oh man, 12 pages and over three years, this is a lot to catch up on. Right now I am reading the Star wars expanded universe novels: legacy of the force. Several authors write the books but troy denning and aaron alston are my favorite authors. at one point these books were canon, now they aren't and disney has basically stolen and rebranded a bunch of these stories, and intends to continue doing so from what I can tell. The expanded universe novels are a million times more entertaining and engaging than the hollywood blah that has been coming out since after the empire strikes back.
A while ago, somebody recommended I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It took me a while because it kept being unavailable in the library, but eventually I bought it online, together with 2 other books I'll read later. I got the English translation. I found the book very strange as I got into it, but there was some nice story. Some interesting ideas were presented, most of which I disagreed with, but some of which I could agree with. Overall, the story was nice, but I certainly wouldn't recommend the book.
Here's a series that I love and I do not think has been mentioned in this thread! The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel This is a 6 book series written about Nicholas Flamel (obviously) and a kind of modern twist on the stories surrounding him. It is actually really well written and I enjoyed the full series. The author did a good job planning out the main plot and subplots, then bringing all of the plotlines together in the end. Here's the synopsis: The truth: Nicholas Flamel was born in Paris on September 28, 1330. The legend: Nicholas Flamel discovered the secret of eternal life. The records show that he died in 1418. But his tomb is empty. Nicholas Flamel lives. But only because he has been making the elixir of life for centuries. The secret of eternal life is hidden within the book he protects—the Book of Abraham the Mage. It's the most powerful book that has ever existed. In the wrong hands, it will destroy the world. That's exactly what Dr. John Dee plans to do when he steals it. Humankind won't know what's happening until it's too late. And if the prophecy is right, Sophie and Josh Newman are the only ones with the power to save the world as we know it. Sometimes legends are true. And Sophie and Josh Newman are about to find themselves in the middle of the greatest legend of all time.
I really enjoyed the series as well! Although it's been a while since I read it, I have a pretty positive view of it as a whole. I can't quite remember if I read the entire series or not; I know they were being written as I was reading them, and I believe I outpaced the author haha. I'll have to look into that and see!
I'm currently reading the chapter 'Treebeard' of book 3 of The Lord of the Rings, and I'm really enjoying it!
I've been trying to read a lot more over the past three months. I think that's called a new year's resolution, but I never really planned to have one - I just had money sitting in my bank account doing nothing until I go to the Canary Islands in August and move out of my parent's house in September to go to university, a good paperback is inexpensive, and I had a whole backlog of recommendations. Here's a few of them. Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut was born in the United States in 1922, a descendent of wealthy German immigrants, from whom his parents had inherited a thriving textile business on his father's side and, on his mother's side, a brewery. When the Great Depression hit, they lost their businesses and financial security and by 1943, after failing school, Kurt had enlisted in the American Army to fight in Europe rather than wait for conscription. While training, he went home on Mother's Day in 1944 to find that his mother had killed herself, citing her lack of success as a writer and Kurt's imminent death in Europe to be the reason. He was present at the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944 - January 1945), however he was quickly captured as a prisoner of war and shipped off into a camp in Dresden. While there, he witnessed the Firebombing of Dresden - the Allies bombed the city with incendiary bombs, burning 25,000 civilians alive; they tried to keep it a secret-but-not-really and in the 1950s claimed that they were bombing communications infrastructure, however they were found to have bombed without any specific targets and never hit any communications infrastructure. He was escorted by the Soviets to Le Havre in France and was discharged from the American Army. He returned home, married his childhood sweetheart, moved to Chicago and studied at the university there, worked as a news reporter, and eventually wrote this book. Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of a man named Billy Pilgrim. It is an out-of-order account of Billy's life: his service in the war, the bombing of Dresden, his marriage, his family life (in which he is an awful, awful husband and an awful, awful father), his career, the deaths of the people he loves. Billy claims to have been abducted by alien beings who don't perceive time and put him in a zoo, has had flash-forwards to later events in his life since he was young, and doesn't really care for death - he sees it as something that just... happens, and feels no sorrow or remorse. The story begins and ends with the chirp of a bird. It's a funny, interesting way of describing the dehumanisation war has on people, the PTSD soldiers get after it all, and how utterly pointless all of that is because war is not the act of intelligent beings and thus there is nothing intelligent to say about it. I thoroughly recommend it. If you think I've said too much, I'm kind of lenient on the slight spoilers because the book does all of that on the first page anyway. