Right now, reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Excellent story from an excellent writer. Its too bad that Kipling is remembered more for White Man's Burden.

Philip K. Dick is fun because you can cruise through his books pretty fast. They are dangerous because if you only want to read 2 hours a day, you may end up reading another 2 to finish the buggers.



Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? More complex and interesting than Blade Runner (the movie it was turned into). Basically, Blade Runner is just about the whole maybe you were just made yesterday with false memories thing. Really, they come to different conclusions as well. In ...electric sheep the entire exposition is it isn't conciousness, intelligence, society or any of that which is distinctly human, but rather empathy. While in Runner, the conclusion is there is nothing distinctly human, so worrying about the question is silly anyway. Or even, what makes us human is thinking we are human.


Also, in ...sheep it has a better sense of "dickisian" humour. Sad irony, or maybe increduility at a bizarre but credulous universe. (buying lead cod-pieces in a post apocalyptic world. Protect your junk from the radiation, ya know).



Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Good stuff. Not as good as electric sheep, but it has its moments.


Contact. Carl Sagan is an enormous douche bag. Don't believe me? Read the first 20 pages, and try not to puke your guts out.

This post has been edited by Urquhart: Aug 31 2009, 12:55 PM

Sagan is a cool dude but god Contact is a bad book. I like the movie tho.

Blade Runner is probably my favorite movie of all time so I'll likely never read the book. Dick is definitely one of the better sci fi authors; VALIS was a cool book. I found A Wizard of Earthsea at a garage sale last weekend, I think that'll be my next busride book.

'Ghostwritten', by David Mitchell. In the spirit of the thread, I haven't read it yet, but I read a few chapters way back in 2000 and I plan to read it now.

le guin is good stuff.

im actually reading house of leaves. someone please break into my appt and kill me and light my body on fire

I had friends who were obsessed with that. One of them got something from it tattooed on her arm i think...

A friend of mine gave that to me a few years back. Reread it a few weeks ago. Not a bad book.

Decided to break up the monotony of my coursework and research with Charles Stross' Laundry series of books. Slightly bumbling british secret agents/sys admins fight lovecraftian horrors and the evils of the civil service bureaucracy. There are only two novels and a few short stories but they are really quite fun.

I actually liked the story within the story--you know, the interesting one. The tattoo artist's "narrating" annoyed the hell out of me.

Those are brilliant (as is his book accelerando). The newer book inspired me to buy some Lovecraft stories.

This post has been edited by Ralph Wiggum: Sep 27 2009, 01:53 AM

PK Dick rules - never read a worthless book by him, although some of them *appear* to be pulp. AB-SO-LUTE fucking genius, wipes his american ass upon every pompous euro 'philosopher' of the 20th cent.

wouldn't recommend 'illuminatus trilogy' unless you enjoy pain - far better to start off with Rob anton wilson (God BOB) other stuff, such as prometheus rising, or indeed anything alse by him. Illuminatus IS awesome (the ending, which will come as much of a relief as anyone who has also bothered to wade through war and peace, is somewhat scary re events 9/11), but the second reading of which i found extremely hard going... leading me to assume rosy specs after the first reading... (IMG:../forums/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

good book i'm reading atm (so wouldn't recommend until finished), is "women who run with the wolves", clarissa pinkola estes, either excellent (so far) story/dream/initiation analysis, or jungian psychobabble, depending upon your perspective.

-also read recently "tiger tiger, burning bright" (UK different title), by... alfred bester - some might recognise the name, and no, its not a coincidence (IMG:../forums/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) - both classic sci-fi (with all the pulpishness that implies), and yet has something... timeless about it. Not a waste of time, although have read much better, has to be said. Similarly, just now rereading the lensman series by ee doc smith - great swashbuckling stuff, unashamedly of its time, and the BEST example of how to constantly build greater and greater crescendos... almost a literature form of wagnerian style, lol.

never done the lovecraft thingie, but a close friend of mine recently recommended it - bot really what i would have associated with her, either. Any good recommends on that?

uh, war and peace is really good.

what, the whole book??

the last 3rd is excellent, with all the analysis, but that story just went on and on and on and on... the only reason i ever bothered finishing it was i was on a beach at cannes for a month, and i had bugger all else to read - and yes, there was some small social cachet from reading the bloody thing - or at least, i kept telling myself such, self-delusion being great. (IMG:../forums/style_emoticons/default/dry.gif)

then again, i was quite young... but i really have to say, i doubt i would appreciate it even now, in fact my tolerance for soap operas has dropped markedly in the last 2ish decades or so since.

you are very immature.

why, thank you, if not particularly enjoying an utterly boring and utterly pointless 'saga' of utterly boring upper-class Czarist Russian society makes me "immature", then i am happy so.

i also don't like 'eastenders', 'neighbours' or 'home and away' - or for that matter most 'reality TV', i already have a pretty good idea of how stupid and inane most of human activity is, i don't need to hear fictional accounts thereof as well. But hey - that's just me. I like ideas. You're free to blow whatever blows *your* whistle. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/emotwordshp7.gif)

Philip K Dick wasn't that good of a writer. Man in the high castle was alright, and I got another book of his. The style got old very fast, kinda like with chuck palahniuk.

