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The books thread: non-WW2, non-military fiction.

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#22
I. Kant said:
The whole cycle's a very good read, but I can tell you that I've read the Day Watch in an English translation and comparing it to all the other books from the cycle which I read in Polish, the Polish translation was way superior. It just kinda captured the sort of peculiar humour, that seemed to be absent from the English translation (which was, well, kinda cold and detached, unlike all the other books and I'd be willing to blame the translation).
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Well, I've started on Day Watch. I'm barely into it but I already miss having the perspective of Anton. I'm sure it'll pick up the more I read it though.
 
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#23
Yeah, well, Day Watch was fun, so was Twilight Watch. But when reading Twilight you've got this feeling that you're in a state of freefall - that nothing that you've learned so far about this world holds true and that suddenly everything gets turned around. Deffo makes for a good read, but when the same trick got played in the Final Watch, I had this impression that that book was written solely for the money. Sure, it tells us a bit more about the world, but it felt pushed, IMHO. In fact, I was unhappy to learn of The Final Watch when it came out here. Of course, I read it, but I felt like being cheated - "Wha? There's one mo'?! How many of them are there going to be still?"
 
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#25
"Crime & punishment" by F.Dostoyevsky - the only "long" school reading I've finished in my entire pupil-cadency. Never regreted it and it's probably #1 on the "read-again" list.

P.K. Dick(again) - I've read the following: Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Don't like the way he writes but really enjoy his ideas. Currently I'm reading "the man in the high castle", mentioned here a few post earlier. My first Dick novel (ekhm :rolleyes:) in english.

"Roadside picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Very graphic, you may also want to see the movie "stalker" which is very losely based on the book (Strugatsky bros. also helped with the screenplay). While the movie can get a bit boring, it has very good pictures/camera work and filming locations.

Stanislaw Lem - most popular polish s-f writer.
The Cyberiad - a collection of short stories. I'll read them to my children as soon as I'll have some ;) But it's also a good read for adults.

Tales of Pirx the Pilot - short stories about Pilot Pirx, all of them good, some are even extraordinary. One could say this is a teeny adventure book, but the technical jargon used, makes it a lot more. "Terminus", "the inquest" and "ananke" are probably one of the best stories i've ever read.

Golem XIV - this one is about a super computer which was developed by the military but eventually the project got suspended and one of the computers is given away for academic studies. It depicts the dialogues/monologues that Golem has with the scientists. Very good begining, you dont know where the facts end and fiction begins. But it's a hard read, unfortunately I haven't finished it.

"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" - Post apocalyptic world. The main character is living in one of the underground "new pentagons" and gets enlisted as an agent with a secret mission. There's only one problem... no one in the pentagon knows what the secret mission is. A very paranoic dystopia.

I DO NOT recommend reading the novel "Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk. At least not all of it. While some of the short stories in the book are very good, the parts stiching them togheter are rather dull imho. I struggled to finish it. Here's one of the best stories from this book.
 
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#27
I recently read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I would NOT reccomend it. Not only is it excessively long, but it's all over the damn place and full of thinly veined political commentary - lofty political commentary. If you're interested in Rand or her philosophy of "Objectivism"/Egoism then I suggest you just read Anthem. Same thing, less diarrhea of the typewriter.
 
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#28
Necropimp lolloptera.

I have recently finished reading Barry Gifford's writings about Sailor & Lula Ripley (Wild at Heart, yeah, the one that inspired Lynch's film; Sailor's Holiday/ Sultan's of Africa and Consuelo's Kiss/ Bad Day for the Leopard Man).

The style is simple, reminds me a litlle of the positive simplicity of some of Dick's writings, plus it's got a pretty skewered view of the world. Funny thing is, the plot seems to be compeltely random and is nowhere near the intricate complexity some writers can achieve. Also, they're short, good for a non-commitant read on the bus or wherever.
 
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#29
Decided to try an audiobook since ive got a long(ish) walk to work everyday and my boss has been in and out alot recently with him selling his house so im hoping that this will keep me from being distracted, like atm. Got Fellowship of the ring off of Audible from their free trial but probably going to get the others as well could use my other card for another free trial.... muhahaha:eek:, but at each book being two volumes of ~9hours each and being pretty good quality (read by Rob Inglis) i'll prob buy them properly.

