Thread "What books are you reading?" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 6:04AM, Apr. 2, 2012

Behold a Pale Horse - William Cooper

Posted at 8:04AM, Apr. 5, 2012

I finished Neuromancer the other day.
It was pretty decent, pretty well written, fairly clever too.
So that was the godfather of the cyberpunk genre…?

Very 80s. Hehe. People think SciFi is all about the future and predictions, but that's just shit. SciFi is a projection from a person's given point in time, not a prediction but an extrapolation.
In Neuromencer, brands are a huge thing and it was a real nostalgic step back in time to be reminded of brands like Sanyo, Akai, Braun etc, of back when they really meant something.
…But the idea that the character was fencing 4 meg of super expensive ram in the start was a bit cringeworthy… and the fact that he always needed to hook up his heavy powerful computer deck to get online, people playing video games in arcades…. Those are just unavoidable artefacts of extrapolated 80s scifi but it makes it a bit hard to get into initially. Very retro.

The of course there's the banal irony of having downloaded the book wirelessly and having read it entirely off of a phone and tablet (which the comps in the book couldn't do), with far more power than the imagined portable computers in the book had… But then of course that's not really relevant because the rules and props of any given fictional world (contemporary, historical, fantasy, scifi, whatever) are specific to it so if you want to enjoy the story you have to "suspend disbelief" and just accept that's how things work in that world.

Another interesting thing is you see that's where they got most of their ideas for "the Matrix" movie.
Maybe all that was a hommage to Nueromancer rather than stealing? Even the inclusion of Zion etc, not just the fact that the net is called The Matrix. Also where Shadowrun came from and more… So the book is one of those pop-culture landmarks that inspired a lot of other things, like Lord of the Rings , Star Wars, stuff like that.

Posted at 3:04PM, Apr. 5, 2012

that;s so very true, even when authors fudge the details even language can betray the era it was written in. i love cyberpunk stuff but it is a very 80s genre.
As for my reading… it's coming very slowly but I'm gradually getting through a feast for crows.

Posted at 4:04PM, Apr. 5, 2012

Finished GAME OF THRONES (misspelled in the moan and groan thread).

Absorbing, pop reading - kept thinking of bravo when it came to the tourneys, melees, armor descriptions of lobster this and scaled that, helms with antlers and (OK - so this is fiction, not historical), gem encrusted armor.

Most of the battle stuff was skimmed, I confess. But the characters are very well-written – rivals WAR & PEACE in the number thereof, but author Martin (I think) does extraordinarily well in 3D sketching. The last chapter, with "Dany" had me wondering if he modeled that character after any one in particular.

All set to start CLASH OF THRONES.

Posted at 11:04PM, Apr. 5, 2012

You do know that Game of Thrown would be a great title for a parody of Martin based on baseball maybe.

Just started Disclosure by Michael Crichton. It takes place in the tech business and it's funny reading about the problems they have with platforms that have already been superceded several times since. But that's really incidental to the sexual harrassment plot. A writer could substitute any business.
However, it is a bit obvious at times how Crichton was consciously writing the novel with the screenplay and movie production in mind.

Posted at 12:04AM, Apr. 13, 2012

Genejoke wrote:
i love cyberpunk stuff but it is a very 80s genre.

Especially Gibson.

Continuing my cyberpunk odyssey, next of the rank was…

Dome City Blues.
This was highly recommended on Amazon…It wasn't very good though. Truthfull, I only got it because it was decently long and very cheap.

-Lot's of homage/influnce from Gibson's Necromancer. Brands are mentioned a bit and the book's name is an obvious homage- the first chapter of Necromancer is "Chiba City Blues".
The main problem with this book is that it's a very obvious formula detective story (in the old noire style), bolted onto cyberpunk.You might think that'd make a good story but bolting is a horrible way to mix genres or settings. It's clunky. And because it's formula you can accurately guess 10 steps ahead past what the author intends.

