Favorite books / What are you reading?

[AskWazzup]

Is it for a school course or just general enlightenment?

I guess you could call it general enlightenment, but it's more of a bittersweet drug now, since the more you learn, the more angles you start to see in pretty much everything, it's like you get a second vision (i sometimes spot myself creeping behind my back and analyse me analysing something), so you can appreciate so much more than you could before. And even though it's sometimes pretty hard to put yourself in a spot where you sit down read, do exercises (that's what i meant by bittersweet), i still pretty much have a craving to learn everything i can in this short, frail lifespan of a human. And it's not just for knowing more, i started to have a very huge craving for creating a few years ago, so i started to dabble around with music, programming, sketching etc. Of course since i don't have enough time to learn everything that i would want to, i had to trim it down to a few things. So now i am determined to compose (already learned how to play the piano and a very big portion of theory), learn math (which i completely avoided in school), physics, programming, algorithms etc. The great thing is that all of those things sometimes coincide, so you also sometimes need to use them all.

All of it has nothing to do with a career, or money, now i just want to do it and that's it. And this phase of me actually wanting to sit down and learn something is just a few years old, so i don't know if it's all still a novelty, but i hope i will continue this until i kick the bucket.

 

[UniversalWolf]

...music, programming, sketching etc. Of course since i don't have enough time to learn everything that i would want to, i had to trim it down to a few things. So now i am determined to compose (already learned how to play the piano and a very big portion of theory), learn math (which i completely avoided in school), physics, programming, algorithms etc.

You might enjoy my friend's blog. He writes a lot about music theory. He's the piano player for a trio called The Bad Plus. They play gigs all over the world.

http://dothemath.typepad.com/

http://www.thebadplus.com/

As for what I've been reading, I've been hacking away at The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for a long time now, but I think I'm putting it on the shelf for a time. I'm well into the Byzantine period, which is of less interest to me, at least for now. I have to admit I found the parts about early Christianity much more intriguing than I expected, and I'm satisfied that I made it past the death of Justinian.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Hellboy: Hellboy in Hell, BPRD: The Reign of the Black Flame, and Davey Jones and the mystery of the monocle men.

 

[AskWazzup]

...music, programming, sketching etc. Of course since i don't have enough time to learn everything that i would want to, i had to trim it down to a few things. So now i am determined to compose (already learned how to play the piano and a very big portion of theory), learn math (which i completely avoided in school), physics, programming, algorithms etc.

You might enjoy my friend's blog. He writes a lot about music theory. He's the piano player for a trio called The Bad Plus. They play gigs all over the world.

http://dothemath.typepad.com/

http://www.thebadplus.com/

As for what I've been reading, I've been hacking away at The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for a long time now, but I think I'm putting it on the shelf for a time. I'm well into the Byzantine period, which is of less interest to me, at least for now. I have to admit I found the parts about early Christianity much more intriguing than I expected, and I'm satisfied that I made it past the death of Justinian.

Thanks, the first thing i saw when i opened the first link was pretty interesting. I hope for his sake he wasn't the one who transcribed those Mccoy Tyner(one of my favorite pianists) solos - that's a pretty laborious task!

As for the The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, are you reading the whole set? And how is it? I have been interested in the subject for a while (no time for it though - i still want to read the oxfords history of music (the whole set!) which is nonless fascinating in quality and total length - 3856 pages).

Fucking books - too many of them! Too many temptations!

 

[UniversalWolf]

I hope for his sake he wasn't the one who transcribed those Mccoy Tyner(one of my favorite pianists) solos - that's a pretty laborious task!

The fact that you know who McCoy Tyner is is a good sign!

I don't know whether he transcribed it himself. Probably not, but he's certainly capable of such a feat.

BTW, I saw McCoy Tyner live once back in the 90s. Really good show.

As for the The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, are you reading the whole set?

I have this version:

http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Empir...m_sbs_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0T1EY6YKNB62VHWX0TTE

...which is an abridged paperback copy (but it's still about 3000 pages with small type). I really enjoyed reading it, but I've read a lot of translated classics (Plutarch, Tacitus, Thucydides) so I liked it most for the comparison to those, and it's different point of view. I also found the parts about early Christianity and the conflict with classical paganism very, very interesting. Much more interesting than I expected at first.

If you like classics, I highly recommend Plutarch.

 

[Atomic Postman]

I've been recently reading a lot of Mythology, specifically Greek, Norse and Germanic.

I think I'm done with that now though, and I've been looking at the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King.

Does anyone have an opinion on it?

I've heard it is very good.

 

[UniversalWolf]

I've been looking at the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King.

Does anyone have an opinion on it?

The first Dark Tower book is excellent. It's possibly my favorite story of the King stories I've read.

I started the second book and lost interest, but that was a long time ago.