On paper im reading Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith, not getting very far as i only ever read it while on the bus :rolleyes:
 
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#30
Oh, on the subject of Scutlend - Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. The language stylisation (in the original version) made it really hard to read at the beginning, but after a time you get into the grind.

A novel about a group of young people who are lost in life and would do everything to get away from thinking about life. Everything usually means sex, drugs and alcohol (a little bit of R'n'R,too - Iggy!) .Good, insightful, revealing book. Hard to digest at times (shooting H down your penis, anyone?), really smacks the complacancy out of you. Ah kent git it oot a mah heid, ken? You may have seen the film, but you've also got to read the book.

Right now, the sequel, Porno is waiting for me, neatly laid on its place on the shelf. It's growing ripe for consumption, I reckon. Oh, and there's far less Scottish accent from what I've seen while browsing through it upon acquiring it - bummer, because that made it interesting (albeit sometimes hard to concentrate on the message).
 
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#31
Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman now. The original was Swedish and at times I get the feeling that the English translation is awkward. Past perfect sentences every couple of lines don't feel right, somehow. I'm still wondering whether it's the style and the translation's true to the original, or if the translation's distorted the original message a tad.

The book is a, well, strange mixture of thriller and a psychological analysis as it delves a bit into the steam of consciousness of its protagonists. Oh, and then there's some mysticism involved, too, appratently (I'm only halfway through).

(small) thumbs up.
 
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#36
BlackLabel said:
Got no new books so i went reading "watership down" again. :eek:
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nooo the bunnies :(

Also relating to my post a few above this just started ROTK so only about 18hours of Rob Inglis' voice to go. Hardly got anywhere with Gorky Park due to uni and being sick of books due all my reading being dissertation related (about 5000 words to go on that woop)
 
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#37
Remembering the recommendation posted here and following the urgings of my friend, I've started going through The God Delusion.

And while non-fiction books have already been mentioned, I'd recommend Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Although I disagree with several of her theses, and her comparison of torture techniques to economic policies strikes me as a little exaggerated at times, I think it's a book really worth reading. Puts many things of the last thirty years into a certain perspective - the coups in South America, the free market reforms in post-SU Europe and Russia itself, Iraq, where the profits go and who's pulling the strings.
I also found it well written, the style suited me better than Dawkins from what I've read of him so far.
 
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#38
Haruki Murakami- Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

(and any of his other books for that matter)

Absolutely incredible, while insanely off the wall. The best way to describe it is that it appears that he is loosing the plot but that he is actually taking the fastest route, be it subconscious or conscious, to the point.


Wierd, huh?
 
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#39
Day by Day Armeggedon is an awesome zombie book. It's got a bit of military in it (in that the main protagonist has military training), but is awesome because it doesn't really partle on about the guns and what not unless it's somehow a plot point (like training his fellow survivors with the .22).

While technically it might be classed as a 'war' book, the Forever War has little in the way of actual war fighting (and it's sci-fi war anyways, so no m16's) and deals more with ..weird ****. Like the fact that space travel takes a long time and you might come back home to find that suddenly everything is completely different.

Little Brother is a neat book set 15 Minutes Into The Future, with another attack occuring on American Soil and the Department of Homeland Security going ape****. It's an interesting read.

bloodypotato said:
Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon are both really good Neal Stephenson books.
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I need to read Snowcrash.

And Neuromancer.

And a lot of cyberpunk/postcyberpunk books. I'm a fan of the genre, but I've never read the big names. :eek:

Stefan Knobb said:
"Roadside picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Very graphic, you may also want to see the movie "stalker" which is very losely based on the book (Strugatsky bros. also helped with the screenplay). While the movie can get a bit boring, it has very good pictures/camera work and filming locations.
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I love RS picnic. I read it on the 'net in my senior year of High School. 'tis awesome.

It's also a major source of inspiration for the STALKER video games. A number of anomalies, artifacts and items in the STALKER games are wholesale ripped from RS (like the suits the scientists wear, the use of bolts, the Witches' Jelly...)
 
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