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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 20, 2022 2:38:20 GMT -5
I recently read an interesting novel called The Verifiers, by Jane Pek.
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Post by gotonemos on Jun 29, 2022 14:56:24 GMT -5
Well that’s interesting. I previously talked about reading K. Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant before I knew that he had written The Remains of the Day, which I knew as a movie before I knew as a novel. I just spent the past few days reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and it turns out that he wrote The Martian, which I knew as a movie (albeit one which I haven’t seen) before I knew the novel. Anyway Project Hail Mary felt a little like a YA novel, specifically a YA novel packaging of a high school physics text book. I almost gave up on it twice, but, in the end, plowed through it in three days.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 29, 2022 15:21:24 GMT -5
Well that’s interesting. I previously talked about reading K. Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant before I knew that he had written The Remains of the Day, which I knew as a movie before I knew as a novel. I just spent the past few days reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and it turns out that he wrote The Martian, which I knew as a movie (albeit one which I haven’t seen) before I knew the novel. Anyway Project Hail Mary felt a little like a YA novel, specifically a YA novel packaging of a high school physics text book. I almost gave up on it twice, but, in the end, plowed through it in three days. I read The Martian. It was interesting because of the publishing history. Weir couldn't sell it to any publishers, so he self-published it on the web. Then he offered it as a free e-book. Then he offered it on Amazon as an e-book for $0.99 (the lowest price he could). At each stage there was more and more interest. Finally a "real" publisher bought the rights to the now quite popular book and released it in hardback. That drove more sales, and eventually it became popular enough that Weir was offered the movie deal. So a book he couldn't sell and started out by giving away for free ended up making him a LOT of money. I later started reading another novel by him, Artemis, but got distracted by something else and never finished it.
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Post by nowhereman on Jan 23, 2023 0:00:34 GMT -5
276 pages into moby-dick. have to say it's not as dull as a former coworker warned it would be when i told him i got it. it is just long. melville used a lot of compound or run on sentences so it's easy to lose track of where a sentence starts or ends. anothe gripe or two i that whales are portrayed as these evil monstrous things when they really are not. makes you wonder if that had a lot to do with many getting endlessly hunted. and they are mammals, not fish.
next project is dostoevsky's crime and punishment.
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Post by nowhereman on Feb 23, 2023 2:07:47 GMT -5
Just wrapped up crime and punishment. Thought it was great. Admit that some of the dialogue made no sense, but no deterrent at all. Next project: the power of one by Bryce Courtenay.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 23, 2023 5:15:13 GMT -5
Just wrapped up crime and punishment. Thought it was great. I read that in high school. Wasn't too impressed. Of course it was a translation, so there is always the chance it was a bad translation. Shortly after, five Hitchcock movies that had been held up for a long time due to rights issues got released. (This is actually a very interesting story. Hitchcock negotiated with his studio for six films -- many of his best films! -- that nine years after the initial release the ownership would 100% revert to him, personally. These included four films starring Jimmy Stewart including Vertigo and Rear Window. Also Shirley McClain's very first movie, The Trouble With Harry. And Psycho. He later sold the rights to Psycho, but retained the rights for the other five. And then ... he refused to let them be screened. Pretty much by anyone. They became known as "The Forbidden Five". And this went on the rest of his life. Only after he died in 1980 did those five films eventually become available again.) One of the five films was Rope, which was closely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder. Leopold and Loeb believed that they were smart enough to be able to murder someone and get away with it. And so they killed a kid named Bobby Franks (who was Loeb's second cousin and lived across the street from him). They basically did it just for the thrill of being able to get away with it. Except ... they didn't get away with it. They weren't nearly as clever as they thought they were. They left incriminating evidence at the scene and their alibi was disproved. Anyway, I went to see Rope with a high school friend of mine, who had also had to read Crime And Punishment. And despite knowing nothing about Leopold and Loeb, we instantly picked up on the same themes of people who feel they are "extraordinary" and therefore above the constraints of morality. We ended up kind of giggling all the way through Rope, because of our shared Crime And Punishment experience and our surprise at unexpectedly seeing a movie with pretty much the exact same themes.
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Post by nowhereman on Feb 23, 2023 13:22:42 GMT -5
Just wrapped up crime and punishment. Thought it was great. I read that in high school. Wasn't too impressed. Of course it was a translation, so there is always the chance it was a bad translation. Shortly after, five Hitchcock movies that had been held up for a long time due to rights issues got released. (This is actually a very interesting story. Hitchcock negotiated with his studio for six films -- many of his best films! -- that nine years after the initial release the ownership would 100% revert to him, personally. These included four films starring Jimmy Stewart including Vertigo and Rear Window. Also Shirley McClain's very first movie, The Trouble With Harry. And Psycho. He later sold the rights to Psycho, but retained the rights for the other five. And then ... he refused to let them be screened. Pretty much by anyone. They became known as "The Forbidden Five". And this went on the rest of his life. Only after he died in 1980 did those five films eventually become available again.) One of the five films was Rope, which was closely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder. Leopold and Loeb believed that they were smart enough to be able to murder someone and get away with it. And so they killed a kid named Bobby Franks (who was Loeb's second cousin and lived across the street from him). They basically did it just for the thrill of being able to get away with it. Except ... they didn't get away with it. They weren't nearly as clever as they thought they were. They left incriminating evidence at the scene and their alibi was disproved. Anyway, I went to see Rope with a high school friend of mine, who had also had to read Crime And Punishment. And despite knowing nothing about Leopold and Loeb, we instantly picked up on the same themes of people who feel they are "extraordinary" and therefore above the constraints of morality. We ended up kind of giggling all the way through Rope, because of our shared Crime And Punishment experience and our surprise at unexpectedly seeing a movie with pretty much the exact same themes. Great may be a bit much but compared to Moby-Dick it's definitely better.
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Post by coachdavid on Feb 24, 2023 12:17:22 GMT -5
Re-reading Riyria Revelations by Michael J Sullivan. Its high fantasy fun. Quests! Lost kings! Magic artifacts!
But well written characters and a fun plot make for a great afternoon read.
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Post by nowhereman on Feb 24, 2023 12:32:56 GMT -5
Started The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. Compared to Moby-Dick and Crime and Punishment it is a breeze. I'm a firm believer that reading hard and harder stuff makes the easy stuff easier.
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