine. Can't you see his emblem? He's not in the army. Don't insult him.”
“Thanks,” I yelled. That was my first encounter with men who had no esprit."

 

[Kaplan]

Dan Simmons: The Fall of Hyperion, 1990.

"There are those AIs which do not want to build God. They learned from the human experience that to construct the next step in awareness is an invitation to slavery, if not actual extinction."

This completes the duology started by Hyperion - which I found (just) interesting enough to see the conclusion to. Happy enough to have read both, but these (and a few other recent reads) have helped me realize that big, sprawling space operas aren't my preferred cup of SF. Still, I'll probably pick up a singleton from Iain M Banks eventually.

 

[am55]

Dan Simmons: The Fall of Hyperion, 1990.

"There are those AIs which do not want to build God. They learned from the human experience that to construct the next step in awareness is an invitation to slavery, if not actual extinction."

This completes the duology started by Hyperion - which I found (just) interesting enough to see the conclusion to. Happy enough to have read both, but these (and a few other recent reads) have helped me realize that big, sprawling space operas aren't my preferred cup of SF. Still, I'll probably pick up a singleton from Iain M Banks eventually.

Noooo (in the sense of: I'm so sorry you read the sequel)

Hyperion is great. One might even call it art.

Wrapping up the series and explaining the mysteries went down about as well as Alien: Covenant after the masterpiece that was Prometheus. As for the Shrike, I much prefer the version from Harkaway's Gnomon, which is at least internally consistent and a crucial piece of the narrative.

 

[Kaplan]

Lord Dunsany: The King of Elfland's Daughter, 1924.

"And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended."

Taking a detour from science fiction with this 100-year-old fantasy. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany, weaves a beautiful, ethereal spell that reads more like a fairy tale than the fantasy (from Tolkien and others) which it inspired.

Spoiler: Dunsany, his life and literary influence.

 

[Scuppers]

Refreshing that it is not another tragic operetta of the subjects life from birth to death, but an interesting synopsis of her life of performances knitted with suitable dramatics and levelled pathos.

To this day i find myself in and out of the Callas camp, so many of her recordings project the voice too greatly in the foreground, whereas Tibaldi’s are more sensibly recorded at the depth of mid-ground projection.

However;

Callas: Tosca (Pretre)

Tibaldi: Madama Butterfly (Serafin)
Recordings I will take to the casket.