📚 The book lovers thread
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Wow I don't see a lot of Non-Fiction. Nerds/Geeks ( not the derogatory meaning ) prefer Sci-fi or what the fuck is going on here ?
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@dse Omg This book was amazing. Probably the only 34000 page book that was a fun read cover to cover. Did you like Winter of the World and Edge of Eternity ? I kinda left WotW midway and can't be arsed to start again, also don't remember half the fucking characters from Fall of Giants. Now I'm stuck with this paperweight.
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@stillwater said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Winter of the World
I have got it but have not dared starting it yet, it is a book to enjoy with the peace of mind.
I liked Ken Follett's
Pillars of the Eartheven more than Fall of Giants:@stillwater said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Nerds/Geeks ( not the derogatory meaning ) prefer Sci-fi or what the fuck is going on here ?
I do not know if it counts but I also like fantasy. My most favorite book still is Harry Potter :--)
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@dse said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Anathem
Probably my favorite book at the moment. The way it deals with alien cultures and such is just incredibly interesting.
Lately I've been reading VALIS, and I definitely hold that of PKD's books, Ubik is my favorite, but these are ridiculously weird, considering the second book is sci-fi, but the main character of the first book is PKD.
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@chubertdev said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Yeah, as an 84er, I get lumped in with the millenials.
You'd rather be lumped in with the Generation X crowd? Man, are you a crazy person.
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@boomzilla said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I can't imagine how the 20-year veterans of the EU feel about having all their work thrown away.
I think ignoring that stuff is the best possible decision for Disney. Inevitably, they'd need to change stuff for movies, at which point the EU people would get sand in their vaginas about that. Better to deal with all the sand now. And then we don't have to worry about EU fans spoiling anything for us, either, though I'm sure you guys will continue to whine about it.
Totally agreed, especially since it's easier to deal with the fallout now, when the hype is steaming and people are actively deceiving themselves that VII was a good movie (hint: it wasn't even bearable) than in the future, when Disney does to Lucas Arts what it did to that comic studio of theirs (Marvel?)
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@Weng said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
And I'm only 11hrs into the 30 fucking hour audiobook. So if you do Audible and like lengthy titles, this is a thing. Yeah. The complete destruction of Planet Earth is basically Act 1.
It goes kind of downhill from there, I'm afraid.
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@PhillS said in Office politeness:
I'm reading a book called "Watching the English" and apparently lack of social skills is one of the defining characteristics of being English.
I read the original and now I'm on the revised version. This book really is excellent at explaining why we English are the way we are*. Recommended for English peeps and those who have to deal with us in any capacity.
*tl:dr we're social retards.
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@stillwater The SF crew got here first and scared away all the little Fantasy elves.
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@Weng They're not scared away. They're just biding their time in the shadows…
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Here's a good fantasy book, it will also appeal to those of you who enjoy fucking massive books
I like David and Leigh Eddings, and this is a very similar tone to the Belgariad and Mallorean. Recommended
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@stillwater I read nothing but histories, but nobody cares so I don't post those here.
If you do care, the last one I finished was this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TCNU33U/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1
It's ok as a general history of US involvement in the Great War (as I call it, because that's a better name than World War One), but despite the title it doesn't include many details/first-hand impressions from doughboys. It does spend a lot more time talking about the east Russia campaign than 99% of Great War histories, which I appreciated. (It was a goddamned disaster, and it's a shame it's not covered in more histories. People think US involvement in Vietnam was a farce, hah! Go back to 1917 and look at US involvement in the Russian Revolution!) And it's a great defense against those morons who don't think American soldiers made a contribution towards ending the war. (At the conclusion of the war, the US had 2 MILLION combat-ready soldiers in France. That's significantly more than the British Expeditionary Force had. And you bet your ass that surrender document wouldn't have been signed had the allies had 2 million fewer soldiers in the ranks.)
And while it's true that American soldiers weren't involved in many of the battles, in places where they fought, they fought like demons.
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@Jaloopa This is another one of my favorite books of all time. I've read it far too many times, and will always remember the guy who yelled so many challenges at god, that they say one day god took him up on his challenge.
