The Royal Library of Alexandria (SP Book Discussion)

Miscellaneous Blather
#61

Turns out endings are pretty hard to get right. I don’t remember having that experience with Neuromancer, but every Neal Stephenson book before Anathem, yes. I have not yet made it through a Vandermeer book, but I like the idea of the Ambergris books, if not the actual execution.

Speaking of endings that seem sort of rushed, I just finished up A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews last night. A former high school football star feels his life closing in on him as the annual Rattlesnake Roundup approaches in Mystic, Georgia sometime in the early 70s (probably). Overall very good, grimy as hell and somewhat nightmarish, as you might expect for someone labeled by Wikipedia as “the Hieronymus Bosch of Southern Gothic”. I loved it, even if it was hard to read in places (because of the content, not the language) and the ending did, as I said, seem a little rushed. Gonna have to track down more of his stuff.

#62
#63

Brent Weeks’ Shadow trilogy and Lightbringer series are good reads. And he is quite funny on Facebook:

[quote]Book DLC. Unlockable chapters if you grind (re-read the book enough times). Expansions. Season passes. Cosmetics (buy-able alternate covers). Time locked ads every time you open the book. 99cent passes to get rid of ads. In-book pop-up ads obscuring the text.
Guys, with ideas like these, I’ll be on a yacht in no time.[/quote]

#64

[quote=“OhBollox, post:24, topic:842”]
I quite like 1177 BC by Cline. It spends more than half of its pages just exploring the Bronze Age and it’s aimed at laymen. Cline is a proper historian and knows his shit.
[/quote]Around 15? years ago, Eric and his wife (also an historian) were the featured guides for a Smithsonian trip that my father, my oldest son, and I took to Greece. It was a family-oriented Aegean cruise with stops at Crete, Rhodes, Mykonos, Santorini, and Patmos, as well as several day excursions in Athens and elsewhere. It was an amazing trip. The Clines would often take us past the
“popular” items on display in the museums we visited to show us the “truly significant” items hidden away in the museum collections. The Megiddo Valley is a particular area of study; Eric’s book The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age is a fascinating review of the battles that have taken place in and around the Megiddo Valley.

1 Like
#65

[quote=“Mirefox, post:58, topic:842”]
Years ago when I finally got around to reading “Neuromancer” by William Gibson I was left scratching my head wondering what in the world I had just read. I give him all the credit in the world for being decades ahead of his time and envisioning a cyber world thatwould not exist for years and years…but I thought the narrative was pretty awful and convoluted and vague. I eventually had to go online to find out what the ending of the book even meant.
[/quote]Neuromancer has not aged well at all. It might have been mind-blowing stuff when originally published, but the tech is too outdated by today’s standards to be even remotely enjoyable. If anyone missed it 20 years ago, don’t bother with it now.

#66

Speaking of goodreads, feel free to add me to your friend list. I’m on goodreads as Gregory Martin.

#67

Hmm, outdated tech seems like an odd reason to reject a book. Granted I haven’t read it in over 15 years, but going by my memories I think it’s still worth reading.

#68

I agree. Besides, if outdated tech were the basis of rejecting sci-if, there wouldn’t be much sci-fi around. I can’t think of many sci-if stories from over 10 years go that haven’t gotten something wrong.

Still not a fan of Neuromancer, though.

#69

Youth Street Gangs: A Critical Appraisal, by Brotherton. A fascinating work looking at gangs as just another social layer rather than a social pathology. The reinforcing role of criminology, the encouraging if not outright enabling by the state, and the role of deviance and its characterisation as a threat.

1 Like
#70

Has anyone read the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown? I found it a thoroughly enjoyable space opera set in a dystopian caste-based interstellar future where the main character attempts to infiltrate the upper castes via a Hunger Games-style gauntlet. I was just in a book store and was pleased to see a new book in the series in spite of the fact that the original trilogy was complete. I picked it up and will be starting it as soon as I finish the “I don’t know what to read next so I’ll fill the time with a” Clive Cussler book I’m currently reading.

#71

I read the first one and enjoyed it. I was disgusted with myself.

2 Likes
#72

I lol’d at the truth of this. Read the first one with shame in my heart and soul. My mom passed along the second in the trilogy right before I, thankfully, started studying for the promotional exam last year…

1 Like
#73

Every time the protagonist won something I’d sneer “Oh fuck off.” at the page, and then just keep reading.

It’s a YA series and it has got a proper Mary Sue as a protagonist and it is just the Martian Hunger Games but it is decently written.