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea Kimitake Hiraoka, better known by his pen name Yukio Mishima, was born in 1925, the son of a Japanese government official and the daughter of the principal of an all-boy's secondary school. He was raised by his grandmother, Natsuko, who was herself the descendent of the daimyō/lord of Shishido, and had married a governor-general of Sakhalin Island. She was prone to violent outbursts against him, stopped him from going outside, and instilled a fascination with death in him. When he was returned to his father, he was frequently held up to the very side of moving trains and his father raided his room to search for anything feminine he might be looking at - this included books and writing. His mother, however, was supportive and encouraged him to keep writing, keeping it a secret. When he was called up for conscription in World War II, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and declared unfit for military service since he was going to die of the disease anyway. He did not have tuberculosis. He had a cold. He used the opportunity to attend the University of Tokyo, and graduated into a career in the Japanese Finance Ministry. After a year of that he resigned and started writing books. He also became a relatively successful Japanese actor and director, and had a modelling career going on on the side too. In private, he practiced swordsmanship and had an intense weight training workout regimen. He had a wife and two daughters, but visited gay bars often and had an affair with a fellow male writer. On top of the writing, acting, and modelling, he also ran a militia - he recruited young boys and trained them in martial arts and physical discipline. They also followed bushido, the code of the samurai. They swore to protect the Emperor of Japan, however they didn't believe the Emperor was one single man, but rather the essence of Japan. Indeed, he hated Emperor Hirohito for what he perceived as spitting on the graves of all the WW2 Japanese soldiers by caving to Allied demands. In 1970, he and the militia visited a Japanese Self-Defense Force camp (quite a normal thing), then got into the commandent's office, tied him to a chair and barricaded themselves inside the room. He left onto the commandent's balcony, delivered a speech to the soldiers below, hoping to inspire a military coup against the government of Japan - they laughed at him. He finished the speech, went back into the office, and stabbed himself in the stomach with a sword and had a fellow coup plotter decapitate him - this is called seppuku. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea was written seven years before his death. It tells the story of Noboru, who is part of a gang of teenage boys who despise all feelings - one ritual they have is brutally killing a kitten and training themselves to not feel remorse. Noboru's mother, Fusako, who runs a European clothing store, begins a relationship with Ryuji, a sailor who Noboru idolises and wants to be just like. However, he and the gang resent father figures and see them as weak and dishonourable, with their only salvation being death. Kinda complicates things. A commentary on traditionalism that Mishima loved so deeply - Mishima is Noboru, Ryuji is pre-WW2 Japan, and Fusako is post-WW2 Japan. Shows what his beliefs on humanity are (Mishima was quite the nihilist lol), Japan's political state, gender roles, blahblahblah. Great story, great read and really fascinating. I couldn't put it down. I hope I didn't spoil too much. I'll probably recommend Dune when I finish it. That book is big.
LOVED Slaughterhouse Five and LOVED Dune. Seems we share similar tastes in books... in which case, I will have to add The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea to the top of my reading list. Thanks for the recommendation!
Got some big non-fiction picks for you today! Mapping the Deep - Robert Kunzig 10/10 book; moving this to the op. The ocean covers over 70% of our planet, and you will not look at it the same way after reading this book. Kunzig does an amazing job of relating the history of our oceans and descriptions of the life within in ways that are easy to understand and wonderfully enjoyable to read. This is the best introduction to our oceans that I have ever read, and given what climate change is doing to them right now, I recommend it now more than ever. I cannot recommend this enough. Just as an example of the kind of stuff Kunzig does, there's one metaphor (so many fantastic comparisons to the terrestrial world) where he describes aliens coming to Earth but being unable to penetrate our atmosphere; they put down a tractor beam, bring up a small car, and wonder at the strangeness of the organism, which appears to have some living endosymbionts inside it. That's what studying the deep ocean via nets is like. Beautifully, beautifully written visuals in this book. Tl;dr... if you like descriptions of "thundering herds of sea cucumbers," this book is for you. An Exorcist Tells His Story - Gabriele Amorth This book can admittedly be a bit repetitive, but it's highly interesting nonetheless... who knew exorcisms still went on in this day and age? A complete guide to exorcism as told by the former chief exorcist of the Catholic Church (who passed away only recently in 2016).
Been reading a lot of Larry Niven books recently. The best one to start with is Ringworld, imagine hundreds of years into the future when the human race has made contact with multiple alien races, Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu who goes on an expedition to a mysterious structure that nobody knows the makers of. Really great visuals and story but I will say that I have to put a mature warning on these books for some light sexual content. Absolutely great books though.
