What are you reading?

[It's Me!]

The Diary of Anne Frank

[Waluigi]

Son of Hamas.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Qingdai

"Facing West: The metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building" by Richard Drinnon

Are you reading this because I mentioned it previously?

If so:

[teasasue]

oh oh oh oh I just got to borrow the 4th Harry Potter book Goblet of Fire, So I have started that today while I finish my other book

[Ensign Steve]

Have you read that one yet? It's by far my favorite of the series.

[Qingdai]

OMG! Ensign Steve reads!

I am reading it because you suggested it, Null. I rescued it from the closed stacks.

[Ensign Steve]

Yeah, I read Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown.

I would offer to start up a junk food books thread with Sharon, but all I have to offer is, "I read Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown."

[teasasue]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

Yeah, I read Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown.

I would offer to start up a junk food books thread with Sharon, but all I have to offer is, "I read Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown."

I have just started book 4 I am now on chapter 2, dont get much time to read at work

I have all the twilight books they are so much better than the movies, I really really want to buy the Harry Potter books but money is tight right now. So i am stuck borrowing them, but hey that is better than nothing.

[Janet]

Murder on the Orient Express. After watching the David Suchet version I decided to go back to the original and see which version was more accurate and which bits were changed.

Now that I think about it, the impulse to find out which movie, if any, had the facts right was what led me to becoming a vampirologist. I guess some personality traits never change.

[Crumb]

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Adamus Prime

Justin Cronin's The Passage - Not bad so far. Reminds me a lot of early Stephen King. A little cutesy with some of the details of its fifteen minutes into the future setting. Oh, LOL, Jenna Bush is Governor of Texas!

Warning!

I finished The Passage a couple days back. I have since learned that it is the first book of a planned trilogy (meh...I'm pretty sick of the prevalence of trilogies in SF/Fantasy) and that the film rights have been sealed for a while. That makes sense, since I couldn't shake the feeling that it was written to be filmed as I was reading. The story, especially toward the end, skips from set piece to set piece.

The cover blurb is misleading, making it sound as though the book is essentially The Road: Now With Infinity Percent More Vampires. In actuality, The Passage is almost like three or four different books crammed between the same set of covers. The first section, highly derivative of The Stand, deals with the events surrounding a near future (certain clues seem to point to 2016, but that doesn't seem like far enough out to account for other things Cronin mentions) military experiment gone wrong, and ends with the opening moments of what I suppose is best described as a vampire apocalypse. We are then presented with a brief section that is consistent with the cover blurb, as Agent Wolgast, the main protagonist of the first section, who had been tasked with collecting experimental subjects, flees the unfolding disaster, carrying along Amy, a six year old girl who was part of the experiment.

The transition to the next section is provided by the device that will be used periodically throughout the rest of the book to tie set pieces together: journal excerpts presented at a far future academic conference on the history of the apocalypse. In this case, the journal is one kept by "Auntie", an old woman in an isolated post-apocalyptic Colony, recording her memories of being evacuated from Philadelphia as a child. We then switch protagonists, and experience the remainder of the section through the eyes of Peter, a young man serving in the Watch of the Colony nearly 100 years after the events of the first section. This was by far my favorite section of the book, as I'm a sucker for world-building, and I enjoyed Cronin's take on survival post-vampire.

Inevitably, shit goes south, hurried along by Amy's arrival in the Colony (as noted on page one of the book, she is now The Girl From Nowhere, with an unnaturally prolonged lifespan, and a psychic connection to the vampire population) and the fourth and final section follows Peter and his allies as they leave the colony on a journey to return her to the Colorado military base where she was created, where they are vaguely hopeful that military survivors will be able to use her against the vampires.

I enjoyed the story but, at the same time, it's heavily, heavily, derivative. One review I read after finishing it remarked that it's almost as though Cronin intentionally set out to see if he could tell a story consisting entirely of tired cliches and still make it entertaining. Amy's mother is less a character and more every abused woman trope ever wrapped up in one package. Wolgast fills the lonely divorced guy with a dead child looking for a surrogate to protect role. Peter is a textbook case of the young hero living in the shadow of his father and elder brother. We have not one, but two, old black women to dispense wisdom (one of them is even named "Auntie", ffs). Etc., etc., etc. Even the broad strokes of the plot are derivative. We open with The Stand, pass through The Road, and end up in The Lord of the Rings. But, having said that, he did after all succeed at making his cliche laden tale entertaining.

One major complaint I do have is that Cronin is very resistant to killing protagonists, which kills the verisimilitude of the atmospheric day to day survival setting he has established. He writes a number of situations in which a major character appears to die but, oops, not really. An author can get away with that maybe once, but resorting to that trick multiple times destroys any real tension in a story.

Another big one is that Cronin introduces apparently supernatural elements as simple plot points with no apparent reason. Compared to, say, The Stand, where the supernatural elements are thematically important, it's odd and jarring.

Another oddity is that, though Amy is said to be special (in the sense that she has a vampire's lifespan, regeneration, and psychic abilities, yet is not a vampire herself) because she was given a refined version of the virus that had been created from the version living in the other 12 original vampires, it is also made clear that she was already somehow special in an early scene where (seriously) she has a psychic encounter with a polar bear who, she reports, "Knows what I am". I'm hoping this is dealt with in the sequel, because otherwise, the plot hinges on the extraordinary coincidence of the military choosing, at random, to experiment on the one person with the ability to save the world. I've read that Cronin developed the original plot outline as part of a sort of collaborative storytelling game with his 9 year old daughter, though, so I'm half afraid that the polar bear scene is a remnant of some Harry Potteresque shit she suggested, and not something that will eventually be explained.

Beyond that, I have a few minor nitpicks. I think most of what I would otherwise criticize is accounted for by the fact that this is only one third of the complete story.

