Red’s
Comments
(group member since Apr 06, 2014)
Red’s
comments
from the Literally Geeky group.
Showing 41-60 of 65
I'm waiting with bated breath to see how the proposed adaptation of American Gods plans out
Said it before and I'll say it again - film version of High Fidelity is waaaay better than the book
Otherwise, I'd suggest A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock - thought provoking & entertaining
I second Donovan's Dirk Gently suggestion a) because it's a good book, b) because I haven't read it for ages, and c) I actually own a copy :-)
Ah, I'm back in the Literally Geeky saddle. Sorry I've missed the last few, but you know, life. Anyway, just finished The Martian (spurred on by
Lou Carvalho's review
and the fact it was only about £1.50 on the Kindle), and what an enjoyable book it was, albeit an extremely nerdy one.
Here's my review
- feel free to read it, since unlike Aaron, Lara, Ez and Donovan, no-one's waiting with bated breath for the verdict tomorrow. ;)
I'm like Craig, in that I don't have a consistent methodology, although I do find a 5 stage scale (like that of Goodreads) a little limiting - I generally find I need several gradations along the lines of Lara's "enjoyed it, but I had quite a few problems with it" to really nail what I think about most books. ;)
Yes, having read that Mallory Ortberg piece on http://the-toast.net/, I've got to say it sounds far dodgier than the whole "isn't it wonderful she's publishing again after 50-odd years?" guff that's been going around the various news outlets today...
I don't know if this gets covered in the book, but here goes - I got a book on philosophy for my birthday on Sunday, and having a quick dip into it this morning following last nights Literally Geeky, I came across "The Ship of Theseus", a ancient thought experiment that Wikipedia tells us "raises the question of whether an object which has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object". Quite aside from the synchronicity of it all, does this add/detract from the layered appreciation of S?
I wouldn't worry about it Tripp - whilst laudable, the references become so repetitive you just end up not reading them.Hold on, we're still taking about the giant firebreathing mecha koalas, aren't we?
Have you ever found yourself scheduling books in such a way that one book thematically follows the other? I'm not talking about reading the next in a series or anything like that, more reading a second book that talks to the previous one you read. I only ask because outside of reading the next book on the Literally Geeky list, I find that I have inadvertently just finished Bill Bryson's take on British culture (Notes From A Small Island) and followed it up with Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox - I'm obviously in the mood for popular anthropological accounts of my own culture without realising it!
If you want a slightly different take on short stories (some of them extremely short), try The Exploding Boy and other tiny tales by Nick Parker
For many years all I ever read was non-fiction, since as an academic that was what I did all day anyway. Equally, most fiction didn't really appeal to me. I only really started getting back into fiction after reading the SOFAI books by GRRM, and that only after I started watching the TV series. Non-fiction is still my first port of call when it comes to a book, but having joined (if that is the right word) Literally Geeky I am reading more fiction than I've read in years!
I actually thought more could have been made of the class angle in the book, but perhaps that wouldn't have gone down well with an international audience (what with Sobel being American too). I also felt that the books stated "theme" of 'one man against the establishment' was a bit weak, given that Harrison clearly had the support of his family and friends throughout his career, but again, maybe that plays better with the popular science market than the more interesting (to me, at least) ins and outs of the engineering and the politics involved...?
Yup, as mentioned during the Twitter discussion of the last Literally Geeky, this is actually a book I've physically had on my shelf for years (nestled between Norah Chadwick's The Celts and Bede's The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), but never read, so woot! Enjoying it so far, not least because of some of the lovely writing in it:" Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the main-spring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on. The most we can hope a watch to do is mark that progress. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able."
So here's my full review...I wanted to like this book, really I did. I could not be more in the target audience if I tried - only 2 years older than Ernest Cline, the 1980s he grew up in and so obviously celebrates in "Ready Player One" was my 1980s (albeit from a UK perspective) - the Atari 2600, AD&D, Star Trek, dingy game arcades, Star Wars, MMORPGs, lots and LOTS of Monty Python... the list goes on. Hell, from this description alone, I'd so be playing in the OASIS:
"The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed recreation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that."
But whilst I found it enjoyable (my favourite geek in-joke being Wil Wheaton and Cory Doctorow getting consistently re-elected as president and VP of the OASIS User Council), I couldn't really warm to the book. To some extent, the problem might have been my over affiliation with the geek worlds Cline uses to describe his world of 2044 - perhaps (younger?) readers less familiar with not so obscure to me AD&D modules might find what is being described as compelling and interesting, but for me it all seemed a little obvious. And perhaps even a little lazy too - it's all well and good dealing with perfect recreations of classic films and so on, but to say stuff like "their shape and color always reminded me of Doctor Who's TARDIS" (without developing things a little further), whilst designed to show how 80s both Wade and his fellow OASIS denizens are, seems like the most lackadaisical application of a simile to me.
