Got both of these in that Amazon kindle sale of books of films that someone posted on here a while back. Had not read either. Enjoyed both. Though the central idea in the second that one untrained guy with a microscope discovers what all the scientists in the world had missed when it's something as obvious as a germ interrupted my suspension of disbelief.
i haven't been able to really get into anything since i finished freedom about three months ago. not sure if that's because (a) of how strong an impact the novel had on me, (b) i'm going through a crazy period (switching from partnership in my firm of 12 years to a new firm, and opening a new office for that firm), or (c) pure laziness. but i want to pick-up something soon. maybe back to swamplandia!. i liked it well enough, but -- you know -- once the momentum is gone, it's hard to engage with a book again.
I read I Am Legend 51 years ago, I would guess, when I would have been 12. I still remember getting to the end. Even though I was sitting on the front porch of my home I was a little frightened. I was probably a little less critical then about holes in the plot.
Just finished this, which is a little outdated but good anyway:
Now starting on this, which seems good so far:
And well into this, as threatened. It's the same design as all the others, but it's such a good design and the details are done so well that I don't mind:
..... and now Cafreema will know the feeling that Nefferid mentioned on the last page you get when people say they are reading ASOS.
I just read (well listened, on audiobook) this, biography of Ahmet Ertegun. Very good, if you want to know details of every ruth Brown session in 1940-whatever it won't tell you but a good overview of am amazing life and career.
Nanker - I can't wait to finish the book now so my wife can read it. I'm a bit ticked at myself for not seeing the massive hints of what was about to happen, but at least I figured out the next major death before it happened.
Reading this detective book I picked up cheap as a kindle daily deal. I don't read much detective or mystery stuff, but this was described as surreal or mystical; pretty interesting so far.
A warning, not a rec: I started reading a book called "Missing" by someone called Lang that was a free Kindle mystery novel. The badness of the writing would be hard to top. Gave up after a chapter of pedantic detail (she took a skillet. She put the hamburger in the skillet. She cooked the hamburger. She ate the hamburger. At first I wondered if it was some kind of literary device, like some of that post-war French stuff, Robbe-Grillet et al, but it never quit or went anywhere) and garbled tenses. Avoid, even for free.
Yeah, there's some bad stuff out there; this one wasn't free; it was a deal of the day, and I googled around and there were some good things said about it. It seems well written so far.
I've picked up some free things that were real clinkers, but I've gotten some, like this:
which, although it's not the best thing in the world, it is mildly entertaining from a space war saga point of view, and good for late night brain-turn-off. I've been reading it for a few months on and off, just maybe a little embarrassed to admit it.
Backed this as a Kickstarter, it's been an entertaining read.
The wife has gotten me back into reading comics and this series is one that was highly recommended by the folks over at Comicazi. Sort of slow to start but picks up after about the 6th issue.
Engaging history so far, the writing moves along quickly but never feels like it is glossing over or skipping details.
I and my kids love that book, Nereffid. It's absolutely essential, though, that you know the tune "Night In Tunisia" and read it by singing the words to the tune.
Well I just had a 30+ hour journey home from Perth (with a long flight delay on the last flight that got me in at 2:30 a.m.). I used the more sentient spells of it to read the whole of :
and, finally capitulating to inevitability, about the first third of:
Starting the Martin saga feels like taking on a mortgage, but I'm enjoying it so far.
@amclark2, thanks for the tip - I like sci fi as a thing to unwind to, though there is a definite floor to my tolerance of style.
@kez, and in general, I am currently reading Volume 10 of this accursed series, Crossroads of Twilight - what, accursed, he said? It's complicated - obviously I have been ensnared by this storyline enough to keep plowing through it, but it feels like plowing a disconcerting percentage of the time. If I had it to do over I don't know that I would recommend the experience. I do believe this epic could have been honed down to fewer volumes (and I'm still on the ones the author wrote before he passed away). There is a lot of repetitious tale telling because the action has been spread through so many storylines that whole volumes go by (most egregious beyond Volume 6 I'd say) with hardly a mention of major characters, in often contemporaneous timelines, resulting in an overwhelming amount of what comes to feel like filler with a lack of focus. Ah, what the hey, only four more volumes to go, and I already bought #11.
Those who have read Volumes 4 & 5 of A Tale Of Fire And Ice - A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons - may have an opinion as to whether Mr. Martin did or did not commit a similar type action. I'd like very much to hear - without spoilers of course. As strong a thumbs up as I would give the first three volumes, I am conflicted about 4 & 5, and feel some self editing might have been in order. Lastly, Mr. Martin had better not pull a Robert Jordan on us and shuffle off before he finishes the series - as cold and self interested as that sounds, no apology.
I am about halfway through the book, currently consuming a cheap Zin, listing to "Sounds of the Big Bands." That would combine what are you reading, listening to and drinking into a single thread.
