What are you reading? (Page 6 of 11)

Yeah, I can understand that (I'm pretty okay with On the Road, and it has the same problem).

Reamde - I decided to pick this up based on Teague's recommendation from the Berks episode. The exposition takes a little while, but after that...god damn. Very intense, fast paced writing. Definitely good stuff.

Game of Thrones - It has taken me over a year to get through this book. It's not that it's bad written, but the show has done an exquisite job adapting the material to the point where it's basically interchangeable. And, to be honest, I found the books a little boring (and I absolutely love LOTR, I read that shit every year.) I don't think I'll continue with reading the series. The show is good enough for me.

I'm planning on reading  11/22/63 and Already Dead next.

Just re-read The Great Gatsby in advance of the film. Not sure how the movie is going to work, considering that the book is actually pretty light on plot.

None of the prior adaptations of Gatsby that I've seen are particularly impressive, including the Robert Redford one for which Coppola was the screenwriter. Some of the novel's main themes seem so specific to the time in which it was written.

That's it alright. It's in part a critique of the vacuous pleasure-seeking and cynicism of upper-class folks in the 1920s... but, yeah, that critique is bound to feel less urgent for us here in the present day. And probably less so on the big screen.

I read it recently, too, and there's a heavy sadness to the novel that I'm eager to see how Baz Luhrman handles. His movies seem to love swinging tonally from exuberance to melancholy, sometimes in the same scene.

Are you taking preorders on that yet?

Well, the advance reviews of Gatsby are currently trending negative. Di Caprio, however, seems to be getting some praise. It's a tough part to cast, since Gatsby is classy, but the whole point is it's an inauthentic, affected kind of classy. He's basically a poser. So you need someone who can do the classy-handsome-man thing but at the same time give off that undercurrent of pathetic overreaching.

I was skeptical about DiCaprio, but he's so talented that I'm not surprised he does well with the role.

That said, Michael Fassbender as Jay Gatsby...now I'm disappointed that it's not him.

James McAvoy and JGL are a lot better for Nick, though. Definitely better than Tobey fucking Maguire.

Joel Edgerton is a good choice too, but his mustache just SCREAMS villain. He looks like the kind of guy who ties maidens to railroad tracks.

Finished A Storm of Swords in anticipation of season 3 of the show.

I really liked it. It was more twisty and turny than the previous two books. There were some downright badass character moments and more than a few jaw dropping surprises.

Knowing what's coming, I can't wait to see what people have to say after the season finale.

Oh, hey, Teague. I heard you mention Robert Charles Wilson's Spin on one of the podcasts. I read that book a couple of years ago and loved it, too.

A Storm of Shits?

Since my last update, I've read:

Old Man's War - John Scalzi

A great premise with an execution that mostly failed to engage me. Neither the plot nor the characters were compelling to me. I became more and more frustrated with how the book handed out exposition and none of the banter was as witty as I suspect Scalzi thought it was when he wrote it.

Harlan Ellison's Watching

Harlan Ellison being Harlan Ellison: Angry and occasionally stubbornly wrong, but always enjoyable.

Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There - Tom Davis

A collection of scattered anecdotes that I wish had been presented more chronologically and with a better sense of an actual narrative to it. Also wish it actually had been more about SNL and less about Tom Davis himself, who is someone I ended up not really liking by the end.

Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live - Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller

Loved this one.
 
Pet Sematary

Yeah, so... It's definitely another Stephen King book. I wouldn't say there are any surprises here, but it's also probably one of the better 'regular' King books. Whatever that means...

The Ghost Brigades - John Scalzi

"So, Hansen if you didn't like Old Man's War, why did you read the sequel?"

Good question! And an even better question considering I didn't particularly like this one either. I suppose I read this one because I wanted to give Scalzi one more chance to win me over. Unfortunately it was more of the same and I won't be reading any more Scalzi any time soon. I suspect he's not a writer for me.

Next, I'm reading Slaughterhouse 5 and maybe Jurassic Park. Maybe.

Started and bailed on audiobooks for both Under the Dome and Footfall. You could play Stephen King Bingo with all the tired tropes and archetypes King slaps on the page (everyone thinks in obscure song lyrics and they're somehow all thinking of the SAME obscure song lyrics all the time; religious villain has an idiosyncratic cursing vocabulary; etc.), and Footfall was just not engaging to me in the slightest. Both felt like homework and when I realized that I stopped listening.

Meanwhile, I read Joyland in about a week and enjoyed it. It's light fare and has a supernatural element slugged in that the rest of the story frankly did fine without, but since it wasn't such a major time investment the somewhat weak ending didn't bother me, and pretty much none of King's self-conscious Stephen Kingness gets in the way.

I'm now reading Watership Down, a book I've heard a lot about but never read before. The rabbits just got to Cowslip's warren and I'm pretty sure they're going to get eaten or something.

Also reading Lest Darkness Fall, in which a 20th century man travels back to Imperial Rome (fuck you, that's how) and tries to stop the Dark Ages from occurring. In the vein of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, it's more a comedy than a thriller, in the sense that it is completely a comedy and not at all a thriller.