What book are you reading, ιf' - Iff you read books

[gangleri2001]

The game I'm currently playing made me finally read this:

 

[Smellincoffee]

Just finished Extinction by Doug Preston and Lincoln Child. Two young people are kidnapped and cannibalized at a resort park where six species of extinct megafauna have been brought back to life. Solid thriller with a nice mix of science & action.

 

[gangleri2001]

Just finished Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. All I can say when I compare it to the Blade Runner movie is...

Spoiler :

Thank God Ridley Scott left out all that Mercerism thing! Had he not, Blade Runner wouldn't have become the timeless classic it has. Other things that shocked me from the book due its stark contrast with the movie are:

- In the book, Rick Deckard actually performs the Voigt-Kampff test on himself so we know for sure that he is human
- Rick Deckard is married to a depressive woman and lives in the (now radioactive) suburbs of San Francisco
- Rick Deckard is more worried with keeping up with the Jonses (which in the world of the book means taking care of your own animal in order to better fuse with Mercer) than anything else
- Rachel and Pris are the same Nexus-6 model, so Sean Young should have played both roles in the movie if Ridley Scott had decided to keep that in the movie as well
- Roy Baty is... ASIAN?! Really?! Finding out that Roy Baty is supposed to be an android (or andy as they are called in the book, the word replicant only appears in the movie) that imitates a huge Mongolian warrior bewildered me for some reason. Just imagine Genghis Khan reciting the famous Tears in rain monologue, confusing, right?
- Rachel and Rick have sex... because Rachel is programmed to seduce bounty hunters (again, the term blade runner is a movie thing. In the book they are simply called bounty hunters).
- If Mercerism had to go in order for the movie to succeed, so had to go Buster Friendly, Wilbur Mercer's nemesis.
- The Phil Resch is a very interesting in character in its own right as he is the only other bounty hunter Rick ever encounters. Should have appeared in the movie. Sure in the movie we have Gaff but it is not the same thing. Gaff works for the police department whereas Resch goes solo.
- No cool cyberpunk cities in the book. Just ruined cities as everybody who can is leaving Earth

BTW, now that I'm done with Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, I've just began Eva Baltasar's Boulder

 

[Smellincoffee]

About to finish Sharpe's Command, a shorter Sharpe novel in which Sharpe has to destroy a bridge in Spain before the invasion of Spain. Unusually BC is releasing two Sharpe novels this year, with the second arriving in October.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

To give you an idea of how insufferable Swann's Way can be, there's a part where the narrator hears girl A calling to girl B (whom he knew back in Combray) and writes an entire essay on how he felt and why he felt about the single phrase girl B utters.

...in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from the path, another little girl, who was putting on her cloak and covering up her battledore, called out sharply: "Good-bye, Gilberte, I'm going home now; don't forget, we're coming to you this evening, after dinner." The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target;—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle. Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at her home,—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods; casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood (at once a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair player, who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess, with a blue feather in her hat, had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, of the colour of heliotrope, spread over the lawn like a carpet on which I could not tire of treading to and fro with lingering feet, nostalgic and profane, while Françoise shouted: "Come on, button up your coat, look, and let's get away!" and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

So Swann is not on good terms anymore with the narrator's family. Why I cannot say. There was some indication of discord in the first part of the book, but there were so many words I missed the gist and the severity of it.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Just started a new Ruth Ware book, An Ideal Couple.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

The Spymasters by Charles Whiting. Subject is US and British spycraft during WW2.

Writing style isn't great and espionage wasn't well developed at the time (Cold War was more interesting - the book about Oleg Gordievsky was a better read.)

