Game of Books

[Siana Blackwood]

Game of Books

Basically, go and read something. Then come back here and tell us about it.

Okay, there's a little more to it than that. What you do is this:

1. Every day, read something. Could be a quick thing that you finish in a couple of minutes or part of a bigger thing (e.g. part of a novel).

2. Later that day or some time the next day, visit this thread and share a little something from your reading. Could be a line or phrase you particularly liked, something that happened in the book, a random distraction that happened during reading time, an idea the reading triggered... basically anything at all provided you can convince the rest of us that there's some kind of link between the thing you read and the thing you posted.

You can also (in fact, please do!) engage in further discussion. Give and receive recommendations, link to things you can read online, ask questions about something someone else posted etc.


Oh, and...

NO SPOILERS! NOT EVEN IN SPOILER TAGS!


PS - I'm not really sure where to put this. Is it a game, a discussion thread or a random?

[Siana Blackwood]

I'm reading Robin Hobb's 'Liveship Traders' trilogy at the moment and I'd like to draw your attention to a character named Malta. She's thirteen years old and she's one of the most devious, manipulative little... pains in the neck... I've read. She thinks she's an adult, or at least that she deserves the privileges of one without any of the responsibilities. Considering what's happened to most of the other major characters so far, I'm pretty sure it's going to bite her.

And if she somehow turns into the hero, the entire trilogy will go flying across the room.

[Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍]

Oooh, I have those books. Gonna have to read them at some point.

Do comic books count? Because I've been reading those a lot lately. THERE ARE WORDS ON THE PAGE SO IT'S GONNA.

Lumberjanes is adorable, derpy, and pretty funny. It's a story of friendship and ass-kicking that stays interesting without getting too cutesy, and never takes itself too seriously.

Father knows best. Ehehehehehe.

[Siana Blackwood]

I've finished the Liveship Traders books and now I'm heading off in a (sort of) different direction: Time And Time Again by Ben Elton. It's a time travel thing that reminds me of Stephen King's 11/22/63, only with an ex-SAS survival expert instead of a schoolteacher.

[Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍]

Oh, I am horrible because I completely forgot about this.

I'm going to use a scale of 0 to 5 :-) with the following criteria:

0 :-) : Rock bottom.
1 :-) : Complete waste of time.
2 :-) : Some good bits, but mostly didn't like.
3 :-) : It was okay, worth it to pass time. Or, good but not for me.
4 :-) : I liked it. Worth a read.
5 :-) : I loved it, I'm in love, and you need to read it NOW.

I'm still reading a lot of comic books.

Highlights:

Black Science

About a scientist who invents a Pillar that can zap people to different dimensions. He intends it as a philanthropic enterprise, but it ends up destroying everything it touches, including himself and his family. Now he and his team are trapped and scattered in the multiverse, and he sets out to fix the destruction he's wrought, find everyone, and put his family back together. Too bad all those pesky alter egos have different ideas. So while I quite like the idea of this one, it starts out without much buildup and courses along as a series of bad things just happen one after the other. There's also not much character depth. Art-wise, all the women are tall and slim with black hair, so it's hard to tell who's speaking, especially in low light conditions. Now, what it IS is a fun adventure with wonderfully weird and unique settings and creatures. Each world has its own feel, and the pace never lets up. So if that's what you like, or you're looking for a com read, check this out. Overall, 3 / 5 :-) for me.

More to come later.

[Danielle Wayland]

I just started reading Ender's Game today.

I'm on like chapter 3 so far and I have to say, I don't care much for Card's writing. The fact that he switches from 3rd person to 1st person in the same paragraph bugs the heck out of me. Like seriously, if author's did that today they'd be given the stink eye or think of as amateurs. Personally I'd give it a pass if the 1st person bits were italicized but they're not, and it makes me angry (unless it's just the copy I have, and I'm not too inclined right now to look it up).

