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What is everybody reading?

Finished Moonraker by Ian Fleming. It is well chaptered and was a relatively quick read for what time I put into it. This one was definitely better than Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming. There was quite a good card game and the action near the end was much better and tense, and the story was decent. The only part that was a bit of an eye-roll moment was at the end. I won't spoil it too hard but Bond doesn't quite get the girl, but other than that it was actually a decent Bond adventure overall.

I'd recommend it, which is a lot more than I can say for Diamonds Are Forever.

Next up I'll be starting On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming.
 
Atreyu said:
Finished Moonraker by Ian Fleming. It is well chaptered and was a relatively quick read for what time I put into it. This one was definitely better than Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming. There was quite a good card game and the action near the end was much better and tense, and the story was decent. The only part that was a bit of an eye-roll moment was at the end. I won't spoil it too hard but Bond doesn't quite get the girl, but other than that it was actually a decent Bond adventure overall.

I'd recommend it, which is a lot more than I can say for Diamonds Are Forever.

Next up I'll be starting On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming.
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While I’m a relative defender of the original, I’ve been calling for a remake of OHMSS for years now. I was hoping they’d do it with the Craig Bond, but it would be a great way to launch a new Bond too. Unfortunately it probably isn’t action packed enough for modern audiences.
 
I am about to start reading this...

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Moe_Syzlak said:
While I’m a relative defender of the original, I’ve been calling for a remake of OHMSS for years now. I was hoping they’d do it with the Craig Bond, but it would be a great way to launch a new Bond too. Unfortunately it probably isn’t action packed enough for modern audiences.
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I'll have to see. As long as it's got a bit more action than Diamonds Are Forever then I don't think I'll be able to complain much in that department. I'll include comparisons in my review anyway.
 
Finished On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming. It is well chaptered and was a relatively quick read. Easily the best Bond book out of Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker. It does have plenty of action, but it also has a lot of well built up tense moments, and the best part is Bond's alias is actually vital and important to the "mission". Ends on a nice cliffhanger moment too, it's a really well done story overall and would absolutely recommend it.

Next I'll be reading through a 14 book collection of Pokemon.
 
Finished reading the 14 book box set collection of Pokemon. Each book is a fairly quick read, and they read as episodes of the anime in text form, because that is what they are. The storyline of the books are also not linear; the first book begins with the main character being tasked with fetching a GS Ball, but then the books shift to way further down in the TV Show seasons, and then the last book goes back to before the previous books timeline wise.

However, I cannot blame the books for dropping the GS Ball story, because the anime did the exact same thing; it was a scrapped story arc for the "Celebi" pokemon creature because they opted to make it the focus of the 4th Pokemon movie instead of a TV show arc. However it would've been nice if this book set covered the "what could have been" of the cancelled TV Show arc of Celebi, could've been a must have for Pokemon fans (this is also a restored event in the classic Pokemon Crystal Gameboy Color game), however as it stands they are just cherry picked Pokemon episodes in book form, and you'd get a more complete story simply by watching the anime.

If you're expecting to get something different from what you might see in the anime, you'll be disappointed here.

Next will be Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald by J.K. Rowling.
 
Moe_Syzlak said:
Just finished The Secret History. Apparently this is part of a whole genre called “dark academia.” 🤷‍♂️ It was okay. You can tell this is a freshman effort. The characters are thinly drawn and the beginning of the story takes too long to get going. And worst of all, for me, was the writing itself which is constantly punctuated by “he said” over and over again with little to no variation. It is clearly trying to be a modern take on Crime and Punishment. And, like that novel, there is nary a likable character in sight. However, unlike this novel, I found Crime and Punishment compelling. That’s not to say this is a bad book; it just doesn’t quite live up to the hype for me.
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Well I finally finished this last night. I honestly don't know what to think of it. I did like the writing style, but I found the characters all totally unlikable and largely interchangeable. I don't understand any of their motivations for the entire last third of the book after the murder. (I understand the motivations for the murder, even if they were bad.)
 
asterixsmeagol said:
Well I finally finished this last night. I honestly don't know what to think of it. I did like the writing style, but I found the characters all totally unlikable and largely interchangeable. I don't understand any of their motivations for the entire last third of the book after the murder. (I understand the motivations for the murder, even if they were bad.)
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I’ve got Goldfinch sitting on my shelf but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it due to the sour taste in my mouth after Secret History. Rarely has a book so vociferously praised left me completely baffled as to what those readers found compelling.
 