#74

For what it’s worth, the Hunger Games bit doesn’t extend into the following books from what I remember. As for being a Mary Sue, I do agree that it can be a little eye-rolling, but it is also explained at least. I suppose that’s a step up from the perfect protagonist that can’t fail at anything for no real reason at all.

I don’t know what it is that I got me hooked into the series. Part of it is that I really wanted a space opera at the time and needed something new that I hadn’t read before. Another part of it is probably that the YA categories are inundated - and that is an understatement - with absolute trash that is written by some of the poorest writers imaginable, but this series was decently written.

1 Like
#75

The Rzhev Slaughterhouse: The Red Army’s Forgotten 15-month Campaign against Army Group Center, 1942-1943, by Svetlana Gerasimova.

Considering the sometimes awkward lack of discussion coming out of Russia over some of the most titanic battles the world has ever seen, to have a work from a Russian historian and for that historian to then get into trouble for disclosing the real casualty numbers (some 2.3 million on the Soviet side) is reassuring. The battle lasted more than a year, with fighting that varied in intensity but never stopped, with a very small amount of prisoners taken by the Germans (even fewer of whom would survive being a POW), and the Russians are still finding thousands of corpses each year via battlefield archaeology. I’ve been on a little Eastern Front jaunt lately, and the scale is staggering.

The fight wasn’t exactly easy on the Germans, either, although it was only moderately hard by Eastern Front standards, and the Soviets paid for their manpower churn with further losses (bear in mind they lost some 5 million men in 1941 alone, and such was their resilience and depth they were back up to 6 million by the end of that year. and remained at 6-6.5 million for the rest of the war).

The book raises another eyebrow when it dares to criticise Zhukov, which you don’t often see from a Russian. Rightly so, for the battle was longer and more costly than that of Stalingrad.

2 Likes
#76

The Last Weekend, Mamatas. In the safe enclave of San Francisco, Billy Kostopolos is a driller. When people die and are about to reanimate, they call him, and he carries out the messy job of ensuring they don’t rise again via power drill to the skull. I thought I was getting a fun, pulpy novel and instead got a grim work on human life. Kostopolos is a drunk and a writer who has had exactly one story published; the book spends as much time dissecting how people crush themselves with their behaviour as it does on surviving in a city on the edge of a zombie apocalypse. Excellent, deeply upsetting.

I thought I’d cheer myself up with The Triumph of the Dark, by Steiner. A great account of “ideologies which the democratic perceptions could neither penetrate nor arrest.” in 1930s Europe. It takes into account Asian conflicts as well, and is one of the clearest works I have ever read on the run-up to WWII and the possibilities along that path. Very well referenced and thorough.

And of course how could I escape WWI? Collision of Empires by Buttar lays out the preconditions necessary for WWI before merrily ploughing straight into the Eastern Front of the conflict, where three would-be empires tear each other apart. The assumptions, traditions, hidebound thinking, inefficiencies, and poor support and co-ordination (the chapter on Tannenberg detailing the complete lack of cohesion between Rennenkampf and Samsonov, both commanding Russian armies, quickly approaches black comedy) that contributed to a war that, while initially seen as inevitable and perhaps even desirable, did not pan out as intended for anyone. A book aimed at redressing the balance between the well-known Western Front and unfairly obscured Eastern. Quality.

1 Like
#77

The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman. The famous book about industrial design, which I picked up after, oddly, thinking about one of my firm’s products. How does a product tell you how it should be used? The answer is too often “not clearly enough”.

1 Like
#78

Authors of the Impossible, Jeffrey Kripal. Kripal, a professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, TX, writes a book that is about four writers (Frederic W.H. Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee and Bernard Meheust) who have staked out territory in “the fantastic,” the place where the reader (and, usually, the writer) is not really sure what is real and what is not. Wonderful book, I cannot really do it justice. If you have any interest in folklore, mysticism, the paranormal, Grant Morrison/Alan Moore’s ideas of the artistic as magical (though neither of them are discussed in the book, they are resonant with it), etc., do yourself a favor and read it. Moving on to his Mutants and Mystics, now.

1 Like
#79

London Rules, Mick Herron. Probably my favourite series of recent years. A bunch of not-quite-useless spies and their ruthless overseer, stuck in the MI5 version of Purgatory, crowbar themselves into another nice mess and use their atrophied talents to the ‘best’ of their ability. Some of the best dialogue I’ve ever read, between characters who don’t really like each other but have to work together. Tightly plotted, fast-paced.

#80

http://www.crossedcomic.com/webcomic/crossed-doa-part-1/3/ - extremely NSFW, but a very good webcomic.