Grand unified books thread

[Razgovory]

Finished 11/22/63. Stephen King's best work since the late 80s.

Bought that for my mom.  I don't know if she has finished it yet.

[Habbaku]

Cracked open Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin, 1945.

Hitler, Stalin, Guderian, tanks, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape.

[Ed Anger]

Cracked open Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin, 1945.

Hitler, Stalin, Guderian, tanks, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape.

I dumped mine at half-price books because of the rape.

[Habbaku]

Yeah, I only started reading it to tide me over until my new book comes in :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306806886/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details

War in Italy, 1943-1945 : A Brutal Story by Richard Lamb.

Goes into good detail about the pro-Allied Italian troops, the German occupation of northern Italy, etc..  A lot of the negative reviews are from Fascist sympathizers, so the author seems to have pissed someone off somewhere.  Should be a good read.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life beyond Our Solar System

It's basically exactly what it says. It goes through the history of searching for extrasolar planets, the methods used, and the potential future.

Tim should definitely read this book.

After finishing the book, I'll add to my review.

It gives an excellent overview of the history of planet-finding, and the various techniques for finding planets. However, the last chapter, on astrobiology, was extremely interesting but far to short. It only covered the very surface of the topic. It did have some interesting speculation, such as how plants might be black or other dark colors on planets around small red dwarf stars in order to absorb a greater stretch of the light spectrum, but not nearly enough. It easily could have had another few chapters on that.

There's a book exclusively on astrobiology that I'm looking at, but haven't bought yet. Hopefully it will cover what this book didn't.


Currently reading Court of the Red Tsar, a biography of Stalin. It focuses on the personal lives of Stalin and his inner circle. While it does of course talk about politics, that isn't its main focus. It's been pretty interesting so far, but I haven't even gotten to the Purges yet.

[Ideologue]

Finished Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory.  It's probably his weakest novel.  It lacks energy--and when a Houllebecq novel lacks energy, holy shit, that's what they call a true vacuum.

Which is sort of the point, as the protagonist, Jed Martin, artist, is almost inhumanly emotionless; in this regard he is a complete departure from Daniel, from 2005's The Possibility of an Island, although his existence is remarkably similar to that book's Daniel 24 and Daniel 25 (the former's far-off clone descendents), albeit without even the dying spark of yearning even those transhumans had.  Like, I know it's the point--but like the author himself once said, it is "a flatter, more terse, more dreary discourse" that he's invented here.  It still has some points of interest in the first two thirds, but not quite enough to justify their length.

It only finally picks up when Michel Houellebecq is murdered.

The character, that is.  He's introduced during Jed's portraiture period, when Jed paints a picture of Houllebecq.  He acts basically like Houllebecq acts in public, i.e. a sad and complete loser.  And then he and his dog get his head cut off.  Then shit really gets rolling and Jed closes in on his own natural death (which is where the author should have begun, because that's his forte), and Jed eventually completes one last phase of his artistic career before he eats it:

He then treated the images [of the forest] according to a method that belongs essentially to montage, even if it is a very particular form of montage, where he occasionally keeps only a few photograms out of three hours' shooting; but it is well and truly montage that enables him to achieve those moving plant tissues, with their carnivorous suppleness, peaceful and pitiless at the same time, which constitute without any doubt the most successful attempt, in Western art, at representing how plants see the world.  [...] That feeling of desolation, too, that takes hold of us as the portraits of the human beings who had accompanied Jed Martin through his earthly life fall apart under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming in the last videos to make themselves the symbols of the generalized annihilation of the human species.  They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants.  Then everything becomes calm.  There remains only the grass swaying in the wind.  The triumph of vegetation is total.

So, you know, it ends like literally every Houllebecq novel ends, with the human race in some combination of dead, dying, or deserving to die.  So it does have that to recommend it.

But I can't say I was disappointed.  I knew it wouldn't be as good as The Possibility of an Island, and was unlikely to be as good as Platform, Elementary Particles, or Extension of the Domain.  But you know what was really missing?  The dozens of pages of padding in the form of bluntly phrased pornography.  What the fuck happened, you fucking drunk, did you grow up?  Lame.

Of course, since the rest of you are cultureless abominations, I suppose I'll discuss it with Mihali when the booze wears off. 

[Capetan Mihali]

OMFG spoilers!     I'm 50 pages in.

[Ideologue]

OMFG spoilers!     I'm 50 pages in.

Sorry.  I thought you'd already finished.

I also tend to be spoiler-proof myself and I forget other people are sensitive.  But I don't think I really spoiled it, as you'll see; I mean, unless the spoiler was "It wasn't as good as previous books."

[Capetan Mihali]

OMFG spoilers!     I'm 50 pages in.

Sorry.  I thought you'd already finished.

Oh, I'm finished alright...

[Ideologue]

OMFG spoilers!     I'm 50 pages in.

Sorry.  I thought you'd already finished.

Oh, I'm finished alright...

Oh, come on.  Seriously?

[Capetan Mihali]

OMFG spoilers!     I'm 50 pages in.

Sorry.  I thought you'd already finished.

Oh, I'm finished alright...

Oh, come on.  Seriously?

Want to make something of it, pretty boy?

[Ideologue]

I am sorry.

[Capetan Mihali]

What do your damn italics mean?   

[Ideologue]

To emphasize that I am, in fact, sorry, apologetic, and contrite.

If I hampered your enjoyment of a book by my favorite author, I feel bad.

I also suggest you keep reading, because it gets good toward the end, and I don't think my spoiler (and it was inadvertent ) is going to fuck up the experience irreversibly.

I mean, Houellebecq isn't a twisty dude.  I knew the entire plot to Elementary Particles and Platform before I read them... but then again, that may be because I'm impervious to having my shit ruined (I knew how Sixth Sense ended and it didn't bug me), so sometimes I'm an asshole who doesn't take others' different approach to fiction into consideration; although I did think you were done, I should have probably checked or tagged it in some fashion.  Like I said, I feel bad now.

[Capetan Mihali]

  No, I never give a shit about spoilers, I was joking entirely.   SHE JUMPS IN FRONT OF A TRAIN -- "Anna Karenina" is still worth reading.