People frequently dislike their books, because they are formulaic. In the Belgariad especially, that was the point of the book, so that isn't a complaint that holds water as far as I'm concerned. Additionally, characters and catchphrases get reused a lot.
But this one is interesting because it hits so many themes, and has an interesting tone that you don't see a whole lot.
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@Magus said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
People frequently dislike their books, because they are formulaic
I find them a bit cheesy, like the characters in these medieval themed worlds have modern American attitudes, but it works with the style of storytelling.
The one thing that took me out of suspension of disbelief was how little the world seemed to change in the 2000 years he was in the house. There's mention of cities getting bigger and some reduction in wilderness but apart from that the world seems stagnant
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@blakeyrat added to the list. The Russian fronts in both wars was far more interesting than the rest of the war.
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@Weng Don't get misled, the US involvement in Russia in WWI had nothing to with "the war", it had everything to do with the Russian Revolution.
The justification was that a ton of military supplies had been shipped to Russia for use in WWI, but after the revolution they signed a separate peace (or a separate cease-fire at least) with Germany. So there were tons and tons of lend-lease weapons/ammunition/etc all sitting in Vladivostok awaiting shipping westward which (in theory at least) belonged to the new Soviet government which didn't want to pursue the war. Making things even more confusing, the Revolution was far from settled in Russia's far east, and the Whites and Reds were still very actively fighting it out. Oh, and pretty much the only way to ship those weapons westward was via the Trans-Siberian Railway, which had been taken over by Czechs (who incidentally supported the Whites, more or less) who had been basically forced to fight on the Western Front and wanted nothing more than shipping back home. Oh and did I mention the numerous bloodthirsty warbands wandering around using the war as an excuse to simply murder anybody they didn't like? (And, also, get paid mucho dinero by France and Britain to fight the Reds by proxy-- the Tsar was an ally, the Communists an enemy.)
Enter a strange coalition of UK, France, USA, and... Japan!? to enter and "defend the stockpile of military goods and ensure free and equitable access to the Trans-Siberian Railway". The UK and France only sent a tiny token force; the Japanese send tens of thousands of soldiers, most of whom were just interested in massacring any Russians they spotted (regardless of which side they were on), and the poor US was stuck somewhere in the middle. The BEST thing you can say about the US presence is they didn't do as much damage as the warlords and Japanese did. (The US actually seemed to kind of try and embrace the mission. Unlike the Japanese who didn't even pretend.)
But it was a ridiculous clusterfuck for everybody involved.
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@blakeyrat That's even more badass. Why have I never once heard of it?
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@Weng said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
That's even more badass. Why have I never once heard of it?
Because you're an ignorant motherfucker? I dunno.
You'd be better off finding a history that addresses it directly (if you're interested) rather than one that discusses it as a side note to US deployments in WWI.
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@chubertdev said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Last book I read was ~150 pages, read it in one sitting, in under half an hour.
There's a series that will cure you of that. I launched into Titus Groan at my usual ridiculous page rate, and got to page 14 before I realized I had no idea what was going on. So I went back to the start, and took it deliberately slowly, pausing after every paragraph to let what I'd just read sink in.
Reading Titus Groan is like drinking a marvellous old Cabernet Shiraz. Ripping through it at speed is an utter waste of time. It needs - and demands - to be savoured.
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@Weng said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Those of us born in the 80's? We have practical experience and memories of the bad old times.
Those of us born in the 60s have practical experience and memories of a time before governments got a hardon for "economic rationalism" and started sacking public servants in order to hire them back at twice the cost as consultants, and privatising all the public assets. Australia used to have a publicly owned monopoly telco that, while undoubtedly flawed, was never as horrible to deal with as the company it's grown into since privatisation; we used to have State-run electricity generation and transmission bodies, who supplied electricity on a cost-recovery basis, kept the transmission network properly maintained and would pursue demand reduction rather than capacity growth where it made sense to do that; State-run public transport systems that, again although somewhat flawed, coordinated with each other much more effectively than the mess of competing providers we have now; State-run water suppliers who didn't charge and arm and a leg... fully Government-funded tertiary education for anybody who qualified for entry... the list goes on.
It was the early Eighties when this rot set in. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations were in charge of the "free" world and their particular style of high-handed indifference has pretty much become the baseline for everything that's happened since. It's really, really difficult to convince people born since then that where there exists a natural monopoly, putting a properly staffed publicly funded organization in charge of it can work really, really well.
It's also difficult to convince people born since then that in the mid-70s, the kind of "radical" "socialist" positions Bernie Sanders gets scoffed at for were completely, uncontroversially mainstream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k
Filed under: belt onions
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@Jaloopa said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I like David and Leigh Eddings, and this is a very similar tone to the Belgariad and Mallorean.
No, it's the same book as the Belgariad/Mallorean. He just changed the names of the characters, and the underlying plot's a bit different.
His next series, the Elder Gods or whatever it was called, is the same way.
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@FrostCat So it's like Nickelback, but in novel form.
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@FrostCat Not really. Everything about the structure of Althalus is different, even if many of the characters are similar. It's honestly a really strange book.
Now, the belgariad/malloreon and the ellinium/tamuli are much closer, despite having very different settings and the latter being much darker than the former. They have completely the same structure.
The Elder Gods books were the worst they ever wrote, because they're truly all rehash, with the worst possible ending.
Overall, with the Belgariad, the goal was to do a perfect High Fantasy story, playing to every trope, but with interesting characters. It isn't anything ground-breaking, but it's really good for what it is.
The Redemption of Althalus is, as far as I'm concerned, the high point - partly because it throws away a lot of the typical high fantasy stuff, has a lot to do with time and the nature of divinity. Sure, the interactions are largely similar, and there are magical god-items, but there aren't really other books like it.
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@blakeyrat said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
And it's a great defense against those morons who don't think American soldiers made a contribution towards ending the war. (At the conclusion of the war, the US had 2 MILLION combat-ready soldiers in France. That's significantly more than the British Expeditionary Force had. And you bet your ass that surrender document wouldn't have been signed had the allies had 2 million fewer soldiers in the ranks.)
USA had everything to do with the end of the war. The entire German strategy during the second half was trying to deal with those 2 million fresh troops hanging over their head.
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@cartman82 I know that and you know that, but there's a lot of historians (even in the US) who think that the US didn't "contribute" other than materially, which is complete crap.
As evidence they'd say that US troops weren't involved in the large offensives at the end of the war, which is (mostly) true (but ignores that Americans held the line, and more of the line than the British did-- making those offensives possible in the first place-- and that they didn't participate in those offensives not because they didn't want to, but they were literally not invited to by the British or French leaders.) Or that the added manpower of US troops was effectively countered by the increased manpower Germany could bring to bear after closing their Russian front, which is... significantly less true. (Germany's manpower was 16-year-olds and 50-year-olds. Those American soldiers were in their prime, and healthy even by pre-war European standards-- by the standards of countries after 4 years of strict rationing, they were practically superhumanly fit.)
That said, even if the US had only provided material assistance and not sent troops, after the German U-boat threat was effectively dealt-with by the convoy system, it's highly possible the war would have be won by the Allies on a virtually-identical schedule. (Or early in 1919, before the campaigning season really kicked-off.) But that's alternative history.
And none of this is to say the American Expeditionary Force was perfect. As the book points out, it's pretty fortunate that the cease-fire came in November 1918, because given the state of the Army's available transportation and supplies the logistics would have collapsed utterly only a few weeks after that date.
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@blakeyrat said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
@FrostCat So it's like Nickelback, but in novel form.
I'd've maybe said Coldplay, but yes. The first few novels were pretty good if you didn't mind the writing style. The next few were still OK, but he was clearly coasting. Althalus and the Elder Gods series were totally phoning it in. All the characters were literally the same except for the names, down to speech patterns, the way they interacted with each other, and so on. They even used the same catchphrases. There are about 2 series I have deliberately quit reading partway through (as opposed to "haven't read the last book or two yet") in my life, and Elder Gods was the second one.
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@FrostCat said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Althalus and the Elder Gods series were totally phoning it in. All the characters were literally the same except for the names, down to speech patterns, the way they interacted with each other, and so on. They even used the same catchphrases.