Other than that, the story itself is interesting, if not a little confusing with terminology I have to keep reading to understand. I like Ender's sister, Valentine. His brother, Peter, on the other hand, can go jump off a cliff with his bipolar self xD

[Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍]

Yeah, back when I was 15 and incapable of distinguishing between what to do and what not to do, that thing tripped me up so much in my own work. I can see why he did it, but it's not the best writing device. It comes across as kind of pretentious now.

Keep reading though, it gets intense later. The movie doesn't do the book even a quarter of the justice it deserves. It's pretty sad. It had been in the works since before 2008, but it only got made during the teen dystopia craze, which EG certainly is not.

And yes, in this book Peter is pretty horrible. There are other books.

...I have mixed opinions on the rest of the books though, both the Ender and Bean ones. They were good, but they get...pretty weird. Not always in a good way. Some bits just squick me out.

Okay, on to reading. Still doing comic books. I just caught up on...

Saga

Saga is great. It's the story of how two fugitives from opposite sides in a galactic war have a baby together, and so everyone is out to capture them and the kid, while they just want to be left alone. Variety of interesting characters, most of whom you sympathize with even if they're a bit villainous. I really like how they all come across as real humans. Also, one of the best talking cats ever. Read this one even if you don't like talking animals. The story is epic, but not ponderous. The only not- fault is that I wish we could spend more screen time with the characters before things change, but that's not really anything against it. Definitely recommend this!

4.5 / 5 :-)

[Dec]

It's been a really long time since I read Ender's Game. The story's nice, though I remember some parts in the middle being a bit of a slog to get through -- or was that the one with Bean? Ehh, now I definitely don't remember.

I'm the boring person in the corner reading the nonfictionest of nonfiction -- the 'how-to' book. Mind you, it's 'How to Write a Memoir', but it's still a how-to book.

And that totally isn't what it's called, by the way -- it's The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr. I'm a little more than halfway through, and she's currently talking about how horrible her early work was -- solely because of how pretentious and high-brow she was acting, when that's not what she is or where she came from.

And the fiction she quotes from... man. Just saccharine as all get out. Reading an entire book like that would likely make my teeth rot. I don't know how she could stand writing it.

Actually, let me quote it:

On my sixteenth birthday, my mother presented me a pair of nineteenth-century opera glasses from France--gold-plated binoculars small enough to fit in a pearl-beaded evening bag. This gift might lead you to think that we occupied a different sort of world than we did, that we regularly attended some opera house, that we climbed in and out of a lot of taxicabs as doormen held umbrellas over us.

Even while the novels's first paragraph refutes the opera glasses claiming they aren't who we are, they start the dang book. And as Freud says, there are no negatives in the unconscious. Even the diction--presented instead of gave--is a stilted stand in for the vernacular I'd wind up with.

Not the worst of the fiction quotes, but the "no negatives in the unconscious" is a good one, methinks. It's a lot harder to overwrite something once you present it a certain way, and that's an important thing to remember whether you're doing fiction or nonfiction.

[Siana Blackwood]

I'm reading a series of articles on the attraction of violence in the media.

Homework.

[Dec]

Picked up another how-to book on memoir -- The Memoir Project. It's a slim little thing, and I'll probably finish it by the end of the week, but hopefully it's good.

Especially because the woman who wrote it just has it out for writing exercises. Which, I guess makes sense -- why spend time on writing morning pages and such if you could be writing the book? -- but that's from someone who rarely does exercises anyways. So far she hasn't said anything earth shattering, but then I'm barely past the introduction -- she could definitely surprise me.

And does anyone know anything about The Glass Menagerie? I picked it up from the library on a whim, and now I've got it just sitting here. It was apparently a big hit of a play in 1944, but the blurb on the back says exactly nothing about the story. You also get an essay called "The Catastrophe of Success" for your troubles, which sounds like a nice read, but that still tells me nothing about the play itself.

...I really need to pick up a fantasy book or something. This stuff is making me sound old.

[Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍]

Read what you like! Age has no bearing on taste. Shouldn't, anyway.

I've read The Glass Menagerie. Had to for school. Worth reading at least once, though whether you'll like it depends on taste. It's about...hmmm, non spoiler-y version, a woman collects glass animals and has high hopes for her child/children that seem...impossible to realize. There, that's as non spoiler-y as it gets. Yes, the glass animals are important and symbolic. It's a quieter sort of play and rather hard to blurb without giving the whole thing away. I don't doubt I might like it more now as a adult than as a 17yo, but even then I could appreciate it because I understood where the character was coming from. Oh wow high school was over ten years ago I'm so old...

[Siana Blackwood]

Hmm... wonder if Ken Liu's 'Paper Menagerie' is partly inspired by that?

---

I'm between books at the moment. *panics quietly*

[laloca]

I'm reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.  Tried reading it in Spanish a while back and just could not do it.  The language is too complex.  I like how he writes, but I have been reading this book for  a long time and I am having a hard time getting through it.  I'm on my last renewal from the library.

Here's an example of his description.  I am studying because I need to get better at description.
"Her voice was pure crystal, transparent and so fragile I feared that her words would break if I interrupted them."

The first two sentences:
"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.  It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Mónica in a wreath of liquid copper."

[Dec]

Still reading The Memoir Project.  She's good at weaving things together, though she hasn't made a point I've found ground breaking yet.  The idea of relevancy comes close, I guess, but I already having editing advice telling me to cut like a well-trained butcher, so I don't think that's much of a revelation.  Going so far as to cut your mother's affair out of a book about your mother's decent into Alzheimers, despite finding out about both near about the same time, definitely sends the point home, though.

I'm also in the middle of Coding for Dummies.  It's kinda 'meh' so far -- everything in the early chapters I kinda already knew, and the things I didn't know where presented in such a way as to be confusing.  I'll give it a pass until I hit Javascript, and then hand out judgement.

EDIT: Oh, derp -- forgot to ask.  Any of you read/have any suggestions for Harry Turtledove's stuff?  Went to look him up on the library catalogue, and there's literally pages of his books, and I have no idea where to even start.

[Dec]

Found an interesting suggestion in The Memoir Project:

In long form memoir, the only way to find a structure is to first reduce your book idea to one sentence.

Okay. I see what you're doing. You're about to put this down. Don't Do this now or you'll fall into the abyss of never writing the book and instead merely talking about it for years. More divorces can be tied to unwritten books than any other undone task I can think of. Don't bore your relatives. Enthrall us.

So let's do this now together. Let's write your sentence.

Let's say your one sentence -- your argument (and all books are an argument, no matter how small) -- is that life is really hard unless you get a book cat to live with. Great. Here's how that will break down. By each phrase: Life. Is hard. Really hard. Unless. You get. A good cat. To live with.

Well, there are your seven chapters. Don't believe me?

Life: Who you are. Is hard. Really hard: First show us hard, then show us really hard. One chapter each. Unless: This is where you show us that you are open to alternatives. You get: This is where you show us all the things you've tried in order to make your life better, like speed dating, dieting, drinking heavily, perhaps. A good cat: Maybe you've had bad cats or good cats. Tells us. To live with: Show us living with that one good cat. Maybe there is a sad ending. Or a happy one. Or a sad one turned happy when the good cat dies and you have the courage to try again with a new cat. See how this works?

But it absolutely depends on that one sentence. It's the spine upon which you build the rest of the body.

Don't know if it works, really, but it seems like a nice idea. Tried to come up with a sentence for my own memoir, but... yeah. Hard to find one that encompasses what I want to convey, mostly because I'm still finding out what the heck I'm even getting at.

It's a bit frustrating that she waited 'till the last third of the book to finally get to the point, but, at the same time I kinda get it. She tried to make a self-demonstrating book to try and drive the message home, and it was a nice enough read by itself. And besides, the book it short enough that it doesn't matter too much.