Wow, I'm STILL slowly reading through 20,000 leagues under the sea on the train…
It starts off with all sorts of exciting accounts of mysterious goings on, on the ocean, speculation about an unknown giant sea creature, then the exciting hunt for it… The when we actually get ON the Nautilus everything shunts to a crawl.
We get introduced to a detailed look at the scifi tech of the amazingly technological submarine, which is pretty interesting and really very, VERY clever considering there are only crude experimental ones around in his time and the Nautilus is basically a FULLY modern electrically powered submarine from the mid 20th century with everything but sonar.
And Verne gives an exhausting report on ALL the different fish and species of shell, coral, sea-slugs, sea snakes, whales, otters luminous plankton, various sea-mammals! Every single chapter is full of it. He makes David Attenborough look like Steve Irwin (ie. Irwin was to Naturalism what Paris Hilton is to celebrity).
WAY, way too much emphasis and time spent on the sea life… But Verne had obviously done a hell of a lot of research! From his descriptions you'd think he'd have to have gone to see most of this stuff first hand, either by actually visiting and diving in the tropics or looking at every aquarium and collection he could find! Unless it was almost/mostly/basically plagiarism from biological journals and things… He'd obviously absolutely devoured all the scientific journals of the day, on every singe subject. The man must have been extremely clever and knowledgeable!
But that doesn't make for very exciting reading. :(
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
What books are you reading?
Just finished World Without End Ken Follet's follow-up to Pillars of the Earth
It has Crecy and the plague and some interesting characters. They are a lot less balck and white than they were in Pillars of the Earth. Follet does a great job in recreating the 14th Century and it really, really is an epic fantasy ala Game of Thrones without the magic. Who needs pseudo medieval fantasy when there's a book about the real thing. It's good that Follet is very general about the battles going with impressions of the characters. Pre-modern battle is the expertise of Bernard Cornwell and I could tell that Follet had read the Archer's Tale.
There are also some inside references to bits of Chaucer which are good for a smile if you know the Canterbury Tales.
Now comes my quest to find more historical fiction about the Middle Ages.
Instead I'm reading Terry Brooks' latest Armeggeddon's Children. After this it'll probably be time to crawl back into some nonfiction. I have a hankering to learn stuff.
Right now I'm reading the Blade Itself
http://www.amazon.com/Blade-Itself-First-Book-ebook/dp/B002VHI8FE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328013462&sr=8-1
Read Alice In Wonderland.
Nice book :)
The original dream state novel… or at least the original modern dream state novel. Yes, 1800s are still modern because litereture then was the same as it is now.
Anyway, I'm taking a break from old classics for nome modern SciFi now. Iron Sunrire and Singularity Sky, two books by Charles Stross I'm looking at now.
He's not a great writer, he's ok… it's just that he's the sort of writer I'm in the mood for reading right now. You know?
-New SciFi, adventure, mystery, daring, a bit of techno flash and cool… very visual writing, with enough real, current science knowledge to make everything plausible enough.
Totally getting into DiscWorld right now. I'm only on the third book (Late entry, I know) but so far I'm loving it! Terry Pratchett's hilarious. Also, if you thought I was late to THAT party… I've just recently been getting into Sherlock Holmes. Shame on me for starting so late, I know.
I'm reading Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross.
It's a bit of a real page turner. Some decent modern SciFi!
But he's definitely not up their with greats like Azimov, Anne McCaffery, Robert Heinlein…
Criticism:
He's just a little cheap in some of the writing tricks he uses: Things like not fully describing what a character sees or cutting away before reveals, that sort of thing. It's a really easy, cheap and nasty way to get some suspense in there, but the problem is that at the same time it makes the story far less immersive.
You can't as fully identify with the characters, there's always a lot more distance between you and them because you know some of their thoughts, what they're feeling and all that sort of thing, but suddenly in a key scene you're cut off and have to wait for that event to be described second hand some time later… That isn't just done once or twice for effect, but constantly: enough to be a little irritating. often you can't "see" what a character watches on a screen, or reads in a message, or who comes through a door in front of them etc, all you know is their reaction to it.
Poor social commentary-
One other thing is that he's a bit too obtuse and heavy-handed with the social commentary.
It's great that he HAS social commentary in his stories, just like all the greats used to, but they were great because they were subtle ad clever with it.
Stross has things like having an imperialist ex-earth colony that is completely and utterly imperial and conservative in the old pre-WW1 style, with Victorian architecture and uniforms and Victorian embellishments on their technology. They're highly royalist and socially conservative. Women are stuck in dresses and not treated equally. And they have secret police forces and social hierarchies to rival anything in old Slovakia or Imperial Russia…
And of course they're completely "backward" and evil and stupid and extremely religious as of course ALL royalists and conservative people ALWAYS are /sarcasm.