 

[Hassknecht]

Loved The Dark Tower. Couldn't wait for new books to come out. The connections to all the other works of King are kinda fun, too.
The setting is really cool, too. Well, the Midworld setting. That whole 'magic replaced by technology' thing dosed with some post-apocalyptic western stuff. All sorts of weird, all sorts of awesome.

 

[MutantScalper]

Misery is about the only book from King that I've read, it was good.

In addition to Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (which is a good book, although a bit heavy covering a lot of events) I'm reading a book called Soldat by Siegfried Knappe. It's about a German artillery officer who had a pretty illustrious military career in WW 2. He ended his war at the Hitler bunker before heading off to Soviet Union for a stint at the POW gulags.

 

[Gizmojunk]

Currently?

I'm about 80% through the 'The Fountainhead'.

Other books I'd recommend are 'Shogun', 'Tai Pan', 'Confederacy of Dunces', ~and of course the Hitchhiker's Guide.

I liked Glen Cooke's 'The Black Company', it's the book that Bungie loosely based their Myth Franchise on.
Anything by Orwell, George Alec Effinger, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, or Eric Rücker Eddison;

Dune 1-6 by Frank Herbert.

 

[Akratus]

I've been reading the Horus Heresy series the past few weeks, and I must say, the only thing that makes me continue is my love for 40k. There are a few great books in there, but even between them it's ALWAYS a story that interchanges between the perspective of astartes and humans in some bad event of the heresy. Maybe a few excepted. It's really starting to wear me down even though I just read a great novel, A Thousand Sons was my favorite one so far.

I can recommend the opening trilogy which isn't that good, but is important to the overarching story so, you know.
Then I can recommend: Legion, The First Heretic and A Thousand Sons and Flight of the Eisenstein. Especially the first three.
Also, you don't really need to read them in release order. In fact, I would recommend reading The First Heretic as the very first novel, since it sets the stage more perfectly than Horus Rising ever could. Fulgrim was a very bad read for me, and I skipped a large portion of it. Do NOT read Descent of Angels. How that novel ever got through the editorial process I can never imagine, but it is utter shit, it's like a children's novel.

Also skippable: Battle for the Abyss, Mechanicum, Fallen Angels. Then there is the collection of short stories called Tales of Heresy which has a few excellent stories that are true must-reads, and a few worthless throwaway ones. I would recommend only reading: Blood Games, The Last Church and After Desh'Ae. The Voice and Scions of the Storm might be enjoyable to some but aren't great reads in my opinion. The Voice however is better than scions, as scions is a regular planetary conquest and the voice is an Alien-esque story about the Sisters of Silence.

But overal I really have to say this is very pulpy stuff, with very varying degrees of quality that never really stands out as anything other than more food for 40k fans. But I've only read up until A Thousand Sons so far, so I have no idea what else is in store for me.

 

[SnapSlav]

I'm not much of a reader (yes, I see the irony, considering my contributions to the Writer's Corner thread, always have, when my interest in writing first kicked in) but of the book series I ever DID give much time, The Magic of Recluse stands out in my mind more than any others. To those totally unfamiliar with it, it's "just another" fantasy setting, but it focuses its story of the conflict between Chaos and Order, characterized as Light/White and Dark/Black, respectively, and pointed out many times as neither Evil nor Good. It had fascinating philosophical musings mixed in with pretty interesting tales surrounding different kinds of characters- some you loved right away, some you just plain couldn't stand -and colored by copious sexual activity on the parts of the protagonists handled by the author just sort of trailing off.

The books weren't written chronologically as far as the world of Recluse's events/history goes, so going from one book to the next you'd sometimes take a few CHAPTERS before you figured out just when exactly this took place. "Okay, so that marvelous city that was in ruins in the first book is still a bastion of commerce right now? Huh, this must've been a while ago." But I always found them fun reads, for the most part, although I didn't get past the 4th book for personal reasons and at the time I last read one of the books there were at least 8 (maybe 12?) in the series at the time... Well, just thinking back on it brings a smile to my face, because they delighted me when I read them.

 

[BigBoss]

Was reading this, but I lost the damn thing. It's about a guy who grew up in Ireland, and somebody killed his parents. He then went as started training in fencing and other types of sword fighting with all these great teachers around the world. One guy was a Spanish fencer I think who was known to be the best fencer anyone ever fought. Another guy was an Scottish Clansmen, and taught our hero even more fencing techniques, and how to fight with a claymore. He wanted to learn because he wanted to take revenge on the antagonist (guy who killed his parents).

The story regularly alternates between past and the then-present where in the present he's trapped somewhere in the Americas after something happened to his ship, and then eventually comes upon a Spanish treasure fleet.

 

[UniversalWolf]

I've been reading a book called Indian Nations of Wisconsin by Patty Loew. Really good book, and very interesting to read since it's about my state. I grew up here and never knew most of this stuff about the different tribes and their backgrounds.

 

[Gizmojunk]

If you like 1984 or dystopian settings in general I'd recomend Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as well.

