Wow, this thread isn't too active anymore, is it? This post will start off page 18, but at the top of page 17 is a post from October 2020... I read Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. I had read the Geronimo Stilton adaptation before, but remembered very little of it. It was an interesting read! I've read two Jules Verne books before: Journey to the Centre of the Earth and From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes. I think my enjoyment of this one was closer to the latter than the former, with my favourite being the former. I was expecting some of the mystery to be cleared up better, and was a bit disappointed with the ending (trying not to spoil things, here ). I read on Wikipedia though, that the novel was originally more explicit on some details, but the publisher requested edits for political reasons.
Hm, I need to look back through this thread. --- I read a lot of adult and YA novels. Mostly fantasy and sci-fi. I'm currently reading the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Really enjoying it. Here are my favorite reads from 2021: --- * Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson (6 books) * Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson (6 books, 7th pending) * Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson (3 books, 3rd just released) These are really, really, really, really good. Up there with all-time favorites, and people I am old. That's a lot of time. --- * Throne of Glass series by Sarah J Maas (7 books) Series really grabbed me. I've heard it's a slow start for some. --- * Shades of Magic trilogy by V.E. Schwab A little unpolished but I really enjoyed books 1&3. Book-2 was filler. --- * Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden I really enjoyed it. Almost DNF the first though until I got used to her writing style. Then I was hooked.
I finished Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. My edition has an afterword, which was quite welcome. It included background on the publication of the contents, and also on the translation. I wonder in what kind of shape Wittgenstein would have liked to publish the material, if he could have done it to his satisfaction. I might read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus later, considering that it is the only book published by Wittgenstein himself (i.e. not posthumously). I know that he later disagreed with many of the ideas there, but that could be interesting. I found part I more interesting than part II, in general. It's really weird to me that part II consists of 14 sections, with 6/10ths of it being section 11. Both parts have lots of interesting ideas, though, and if you're a critical thinker passionate about language and philosophy, I would recommend the work!
If you're living in Belgium or the Netherlands and have a library subscription, you should try some Jommekes. They're delightful. The target audience is younger than other European comics (and a lot younger than American comics, I suppose) and the stories are mostly quite simple and predictable, but oh, they're so well executed. A comfort comic.
I read White Fang and The Call of the Wild by Jack London. For some reason the edition I read had the novels in that order, despite their dates of release being the other way around. I enjoyed both quite a bit! I was really impressed with Jack London's writing skills. I personally preferred White Fang. I got to reading these after watching the 2018 animated film White Fang, and while reading the book, my impression of the film decreased a whole lot. I thought the story was alright, but man, the original plot is so much more captivating... Both were written in quite a naturalistic style, I found, maybe White Fang more so. However, the books certainly did not make me feel sad; there's quite some love in both, and a lot of moments of satisfaction. Recommended reads, especially for inexperienced readers, because they're quite short. Here's a quote from The Call of the Wild that does not spoil much, to get a taste of the writing skill and world view of the author. This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and insofar as he observed them he would fail to prosper. I think this might have been the first book written for adults I've read that so closely follows animals!
I don't read many books but I thought the Percy Jackson and the Olympians was a pretty good series EDIT: From my understanding Disney is finishing the remaining 3 movies since the first 2 were made almost a decade ago
I read Hamlet. I was surprised by how easy it was to follow; there were some lines of thought that I did not understand (sometimes these had notes explaining them, and sometimes these made me understand them), but I could always follow the characters' general intentions. It was also interesting to see some elements that I still come across in the musicals I attend, that I hadn't necessarily expected in such an old work: puns, references to actualities, and sexual innuendo. It would be nice to watch or hear a bit of a staging, as I very rarely read the text with a consistent metrum, which is surely intended to be done. All in all, I enjoyed the story and the writing, but I don't really get what The Lion King has to do with this?
Do you guys read the introduction to classics before or after reading the rest of the book, or not at all? I tend to begin reading it at the beginning, and then stop when plot details are revealed. I try to remember reading it at the end, but it's possible I sometimes forget. I prefer not knowing the plot when I'm reading a book for the first time, it makes it more exciting.
For classics yes. For modern works no. I don't watch movie previews either. I usually go to GoodReads and look at the reader's choice lists, and make selections after reading a few of the user reviews. I'm usually less concerned with what the story is than I am with "is it a finished work?" and "is the writing tolerable?"
Since my last post I've read: "Farseer Trilogy", Robin Hobb (1-3) "Shadow and Bone Trilogy", Leigh Bardugo (1-3) "Red Rising Saga", Piece Brown (1-5) "Later", Stephen King "Cytonic", Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #3) "Battle Ground", Jim Butcher (Dresden #17) "The Cruelest Month", Louise Penny (Inspector Gamache #3) "A Court of Thorns and Roses", Sarah J Maas, (ACOTAR #1 of 5) ---- I have mixed opinions on the three series. They started well but dragged on. Singular books in this list were all meh. I was especially disappointed by "Later" because I have high expectations from Stephen King. When I reached the last page I was actually shocked because it was so unexpected...the story never really developed or reach a high point that I noticed. I liked "A Court of Thorns and Roses" and am hoping the rest of the series stays strong. But I'm also biased towards Sara J. Maas because I loved "Throne of Glass". --- Currently reading A Court of Mist and Fury (ACOTAR #2)
I didn't know modern works could have an introduction. I do know that modern works often have half of the main plot points on the back of the book. So I try not to read the back until I'm done reading the book either.
