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F. Murray Sandyclam wrote:

badgevvrecker wrote:while Stephenson has continued to get better and better

Hmmm...must research.

read system of the world. don't expect it to be fast-food reading.

Pure - Andrew Miller

This was really good. It's the story of an engineer who gets recruited to move the bones out of an overfilled Paris cemetery in 1785. It's suitably eerie and dark and violent, but it's also restrained and the writing's quite pretty. 7.5

TheDOAD wrote:I just finished pattern recognition this morning and it was a meh for sure. Some really cool ideas in there but overall, maybe a 6.5?

Riles you could probably get way down on Anathem.

http://www.amazon.com/Anathem-Neal-Step ... 0061694940

it's no count zero, even though it's pretty much just count zero.

[quote="kickpuncher"]Post Office - 11/10

TheDOAD wrote:Riles you could probably get way down on Anathem.

http://www.amazon.com/Anathem-Neal-Step ... 0061694940

Yeah it's the next Stephenson I'm going to read. Right now I'm doing Mote in God's Eye though.

riley-o wrote:Mote in God's Eye

Pisscubes wrote:

Alfonso wrote:Infinite Jest 9/10

Thought the ending was sort of anticlimactic, but it's quite engaging through and through for such a fucking lengthy work.

Got a third of the way through some months back, am trying again this week. Recently read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and thought it was mostly awesome-- 8/10

The titular essay actually made me LOL at courthouse downtime a few times

Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy - 7/10

Helen Tilley - Africa as Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950, 8/10

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations, I dunno a 6 or something

Ayi Kwei Armah - The Healers, 4/10 (didn't finish)

bossy pants (audio) 5
it was funny the first half while she was telling stories, but the second half was mostly her politics. She had a chapter devoted to defending the photoshopping of women in media.

Michael J. Sandel - Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do

There's probably not much new in here for people who have studied political/moral philosophy (the book relies heavily on Rawls, Kant, Aristotle and a handful of utilitarians), but for someone like me who hasn't gone too far down that path yet, it came across as illuminating and clear-headed, but un-simplified. The thrust of the book isn't philosophy, but what's being debated when people disagree about moral questions. I thought it was great. It gave me a lot to think about. 7.5/10

Jorge Luis Borges - Labrynths

Blew my mind. Some of the most unique, imaginative, perplexing and flat-out enjoyable fiction I've ever come across. It's astounding on every single level I can think of. 10/10

Pisscubes wrote:

d.hellion wrote:

kickpuncher wrote:Post Office - 11/10

My buddy and I have another trip planned to the horse track and were recently talking about the brilliance of Bukowski. Mostly, it's those small times that he's "up" in the books that throws all the sleaze and poverty into sharp relief. I forget if it's in Post Office or Factotum or Women, but there's a small section in one of the books where he has a new system for the track that's actually paying out. Chinaski knows it's not going to last, but he just lives like a king for a week-- at the end of the day he collects his winnings, buys an expensive cigar and drives down the coast, every night selecting a random but nice hotel on the water, getting a room with clean sheets and a window with the sea breeze coming in. He goes to the hotel restaurant each night, orders a steak and some good red wine and sleeps like a baby. Sure, by the end of the week he's broke again and back to cheap beer and rooming houses, but just the small description of that short time he had the world by the balls... man, it always makes me smile.

pretty sure that's "women".

err.. i could be wrong about that though.

F. Murray Sandyclam wrote:

altars of radness wrote:Borges

One of my favorites...

Almost too good.

makes me want to learn spanish

pacifism as pathology 10

Jeremy Narby - The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge - 8 until I realized that the last 1/3 of the book is all end notes and so it's pretty short and lacking depth, 6.3

Dan Simmons: Ilium - 8
great read, but I REALLY hate how Simmons makes you wait halfway thru a book without explaining things more fully. I've had about enough of the intertwined literary fanboy references too. Still, I'm stoked to read Olympos next.

Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists 8/10
I think it was just a joy to read some well-crafted contemporary fiction. Nothing special, but just what I needed.

TheDOAD wrote:heh yeah I know what you are saying but That is what makes dan simmons books dan simmons books. YOu hate all the Shakespeare stuff?

Just the constant intertwining of shakespeare and proust gets tiring after awhile. I recognize how masterfully he does it, and it's a good gimmick, those
guys just aren't my cup of tea. My favorite character was Mahnmut.

EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO wrote:Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists 8/10
I think it was just a joy to read some well-crafted contemporary fiction. Nothing special, but just what I needed.

this is one of my favorite new reads. I thought it was fantastic all of the characters and stories were amazingly well-crafted

I think well-crafted is really the best description. I didn't come away wanting to rave about it, but Rachman writes extremely well. The weaving together of the stories was pulled off without feeling cheesy or forced at all.

The Red Prophet- 9/10
I liked this one a lot more than Seventh Son.

Ender's Game- 7.5/10
Easily could have been another 75 pages long. Based on what was there, not what was missing- 9/10

Library of America is releasing a two book science fiction collection. I just got the new catalog the other day and it had a write up on the collection: The Space Merchants, More Than Human, The Long Tomorrow, The Shrinking Man, Double Star, The Star My Destination, A Case of Conscience, Who?, The Big Time.



http://www.amazon.com/American-Science- ... +the+1950s

"Following its acclaimed three-volume edition of the novels of science fiction master Philip K. Dick, The Library of America now presents a two-volume anthology of nine groundbreaking works from the golden age of the modern science fiction novel. Long unnoticed or dismissed by the literary establishment, these “outsider” novels have gradually been recognized as American classics. Here are genre-defining works by such masters as Robert Heinlein, Richard Matheson, James Blish, and Alfred Bester. The themes range from time travel (Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time) to post-apocalyptic survival (Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow), from the prospect of a future dominated by multinational advertising agencies (Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants) to the very nature of human identity in a technological age (Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human and Algis Budrys’s Who?). The range of styles is equally diverse, by turns satiric, adventurous, incisive, and hauntingly lyrical. Grappling in fresh ways with a world in rapid transformation, these visionary novels opened new imaginative territory in American writing."

Hayduke Lives! 10