And of course for any die-hard LOTR ' er theres The Silmarillion, an interesting read to be sure... a bit slow though, kind of reads like genesis cept with fantasy names "ektor begat snooglin begat..." hehe

I've read all of those except Huxley's work, but I will when I get a copy. If you like Tolkien, try Eddison; (Tolkien once said of him that he was "the finest writer of invented world that I have read").

Worm Ouroboros, by Eric Rücker Eddison.

Everything fantasy after Tolkien was affected by him; Eddison wrote Ouroboros fifteen years before before the Hobbit was published. The Silmarillion was likely still notes on a duty roster.


My recent books read were:

• Fountainhead
• Confederacy of Dunces
• Tai Pan
• Shogun
• Chronicles of the Black Company

The next book will either be 'Do Androids Dream of Electrics Sheep' or 'Atlas Shrugged' ~ amazingly (to me) neither of which I've read before.

 

[Ah-Teen]

My favorite books I've been reading have been 'The Favored Daughter' about a female Afghan politician growing up with the Soviet invasion and the Taliban. It's cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had coming out to Afghanistan and gave me a better insight into the culture. It also pissed me off about how much shit these people have had to go though and still go through.

Beyond that been reading stuff off army reading list and for entertainment I'm reading the Ender's Game books. I think I'm going to read 'Do Androids Dream of Electrics Sheep' when I finish Ender's Game.

 

[alec]

Started reading Walden. Very good so far. I like the way Thoreau expresses his thoughts - simple, yet very effective.

Walden is fantastic. Especially the idea, the whole experiment. Plus: reading poetic paragraphs about peas and beans and solitude? Count me in. Thoreau also wrote this essay on civil disobedience which everyone should read, imo.

I'm re-reading old comics, especially Chester Brown stuff.

 

[Atomkilla]

Started reading Walden. Very good so far. I like the way Thoreau expresses his thoughts - simple, yet very effective.

Walden is fantastic. Especially the idea, the whole experiment. Plus: reading poetic paragraphs about peas and beans and solitude? Count me in. Thoreau also wrote this essay on civil disobedience which everyone should read, imo.

The part where he describes ant warfare left a particular impression on me. Among other things. I mean, the whole book is fantastic - a real masterpiece. Most of the stuff he has written there haven't lost their edge one bit. I'm left wondering why this book hasn't got greater "coverage" - apparently, it's counted among classics of American literature, but I stumbled upon it by accident. It was never mentioned in my high school, and couple of my friends who are studying literature didn't know anything about it.
I guess it's just the "local" problem, with older American literature not being given the attention it deserves, but I'm still a bit puzzled.

I have Civil Disobedience too, the two are in the same volume (along with several more essays), but I still haven't read that one. Kinda reading something completely different at the moment, but I will get back to Thoreau sooner or later. And other transcendentalists, for that matter.

 

[Akratus]

Anyone here read Sapkowski's Witcher books? How do they compare to tolkien? I'm interested in reading them, but it would be the english translations which I hear negate some of the polish charm.

 

[Atomkilla]

Anyone here read Sapkowski's Witcher books? How do they compare to tolkien? I'm interested in reading them, but it would be the english translations which I hear negate some of the polish charm.

Official English translations are pretty bad. Luckily, there are solid fan translations on the net, but you will have to look a bit there...
For the record, I've only read some of the books in English, and for the comparison to the translation I've read.

As for the content of the books and comparison to Tolkien...I'd say its Tolkien deconstructed.
But that's a poor explanation on its own.

Thing is, Sapkowski utilizes Slavic mythology and culture, Polish (and in general, European) history with plenty of tolkienesque (read: cliche) fantasy elements (dwarfs, elves etc.), throws it into the cauldron and spices it up for the good measure... the result is the book with a healthy dose of philosophy, analysis of politics, history, society and, in general, everything "human related". It's not some in-depth analysis, mind you - it's basically common sense given as food for thought while presented in a metaphoric fantasy setting which is a lot closer to our modern-day society than you could imagine.

Looking at it the other way around, it's packed with great characters, solid storyline, interesting setting and tight writing...most of the time. That kinda depends on the translation, tho. Sapkowski's style is peculiar, I guess in order to understand his writing completely, you have to be from Poland. Which I'm not, but that's what I've been hearing, anyway. I enjoyed them nonetheless.

Personally, I'd greatly recommend them. Those are some of my favorite books. They have their share of flaws and annoyances, and aren't everybody's cup of tea, but I loved them - they offer a lot, especially if you dig a bit deeper.


On a side note...if you get to read them, please don't look at them from the perspective given by the video games, since I know you played them. I mean, those games are great on their own (but that's another discussion), and are finely based on the source material (unlike, hm, LotR games), but the novels themselves are...different beasts. Take a fresh approach if you get to read them.
I had first played the original game and then read the whole Saga. Games are great 'n all...but I consider them very well-executed fan fiction after reading the books, nothing more.