In Iron Sunrise there are a bad group that infiltrate and take over governments and worlds by stealth, before coming in in a more heavy handed way to help "protect" them… Basically they're completely based on the Nazis. They call themselves the Re-mastered, most have blonde hair, huge cartoon Nazi storm-trooper physiches and German names.
He's not subtle about it. Deliberately not subtle. The idea will probably be that the group is directly inspired by old Nazi ideals because of some old cultural connection and they think it's a great ruling philosophy.
But I still don't think that's very clever. Reading audiences are not cretins, we can easily work out that some group is bad and nasty and what they're doing is Nazi-like without so many obvious superficial cues!
It doesn't make the writing patronising though; it actually makes it semi-comical, which is jarring because the Nazi type people really are fully nasty in a gritty and visceral way.
I'm officially re-reading Black Hawk Down for the 19th time. I more or less have it memorized to the point I can give a synopsis at the drop of a hat by now. It's still an enjoyable read, but I have a feeling that after I spend the next month dissecting it and analysing every single person in it's moves that I'm going to not want to pick it up again for a long time.
If you haven't read it, it is a really interesting in-depth look at a part of military history that never really got a lot of coverage to begin with. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of the western world's New World Order ideas in Africa and abroad. It's interesting to note how it tied into other world events of the time like the genocide in Rwanda. Heck, even if you just want a cool war story you'll probably enjoy it.
Hornet Flight by Ken Follett. A novel during the darkest days of 1941 and how the Brits found out about and combatted the first German radar based on true events. And airplanes: Whitley's, BF-109s, Tiger Moths, Tiger Hornets. Interesting insights on the collaborators and resistance in Denmarck.
lenoir85 wrote:One of my favorites. I've read it three times. "Never bring up what you can't put down again."
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
I <3 Lovecraft.
Just started The Longest Tunnel which is the final definitive account of the Great Escape. This is like the fourth book I've read about Stalag Luft III.
STill reading The Picture of Dorian Grey slowly on the train.
It gets better and better and better… then you bog right down into lists and lists and lists…
Like the endless lists of sea flora and fauna in Vern' 20,000 leagues under the sea, instead it's lists of instruments, jewels, art, church clothing, relatives, characters in a book, and so on.
Very boring.
Now the story has finally through that stage, things seem to be picking up again.
Lord Henry is obviously the key character. Basil the painter represents the voice of sanity and normalcy… They function sort of like the angel and devils on the shoulders of a cartoon character. Lord Henry, the devil, wins… But Dorian is an empty vessel. a pretty face with no mind or character or substance, till Henry breaths it into him and even then he's just a stupid puppet and he doesn't even realise it.
He's like one of those modern day celebs that get built up hugely by some Svengali of an agent or producer like a fast growing fungus and then rot from the inside out as they find they can't handle their fame and postilion any more.
ozoneocean wrote:That's quite unfortunate when one can no longer handle those that handle one's carriage horses. ;)
they find they can't handle their fame and postilion any more.
Just started Murder in the White City which is about the prototype of the modern urban serial killer who thrived in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Seems I keep getting drawn back to history.
I thought that was Jack the Ripper (the prototype) :)
My fingers are far more literate than I'll ever be… I'm continually surprised by their automatic typing. Generally my typing or spelling mistakes turn out to be proper words that would be rather difficult to type by mistake because the letters are often on keys that weren't near the where they could have been hit by accident and it's not a logical spelling mistake.
…though that one clearly is! … but why an "L"?
Not quite. Jack was never captured and we have no idea of motive or psychology. This guy was captured and fits all the profiles. He was the nice guy next door who hid horrible goings on in his house all the while young ladies were disappearing in the neighborhood as opposed to the typical slasher.
People vanished, this guy was doing it and no one knew anything and he worked for years and the disappearances only became murders when his house was searched.
That is the classic urban serial killer like Hannibal Lechter. There is no crime scene, just a series of missing persons whose bodies aren't discovered until much later.
I do despise serial killers.
They remind me of Pokemon. The serial killer is the ultimate end form of the useless dork who fails to evolve and transcend his pathetic origins.
Speaking of pathos, I decided to finish Dorian Grey. It wasn't a very long book afterall… I just had a lay in this fine Sunday morning and read through the final pages.
What a GREAT book! Wilde really was a genius. Lord Henry has some of the best epigrams I have ever read. Genius.
Now to begin my cyberpunk odyssey, starting with William Gibson's seminal Nuromancer. ^_^
I've never read Gibson before but I've head two of his works adapted on BBC radio4: Pattern Recognition and Burning Chrome.
Both were excellent, so I'm looking forward to this.
Just started reading a series of short stories by R.A. Salvatore from the "Legend of the Drizzt" series. Although the series is quiet sterotypical for a fantasy setting, Salvatore is trying to expand the world around the drow. Just started reading it but I don't think it's going to take me long to finish it.
Also I finished few papers by Lenin. Almost scary how things haven't changed much for the last 100 years…
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