In terms of the writing overall, I was also never entirely convinced by Wade's voice, especially when such phrases as "her entries were filled with self-deprecating humor and witty, sardonic asides" are put into his mouth as examples of his standard, everyday speech. Similarly, Wade's supposed position as a top "gunter" and Halliday scholar is often sacrificed for the expediencies of plot - not getting the whole Zork/Frobozz thing seems like an odd lapse, over and above the fact it drives the story forward, and only serves to chip away at the convincing characterisation of the book's protagonist. Having said that, maybe the problem is that having come up with his extremely ingenious premise, Cline finds it insanely difficult to consistently come up with plausible riddles (God knows I would) - so for example, (view spoiler)
I know my next criticism might seem odd for a book mainly set in a wholly created virtual world, but I was troubled by Cline's description of the "Real World" of 2044. Whilst entirely plausible in general, and redolent of William Gibson and his take on how the intersection of technology and society could conceivably pan out, this book doesn't share his ability to create a world that feels realistic all the way down. Although Wade is a product of the Stacks, the book would have held together better if it had, like Gibson does, shown how tech use (or lack of it) differs at different levels of social spectrum - I found it hard to believe that either culturally or economically the very poorest people on the Earth (by which I mean your African subsistence farmer kind of poor) were all logged into the OASIS. Of course, Wade is an unreliable narrator at times, but rather than feeling like his mitigated POV, this lack of reality in the real world being described in the book seems to be a (wholly understandable) reflection of the author's necessarily Western viewpoint. Not so much a problem when we are in the OASIS, but given a major character arc involves (view spoiler) the undercooked nature of the real world of "Ready Player One" is jarring.
My final bone of contention is IOI - as the bad guys of the piece, they are too obviously THE BAD GUYS, their motivation for taking over OASIS being purely monetary. OK, that is the underlying raison d'être for most corporations, but no bad guys in history have ever stated that they are the bad guys - even the Nazis had what seemed to be perfectly acceptable justifications for their policies amongst those ordinary people who supported them. "IOI believed that Halliday never properly monetized his creation, and they wanted to remedy that" - how many companies do you know of have a marketing strategy that says in bald terms "we only want to make money out of you - suck it up!", and how long do you think they'd stay in business if they did? If we are to believe this world Cline has created, for me I would have liked to have seen things from the other side of the propaganda curtain, as it were, because otherwise IOI seem to have as much depth as a moustachio-twirling villain of a Victorian melodrama (something which is only reinforced by the straightforward drone-ness of their avatars).
All of the above might make it sound that I didn't like this book, but I did - it's just that I didn't like it as much as all that. Cline's geek credentials are impeccable (although I'd argue the toss as to whether or not Car Wars was actually a role playing game, GURPS Autoduel notwithstanding) and his vast amount of film, game and book references provides a great deal of pleasure for the geek reader in spotting them all (my favourites being the Brazil-themed aliases Wade uses at one point). But to some extent I feel that this would work better as a film (aside from the fact that the IP/licensing issues for such a project would be insane), since a good actor would be able to imbue Wade with a little more depth and reality than Cline has been able to.
Just read Necromancer Ez (and the next 2 in the trilogy), you won't regret it. Also, how long have you been dying to use that Dick joke...?
The first (and as far as I recall the only) book I ever gave up on was The Information by Martin Amis - earlier in life I'd gone with his whole oeuvre, but buying The Information in a charity shop later in life, I realised that my tolerance for west London upper middle class whining had radically diminished...I also tried rereading Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books recently, but gave up during that long period after Covenant's got to The Land and he's basically alienating everyone and everything he can see - I can generate enough misanthropy myself without reading about someone else's... But given I'd read all the way through the first trilogy back when I was about 14 (my Dad was a big fan), I don't count that as giving up on a book. ;)
Think I might have to sit on the grumpy step, because as you'll see from my review, I wasn't as enamoured of this book as all that...
Well I think I'm on a hiding to nothing trying to think of books Ez hasn't read, so I might keep my powder dry for now. I could suggest Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, but at 940+ pages, I think it might scare the horses...
I'd heard of Hope Mirrlees because Neil Gaiman cites her as an influence, but I've never read her stuff. I'd be interested to compare it to the Fritz Leiber book I'm reading at the moment, in an "older fantasy fiction that isn't Tolkien" kind of way...
