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Shane

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Just finished the 30th anniversary edition of Ken Dryden's theĀ  Game, a great book, ostensibly about a week in his last season, its actually quite a but more. Full of hockey history as well as a great autobiography, I'd say its a must read whether your a hockey fan or bot.I'm only a casual hockey fan, but it kept me hooked at all times.

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1-7. ā€˜In Search of Lost Timeā€™ by Marcel Proust

This is time that you will never get back. More self-indulgent than David Foster Wallace, if such a thing is possible.


11. ā€˜Gravity's Rainbowā€™ by Thomas Pynchon
12. ā€˜Titus Groanā€™ by Mervyn Peake
14. ā€˜The Bone Clocksā€™ by David Mitchell

These I liked.
15. ā€˜Anno Draculaā€™ by Kim Newman
16. ā€˜Ship of Magicā€™ by Robin Hobb

These I didn't

17. ā€˜Papillionā€™ by Henri CharriĆØre

Pretty good for what it was.


18. ā€˜Ringā€™by Koji Suzuki

Simply brilliant for what it was!Ā 


19. ā€˜The Song of Achillesā€™ by Madeline Miller
21. ā€˜My Brilliant Friendā€™ by Elena Ferrante
25. ā€˜The English Patientā€™ by Michael Ondaatje
26. ā€˜Fates and Furiesā€™ by Lauren Groff

Enjoyed all of the above.Ā 
27. ā€˜Wiltā€™ by Tom Sharpe

Tom Sharpe is one of the funniest mofos who ever lived.


28. ā€˜End of the Affairā€™ by Graham Greene

There is no such thing as a Graham Greene book that isn't worth reading.


31. ā€˜The Famished Roadā€™ by Ben Okri
33. ā€˜The Axeman's Jazzā€™ by Ray Celestin
35. ā€˜Of Human Bondageā€™ by W. Somerset Maugham

Your time is not wasted on any of these three.


36. ā€˜Snow Crashā€™ by Neal Stephenson

Pretentious drivel of the worst sort. There's plenty of blame to go around. We can start with the author, move quickly to the acquisitions editor who should know better and finally the publisher for allowing both of these parties to do their respective jobs so ineptly.


39. ā€˜Temeraireā€™ by Naomi Novik
40. ā€˜The Forever Warā€™ by Joe Haldeman
41. ā€˜Rebeccaā€™ by Daphne du Maurier
42. ā€˜The Prestigeā€™ by Christopher Priest
43. ā€˜Hyperionā€™ by Dan Simmons
44. ā€˜The Night Circusā€™ by Erin Morgenstern
45. ā€˜The Black Dahliaā€™ by James Ellroy

I think that you might have a hard time finding seven books all so radically different from one another and such fine examples of the writers' craft.

46. ā€˜A Prayer for Owen Meanyā€™ by John Irving

I know he's supposed to be great, but I have never read anything by John Irving that I felt was remotely satisfying.

48. ā€˜All The Light We Cannot Seeā€™ by Anthony Doerr
52. ā€˜Fight Clubā€™ by Chuck Palahniuk
53. ā€˜The Gallows Poleā€™ by Benjamin Myers

These are all excellent.

54. ā€˜Red Marsā€™ by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Mars Trilogy suffers from some serious bloat. Are we really going to drag a story about terraforming Mars into a trilogy of three books all suffering from acute authorial bloat. There used to be a really excellent writer named Kim Stanley Robinson, I wonder whatever became of him?

56. ā€˜Wizard of the Crowā€™ by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Vastly underrated.


57. ā€˜Lolitaā€™ by Vladimir Nabokov

Vastly overrated.

58. ā€˜Invisible Manā€™ by Ralph Ellison

Brilliant for its time and holds up remarkably well.

62. ā€˜The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastleā€™ by Stuart Turton
63. ā€˜The Fifth Seasonā€™ by N.K. Jemisin
64. ā€˜The Third Policemanā€™ by Flann Oā€™Brien

Loved all three of these.

67. ā€˜One Hundred Years of Solitudeā€™ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of the truly great books of the 20th Century.

69. ā€˜Kavalier and Clayā€™ by Michael Chabon
73. ā€˜Shadow of the Windā€™ by Carlos Ruis Zafon
74. ā€˜Midnight's Childrenā€™ by Salman Rushdie
75. ā€˜The Master and Margaritaā€™ by Mikhail Bulgakov

This is ending your list on a high note to be sure.

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The announcement of James Momoa being cast as Duncan Idaho in the latest Dune movie attempt made me go get my old hardback and give it a read. It's probably been 10 years since I read it, and I always forget how much politic building the first 100 pages has to do to make the rest of the book make sense.

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I'm currently reading a 1974 detective crime thriller Hazell Plays Solomon by P.B. Yuill. That's actually a pseudonym for the writing duo of Gordon Williams and Terry Venables - yes football fans, that Terry Venables! Apparently he and Williams wrote a decently received football novel earlier, and decided to team up on a detective series of 3 books (and a later TV show based on those books) They employed the pseudonym so as not to draw attention away from the work itself. When republished however, the books were printed with their real names and so when I found a 90s Penguin reissue of a crime novel by Terry Venables (what the fuck) at a charity booksale I had to buy it.

It's essentially a London based detective (think a 70s era Bob Hoskins or Michael Caine) mimicking the stye of a Marlowe. I'm only about a third of the way through but it's already thrown up two WTF sequences. Early on, he makes the moves on a woman he's investigating, proving once again that sex is notoriously difficult to write about in prose. (Apologies for the poor formatting - quote box not working correctly for me it seems)

Ā 

Quote

'I want you now, please,' she murmured, savagely.

And she did get me, right there on that awful orange settee. She got more of me than she bargained for.

