#497

I also didn’t get the big deal with Three Body Problem.

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#499

i also thoroughly did not enjoy Three Body Problem.

the Vandermeer books were good fun,

i’m rereading gene wolfe’s Book Of The Long Sun, re-read Book Of The New Sun recently. somewhere in there I read the new Ann Leckie book which was a good time.

thats a lot of sci-fi probably time to dip into a long dire history text

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#500

The Book of the Long Sun is my favorite of Gene Wolfe’s work. Such a unique universe, wonderful writing, and a great sense of mystery.

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#501

Just finished reading Outer Dark by Cormac Mccarthy. It’s a grim parable complete with incest and canbalism. I love the way Cormac writes but sometimes I wish he had just a little more hope and optimism for humanity.

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#503

currently enjoying this. It’s just standard music journalism really summing up the 90s scene- nothing clever- just weaving through the mirriad of bands and making a nice coherent narrative. very readable and nicely executed.Reading about bark psychosis and disco inferno right now.

#504

Have we got a thread for online reading / long reads?

I’d like to have some nice long reads recommended to me to instapaper and then read on the journey home.

also I would like to read a wider spectrum of material… I think one big issue of the internet is that it funnels you to what you think is relevant. and you might well be wrong.

I want to go back to the idea of skimming a magazine… and I thought a thread on lines might be good.

#505

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Thanks @TomWhitwell

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#506

This comes highly recommended:

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#508

So, I finished the first two Hyperion books, and I really, really enjoyed them. I really flip-flopped on reading the second set (books 3 and 4) since I heard they jump ahead in time a bunch and involve totally different characters. Well, I decided to go ahead, and I just finished the third book. Wow! Once again, each book has been quite different in style than the last one, and each one has been excellent. I’m both excited and a little sad to start in on the fourth (and final) one!

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#509

Just started to read Mark Fischer’s “Ghosts of my life” which seems to be a really interesting read if you’re into futurism, criticism of neo-liberal economy and Burial. Anyone else that read this and want to share their thoughts on it?

http://www.zero-books.net/books/ghosts-my-life

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#510

I’m an absolutely huge fan of these series and actually the last two books are my personal favourites of the set. Rich, bizarre, engaging. The Shrike is such a well-done creature, and I find one of the strengths of the storyline is what you don’t know, or what is not explained. I find many sci-fi authors try to explain too many things - Simmons explains just enough fragments of just enough things to make them vast, mysterious, and incomprehensible, and then mercifully leaves them that way in your mind.

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#511

i have read this…and Im sure I really enjoyed it but i cant remember a thing about it now.
(ghosts of my life)

#512

Seems i am in a non fiction mode for now:



Mentioned before

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#513

for what its worth, ‘three body’ really took off for me with book 2. but i guess its not for everyone.

i like his prose and the mysterious revelation of the structure of the world / history. but the sexual dynamics are so repulsive it unfortunately breaks the whole deal for me. (of course applies to a lot of 60’s/70’s scifi. and sometimes i can even get over it when its pulpy like Vance or Lieber… but e.g. Wolfe and Farmer are so self-serious in other respects, i’m forced to take their portrayal of gender seriously as well.) antidote: Delany.

re: science fiction, i’ve been on an enjoyable Greg Egan kick, most recently Diaspora.

re: music theory, revisiting David Temperley’s Music and Probability has been stimulating if almost unbelievably geeky.

re: audio tech, Rick Lyon’s Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning From Sound is newly indispensable in the relevant fields.

re: society, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction certainly takes an alarm(ed/ist) and react(ive/ionary) stance, but is undeniably on the nose in many factual respects.

audiobooks: Peter Yearsley reading The King In Yellow and short stories by Clifford Simak. on librivox

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#514

Egan is so awesome, at least to me, Diaspora in particular.

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#515

there’s a character in Long Sun who is crucial to the plot yet another (male) character repeatedly calls her “Jugs” and its just not a good look.

i remember on my re-read of New Sun thinking “man has this guy ever actually had a relationship with a woman?” bc despite all the great parts of these books the sexual/gender relationships are paper thin and just baaaad.

another antidote, Ann Leckie, LeGuin.

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#516

I agree. I picked up the third body problem because of this thread. I enjoyed the first book but didn’t feel compelled to continue. Then I recalled reading some advice (possibly also in this thread) to stick with it and I am so glad I did. The third book is so full of twists and turns that I had to put it down every twenty pages or so.

I’ve been meaning to get back on a Greg Egan kick. A relative gave me a copy of Diaspora last October. After reading it I bought a few more of his books but got distracted by other reading. Seeing him pop up in this thread is a good reminder to return to those books. I think Distress is next on my list.

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#517

One of the books that distracted me from the Egan books was A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of its Intellectuals by Rudolf Mrazek. It is an incredibly subtle and complex weaving together of interviews with Indonesians who grew up in colonial Jakarta and were still alive in the late 90s.

The last section of the book is a quite moving meditation on Mrazek’s experience listening back to his interviews. He moves from reflecting on the background noise of the city in his recordings, to the noise in the speech of the elderly interviewees, to the noise and silence in their language as they remember moments of political violence in Indonesian history, and then back to the noise of the protests turned violent in 1998 that are occurring as he is conducting some of the interviews.

Mmm, not a great job summarizing on my part but I think, even if you’re not interested in Indonesian history, the end of this book could be of interest to others on lines who work with field recordings.

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#518

oh yeah - i forgot i scarfed through the ‘ancillary’ series a couple months back, fun stuff!

leguin - well indeed. maybe a relatively overlooked novel i really liked was Lavinia from 2008 - retelling of the Aeneid from the perspective of a “minor” character (Aeneas’s second wife.) really interesting hybrid of parallel fiction and almost-translation.

original earthsea books were crucial in my childhood. Tehanu was also very strange and moving. The Other Wind i’m afraid i found less indispensible. many scenes from her short stories stay burned in my head (especially “Lathe of Heaven” - or is that a novel…)

queued up on my reader is a revisiting of the lesser-lauded books in the Hainish cycle.

and - oh yea! - i also recently read Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, which is pretty great, in that vein of 60s-70s feminist scifi utopia writing (though, checking myself now i see it is actually from 1986.)

ooohhh that is amazing i was just today wishing for a resource like this, thanks!

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#519

Just finished Tony White’s The Fountain In The Forest, which was cracking: an elegant postmodern detective thriller, with a hint of the Oulipo in its constrained vocabulary, and a sharp left-wing bent; I might only slightly flippantly described it as an ACAB crime novel. Really good: parallel timelines, a sharp sense of geography, and set in the present but with roots in the 80s and, critically, a timeline that begins the day after the MIners’ Strike ends. Good.

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