Read any good books lately? Rate them here

[Whateverist]

I am reading a book that is absolute rubbish, but a page turner none the less.  The Great Zoo of China is kind of Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones.  Rubbishy rubbish but the flight home from Hawaii went by in a blur.

[Clueless Morgan]

lol, Whatevs

Rubbishy-rubbish books can still be entertaining to read if you're of a mind to enjoy them when you read them.


I have two hours or so left of Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. It's mostly interesting but has some theological pondering tangents that really put me off on occasion.

[Whateverist]

lol, Whatevs

Rubbishy-rubbish books can still be entertaining to read if you're of a mind to enjoy them when you read them.


I have two hours or so left of Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.  It's mostly interesting but has some theological pondering tangents that really put me off on occasion.

Well at least its interesting in turns.  I can't even picture this movie being made anywhere but Japan, using men in dragon suits who kick over paper towns.

[pocaracas]

I'm still "listening" to it, but this book has some passages which are too precious not to share!

“Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.

The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being


“If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening".”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject. ”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[concerning feminism]
“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure... To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[bennyboy]

I've been looking for a good fantasy series to get into as a long-term investment.

So far, I'm really enjoying


It has a very unique take on magic as being purely derived from the various colors of light.  Then we get to see how the best "drafters" combine the magical qualities of different colors into useful things-- almost a kind of science of magic in a sense, with enough coherence to make it reasonably believable.  I'm 1/3 in the first book, and really enjoying it. I'd say 9/10 so far, but I won't know if it's really literature until I finish.

[BrokenQuill92]

Jenny Plague-Bringer Book 4 of the Paranormals by JL Bryan. 3/5 its good but I wish there was more back story and there are too many new characters tossed in on the last book. I hate when stories toss in unestablished character on a solidly built story.

[Ravenshire]

I've been looking for a good fantasy series to get into as a long-term investment.

So far, I'm really enjoying


It has a very unique take on magic as being purely derived from the various colors of light.  Then we get to see how the best "drafters" combine the magical qualities of different colors into useful things-- almost a kind of science of magic in a sense, with enough coherence to make it reasonably believable.  I'm 1/3 in the first book, and really enjoying it.  I'd say 9/10 so far, but I won't know if it's really literature until I finish.

Great series, but...

It's not a trilogy and part four isn't due out for a while yet.

Personally, I preferred the "Night Angel" series by Weeks. If you're really into magical fantasy you should really give "The Name of the Wind," the first book in the "Kingkiller Chronicles" by Patrick Rothfuss a go. If you like your fantasy dark, I'd recommend the "Low Town" series by Daniel Polansky and/or "The Gentleman Bastard" series by "Scott Lynch."

[Clueless Morgan]

I just found Radiant Angel at Costco in paperback, so I need to investigate prices on whether the kindle version is cheaper or not and decide which to buy.

[bennyboy]

Personally, I preferred the "Night Angel" series by Weeks. If you're really into magical fantasy you should really give "The Name of the Wind," the first book in the "Kingkiller Chronicles" by Patrick Rothfuss a go. If you like your fantasy dark, I'd recommend the "Low Town" series by Daniel Polansky and/or "The Gentleman Bastard" series by "Scott Lynch."

Thanks for the advice. I will definitely look for all of those writers, though I'm not going to stop with the current series either.

I don't know what "dark" fantasy is, but I sure like the sound of it.

[Alex K]

After having read the Pinker book I wrote about upthread, I now went to the source which provides a more in-depth (albeit arguably less funny) description with more emphasis on the philosophical background



So far it looks quite promising.