The Eternals (by Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.)
Gaiman has moved off much more into novels and TV these days, but he's still turned out some comic series or graphic novels in the past decade or two. The Eternals is one such, nowhere near on the level of his seminal '90s/early '00s work, but something I was happy enough to check out since it came free with an Amazon trial.

I'd heard that the recent MCU film took inspiration from this story, but man is that a stretch. There are things about this that work pretty well, and Chloe Zhao's movie took basically none of them. Or what it did use, it altered enough to lessen its impact. It's just absolutely stunning how many recent Marvel projects have writers thinking they know better than what fans already liked, and then wondering why the films get so criticized.

One of the greatest parts about the story is that by comparison to that in the film, it's both bigger and smaller at the same time. Gaiman's setup is that there are Eternals all over the world, but they've all lost who they are and so are now living relatively normal existences, waiting to find out that they've actually been instrumental in forming the history of the peoples of Earth. We start on Mark Curry (Makkari), who's interning at a hospital while seeking his medical doctorate. He's always working extra shifts, sleep deprived and half-delirious, so when a random dude on the Chicago streets starts telling him he needs to explain to him how the force that created the world is inside him, and the power to make his life whatever he wants is in his hands if he just connects with the universe... well, it's easy for him to dismiss him as a religious nutjob.

That nutjob turns out to be Ikarus, the sort of white knight of the Eternals, who has partially remembered who he is and is trying to track down other Eternals. He becomes the sort of Sean Connery to Mark's Christopher Lambert in this Highlander-esque setup. Despite there being around 100 other Eternals out there, the story mainly focuses on these two, Sersi, Thena, Sprite, and Druig, and damn if this isn't the biggest mistake that the film made. Essentially having 4 protagonists and 2 quasi-antagonists is enough, besides another shadowy one in the wings. This story seeds the potential for a whole future expansion with more Eternals and more deep-diving into how the different types have influenced different cultures and god-myths across history. But Zhao decided she needed a dozen of them, all at once, with just some passing BS explanations of their impact on the world.

The other great difference here is in the entire treatment of the Deviants, a sort of other race in opposition to the Eternals. Gaiman envisions them as the height of genetic variation, an experiment that the creators of all this (the Celestials) come back to "harvest" periodically, presumably to bolster their own growth. Essentially, they become the food of the gods. But meanwhile on Earth, they're runaway genetic chaos: nightmare versions of living beings with untold limbs, faces, etc. They have learned to wear human skin to blend in, and act as sort of shadowy Illuminati influencers as opposed to the Eternals outright godlike interactions with humans. Zhao's film totally scraps all of this, from the visualizations to the motivations, and subs in some generic CG monster baddies instead.

Gaiman's Eternals unfurls as a gradual mystery, subverting superheroic expectations for much of the first 2/3s. I don't love where it eventually goes and I think a couple narrative changes would have been better off left out of the film adaptation (so those of course are the ones they kept), but it's hard to argue that it's the best story with these characters in probably the last 50 years. Until the end, they actually have personality and an identifiable raison d'etre. It convinced me that really all the good things about the film The Eternals are in the machinery of Marvel Studios' production, the costume design, etc. Zhao really did whiff this one, her vision of what this story could be just vastly exceeded her grasp.
 
Moe_Syzlak said:
I’ve got Goldfinch sitting on my shelf but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it due to the sour taste in my mouth after Secret History. Rarely has a book so vociferously praised left me completely baffled as to what those readers found compelling.
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Oh I didn't realize those were by the same person. I read The Goldfinch a few years ago and hated it. My wife liked it, so take that with a grain of salt.
 
Finished Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald by J.K. Rowling. Super fast read, I got through it in a single night. It isn't really chaptered since it's a screenplay. Overall it was enjoyable although I don't actually know if a screenplay exists for the first Fantastic Beasts movie, if it does then I should probably have read that first because this one continues off from the events of the first and I haven't actually read that yet although I have seen the film, as a result getting re-introduced to the characters in book form left me searching my memory to put a face to the names. Would've been a much more enjoyable read without needing to do that, but that is partly my fault for starting with the second book.

It was alright, it's a screenplay of the movie so if you liked the movie you'll like the book. Although coming out of reading the Harry Potter books, I found myself enjoying Dumbledore's character more off the pages than I did in the movies, because my version of Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books I could apply to this in younger form, and worked better for me than the movie for his character.