PK Dick's was intentionally pulp, in order to sell the stories in the SF media of the day - which was pulp. However i struggle to think of any other writer who dealt in such a personal, subjective manner with issues of reality, sanity/insanity, what it means to be human, transcendence, and who did it in such an easy, readable manner.

man in high castle, although justly famous, is nowhere near any of his best books. I do not often make the appeal "loads of people agree with me!" (can't remember the specific formal label for that error), but he has been consistently voted the best american Sci-Fi writer amongst european intellectuals (who i generally detest), in the way he managed to encapsulate so many themes of existentialism, post-modernism, and cutting-edge theology in books that can easily be read and digested by teenagers, whilst the european writers couldn't do the same in less than 2000pages of incomprehensible gibberish.

the man was a fucking genius. He is not my favourite writer, but he's definitely up there.


what's "chuck palahniuk."?

Another author.

ah, looks interesting, kinda name that's easy to remember (as in, seeing it and having recall, not as in remembering it directly...! (IMG:../forums/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ).

fight club was a very distinct movie, would be interesting to read the original work. Wonder how similar it was.

The Annals of Fulda


And if I like that, the Annals of St-Bertin, to compare what the authors on the other side of the empire were writing during the same time period

The movie followed the book very well. I remember no contradictions between them, and would recommend them both.

Also by Chuck Palahniuk, I would recommend Invisible Monsters. Probably the most fucked up book I've ever read.

nah, dick is v. different from chuck. What dick suffers from is in some (lots maybe) of his books he indulges in stoner babble. What he is good at is creating ridiculous yet believable worlds. Things like student revolts being forced underground.. for 20 years, living as troglodytes. Or corporation made lead cod-pieces in a post nuclear apocalypse. Or government hiring secret agents to make fake ids for their own citizens. Or the eponymous electric sheep. For example, in high castle, the actual plot isn't that great. The situation of the civil war memorabilia craze, and the crisis precipitated by "historicity" of the items. In that world, it seemed positively ridiculous that whether or not a pistol was used by an officer in the Civil War should matter.... but then you think about it, and the same issue does occur all the time in our own world. Some of his stuff is reused, and you always see it coming; there is gonna be a revulsion-against-violence scene, etc. But ultimately he likes his characters, and just kind of smiles at the world in a way that is neither sarcastic nor glib. Just kind of befuddled and amused.

Chuck is basically a literary pornographer. Not of the fun sort of pornogoraphy either; rather, the sort with 28 year old drunken leather skinned morons boredly getting contorted through the requisite positions before getting creamed in the face. It has the same misogynistic tone, and even the same draw; degradation of its characters.

This post has been edited by Urquhart: Dec 2 2009, 05:45 PM

anyway,

wizard of earthsea/tombs/whatever the third book was called Atenyau? the one with the young prince/ etc

also: the Dispossed(!)

She is always gonna be quality stuff. the earthsea trilogy is great because it truly doesn't stand in tolkeins shadow. It makes one desire a kind of simpler life like the shire, or like the early harry potter, or like the rest of her commie pinko works. The best way to describe the series is non-gratiutious. Every thing she does is for a purpose, and everything is elegant and simplistic and wonderful Its the anti-Nerd Porno.

Dispossession: She goes full comi-pinko for this one. I'd say its better than heinleinn when he goes full libertarian. She still is, after all, a better writer. Defintately worth reading, and I enjoyed how she remebered how poverty stricken and still strife ridden the moon colonists would be. However, I doubt her moon-world would be survivable. Fun vocabulary, though. Like 1984. I aim to add "propetarian" to my everyday lexicon.

hominids: so canadian it hurts. Bad. Has this weird science-as-morality thing popular amongst engineers, english majors, and other cretins going on. A lot of it really bothered me. Female lead gets raped, she doesn't call out "since rape is crime of violence, and she just wants to not get hurt". That is v. v. wrong, on so many levels. A woman should always resist and fight back. Not for some abstract moral reasons, but it grossly improves their surivial chances. The "rape is not sexual" i think is a offshoot of retarded leftists trying to keep sex as just a good thing. (as a I side note, i finally realized that all leftists can't tell the difference between the pleasurable and the good. So of course they are leery of anything disparaging sex). It is obviously sexually, in a way that only a person dedicated to naked emperors can deny.


crime and punishment. Obviously rushed at end. Very good book. Seriously, if you haven't read dostevesky, shakespeare, or the bible, you are not educated.

Funny, just finished a book that made an argument against the tendency, at the time (1980s), for feminist attempts to de-sex crimes like rape and prostitution (rape is just violence, prostitution is just economic exchange/economic exploitation)... But that attempt was tied to the ultimately rightist adoption of contractarian thinking as a means of pursuing woman's lib. The Sexual Contract, Pateman.