finished the first part (out of six) of Crime & Punishment and so far has been an interesting read. reading about the murder being done and described in detail was pretty hype lol. im interested in the psychological stuff itll get into later on.
as for past books, i enjoyed reading Hamlet, The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Book of Disquiet. would like to check out House of Leaves in summer
I completely forgot about this thread 😭
Anyways I finished reading Crime & Punishment more than 3 months ago and I'm pretty sure I remember what I thought of it after finishing.
For the most part, it was alright. Didn't really blow my mind or anything just a decent read. Pacing was pretty good but every now and then there would be a block of text that didn't add anything to the story.
It has topics like "capitalism bad" and tbh books with those topics often leave a bad taste in my mouth or end up sorta boring by bringing up the same points all of them bring up. I was more interested in the characters, who were for the most part alright, but they were either very barebones or very complex and rarely in-between.
Character deaths in the book are done really well, the worldbuilding was mediocre, characters were pretty good (although I do wish some of them weren't barebones) and it's written very well.
In short, it's a decent book with pretty interesting psychological themes and character interactions. Not worth a whopping 500 pages though.
I've just finished Mailed Fist by John Foley after reading it on the train to and from work and let me tell you what a story! Really got into it since I'm a bit of a history buff!
been plonking through the discworld series in chronological order of release while at work and just finished mort. i like these funny wizards i think i shall read more of them
Just got a copy of the Ring novel. Gonna see how it compares to the 1998 Japanese movie and the American remake. Heard it gets a bit weird, will report back after I'm done.
i'd actually been meaning to read Ring for a minute, but then i got 8 books deep into Malazan (10 counting the side novels), started The First Law trilogy by joe abercrombie and threw in some warhammer slop novels and it got lost in the shuffle. i'll get around to it at some point.
right now i'm reading Valkia the Bloody by Sarah Cawkwell, some of the aforementioned warhammer slop. i generally use the term endearingly, and there are a handful of Black Library novels that I would consider to be Worth Reading, but this one is to be taken literally. despite being about one of my favourite WHFB characters, it's unfortunately a big ol flop. every single character is almost entirely unlikeable, but not in a cool "well the book's about a villainous character so of course they suck" way. it's uninteresting, kind of a slog despite being a brief read, and tells you nothing about her character that isn't told better in the actual Army Books for the tabletop game. similar to the Horus Heresy novels, it turns out knowing exactly what happened leading up to the event is a lot less interesting than speculating. i'm going to finish it anyway since i may as well, but it's definitely not one i would recommend
Slowly going thru the audiobook of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and I keep on having to rewind it because he has a way of writing in which so much is said with so little words . It's genuinely insane how much detail can be stuffed within the sentences he constructs I've never seen anything like it .
drip came
no clue when im gonna start reading it cause im gonna be busy af the next half a year with other books for school and finals
speaking of one of those books is The Stranger by Albert Camus which ive heard is good
Finished Ring a while ago, but I like to let books and movies sit with me for a bit before I try to put thoughts to them. It does get a bit weird, and it's almost nothing like the movies at all. A considerable amount of stuff is different, I heard there was a straight-to-TV movie released in '95 that more accurately follows the book. Might have to give it a watch.
Some of the things that they changed weren't all bad though. Asakawa is a guy with a wife and one year old daughter, Ryuji is his best friend, and also
a self-proclaimed rapist. This is mentioned a surprising number of times.
Ryuji also is the only one of the two that actively make the story go forward majority of the time, which I get. That's how their personalities are written. Asakawa is a coward. However, you're reading it and Ryuji is being smart about handling everything, then you either
get hit with the fact that he's raped women or you remember it on your own. There's even a scene where he's recalling his first assault, but it stops right before anything actually happens. Which is weird, cause at the end his assistant says he died a virgin.
(Assume future spoilers also contain sexual content.)
I think I enjoy the book version of Sadako more than the films. The films lean into the idea that she calls people after they watch the tape, but that doesn't happen in the book. At least, not this one. I also really like that Sadako was intersex. I found that out before reading and wanted to check out how it was done in the books. She was also raped, then killed because of it. I wanted to research how that was handled so I could better discuss such matters in my own works tastefully and in a succinct way. I'll go in length about this more when I make my own thread about my projects later.
Sadako's cursed tape being a result of her innate psychic power, her sexual assault/hate crime, and contracting smallpox to form an almost STD/virus-esque method of reproduction was genius. I'm glad they kept that baseline idea in the movies. I can say, wholeheartedly, that I actually want a more faithful recreation of the book into a modern movie. The franchise is due for a reboot anyway, it kinda got away from itself with Sadako Vs. Kayako.
Some people say the flow of the book is a bit all over the place, but I didn't seem to mind it or notice. If you like weird shit and can handle overt sexual content/theming, then you'd likely enjoy the book as well. I've been a fan of the franchise for a long time; Sadako is one of my favorite horror antagonists. The book has made me appreciate that even more. Definitely going to read the sequels.
I got back into reading recently and have gone through a couple of decent books I've been meaning to read for forever!
Neuromancer by William Gibson was a fantastic ride as someone who is absolutely in love with the cyberpunk genre, and reading what is basically one of the touchstones of the genre was a great experience. You really feel the grit and grime from the setting and the emotional conflicts of the characters.
I followed that up with Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and that was such a fun time. With the main character literally being named 'Hiro Protagonist', it's almost tongue-in-cheek the whole way through, but leaves a lot of space for the characters to shine. It does a fantastic job and establishing the metaverse and the woes of being caught in the corporate hellscape of a neo future world.
Def going to give a couple of the books mentioned here a shot as well, so many seem really cool!
i actually started reading house of leaves in late december last year! it's been really great so far, just over a third through it now.
i've actually been wanting to read it for years, and considering how i've been trying to "de-rot" my brain of phones/algorithms recently, i thought picking a notoriously "difficult" (?) book to read would be a good start haha. i am looking for what to read next, football 17776 will probably be next but idk how well i'll go, i just have difficulty reading text on screens.
Finished Solaris by Stanisław Lem earlier this week, after like 5 years of procrastinating on it. I’m not the biggest sci-fi guy, I picked it up without any prior knowledge, and it was an amazing ride. I don’t want to spoil much, but this relatively short read is so densely packed with stuff; it’s a cosmic horror, but instead of being unexplainable, it’s overexplained to the point where it feels absolutely naive and bizarre, which doesn’t help at all. It has that fine psychedelic sci-fi atmosphere, and plot-wise, it’s extremely captivating. This story progresses very linearly, written from the first-person perspective, and because of that, I would KILL for a good movie adaptation. And for me, it has this obscure early 2000s 2D quest videogame vibe to it, which I adore.
For the seekers of deep knowledge, this book has it all: a look at our anthropocentrism, solid reflection about our possible alien contact, and wild, wild takes on theology.
If you are interested in futurology stuff, liked Outer WIlds, All Tomorrows or Serial Experiments Lain - please give it a try, you will like it!!!
"We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors."
"I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candour of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of forseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a... sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems and mechanisms that served specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures hisunending defeat."