The Spymasters did have interesting tidbits at different places.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Shogun first published in1975. I read it back then and loved it but most of it I have forgotten. The most recent TV series made me want to read it again. My library has a new hardback edition that I've had on hold for months. Picked it up yesterday. 1300 pages; five pounds of paper. In 1975 global travel was an oddity and fewer people new much about Japan or its history. To make his story work and be understandable, Clavell went into great detail about the history and culture of Japan in 1600. Details known by many today but which would have been foreign to readers 50 years ago. There is so much more in the book than was or can de depicted in a short series. Lots of the story condensed but much of the show dialogue is right out of the book. To do the book justice the show would have to be more like GOT, with multiple seasons and a bigger budget.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Shogun first published in1975. I read it back then and loved it but most of it I have forgotten. The most recent TV series made me want to read it again. My library has a new hardback edition that I've had on hold for months. Picked it up yesterday. 1300 pages; five pounds of paper. In 1975 global travel was an oddity and fewer people new much about Japan or its history. To make his story work and be understandable, Clavell went into great detail about the history and culture of Japan in 1600. Details known by many today but which would have been foreign to readers 50 years ago. There is so much more in the book than was or can de depicted in a short series. Lots of the story condensed but much of the show dialogue is right out of the book. To do the book justice the show would have to be more like GOT, with multiple seasons and a bigger budget.

I took an introductory history course in college that focused on Japan and China. One of our assignments was to read Shogun and write a review.

The classes were 3 hours once a week. We were given one week to read this huge book. People complained, so the instructor relented and gave us two weeks.

Good thing I'd already watched the miniseries. That helped me keep my interest in the book.


Actually, I've seen the Richard Chamberlain miniseries in French, as well as English. One of the French channels here was showing it, so I decided why not... turns out the English dialogue isn't that complicated when dubbed into French, and none of the Japanese was dubbed into any other language. So it was a reasonably easy re-watch.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Working on Haidit's The Anxious Generation, zipping through Ware's The Turn of the Key. It's a thriller set in a smarthome that may also have ghosts. I imagine that's confusing. "The window just opened! Was that Casper or GoogleHome?"

 

[EnglishEdward]

Last week I finished reading the book:

Translation State

by Ann Leckie

copyright 2023

It was interesting, but in a subtly different style from her previous books.

I got the impression that a short story had got too long.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Finished (FINALLY) Swann's Way. That was an abrupt ending, but not an unwelcome one.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Ah, so Swann's Way is only the first volume out of seven of In Search of Lost Time . I'm bailing out. I can't take anymore of this

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Reading The Thing in the Woods by Margery Williams, a horror novel notable for being praised by H.P. Lovecraft. First chapter in and there's a black chap who's a walking racist caricature (lazy, dishonest, unreasonable), who gets called "darkie" and the n-word repeatedly, so I can see how it struck a chord with Lovecraft straight away.

 

[Kyriakos]

The game I'm currently playing made me finally read this:

Not suitable for antheads and other specials ^^

 

[gangleri2001]

Not suitable for antheads and other specials ^^

My poor anthead and/or chickenhead brain is still trying to get itself over the fact that...

Spoiler :

...Roy Baty is supposed to be Mongolian

 

[Cutlass]

Last week I was reading this book I picked up from the library called "Moonbound" by Robin Sloan. Set 11,000 years in the future, it features this song as a plot point. So I call up the YouTube of the song.

Now the song is still hit or miss. I actually kind of like it. But it is an oddball.

But the video....

Playing it through a couple times, the video is just fudging great. It works so well. Whoever designed that should have gotten a prize. Haven't looked up yet if they did.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The Shogun series was nominated for a bunch of awards. Well, If you liked it go back now and read the book. So many of the intricacies of the plot were left out, glossed over or just ignored to fit it into 10 episodes. The book is a 1300 length "page turner"; one more chapter! Knowing the end does nothing to diminish the enjoyment, but I suspect if one didn't know how things ended, It would be wrenching. 300 pages to go!

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Finished The Thing in the Woods. Much better than what the beginning chapters suggested, though the plot was pretty conventional. The countryside setting, the colourful (if not very fleshed out) characters, and the very deft handling of the horror aspect (hard to believe that Margery Williams was most noted for being a children's author) made it a very enjoyable read.