Better late then never! I'm reading Robin Hobb - Ship of Magic, loving it so far.
ok... it wasn't this week - but I missed this post a few weeks ago when I sat down and crushed Animal Farm in a morning. Somehow I managed to dodge reading it (and many others) in my school years. Now that my kids are supposed to read it for school, I snagged one of their copies and read it. I'm super glad I read it, and would recommend it. And being a relatively slow reader, it felt REALLY good to kill the thing in one setting. I can count on two fingers the number of books I've done that with.
Have you tried anything by John Steinbeck? Both "Mice and Men" and "The Pearl" are very easy books to read. You can knock those out in an afternoon on the back porch no problem at all. I don't remember anything about them, but I remember reading some Kurt Vonnegut books that my dad had when I was in high school. I remember those being easy to read as well.And being a relatively slow reader, it felt REALLY good to kill the thing in one setting. I can count on two fingers the number of books I've done that with.
On the opposite end of the scale, I am a fairly fast reader but it took me about 3 (?) months to get through the 80 page Heart of Darkness. Oh man that was a tough read for me.
I cheated my way through Mice and Men during high school, and then proceeded to watch the film adaptations and a few plays. The only other Steinbeck I have started was East of Eden and I got kinda lost in the 78 Characters he introduced in the first 8 pages. I really wanted to love it because some one I really respect referred to it as "her favorite". Perhaps another day.
That was a great review. Somehow I missed it the first time you posted it. Glad you shared it here. I've inkybread of Mice and Men, but it looks like I ought to give East of Eden a shot. Edit: have to leave that auto-correct. "Inkybread?" *ive read
I'm on Children of the Mind in the Ender Series. I've never read them before and started with Ender's Game. Went through Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide in the past couple of weeks. I want to read them all, eventually, but I don't know how many more moral puzzles my sanity can take.
You have more strength than I. I read Ender's as the short story then like 5 years later, prolly 15 or 16, did the book. Read Speaker for the Dead when it came out, and remember waiting for Xenocide. Then started the Alvin Maker series as it came out and lost all interest in Orson Scott Card forever.
I'm listening to them on Audiobook when I drive to work, and I think I stick with them because they are so well done. Each character has their own actor and it's unfolds like a radio drama. I'll have to check out Alvin Maker, though I'm still liking the ideas that Card is throwing out.
Alvin is what drove me away from Card as well. When compared to the Ender series it really clued you in on how exactly Card views himself. The similarities of Alvin and Ender are poignant. It's like Card considers himself a tortured and lonely genius with no friends because he's a genius.
Card being an unrelenting asshole drove me away from him. If a friend lends me his books maybe I'll read more, but I'm not giving him any of my money. He doesn't get residuals from his movie, so it's safe to see (and my friend is in it!). His blog on ObamaHaving been anointed from the start of his career because he was that magical combination -- a black man who talks like a white man (that's what they mean by calling him "articulate" and a "great speaker") -- he has never had to work for a living, and he has never had to struggle to accomplish goals. He despises ordinary people, is hostile to any religion that doesn't have Obama as its deity, and his contempt for the military is complete.
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
Rinx... I love ya - I'm neither trying to pick a fight, nor am I trying to defend Card the clown... But you've chosen two "posts" of his that aren't exactly.... In context. The dude has said plenty of stuff that is ridiculous to be sure. But both of these have big caveats that give him some serious wiggle room.
He's pretty open about his crazy, I had no intention of exaggerating or taking those snips out of context. How do you feel they misrepresent him? I linked the posts they are from, I figure people interested enough can read the whole thing (without giving his blog pageviews)
On both of the examples you provided he gives pretty clear written excuses for why the reader shouldn't take the pieces the way (I think) you're taking them. I'm not suggesting that he's right... These two just happen to have his caveats. (Even if they do sound a little like "I'm not a racist but...") And look. I didn't read all of either of the posts. I can't stand Card. I'm not really trying to pick a fight or anything. If anything - we probably agree more about this than either of us think. He's a wild card (pun intended). You never know what nonsense will pop up.
I don't think your trying to pick a fight at all! Call me out anytime if it looks like I'm steering people wrong. Issues like race, personal politics, gay marriage are complex ones, it's hard to find few line snippits to show people his messed up views. Hopefully people can dig a bit and decide for themselves. I went to a speech of his at Harvard, it was a horrible moment where someone I'd idolized turned out to be awful. Since I can't copy paste that, I just grabbed some quotes to warn people. I understand too you don't have to be a good person to write good books. While I think several of his books are worth reading, I'm in the US and we vote with our money. He can't have mine.
Then read Songmaster. Then read Wyrms. Then read Treason - the retconned version, because the original Treason (which was better) has long been out of print since Card rewrote it. Really, everything you need to know about Orson Scott Card is contained in Kingsmeat, which is probably six pages long.
