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Anyone else read the Dark Tower books? After seeing the film was out I thought I ought to see what all the fuss was about.

I won't bother with the film but I just started book 6 of the 7 and wow it is good. I haven't felt bored once! Unlike the endless walking of LotR, this is totally epic. Love it, love the characters and will be sad when it is over.

Some I have read in a few days, couldn't put them down. Others are far too long for me to achieve that.

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  • 3 months later...

As I've been starting to feel better I've been trying to get into reading again. Also I really need to reduce my screen time and I figure it's not good to have hobbies which are just looking at blinding lights on LCDs all day when that's what my job is also, don't want to get early onset macular degeneration (if I don't already have it)

 

So I picked up the lightest read possible which is Christmas Carol on kindle. Not a lot to say about it really as every adaptation of it ever made is pretty much scene for scene. But it's good enough at putting the fear in you of not wasting your life as a miserable, lonely cunt at this time of year and resolve to do better with the time you've got left. Wonder if it's the reason we have NY resolutions.

 

I've also being trying to read something very different to that. Pourtnoy's Complaint by the late Phil Roth. It's about this neurotic guy complaining to his shrink about his upbringing or whatever. I've only read two chapters but the second one is called "Whacking off" and is a lengthy and very descriptive essay on wanking and includes some real literary gems which I'm afraid to print here but yea it sure is something. I'm just not sure it's something I can read the whole way through tho

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I’ve always loved reading,but I’m struggling to read for pleasure at the moment. What with burying myself in a 20,000 word dissertation,I’m predominantly reading journals or articles.

 

My girlfriend got me “Ask an Astronaut” by Tim Peake for Xmas,which is really interesting. All about what it takes to become an astronaut,and what life in space is genuinely like. Fascinating. 

 

I got here “This is going to hurt” by Adam Kay,which I read in one sitting this summer. I literally couldn’t put it down,it was both hilarious,and moving. One of the best books I’ve ever read. The only other book ive binged in one session is The Martian,which was excellent from start to finish.

 

 

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I got This Is Going To Hurt for my birthday and could not put it down either.

 

Got a couple of books for Christmas - The Games Console by Evan Amos (more photographic, with tear downs of famous consoles and controllers) and Nostalgia Nerd's Retro-Tech.

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  • 1 month later...

A Man Of Shadows by Jeff Noon
I read a decent amount of Jeff Noon in the early to mid 1990s. I really loved his psychedelic science fiction in books like Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation. They were creative, dreamlike and his writing almost lyrical. I don’t know why, but I never thought about or sought out anything else from him after the late 90’s.

 

I found this new-ish book from him recently and had a great time. It’s still creative and dreamlike in many ways. It’s a private detective story set in a strange city which lives under a sky of lights, to the extent that it has eradicated night.

 

The story starts in like a regular enough detective murder thriller, but the stuff I liked most is about what does time mean in a place where there is no midnight, or noon. Does it matter how many hours are in a day? Or what an hour is?

 

People and corporations create and live on their own 'timelines', to the extent that there are so many, people are adjusting their watches to the building/company/neighborhood timeline multiple times a day. The effect on people’s minds and health was the stuff I found really interesting.

 

 

 

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
It’s an Agatha Christie style murder mystery, complete with an English country mansion, full of characters who all have secrets to hide, and a character who must solve a murder that doesn’t look like a murder.

 

Throw in a liberal amount of time-looping, and Quantum Leap style body-hopping, it makes for an entertaining (if a little meandering) whodunnit.

 

 

 

I’m halfway through The Sudden Appearance Of Hope by Claire North.
Hope Arden is a woman who nobody remembers. Her family and friends forgot her at age 16, instead merely seeing a stranger met for the first time each time they see her. Anyone new she meets forgets her within minutes of being out of range of sight or hearing.

 

In the book she is in her twenties, living a lonely existence. Stealing to live, or for excitement, stealing items of value of from the elite to have some kind of impact on the world.

 

When a woman she knew commits suicide, seemingly driven by feelings of inadequacy caused by an enormously popular and incredibly invasive “Life Improvement” app called Perfection, she dedicates herself to trying to take it and the company responsible for it down.

I’m enjoying it a hell of a lot so far.

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  • 1 month later...

I've been reading a weird book lately. House of Leaves, it's about this old dude who develops an obsession with this house a photographer bought. Basically (spoiler alert) it turns out the house has a P.T. hallway in it, so the photographer goes in documenting his findings. Which this old guy finds and he writes a big thesis on it, going crazy in the process. Which the main character then finds later on and throughout the book is scribbling notes which a lot of the time appear to have nothing to do with the source of the mystery.

 

Anyway that's just like the first seventy pages or so, so dunno where this goes. But it's kind of like a game. There's this one part where you have to decipher a letter written by another character based on a code. Another section has the text all backwards, so you point the book in a mirror to read it. Other parts have you looking at photos of clippings to figure out stuff.

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Helen McDonald - H is for Hawk (Costa book of the year winner)

 

 

When Helen's father dies, she buys a goshawk and tries to train it. In returning to a childhood hobby and re-reading classic books on falconry, Helen deals with her grief and grows close to the hawk (who she calls Mabel).

 

About a third of the way through and it's as brilliant as advertised.

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On 14/04/2019 at 12:57, one-armed dwarf said:

I've been reading a weird book lately. House of Leaves, it's about this old dude who develops an obsession with this house a photographer bought. Basically (spoiler alert) it turns out the house has a P.T. hallway in it, so the photographer goes in documenting his findings. Which this old guy finds and he writes a big thesis on it, going crazy in the process. Which the main character then finds later on and throughout the book is scribbling notes which a lot of the time appear to have nothing to do with the source of the mystery.

 

Anyway that's just like the first seventy pages or so, so dunno where this goes. But it's kind of like a game. There's this one part where you have to decipher a letter written by another character based on a code. Another section has the text all backwards, so you point the book in a mirror to read it. Other parts have you looking at photos of clippings to figure out stuff.

 

Fucking. Love. This. Book.

 

I have a tattoo on my collarbone lifted directly from it.

 

Enjoy.

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  • 2 weeks later...

959e2c903e2e68b8bdea2a80281857ed15541264

This is the first actual novel for the series. I'm not surprised given the extended hiatus' Miura has taken with the series since it started in 1989, that they have decided to branch out to ancillary media. Only five chapters in so far and it is less than 200 pages, so it won't be a long read. The overall tone of uncompromising brutality and misery is still on point, in spite of Miura himself not directly writing this time.  

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  • 2 weeks later...

Berserk: The Flame Dragon Knight

 

Here's the thing, if you knew who Grunbeld was from reading the Manga, you already know how this ends. To be fair, even with passing knowledge of Berserk, as soon as you see this story features a Beherit, you know how this ends. What the book amounts to is an enjoyable prequel. It doesn't really take anything away from Grunbeld's character within the Manga, in an overexposure kind of way, yet it doesn't really add to it either. The supporting cast are basically tropes, unfortunately.  The Muira drawings within, further highlighting how similar the characters of Edvard and Sigur are, to those he has already done before. Not bad for a first novelisation 6.5/10

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1 minute ago, wiivo 2.0 said:

Are they actually books? ?

As mentioned, The Flame Dragon Knight is the first actual book of the series. There is a single drawn image about every two to three chapters, the rest is text. 

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