Three and a half psychic polar bears out of five.

[SharonDee]

Now that's a book review!

Originally Posted by Adamus Prime

I finished The Passage a couple days back. I have since learned that it is the first book of a planned trilogy (meh...I'm pretty sick of the prevalence of trilogies in SF/Fantasy) and that the film rights have been sealed for a while. That makes sense, since I couldn't shake the feeling that it was written to be filmed as I was reading.

I had that feeling when I read Michael Crichton's Timeline. (And whaddya know, they did make a movie.) For me that made for a more disappointing read. Although, if I remember correctly, it made for a crap-tastic read anyway.

I sorta skip-skimmed the rest because I may read this book and I don't want to be spoiled. (You are a spoiler tag Luddite, you know.)

[Adam]

I use spoiler tags when there are real spoilers. I don't usually consider broad plot outlines to be spoilers, but i get that other people do, which is why I warn before I do it.

[wei yau]

So I re-read World War Z for like the fifth time. As much as I enjoy the book, it's such a supreme waste. It had a great premise and each interview would make a great short story in itself. But, the style of the book is just not very good. It reeks of laziness and poor writing.

I'm hoping the movie would be better, but I can't see how.

On the other hand, I'm prolly gonna buy The Walking Dead this weekend.

[Doctor X]

Originally Posted by Janet

Now that I think about it, the impulse to find out which movie, if any, had the facts right was what led me to becoming a vampirologist.

So what facts did you learn about vampires?

--J.D.

[ceptimus]

I read Quantum by Manjit Kumar. It's the history of the development of Quantum theory but there's not much science and no mathematics in it. Rather it is the history of the physicists who were involved in the various debates and how they continued to argue with each other about the theory into old age. It concentrates on Einstein and Bohr, but there are plenty of other characters too. I enjoyed it.

And now I'm reading At Home by Bill Bryson. Typical of Bill it's a rather rambling account, but full of quirky interesting details and very well written.

[Waluigi]

Originally Posted by Waluigi

Son of Hamas.

This was an excellent book. Very interesting look at the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Staying in the region, I'm now reading In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth Jones. I'm only two chapters in, but so far it's good.

[teasasue]

Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix

[Adam]

Originally Posted by teasasue

Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix

Warning! Nerd humor follows!

So, the video game tie in for the new HP movie is basically a Gears of War clone, causing the internets to dub it Harry Potter and the Order of Marcus Fenix.

[wei yau]

I demand to see Penny Arcade's take on this issue!

[SharonDee]

I am on a Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child kick. Since June 12 I have read:

1. Fever Dream
2. Relic
3. Reliquary
4. Still Life with Crows
5. The Cabinet of Curiosities
6. Brimstone
7. Riptide

This list is not in publication order but I'm trying to remedy that. Some of these works I have on my Kindle, the rest I have been able to find at my local libraries.

Up next, library copies of:

1. Thunderhead
2. The Ice Limit

I'm glad I stumbled across these creators of the greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes: Aloysius Pendergast. It's hard to believe I was ignorant of Preston & Child, given my recent interest in Arthur Conan Doyle.

[The Man]

So I finished Twelve Hawks' Fourth Realm trilogy. I was not disappointed. As I already said, the surveillance depicted within makes Orwell look downright complacent and Twelve Hawks' insight into of the current political situation is strong indeed. Twelve Hawks correctly notes that surveillance isn't really a "left versus right" issue - governments of all ideological stripes support these things in order to increase their own power, and due to the potential for abuse innate in this technology, which the trilogy compellingly makes disturbingly clear, should be opposed unilaterally. (The ending also makes it clear that a mass movement is needed to generate any meaningful change, a gesture I appreciate - far too much dystopic fiction doesn't really bother suggesting any realistic solutions, but Twelve Hawks' ending gently nudges the reader to get involved). Beyond the political content, the characterisation and plotting are strong and the pacing is immaculate - scarcely twenty pages go by without some compelling action sequence (Twelve Hawks has embellished the modern world by adding a few fictitious science-fiction elements which add to the action and philosophical content, but otherwise left the current political situation unchanged). I like the fact that he doesn't try to conclude things with some gigantic fuck-you action sequence; one of his points, I think, is that violence can only solve so much. He also manages to work in compelling philosophical themes from sources like Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith (who, it might be noted, is significantly more left-wing than typically assumed).

A film adaptation has been optioned by 20th Century Fox and Alex Tse (Watchmen) has been tapped to write the screenplay of the first film.

[Janet]

So what facts did you learn about vampires?

All of them. Seriously. I stopped studying vampire myths when I ran out of new things to learn. I got to the point where each book I read had only about one sentence of information that was new to me. Then I spent some time trying to study the reasons for the myths rather than the facts of them. I stopped that when I realized that the myths were so vague and malleable and I knew so much about them that I could "prove" any theory I wanted about the origins and purposes of vampire myths yet I knew no more about the workings of an 18th Century Hungarian peasant's mind than I did when I started.

Finished Murder on the Orient Express and the Finney movie was definitely more faithful than the Suchet version. I found it interesting that the recent version stole scenes and lines from the Finney movie that never appeared in the book. I don't know if it was a homage or they just thought it worked better.

Now I'm reading Paul is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion. It's proving a quick read, but it's not all that interesting. Once you get beyond the conceit, the actual writing is pretty standard bordering on boring.

[Kashmir]

Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan

So far it's interesting, as far as characters and dialog go.

For being published in '02, the SF bits seem really dated. The technology feels like that of cyberpunk published in the mid '80s. It's like the author said, "Fuck the '90s. Molecular nanotechnology, what's that?" There are details that are already obsolete in real life, and the novel is set something around five hundred years in the future. Yeah.

[teasasue]

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince