Which book are you reading now? Volume XI
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Elaborate please?
Boring is boring.
War and Peace suggests that history is fundamentally a matter of mass movements and that individual actions are either irrelevant or 'swept up in the wave'. To Tolstoy, the individual proposed and the masses disposed. You can imagine why I believe this is an actively harmful interpretation of history.
Since it is a long book and requires a significant investment of your time, I would suggest that it is only worth reading if you are extremely interested in reading it in the first place. There is no other compelling reason to read it. It is not a historically accurate depiction of events. It is not literature that is constantly referenced elsewhere in ways that you will not be able to understand unless you read it. It is just a very big classic book.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Translating о михаиле фрунзе: воспоминания, очерки, статьи, современников. A collection of essays and other documents by and about Mikhail Frunze.
Darth Caesar
Might be a Wizard
So the Foundation Trilogy? Except no Hari Seldon, and a hundred times as long.
Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
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Africa's World War by Gerard Prunier. Pretty good and very interesting so far, though I've barely started. That said, it covers a very complicated, messy, confusing series of situations, so I'm always going back, trying to see if I can make any more sense of it. And there's a lot of "alphabet soup:" Every organization has an acronym for a name that looks just like all the others, though they are often bitter enemies with miniscule differences. It's like Life of Brian. Not to mention all the foreign terms I've never heard before. But most of this isn't the author's fault.
I wouldn't know. I haven't read any Asimov.
Yep. The Great Lakes wars were extremely confusing when they were happening, and the passage of time has not made them much easier to understand. And the "alphabet soup" is a period thing, too, the Bane of the 1990s. Whenever you have the UN and a group of movements that define themselves as socialist, nationalist, or both, there will be eleventy billion acronyms, and they will all be very difficult to tell apart.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
To be fair to Asmivo, that whole approach to history explicitly breaks down by book three. Albeit for pretty silly reasons.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Is that not his name? "Izark Asmivo, Master Magician". Surely?
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I don't see how that is bad. I quite enjoyed reading the NCS's Hamlet.
He shines in his short stories.
madviking
north american scum
that's because he has fewer words to say
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
More charitably, it's because he's best when playing with a particular concept, but struggles when he actually has to build characters and substantial narratives and, well, the whole business of "literature", really.
I count Isaac Asimov as my favorite author (though Wendell Berry is working on edging him out); the maestro's gifts were definitely not in the area of character development. Asimov was a generalist and looked at how humanity as a whole was being changed or could be changed by technology or ideas.
I'm currently reading The Metropolitan Revolution, about city-led political change and economic development, with John Grisham's Sycamore Row for leisure. I hadn't planned on reading any more Grisham, but SR is a sequel to A Time to Kill and follows closely on The Last Juror, so for readers who like Grisham's oft-use setting of Clanton, Mississippi, it's promising. I haven't stopped reading it since I picked it up, but my favorites in Grisham's collected works are those set in Clanton or Ford County.
(With the exception of The Rainmaker, of course, which alternates with The Last Juror as a favorite.)
I'm currently reading The Metropolitan Revolution, about city-led political change and economic development, with John Grisham's Sycamore Row for leisure. I hadn't planned on reading any more Grisham, but SR is a sequel to A Time to Kill and follows closely on The Last Juror, so for readers who like Grisham's oft-use setting of Clanton, Mississippi, it's promising. I haven't stopped reading it since I picked it up, but my favorites in Grisham's collected works are those set in Clanton or Ford County.
(With the exception of The Rainmaker, of course, which alternates with The Last Juror as a favorite.)
Darth Caesar
Might be a Wizard
I just finished Animal Farm. Utterly brilliant and soul-crushingly depressing, Orwell as usual.
I often find Orwell a little too transparent. That is, his work is good at making political analogies and often good at satirising contemporary politics, but it doesn't always feel like particularly good literature beyond that, and it's often difficult to swallow that level of polemic in such a thin disguise. I've read both Animal Farm and 1984, and it's definitely true of the former, though the latter is a bit of a curate's egg. His essay Shooting an Elephant is quite excellent, though, and remarkably honest and revealing, especially considering the contrast between his politics and his employment.
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