Some catchphrases, yes. But not the characters. Bheid was not just different relg, and the others were all definitely different too. They admittedly fit archetypes, which eddings was all about, but they are definitely not all the same. Now, elder gods totally was, I have no argument there. That was not a good series at all, and I'm glad you didn't have to encounter the ending.
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@blakeyrat said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
they didn't participate in those offensives not because they didn't want to, but they were literally not invited to by the British or French leaders.
You probably ought to be glad of that. Those offensives were awful, and the WW1 campaigns were major traumas for most of the nations involved; the US was hit by them much less hard than the other involved powers.
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@Magus said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
But not the characters. Bheid was not just different relg, and the others were all definitely different too. They admittedly fit archetypes, which eddings was all about, but they are definitely not all the same.
At one point, I had a copy of the pack of information distributed by the publishers to reviewers for that book; it went into a lot of the development work that had been done on it by Eddings. It's actually rather interesting from a linguistic perspective as the “magic words” are actually based IIRC on Indo-European (to the extent that modern linguistics has been able to guess what that was like). There was also quite a bit of work done on developing what the climate was really up to and what the consequences of that would be.
I suspect that the disk I saved that on died long ago.
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@Magus Ok, Althalus I'll agree differed more than the rest of his books, but there were strong echoes.
I gave up halfway through the third book of Elder Gods. You or someone else above also mentioned the ending sucked. Care to summarize in spoilers so I don't have that mystery hanging over me?
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@FrostCat said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I gave up halfway through the third book of Elder Gods. You or someone else above also mentioned the ending sucked. Care to summarize in spoilers so I don't have that mystery hanging over me?
Deus ex machina. Ass pulling. Whatever. It sucked. End summary.
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@dkf and also "oh didn't you know we could just time travel and make it so none of this was needed? Sorry, we'll get right on that. Okay, bye!"
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@blakeyrat This is the kind of shit I usually look for but get no recommendations.Adding it to the reading list. This book seems to be about something I don't know much about. Great. Thanks.
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@flabdablet said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Titus Groan
I tried reading that as a book obsessed teenager but gave up after a few pages. Maybe I should give the series another go some time
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I don't get it why, since y'all are extremely sf-oriented, no one has mentioned Le Guin's Earthsea series yet. I think that as far as series go, this is the only truly recommendable one, from start to finish, and these are only four books.
Why is it the only recommendable series? Because it's the only one I know of that isn't simply rehashing same old stuff over and over again, for dozens of books or something. Here, each book is entirely different story and although they share characters, each is written in different style and type.
I would never recommend anyone go through the whole Dark Tower series, although I did that once as a teenager, simply because there's no point for anyone to get sucked into it for a few thousand pages only to read more of the same stuff over and over again. But Earthsea, man! This is a completely different beast.
You should go get it. Really. And don't let anything stop you, kill if you have to.
Go! Go now!
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@flabdablet said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Those of us born in the 60s have practical experience and memories of a time before governments got a hardon for "economic rationalism"
My first response was
did you think all the economic planning hardons were about in the 30s-50s, but google tells me that you Australians have a special meaning for this term, which seems to have been a reaction to all that planning nonsense.
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@Magus said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Overall, with the Belgariad, the goal was to do a perfect High Fantasy story, playing to every trope, but with interesting characters. It isn't anything ground-breaking, but it's really good for what it is.
I agree. That was fun. Then I started reading the other series and realized it was the same thing. Once was enough.
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Right now I'm reading something you Americans could already be familiar with. Can't say much yet, just started, but man do I love Twain!
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@kt_ said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Right now I'm reading something
Life on the Mississippi Without my Reading Glasses?
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@flabdablet Reading Glasses, MA?
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I know some people here were interested in Great War stuff. I just finished Meyer's A World Undone, and I have to say this is by far the best general history of the Great War I've ever read. In an amazingly complex topic, he knows exactly which subjects to gloss over and which to focus on to produce a balanced, entertaining narrative of the war. He proudly presents figures obscure in other sources (like Arthur Currie, possibly the best commander of the war), and doesn't shy away from calling-out the Entente when they were acting like assholes (both Britain's lying to their Arab allies, and later the continuation of the naval blockade after the cease-fire well into 1919, which undoubtedly caused tens of thousands of deaths through malnutrition.)
