The one BigJackBrass found looks as though it might have been generated off a summary of the book, though (school sporting competition). That other, they didn’t even take that much trouble.
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Barnes and Noble is having a 25% off everything in the store (except LEGO, the bastards), so my wife and I went and took a look around yesterday. Ended up spending about $165, but got a lot of things.
One of which was the first collection of the Batman '89 comics. These continue Tim Burton’s run of Batman, about a year or so after Batman Returns. In this series, we get to see the Billy Dee Williams version of Harvey Dent become Two-Face and how that affects Batman and Gotham. It’s pretty dang good! Helps that the writer is Sam Hamm, who wrote the original film and at least contributed to the sequel.
The artwork is great, the characters easily recognizable as their actors at the time. And despite the film canon recognizing that the four Batman films by Burton and Schumacher are all supposed to be the same characters and world, this comic completely disregards that, ignoring anything Schumacher brought to the table.
I will need to pick up the sequel series.
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I should really read A Life with Footnotes
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I have it on the shelf from (last Christmas? The one before?) and must get around to reading it.
(But my to-be-read shelf is large and mighty)
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Its entertaining - Rob has a good writing style.
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I also have it sat waiting to be read. Along with a dwindling number of Pratchett books …
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I have mixed feelings about Stross’ books (Stross himself seems solid, which is always nice). The ideas are interesting and he writes good stories around them. However, they are often uncompromisingly brutal (the last one I read involves the mass slaughter of everyone in, as it turns out, the part of Leeds where I was living at the time*) and I have to be in a very specific mood to read them.
*in hindsight I think, but no longer recall clearly, this could have been prevented by any of the characters realising the defence systems were tuned to “human” on a group of people including a non-human, but everyone seemed to overlook this. Probably intentional, but never brought up.
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I remember being quite startled by this as well, and I feel much the same way – it’s a while since I last read one, and that’s partly because I’d wanted to take a break from it after I’d finished that book, and switched to something less grim.
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I liked the first few Laundry books but I think they suffered from escalating stakes, Stross trying to imitate the style of Peter O’Donnell (who was frankly a much better writer), and the later ones having been banged out in a week or two and apparently not revised by anyone. (Reviews on my blog.)
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I really liked Accelerando when I read it years ago.
I avoid the Laundry books because, much like Rivers of London, I’m not going to spend precious free time on something that’s guaranteed to have needless brutality. I like dark but come on.
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At Christmas, my parents gave me money. My mom never knows what to get me, I never know what to ask for and I know it stresses her out, so just give me money. Today what I bought with said money arrived:
That’s the whole series, around 3,000 pages of comic book. Thanks, mom and dad!
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On the topic of Stross, I finished Accelerando. It was fine.
The back half of the book was much better than the first half. It felt like there was an actual plot, that things were actually happening and not just a series of loosely connected random events.
That stated, the ending was very deus ex machina for my tastes, and a lot of the solutions to problems are kinda handled “off-screen,” but I’m glad I finished it.
I’m now about 3/4 of the way through Gamechanger by LX Beckett, and it’s pretty good. Near future science fiction about our planet and its culture in the aftermath of environmental catastrophe and people working togther to design a post-capitalism system. It’s neat. Less blue-sky than Accelerando, but with some really interesting technology and cultural elements. I’m curious about how it will end, and the mystery elements have been very satisfying thus far.
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Most recent actual reads:
Over Christmas I read a stack of web novels I’d downloaded for long journeys, chosen for probably not requiring much focus. Notable read was A Probability Experiment Turned Me Into A Clockwork Girl And I Really Don’t Know What To Make Of It All which is a decent story about identity and making sense of our own lives - I’d honestly expected something more like a generic adventure or romance and was favourably impressed.
I started Marx’s The Chimera’s Secret (and had fun) but happened to hit the kidnapping section right when the news also turned into all about kidnapping, so I’m giving that a break until I can appreciate it properly. Instead I’m reading The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, which I’m enjoying.
It does strike me that occult/folkorific weird stories in urban areas tend very heavily towards London (occasionally Edinburgh, Oxford, or Cambridge), and I’m wishing people would write some about Leicester, or Hull, or Swansea…
I also read The Victorian Household, which is largely about servants and their lives and how that intersected with the employers and with society in general. Short but interesting if you like that sort of thing (like me).
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I at last finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It took me four tries but I made it.
It’s a rewarding read but I think it’s at the edge of being so densely written that it may require more effort than a recreational reader wants to apply. I feel like I’m on the absolute edge of a generational age where I could read this without footnotes
In retrospect it was an error on my part to try and start with this one. For this try I made it through V. and Crying of Lot 49 before starting in and that made a big difference. Both are much more accessible works
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I read Gravity’s Rainbow immediately after reading focault’s Pendulum, my first year of college. I read both with a couple other people (different groups), and we met once a week or so to discuss and compare our notes. I had over 100 pages of notes (handwritten!) for each of them. An annotated version would have been wonderful, and would have saved me a whole bunch of time tracking down references and allusions. (How the hell I had the energy for that, along with school work, I have no idea.).
I kind of have been thinking I should reread some Pynchon (I have read everything up to Mason and Dixon).
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