Without being too clinical, I could do everything but, if you follow. I was like an oil drill riding the stormy North Sea but the gusher would not flow.

...

I felt like Superman - but I could not deliver the final zap and wowie.

...

[She] eased her hips under mine and again I was drilling deep into the ocean bed and again she was convulsing.

Why be mealy-mouthed about it? I gave her a terrific seeing to - six times by her count - but the old rock-python refused to eject his juice.

Ā 

In the end, what gets him over the finish line is fondling "her unusually long kneecaps" Yes, bizarrely Hazell has a thing for knees and is always noticing them whenever he meets a woman.

Then later on in the book, I stumbled across this lovely piece of prose!

Ā  Ā 

Ā 

A beautiful, half-naked girl opened the door. She had black hair, deep brown eyes and the kind of smile that would corrupt an archbishop.

The top half of her white bikini was missing and the bottom half wasn't hiding anything but essentials. Her exquisitely smooth shoulders and boyishly-firm breasts glistened with drops of water.

Unfortunately she was about eight years old.

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Book 9 was 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' by Michael Chabon

http://scalingthetbrpile.home.blog/2019/02/28/book-9-the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier-and-clay-by-michael-chabon/

TL;DR A great, sprawling tale set during the Golden Age of comics in which two cousins' lives rise and fall alongside the art they so enjoy creating.

(It's many pages long, so that TL;DR doesn't really tell half of the story >_>)

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On 2/20/2019 at 10:03 AM, JLSigman said:

The announcement of James Momoa being cast as Duncan Idaho in the latest Dune movie attempt made me go get my old hardback and give it a read. It's probably been 10 years since I read it, and I always forget how much politic building the first 100 pages has to do to make the rest of the book make sense.

Finished. I do not own any of the rest of the series, as I find the story telling keeps getting worse (and don't get me started on the B Herbert/Anderson garbage).

The short trailer the BBC released to show the characters from their upcoming "His Dark Materials" series has me looking for my daemon, so that'll be the next physical books. Hoopla had me reading the Injustice 2 comics (took a while to get good) and the collected SpiderVerse (EXCELLENT stuff).Ā 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2/28/2019 at 2:36 PM, Liam said:

Book 9 was 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' by Michael Chabon

http://scalingthetbrpile.home.blog/2019/02/28/book-9-the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier-and-clay-by-michael-chabon/

TL;DR A great, sprawling tale set during the Golden Age of comics in which two cousins' lives rise and fall alongside the art they so enjoy creating.

(It's many pages long, so that TL;DR doesn't really tell half of the story >_>)

I don't think I'd want to revisit Kavalier and Clay now. It feels like pop culture has so supplanted it in the twenty years that followed that I'd worry it'd come off as pandering or overly precious now, even though at the time, it was right there out at the forefront.

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On 3/1/2019 at 9:34 AM, JLSigman said:

The short trailer the BBC released to show the characters from their upcoming "His Dark Materials" series has me looking for my daemon, so that'll be the next physical books.Ā 

Finished the trilogy. Oh goodness it's so good.

Re-reading Feed by Mira Grant. Also looking at Hoopla for the Batman/TMNT crossover comic that is being turned into a cartoon sometime this year.Ā 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/14/2019 at 8:41 AM, JLSigman said:

Re-reading Feed by Mira Grant. Also looking at Hoopla for the Batman/TMNT crossover comic that is being turned into a cartoon sometime this year.Ā 

Finished the Newsflesh trilogy. I highly recommend Mira Grant for all your science horror needs.

The Batman/TMNT crossover was an OK story with some hit and miss art. I can see it being a decent animation movie, tho.

Now back to Tad Williams. I re-read The Dragonbone Chair a year or two ago, right before The Witchwood Crown came out. Now that Empire of Grass has a release date of this summer, I should probably finish up the original trilogy before getting the new book on reserve.Ā 

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On 3/1/2019 at 7:34 AM, JLSigman said:

Finished. I do not own any of the rest of the series, as I find the story telling keeps getting worse (and don't get me started on the B Herbert/Anderson garbage).

The short trailer the BBC released to show the characters from their upcoming "His Dark Materials" series has me looking for my daemon, so that'll be the next physical books. Hoopla had me reading the Injustice 2 comics (took a while to get good) and the collected SpiderVerse (EXCELLENT stuff).Ā 

It's very simple, in my world there is only Dune and Dune Messiah.Ā 

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48 minutes ago, Matt D said:

@OSJ

Do I want to read any Poul Anderson?

Depends on why... If you're looking for mind-bending SF that ranks with the best of Greg Egan and Robert Reed you will be quite disappointed. On the other hand, if you want to see what was state-of-art fifty years ago and has held up pretty well, a volume of "Best of" should be right up your alley.Ā 

NESFA Press is releasing a series of his short stories in a nice matching set, they're up to volume 7 now and I keep buying them reflexively knowing that I'll never do more than dip into them occasionally, but I'm stupid like that when it comes to books. Anderson at his best was a great story-teller with tremendous respect for scientific accuracy, maybe the prototype of the John W. Campbell author for Astounding/Analog. If you go in looking for clever plots and great pacing, you'll find a lot to like. If you're looking for ethnic diversity, realistic characters, and nuance; Anderson is not the guy for you.

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I'm reading the The Ghost of Freedom: A History of The Caucasus. I always enjoy reading books about the history of certain regions from around the world. If anybody has any recommendations about the history of certain regions or countries I would love to hear them.Ā 

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16 hours ago, Control said:

This book is terrific.

Yeah, I loved it. Just really good.

I didn't like my next book as much, but haven't written about it yet. Currently reading 'The Fifth Season' at the moment, which has started off interestingly at least.

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