Ender's Game, as a short story, ended with Ender blowing up the alien homeworld, realizing he'd committed genocide, staring blankly into the distance, and then the two military guys are at a playground saying "huh. Kids!" The end. There really wasn't anywhere to go with it. That weird-ass 4th act Card tagged on to the novel exists pretty much so that he could dig himself out of a definitively done story. A storyteller that didn't see himself as the messiah reborn would have finished with Ender in Book 1 and then followed a different POV.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who feels this way. It's good confirmation for me. Also, I didn't realize you were a redditor/moderator. Heh. I feel like i should have known that, somehow. Do you ever get on snoonet?
I'm almost positive you messaged the modmail of /r/hubski like three days ago. ;-) I'm not just a redditor, I'm a monster of the ancient deep. I'm in the first Upvoted podcast. However, since I abandoned modding my last default, I'm only over there like every third or fourth day. The place has changed a whole bumch.
Haha, I think I did. I need to reddit less. I used to have 4 defaults, including /r/music, and /r/politics and all kinds of medium level subs on top of that... I've slowed back to just /r/gadgets, /r/history and /r/politics. I'm considering going to just /r/gadgets one of these days, and that's mainly because I am the top (2nd technically, but boss has been inactive for years) mod and I built the subreddit from 10k people to the default it is now. It eats my time and my mind up, though. I'm so frustrated with the admins and the website in general, and it shouldn't bother me anywhere close to as much as it does. I do have a massive amount of time invested... I have written tons of bots and tools and even run my own website dedicated to things like that. (http://noeatnosleep.me) I have to figure out when I should put it down and why, and then do it.
Fuck yeah! I used bot_watchman, seo_killer and ban_pruner extensively! We've talked about this. I walked away from r/movies and it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It's been downhill since jedberg left, but once Alexis came back and demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that not only did he not get it, he also didn't give a fuck... well, I didn't wanna give 'em my time anymore.
I used to spend 20+ hours a week engaged on Reddit. Now it might be 30 minutes for the week, and that is to only look at the local subreddit. The community there has really changed in the last year or so, hasn't it? I mean Reddit has been getting younger over time as more people find the site, but even the non-defaults have, IMO, seen a drop in quality. I was looking hard at voat, but with the FPH invasion, they turned that place into a shit fest. If I want a shit fest, I'll hang out on the chan boards. Hubski is neat, and the people are interesting, so I'm here for the duration.
voat has been crap since day 1. I won't be caught dead there. I don't think Reddit has changed as much as some people say; it's changed some, but I'm almost ten years older than I was when I started on Reddit. I've changed.
Damn I did not even correlate you with /r/history. I knew several of those co-mods until I dumped reddit. I modded tons of SFWPs and /r/food and a few others.
Yeah I was really involved with redditgifts/secretsanta and their sale to reddit was the beginning of the end for me. The entire culture of the modding and subreddit changed. One failed initiative after another without any input from the community and no advance notice to the mods even though we had to deal with the consequences. I was literally told at one point that redditgifts was no longer responsible to the community but to the CEO. I understand that but it was such an incredibly dramatic shift and the mods were not even told of that shift when it happened as they just stopped responding to reasonable requests and questions. And now the two founders and their first mod and hire are all gone. Within months after the founders were given the ultimatum to move back to SF from SLC (where they had moved to from SF for very serious family issues.) And then they fired someone essentially because he had medical issues. That is just cruel. Then the safe space stuff. And then a bunch of other people I liked got fired, etc. etc. and I decided I just could not be supportive of that anymore. Too bad because even though I blocked most of it I really did enjoy certain little pockets.
I'll catch a few chapters out of the Baroque Cycle every so often, but I'm not reading it. It has been a long while since I sat down and read those books, and I'd like to do it again, but that isn't going to happen right now. Next week is a vacation. I'll probably see how far into Harry Potter I can get.
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, which I finished this week. More like devoured. Holy hell, I did not think a field so steeped in scholarship as the American revolutionary generation could still yield such a masterpiece. Granted, that's the amazing thing about good writers. Whatever it is they wind up turning their attention towards, examining, and then sharing in words happens to be interesting. It could be paint drying. There are some authors who I'd read anything they wrote. Bill Bryson, Michael Lewis, Joseph Ellis. Anyways, 10/10 stars.
Country Driving, Hessler. mk, I recall you're a Sinophile (?) -- have we talked about this author? You're probably familiar with him. River Town is my book of the year so far, and this next promises to be even funnier.
Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon. Can't recommend it enough.
Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia was on Colbert the other night with a new book called Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl ()which came out yesterday) and that is now on my list. And so is Girl in a Band now!
I recently finished the second book in Stephen King's Darktower series. I liked it a lot more than the first. Now I'm reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin and I like it a lot, I'll have more to say on it when I finish. It's my first book from her but I'll definitely read some others.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. It's good, but very similar to the others.
In fairness we just read it for his overall message/theme as opposed to his historical analysis (which to be honest is a bit...eh). This was probably just because we didn't need to go through his chronological stuff cause we weren't really studying his work so much as we were studying how to apply it to something very specific
I went off on a tangent on Pubski, talking to kleinbl00 about a TV show he recommended to me and I remembered that I have a copy of Child of Tomorrow lying around somewhere. I know it's not a book kind of book, but it's very enjoyable. I think I'm gonna give it another go.