Next will be Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams.
 
Finished Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams. It was a relatively swift read, it was mostly well chaptered, a few chapters being shorter than others, but that is par the course for some books.

Not much to be said, it is the story of the video game fleshed out to fill a book. For what it was it was enjoyable, but you'd probably get just as good an experience from watching a cut together cutscene movie of the video game. Or simply play the game, because the book did make me remember when I played the game and it made me miss playing it, because it was a fun Star Wars game.

Recommended for those who want to experience the story and have no desire to seek out and/or play the video game.

Next will be Star Wars: The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster.
 
I recently started Memories of Ice, the third entry in Steven Erickson's Malazan Book of the Fallen.
 
Finished Star Wars: The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster. Relatively quick read, decently chaptered. Not much to say since it's basically the film in text form although the book has a few moments that I don't recall seeing in the movie, but it's been a while since I've watched the movie so maybe they are, maybe not.

It was still entertaining enough to read.

Next I've started Black Adder: The Whole Damn Dynasty.
 
Just finished The Lincoln Highway. Now moving on to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. The only Sanderson I’ve read is his contributions to the Wheel of Time. I’m skeptical Sanderson is for me, but I thought I’d give it a go.
 
Finished Black-Adder: The Whole Damn Dynasty. Great book. Well chaptered. It contains the script for all 4 seasons of the TV Show, but also includes extra stuff, with small little artistic drawings on every other page, as well as extra funny things not in the show. A very fun book despite it being quite a large book.

Recommended for anyone who liked the show as a whole.

I had attempted to start "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, but I simply could not get past the first chapter. As such I can't give it a genuine review.

After skipping a lengthy introduction by someone I don't know of that consists of a decent chunk of the book, I was finally able to get to the first chapter, only to be completely perplexed by it.

Now, as someone who was able to read Bram Stoker's Dracula fairly easily despite the occasional old wording, A Clockwork Orange was impossible for me personally. At least Dracula had a sort of dictionary at the end of the book to explain what the words mean; A Clockwork Orange doesn't provide that comfort. It uses slang and made up words where most of my time was spent trying to work out what the hell each word meant, instead of simply being able to read it and settle into the story, with such fake words I could barely determine what was going on story wise.

As someone who was looking forward to reading this, I am left utterly disappointed. My only hope would be if there is a publicated version where the words are actual English, words that actually exist in a real dictionary, and not just made up words that I can't wrap my head around.

As it stands currently, I think I'll just stick to watching the movie.

So next I'll be reading "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Phillip K. Dick.
 
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Atreyu said:
Finished Black-Adder: The Whole Damn Dynasty. Great book. Well chaptered. It contains the script for all 4 seasons of the TV Show, but also includes extra stuff, with small little artistic drawings on every other page, as well as extra funny things not in the show. A very fun book despite it being quite a large book.

Recommended for anyone who liked the show as a whole.

I had attempted to start "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, but I simply could not get past the first chapter. As such I can't give it a genuine review.

After skipping a lengthy introduction by someone I don't know of that consists of a decent chunk of the book, I was finally able to get to the first chapter, only to be completely perplexed by it.

Now, as someone who was able to read Bram Stoker's Dracula fairly easily despite the occasional old wording, A Clockwork Orange was impossible for me personally. At least Dracula had a sort of dictionary at the end of the book to explain what the words mean; A Clockwork Orange doesn't provide that comfort. It uses slang and made up words where most of my time was spent trying to work out what the hell each word meant, instead of simply being able to read it and settle into the story, with such fake words I could barely determine what was going on story wise.

As someone who was looking forward to reading this, I am left utterly disappointed. My only hope would be if there is a publicated version where the words are actual English, words that actually exist in a real dictionary, and not just made up words that I can't wrap my head around.

As it stands currently, I think I'll just stick to watching the movie.

So next I'll be reading "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Phillip K. Dick.
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Burgess was a linguist. He used this made up language or slang (I forget the name of the language) very intentionally. It’s a feature not a fault of the storytelling. It is meant to be difficult to penetrate. Alex and his friends—as do many subcultures—use this language as a way to keep from being understood by the larger society they wish to remain apart from. I understand it can be difficult, but I think you’ll find it rewarding if you stick it out.
 
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