Ah, you got me, I was talking about those short plot intros. You're right the classics do often have longer introductions. I'll read them if they stay interesting otherwise I just skip them. I remember some being really hard to finish....maybe the intro gives people an idea that something better is coming so they don't give up. I was also introduced to the classics as youth versions. Same main story arcs, modern language, faster pacing.
I read Tom Sawyer. I had read the Geronimo Stilton adaptation before, but I did not remember much from that. I enjoyed the book. I did not find it very good, however. I found it hard to identify with the main character, and the story seemed quite unbelievable. I enjoyed the last few chapters of the book most. I would like to read Huckleberry Finn as well in the future, considering that I liked that character a lot more than Tom Saywer's. What I found most interesting about this book is that it was written for adults and then rebranded as being a children's book (according to the introduction in the edition I read). In some parts it is still very clear that it was written for adults, whereas most parts do indeed seem to work better as a children's book.
Over the last couple of week's I've been in my Jeff Vandermeer era, reading his Southern Reach trilogy and the duo of Borne and Dead Astronauts. The first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, Annhilation, is one of my favorite books of all time, with Borne up there as well. Both of them are science fiction, with the first detailing an exploratory mission into the mysterious and dangerous "Area X" and the second developing an amorphous blob of an alien in a dystopian city. His prose is just beautiful... I'm currently digesting Dead Astronauts, which is, well, like no other book I've ever read. It's maddeningly unclear, but also weirdly emotional, even if sometimes you have no idea what "character" (characters?) it is you're feeling emotional about. “But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil.Joy can only remind you why you fight.” Highly recommend taking a look!
I read The Posthumous Paper of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens' first novel. I enjoyed it a lot. What I found intriguing is how the regular storyline was interrupted with seemingly unrelated short stories now and then: commonly in the first half of the book, rarely in the latter half of the book. I've read a bit about this in the introduction to the book (which of course I read after finishing it), but it appears that it's an unsettled matter. What do you think about it? And did you enjoy them? I thought they were good, but some were way darker than anything else in the book, and in fact than anything other I've read from Dickens.
I read Hey! Listen! by Steve McNeil, which is a book about the entire breadth of video games from the very beginning to the late 1990's. This was an interesting read. Going into it, I actually had fairly low expectations of the comprehensiveness of the book, because there is so much to video games. Consoles, arcades, home computers, pc's... and then quite different scenes in Japan, Europe and North America. This is a fairly short book too (300 pages), and it spans quite a length of time. However, I was very impressed with that! There is actually nothing that I thought was missing. The author clearly knew that there was so much to video games, and did a good job bringing this across. To be able to deliver a somewhat focused narrative, the beginnings of most chapters jump back a few years compared to the end of the previous chapter, in order to be able to talk about developments chronologically but also thematically. I'm not sure if this book could be well followed by people not into video games already. There were a few parts that even I couldn't place entirely, and for many parts I used my own background knowledge to interpret the weight of the described events. For me, though, it was mostly interesting. Also, Steve McNeil was sure to do proper research: I don't recall any passages where I thought "This is wrong", and there were some parts where I was surprised to learn something new. However, there is one aspect of this book that makes it so that I would frankly not recommend it to anyone, not even video game fans. The book is supposed to be humorous, but I very rarely enjoyed the writer's humour. In the introduction, McNeil makes the terrible mistake of downplaying his own book. Most of McNeil's jokes are corny, and/or rely on shock factor. There are two bigger complaints I have about the humour, though. Firstly, some jokes are in the body of the text, but many are also in the footnotes. This makes the book a somewhat tiring read: I think the average amount of footnotes per page is somewhere between 0.5 and 1, and the pages aren't long. As a result, you'll have to move your gaze down and up again several times a minute. You also cannot decide to just skip the footnotes, as sometimes they actually contain useful information. Worse, though, Steve McNeil gets political in the book. This really annoyed me. This is a book about video games, why go flame Donald Trump?? Anyway, it seems that some people did enjoy the book's writing style. I hated it, but substantive, the book was actually great! It's a shame that nobody could convince the author to dial the humour back a bit, if you ask me.
On the surface I agree. Haven't read the book, but I can see from the author's bio that he's a former (failed?) comedian and not from the game development industry. I guess if I wanted to read a book about the history/evolution of video games I'd read a book by someone who has a personal perspective. And for the 80s especially, someone who wasn't a young child at the time.
I read a book by Agatha Christie for the first time: Third Girl. It is one of her later books, being set in the 1960's. I enjoyed it quite a bit! There were not as many 'aha!' moments as I was expecting, because things start making sense quite late on in the book. However, the 'solution' was satisfying to me, and the entire novel was entertaining. I'm definitely interested to read more.
I just got Moby Dick from the library, and it's got a 300 page commentary. o_o (it was published by Penguin Classics)