I haven't got any new works of fiction to recommend. I'm currently working my way through a reread of A Game of Thrones by George R.R Martin, and I'm a few chapters into The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I even started writing something that's sort of similar to A Song of Ice and Fire, but it's a big mishmash of a Carlist Spain situation, the French Revolution, and the Ruhr Uprising in 1920s Germany. The Ruhr Uprising was a revolt by workers all over the Ruhr, Germany's main source of coal and iron and steel and workers - they were angry at the governing party for betraying them, France's occupation, and decided that they wanted to reboot Weimar Germany and bring it back to the very ideology that created it - socialism. If you've come across my musings in the controversial section, you might have seen me proclaim that I'm a libertarian socialist, as the likes of George Orwell were before me. The general gist of it is that I like state control over large portions of industry, a strong welfare state, that the land we stand on does not belong to any one person and thus landlords and such shouldn't exist - but I don't like anything more than that; mass surveillance is a crime against the people that the state exists to serve, and people's homes and the internet I'm sending this message into are spaces in which we should be free. We find ourselves in troubling times. Without getting into the gritty details of what's going on in the world, because I'm sure you all know and I do not wish to start debate: the values I stand for are under threat, and have been for a long time - it is my personal belief that we are at the nadir of that slump. I wish to defend my values with more fervor and knowledge: I took it upon myself to expand my readings in philosophical and political literature beyond Mein Kampf (that was an awfully written book and read exactly like you'd expect the ramblings of a lunatic to read), The Communist Manifesto (the chapter on 'Bourgeoisie Socialism' rang true to me, the rest, nah), Das Kapital (no complaints tbh), and a few others. I settled on a book relevant to the modern world: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle was published in 1967, and was almost immediately a key work of the Situationist movement and Marxist critical theory. Debord argues that we live within 'The Spectacle': our lives are mediated by a collection of images, and genuine human interaction has been supplanted by said images. Our lives are not characterised by living, but about having: The Spectacle tells us that we need certain things, and motivates us to get it at all costs or else we will not be happy. One way The Spectacle does this is through mass marketing: products are advertised and sold to us - the advertising generates waves of enthusiasm for a product, and we think that we need it. It has replaced the role of religion: "moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism". It posits that religion only exists to secure moral repression, but as the world unchains itself from it, it embraces a new form of it - marketing and capitalism. As a result, our culture evolves by copying former iterations of itself - 2010s pop music copies 1980s pop music, I walk around in chelsea boots like my grandparents did in the 1960s, and people are starting to wear double denim again like it's 1999 all over again. We are trapped within The Spectacle, relying on television and video games and other simple pleasures marketed towards us to keep us complacent. Businesses and governments use us as their playthings while we remain blissfully unaware, uncaring, because The Spectacle keeps us happy. Worst of all, The Spectacle exists until we find a way to overthrow it. You cannot criticise or praise The Society of the Spectacle without forcing yourself to become part of The Spectacle - if you're criticising it, you only prove its existence by doing so.
I am not a big fan of portal fantasy. Yeah yeah, you fell through to a different world/timeline/etc. I don't hate this genre or anything. It just has always seemed predictable to me, and a tad boring. There are exceptions to that though I've been reading Magic & The Shinigami Detective, and thoroughly enjoying it. I just wish the series was longer. Only 2 books in it atm and I'm about 65% of the way through book 2.
Never in my life have I claimed to have a favorite book. How could you choose just one? And yet, here we are. As of now, The Fountainhead may be the greatest literary work I have ever read. Yes, it promotes (with no subtlety whatsoever) radically right-wing ideology. Yes, it is remarkably sexist in its treatment of the leading female character. Yes, it exists purely as a vehicle to push forward Ayn Rand's political agenda. But my god, her prose is beautiful... I was captivated from page one. And while her ideology taken at face value may be an utterly immature (and pretty callous) failure should anyone try to apply it to the real world, no matter what you believe, I think it impossible to come away from this book without questioning some of your own stances, your own actions, your own attacks on the world. While Rand's philosophy of "objectivism" might be grandiose, overblown, and ridiculous, it rides on a current of individualism captured more perfectly and beautifully in this book than I have ever seen. And even if I ignored all that, there is the character Gail Wynand. I have never cried over a book--this is the closest I have ever come. Never have I connected so deeply with a character as with Gail Wynand, and never have I felt so personally heartbroken by his story. The book may focus on Roark and the philosophy Roark embodies, but it is Wynand who captures how the world genuinely works, and Wynand who creates the most realistic celebration of human spirit and the most tragic mourning of its pitfalls. I came away from the book in quiet shock over him, stunned by the memory. In short, The Fountainhead gets a 9.5 out of 10 from me. New favorite.
This is funny to read. I tried to read Atlas Shrugged, arguably her magnum opus, but really struggled and gave up. I got proper bad nutjob vibes off her writing, and I just so badly disagree with her weird extremism relating to her flawed perception of individualism that the cringe alone was so bad that I was forced to put it down, and then discovered she was addicted to speed for three decades and I had an 'oohhhhhhhh' moment. Perhaps I should give The Fountainhead a try if it's a little bit more... comprehensible.
She is absolutely a conservative nutjob. There is no question about that. Again, it's about pulling certain thoughts from the overall philosophy rather than trying to swallow the entire thing as is. And, of course, Gail Wynand. If you removed that character arc, this would not be the book it is. It would be 100% fair to say that I am in love with the character and story of Gail Wynand and not the book as a whole (which may seem strange considering that he is not the main character).
