Doesn’t improve much imo.
Heard about that models book and may read it. Worth it?
I’m reading the Shining because I think the story is a good format for a scary book and I am curious why SK hates the movie so much and just how different it is. So far the first 50 pages are pretty in sync.
I’d say it is. I’d say it’s the equivalent to a decent popcorn movie. Not groundbreaking or going to change my worldview but I was entertained.
It made me want to read Emily Ratajkowski’s book to put her experience in context.
1 Like
Just checked it out from the library. Got a nice audiobook version too.
What’s this?? Time for a Friday night double book feature.
A very happy National Poetry Month to all. Of course I’m angry. I’m always angry. Nevertheless, here’s my favorite poem, by Edwin Markham:
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
The Man With the Hoe:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?
Source: The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (Doubleday, 1921)
Many will dislike this poem and I think that’s fine. Many will dislike me because I love this poem, and I think that’s also fine. What comforts me is my indifference to what other people think. And I believe everyone should feel that same blessing.
3 Likes
I recently read Gideon the Ninth and The Fifth Season, two buzzy, ordinally named books that I’d thought about reading before several times but passed on because they seemed kind of faddish. And holy crap, they’re both amazingly good! The Fifth Season is a must-read if you like fantasy, and Gideon is a must read if you like basically any variety of genre fiction.
4 Likes
I enjoy Nick Harkaway’s books and I searched the other day to see if he had put out anything new. He published a couple of books under a pseudonym Aidan Truhen. I read the first one, The Price You Pay - it’s like a comedic John Wick - bad guy feels wronged and takes it out on other bad guys, he’s very mouthy and over the top while doing it. It was quite a lot of fun.
I found Jemisin by asking this thread for sci fi fantasy recs
The broken earth and the other trilogy really good
Just finishing up The Caine Mutiny. It’s around 700 pages of normal font pages. But after section two started I couldn’t put it down. Wouk knows how to spin a story
Im attempting to read all the Pulitzer for fiction winners and after the last few were ok/kinda boring - looking at you journey in the dark.
Caine mutiny was really good
Other highlights
Amazing adventures of cavalier and klay
Rabbit at rest
Brief Wonderous life of Oscar wao
3 Likes
While on this subject. As a mid 40s white dude in American that is at a point in life where I’m comfortable
Those 4 John Updike books are really really good.
It’s strange because they are boring at times. There’s no plot. But that last book. He’s reading that war novel. Slowly.
Makes you reflect on life and dying. I never thought about it before but when I die I’ll be half way through 3 books. It’s inevitable.
I highly recommend all 4 books in that series. Two of them won the Pulitzer for fiction
I was all set to hate read rabbit at rest for beating out the things they carried. But after finishing it. I get it.
It’s funny - I started typing a reply to your first post, where you mention Rabbit at Rest, asking you if you read the other books in the series (of course you had) and what you thought of them.
I read Rabbit, Run a long while back, intending to read the series. And I hated it. One of my least favorite books of all time.
But, I was in my 20s, and now I’m 43 with a kid and a wife and a job that I don’t hate but don’t enjoy.
Edit for clarity - the kid and wife I enjoy. It’s just the job.
1 Like
I don’t think i liked any of the books. It’s weird. But the series is something I’ll never forget. Books like the goldfinch or lonesome dove or the things they carried
Just books I’ll never forget.
When you read 50 books a year you know when you finish a book and it has you feeling that way
Kavalier and Clay was like that. Caine mutiny is like that.
These Pulitzer Prize winners are similar to academy award best picture winners. Sure some of them are like Crash or out of Africa. Solid but mostly forgettable.
But some are just towering above the rest. Godfather II type of movies
1 Like
Ohhhhhhhhhh hell yeah. Y’all are reading the good shit. I used the Broken Earth trilogy as one example in my online class on world building for sci-fi/fantasy authors.
You can still scroll through the archived version for free here. I keep meaning to remaster it into a video but not high enough on the priority list compared to other stuff lately.
Would also highly recommend Jade City by Fonda Lee. Widely considered the Godfather, but…well. I don’t want to spoil it, but if you like a little extra sci-fi/fantasy twist!!
I’m not sure if Lee’s observation is even about culture, rather than about common sense and an understanding of the natural laws of the universe.
In the Day After Tomorrow, the viewer can suspend disbelief enough to accept the possibility of a snowpocalypse.
However, asking the audience to believe that the characters could walk from NYC to Philly in heavy snow in a matter of hours is just absurd and made the movie some more campy than suspenseful.
1 Like
The observation is about culture, not common sense.
Otherwise agreed but not at all what she was saying.
I understand she’s implying that one’s culture primes us to deny what seems irrational to us. I just don’t think that there’s anything special about this observation, since it still gets subsumed under the larger principle that even when reading fantasy or sci-fi the reader needs it to make sense within their framework of understanding how people generally behave.
1 Like
I understand what you are saying, but you are confused about what one person experiences as common sense vs another. “How people generally behave” is not helpful for storytellers unless you conceive of only one kind of audience as the default.
Narrative Validity relies on two central components: narrative fidelity and narrative coherence
Coherence, yes, is when a story makes sense within itself. If you buy into that world, then there’s a fundamental connection and a story can be “bad” but still ring true.
Fidelity is where you are missing the deeper insight into Lee’s comments and my own. Audiences don’t experience fidelity just because it makes sense on paper. That has far more to do with culture than what you are describing. It doesn’t have anything to do with what seems rational or irrational to the audience.
My god I’m about halfway through the 2nd Dark Tower book and we have a woman touching herself while stepping on a fine China plate in some demon hell other world place. And it goes on for multiple pages lol wtf.
King also goes pages without using a period or breaking up his words with anything other than a comma.
1 Like
Thankee :)
1 Like