Of all the lessons Germany failed to learn between the Great War and WWII, the most amazing to me is: secure your food supply, idiots.
It's kind of interesting, today you hear the idea that our era of unprecedented peace is due to inter-dependence in trade. That is, we give China a ton of slack because we rely on them economically, and they give us a ton of slack because they similarly rely on us-- multiply that by every country on Earth and you have the current political situation.
But the thing is: Germany relied on other countries for their food supply (for reasons far less obvious than for Britain and Japan), but that certainly didn't stop them from entering either World War. Here's a thought: if a naval blockade is going to bring your country to the brink of starvation in 3 years, maybe don't piss off the largest navy?
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These are the books I disliked recently, unless you enjoy YA at the level of playground wits and vocabulary:
And more recently:
https://www.amazon.com/Cycle-Arawn-Complete-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00NS88E3G
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@dse I rather liked the reckoners, despite them being basically Sanderson's dumb "please make these a movie" series.
Haven't read the other thing, but it sounds like someone made something dumb out of Celtic mythology?
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@Magus said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
@dse I rather liked the reckoners, despite them being basically Sanderson's dumb "please make these a movie" series.
The book looked like a teenager is trying to describe (read and comment on) a comic book for a friend, comic books sometimes make good movies.
Haven't read the other thing, but it sounds like someone made something dumb out of Celtic mythology?
Arawn in the book is the God of death, or passage to death. He is imprisoned and his followers prosecuted. At one point in the story some priests try to free their God but the protagonist comes and disrupts the plan to stop a war, and then author forgets about the whole ordeal! Then they start the war! It is full of snarky retorts and cheap jibes.
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I read a book a while back that was truly awful, like you-guys-don't-even-want-to-know-level. It was suggested to me automatically by amazon, knowing that I liked diskworld. I can't remember the name, but that's for the best as I haven't read worse, but it was something like "wizards, amazons, and bikers" - about a bad wizards who summons a British biker accidentally during a wizards' duel. It could have been a lot of fun. It wasn't. There are more of them apparently, which is almost nauseating.
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@blakeyrat It's also worth studying the history of what happened to get the world into the state where WW1 happened. Which is a colossal topic.
World history after WW1 is mostly fairly simple once you stop looking at the details too closely. WW2 was largely a reaction to the bad peace negotiated at the Treaty of Versailles; the rise of Communist Russia was another WW1 outcome. The Cold War was the big outcome of WW2 (with lots of proxy wars because the major parties didn't want to fight each other directly) and that only really ended because one side collapsed economically. Add into that the big stories of the economic integration of western and (later) central Europe, the rise of China as a world power, and the consequences of a lot of poor decisions taken over the Middle East (plenty of different parties to blame here), and you've got the current situation.
Socially, WW1 also did a lot to damage the respect of the populace for their leaders. Something about it (and I don't know what) damaged the confidence that those in charge would try to do what was best for all. Now, I'm not claiming that that's what leaders always did do, but usually there was at least a commonly-believed fiction that that was what happened. WW1 seems to have damaged that to the point where the instinctive trust was lost, at least among the younger generations (which is why it took a while for the consequences to work through).
But it's the period up to WW1 that is really interesting. Why did Europe split into two power blocks? That was new, except for a fairly short time during the Napoleonic wars, a century earlier. What happened to cause the French Revolution and why did that change things so thoroughly? It was certainly a point where the world shifted significantly, just as WW1 was. (Has there been another such change more recently? Maybe. Hard to say for sure; we're too close to the details.)
All the above is from a European perspective. I'm a European so that's to be expected. :) But it does mean that there's a need to compare and contrast with the other areas of the world; the key perspectives I'm mostly missing are probably the East Asian, the American, and the post-Imperial (i.e., much of the rest of the world).
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Also, this (and the follow-ups to it) is a good book on this topic. The author is an avowed communist as well as a historian, so read knowing that you probably disagree with his politics, and the chapter on the politics of the French Revolution is insanely turgid, but the rest is interesting. This is writing for non-stupid people.
The Pillars of the Earth - Wikipedia
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Watching-English-International-Bestseller-Revised-Updated/dp/1444785206