I am not sure how I have lived nearly a half-century and *not* read this book. On the other hand, I did watch MASH, which seems to crib quite a few jokes from Catch-22.
Or were you referring to cheap Zinfandel as your all time favorite?
So many great characters. I remember the first time I read the Major Major Major Major chapter, and I just about busted a gut at the absurdity.
Finished the Kind of Blue book last night. Very quick read. It was good, but the discussion of the music was pretty high level stuff and a fair amount of it went over my head.
It's going to take me a long time to get through this, and I don't plan to attempt it at a sitting. Even at over 900 pages they left out the footnotes and you have to download them in a separate file. From the publisher's blurb:
When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders, composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen, grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's books. Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel.
That actually gives a good idea of the nature of the thing - it ranges over just about anything as long as it's connected to perceptions of noise. Already a few pages in I've been fascinated by the brief discussion of how the sound of Cicadas was regarded as beautiful song in Plato and the Iliad (see, drone music has good ancestry!) and by comment on how when cars with rubber tires first came in they were hailed as a great reducer of environmental noise and bringer of urban silence as compared to horses with their clattering, and how that fed the rise of the klaxon (to let you know the cars were there).
Comments
and then
Got both of these in that Amazon kindle sale of books of films that someone posted on here a while back. Had not read either. Enjoyed both. Though the central idea in the second that one untrained guy with a microscope discovers what all the scientists in the world had missed when it's something as obvious as a germ interrupted my suspension of disbelief.
Craig
Craig
Now starting on this, which seems good so far:
And well into this, as threatened. It's the same design as all the others, but it's such a good design and the details are done so well that I don't mind:
I just read (well listened, on audiobook) this, biography of Ahmet Ertegun. Very good, if you want to know details of every ruth Brown session in 1940-whatever it won't tell you but a good overview of am amazing life and career.
And now I'm reading this. I have high hopes.
The game of thrones has changed!
Craig
Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel. The third book of a series, although they are generally unrelated.
Reading this detective book I picked up cheap as a kindle daily deal. I don't read much detective or mystery stuff, but this was described as surreal or mystical; pretty interesting so far.
The last Wallander novel, but I think I've still got one or two earlier books to read, as some earlier ones are stil being translated
I've picked up some free things that were real clinkers, but I've gotten some, like this:
which, although it's not the best thing in the world, it is mildly entertaining from a space war saga point of view, and good for late night brain-turn-off. I've been reading it for a few months on and off, just maybe a little embarrassed to admit it.
Backed this as a Kickstarter, it's been an entertaining read.
The wife has gotten me back into reading comics and this series is one that was highly recommended by the folks over at Comicazi. Sort of slow to start but picks up after about the 6th issue.
Engaging history so far, the writing moves along quickly but never feels like it is glossing over or skipping details.
and, finally capitulating to inevitability, about the first third of:
Starting the Martin saga feels like taking on a mortgage, but I'm enjoying it so far.
@amclark2, thanks for the tip - I like sci fi as a thing to unwind to, though there is a definite floor to my tolerance of style.
I'm now well into:
Thanks, 68!
Craig
Craig
No, not really - it's due out January 13, 2013, though.
"Today I got up and did not have a Wheel of Time book to work on." - Brandon Sanderson
(from yesterday's blog writing here.
Time to start re-reading some of the series now so I'll be all back up to speed by January as to what's going on.
Those who have read Volumes 4 & 5 of A Tale Of Fire And Ice - A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons - may have an opinion as to whether Mr. Martin did or did not commit a similar type action. I'd like very much to hear - without spoilers of course. As strong a thumbs up as I would give the first three volumes, I am conflicted about 4 & 5, and feel some self editing might have been in order. Lastly, Mr. Martin had better not pull a Robert Jordan on us and shuffle off before he finishes the series - as cold and self interested as that sounds, no apology.
I am about halfway through the book, currently consuming a cheap Zin, listing to "Sounds of the Big Bands." That would combine what are you reading, listening to and drinking into a single thread.
Craig
Or were you referring to cheap Zinfandel as your all time favorite?
So many great characters. I remember the first time I read the Major Major Major Major chapter, and I just about busted a gut at the absurdity.
Finished the Kind of Blue book last night. Very quick read. It was good, but the discussion of the music was pretty high level stuff and a fair amount of it went over my head.
Craig
It's going to take me a long time to get through this, and I don't plan to attempt it at a sitting. Even at over 900 pages they left out the footnotes and you have to download them in a separate file. From the publisher's blurb:
That actually gives a good idea of the nature of the thing - it ranges over just about anything as long as it's connected to perceptions of noise. Already a few pages in I've been fascinated by the brief discussion of how the sound of Cicadas was regarded as beautiful song in Plato and the Iliad (see, drone music has good ancestry!) and by comment on how when cars with rubber tires first came in they were hailed as a great reducer of environmental noise and bringer of urban silence as compared to horses with their clattering, and how that fed the rise of the klaxon (to let you know the cars were there).