The other issue was that this was a first time novel. The writer, Jeff Edwards, is much acclaimed for his naval based military fiction apparently (big thriller stuff I think, you know, "dad" books). This cyberpunk novel was something he had lying around and released almost 20 years after he'd written it with almost no changes. The inexperience is palpable. He obviously wrote it when he'd left the navy and was just starting out as a novelist, but could never get a publisher to take it up back then, so now he has some name recognition he's giving this old thing another go…

But it wasn't alllll bad. Amidst the dodgy predictable stuff he writes some entertaining action sequences, he really DOES know enough about weapons to make the mechanics of them work well and believably in the story, even though they'd fictional they "work". And the final denouement, even though you knew exactly what was going to happen and there was no mystery at all to it, was engagingly written enough (because of the action), that I read straight through and enjoyed it.

——————

OK, next book is…
Snow Crash.

This cyberpunk novel is even more highly rated than Necromancer. Certainly a lot more than Dome City Blues.
So far it's started off VERY much like a scifi alternative comic from the pages of Heavy Metal magazine, so it was very cartoonish and because of that pretty hard to get into… But that's seemed to have faded a bit and it gets a nicely hyped up vivid funkiness as you go on.
This one looks extremely promising!

Posted at 2:04PM, Apr. 14, 2012

The hunger games series, just completed it…Bit of a hobby of mine, whenever a film comes out and there's a book for it, I usually read the book first.
But yeah, that's what I've been reading

Posted at 9:05PM, May. 14, 2012

Snowcrash was pretty good. I learned that it had indeed started life as an alternative comic. Then it tried to make it all literary by shoving a bunch of junk about languages and early religions etc… It worked ok, even if it was a bit silly at times, but it managed to get him published by penguin at least.
Love that the main character was called "Hiro Protagonist" :)

Started reading "Norse tales" which is some 19th century collection with a great big introduction treatise on how most northern European cultures and east Asian ones are all part of the same "race" because of the connected language roots…
So basically: Aryans.
Which includes Scandinavians, all the Teutonic people, Celtic people etc and Indians.
But not Basques, Finns, Hungarians and so on.
All because of the famous "indo-European" language roots, and the stories were evidence of that.

The race stuff was mostly nonsense really, but it's a good insight into where a lot of that Nazi stuff that every nation believed and still believes today in a lot of ways, came from. The connected aspects of different stories across different cultures was really cool though, especially how it proved there was far more to European culture than just a bunch of copying from the Greeks and Romans.
But I got a little board after a while/

So now I'm going through Arraminta Station by Jack Vance (who's about 95 or something now).
Scifi from an OLD master who focusses on human relationships. He's a delicious writer for tone and interaction, his dialogue is a real pleasure to read! It's so wonderfully polite, correct, charming and old fashioned, even when full of the vilest threat and menace.
Reading between the lines you can tell that the tale is based on experiences with outposts and personalities in South Africa and maybe some British colony or company outposts in South East Asia.

Posted at 9:05AM, May. 16, 2012

been "reading" alot've recorded books lately actually. mostly the Modern Scholar series. alot've subjects mainly about anthropology, but i also have Sea of Glory. i havent started it yet but im really lookingforward to it. it's about the finding of Antarctica if im not mistakin and Antarctica's a place that really intruiges me. it seems so desolate, but mysterious too, alot've imagination fuel there.

Posted at 9:05AM, May. 16, 2012

I've been sick for a weerk, so I'm trying to get back reading again. I'm trying to read a book called Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb. I've read some of her books before, but I really don't know what I feel about them. I've read six of her books before and while I was engaged, I felt like they were always missing something. I am debating on whether I should just drop the book and go on to something a little more appitizing to me.

Posted at 7:05PM, May. 16, 2012

Grimm's Fairy Tales: as there's a local writing compettion in NZ for a 'modern' take on them, and they are fun to read.

Posted at 6:05AM, May. 18, 2012

Just finished a biography of Sam Houston, next is a Phillipa Gregory historical romance about Mary, Queen of Scots and a biography of Bette Davis.

Ever since reading Maureen O'Hara's memoir bios of classic Hollywood stars interest me. And just love those Tudor romances.