The Idiot Board Readers Corner - General Discussion

Just finished Elon Musks book. Seriously impressive. I highly recommend it. This dude makes Steve Jobs look pathetic in terms of his vision and creativity.

 

For those who enjoyed reading GoT and other similar books do yourselves a massive favour and get into The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson and the associated books by Ian C. Esslemont.

The depth of the world that these two guys have created is simply astonishing and sucked me in faster than any book I've read before.

 

Night Film - Marisha Pessl. Get it out of the way first. The author is smoking hot. Anyway. The book, a NY set mystery about a reclusive movie director involved in cult like doings and possibly child murders, and a disgraced journalist trying to unravel the story. Think Roman Polanski meets All The President's Men meets House of Leaves. Most mysteries fall into the same tired tropes: bad writing, too much exposition with inane details, the protagonist falling into obvious traps which are mostly self inflicted, character doing stupid things to advance the plot. Pessl avoids these for the most part, which was refreshing. The story itself is kind of unique in that I really haven't read it before; it's clever, really clever. Actually suspenseful and tense. Predictable, though, but what can you do about that? It's a symptom of the genre. Anyone who has been to NY sees that the city is used as a character almost as much as the actual characters.

Luckiest Girl Alive - Jessica Knoll. Not light reading. About rape, shitty yuppies, terrible selfish people. It starts out almost like Knoll is channeling Bret Easton Ellis, but as the main character's motivations and experiences are explained it offers a satisfying bit of writing. Fairly genuine account of what it is like to experience and move on from sexual attacks (as genuine as I can fathom being a dude). Seriously, every character is a piece of shit in some way. It is highly pessimistic, and there is a tinge of "every man is awful" in there. The marketing for the book made it sound like a Gillian Flynn whodunnit knock-off, but that isn't the case at all. Character drama, not a mystery.

 

I'm still reading Harry Turtledove alternate history stuff. He's not really a great writer, but he does have a solid knowledge of history and enough imagination to make it interesting, even though he repeats himself constantly which is infuriating..


I'm currently reading his The War That Came Early series (Which is 6 books)...it poses the question What if Chamberlain never signed the Munich Accord? I'm just about through the second book and it's pretty "Meh". I bought all the books, so I'll end up plowing through them.

I recently finished off his Southern Victory series (What if the south had won the Civil War?)....it was 11 books, but a damn good story.

Before that I read his Atlantis series (3 books) which was interesting enough in it's own right.

I still say his World War/Colonization series (8 books) is his best...it poses the question "What if in the middle of WWII aliens attacked?" I've read the series multiple times.

 

If you're looking for fantasy, the big series (most of which you've probably heard of) are:

The Lord of the Rings ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia ~ C.S. Lewis
Harry Potter ~ J.K. Rowling
His Dark Materials ~ Philip Pullman
A Song of Ice and Fire ~ George R.R. Martin
The Wheel of Time ~ Robert Jordan
The Kingkiller Chronicle ~ Patrick Rothfuss
Mistborn ~ Brandon Sanderson
The Stormlight Archive ~ Brandon Sanderson
The Dark Tower ~ Stephen King

As for myself, I recently finished The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. Lewis has an amazing talent for making an incredibly boring subject fascinating (baseball statistics, wall street bond trading, high frequency trading, etc), and he does it again in Fifth Risk with the sprawling Federal bureaucracy and what exactly it does for us on a day to day and year to year basis. Somewhat inherently a condemnation of the Trump administration and the degree to which it was completely unprepared/hostile to the Federal government in a way that neither Obama nor Bush were, it does a good job of making the point that the Federal government is so large because it does so much, and to attack it without understanding what it does or why it does it is foolhardy at best.

 

I just started a re-read of The Boys in the Boat, the story of the UW rowing team which won the gold in Berlin in '38. Phenomenal writing. It actually makes you care about rowing. The author's such a great story teller that I went and searched out his other works and found Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm. I've ordered it and am greatly looking forward to reading it....it's the story of a fire in 1894 that burned 400 square miles in 4 hours.

Also, there is a new book coming out titled "Renia's Dairy", kind of a Polish Diary of Anne Frank. Renia was an 18 year old Jewish girl in Poland murdered by the Nazis. The Smithsonian has some excerpts from the book here. It's absolutely heartbreaking

 

I recently discovered SM Stirling. He's a bit long winded in a Tolkien like sense (I really don't need a 4 page description of what the meal was), but he's an incredible story teller.

I started out with his 3 book Nantucket series. It imagines the island of Nantucket (And the USCG training ship Eagle) being transported back to 1200 BC. It's a fascinating read....he creates characters you genuinely care about, and weaves a tale that draws you in. Stirling is a history professor or some damn thing besides being an author, so the whole thing is well researched for accuracy. Well, as accurate as you can get for Nantucket being transported to 1200 BC.

The follow up series to that is his 10 book Emberverse series. It kind of covers what happened to the rest of the world when Nantucket went into the past. The gist is that combustion (Internal combustion, gunpowder, anything that goes boom) no longer works, nor does electricity...and how the current world reverts to the past. It slowly becomes a very much Tolkien like tale filled with a quest and magic. I've been absolutely devouring the books in the series.

I would highly suggest the books if you're into the sci-fi, alt history, fantasy genre.

 

One of my good friends wrote a sci-fi novel that I quite enjoyed. You all should definitely have a look.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50416786-bastion-awakens

 

I've finished around 30 books since quarantine started. Thank God the library started curbside pickup.

I think the ones that stand out are by Taleb (Black Swan, Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness), Harari (Sapiens, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century) and Robert Greene (Human Nature is the latest one).

I just finished "An Economist Walked into a Brothel", and it was pretty basic, but if you are new to risk management, it's a decent intro.

Anyone read the "Gentlemen Bastards" series?

 

No I have not, but it's something I'll add to my list.

If any of you are at all interested in some of the histories of Aboriginals in Australia have a read of a book called Dark Emu. It's a bit of an eye-opener.

 

I started reading the "Destroyermen" series by Taylor Anderson a while back. I'm 6 books deep at the moment and it's a great story.

The gist of the story is during WWII an American destroyer goes through a squall and ends up in an alternative world. A world where humans didn't evolve to be the dominant species and the ship finds itself in another war between the now dominant species in this "New World."

It didn't sound that interesting to me at the beginning, but I gave it a try. It's a great read (Although it's kind of hard to keep track of all the characters sometimes, but you never lose interest in the sub plots.) Great cast of characters that you actually like and story lines that make you want to keep reading.

 

I just finished The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. It was a cool read, all about a few locals who saved a few hundred thousand manuscripts from being destroyed by Islamic MIlitants in Mali during the last decade or so.