Topic: Nintendo Life Book Club

I've finished up Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (The Fight Club guy), I've always liked his books but he does seem to have lulls where it's a good premise and not much else so I put this off as I thought it would be not much more than The Breakfast Club in hell but I found it to be one of his stronger novels, probably his funniest too. The characters voice of a snarky spoilt brat really works and does some nice world building in hell treating it like prison like sweets are currencies, everyone lies why they got sent there etc. Thumbs up for me and I'm off to order the sequel now.

Ranger's Apprentice and Percy Jackson are my favourites books
Currently at Eraks Ransom and The Mark of Athena
I really recommend these series

@Kaioken The Percy Jackson books are fantastic! When I was younger they got me into Greek mythology, which I'm interested in to this day...

In that have you heard of "Mythos" and "Heroes" by Stephen Fry? Those two books also cover Greek mythology and are extremely funny to boot. With a lot of wit, good dialogue and masterful storytelling.

Began listening to Lorelei James audiobooks, having just started her Bound series. I'd post the YT video, but it's...steamy. Probably over the line as far as NL's community rules are concerned. If you're in the mood for a good piece of romance / smut you can find it easily enough. Work-safe, if you're using ear buds, pods, or headphones.

Adding to my Tolkien collection. Just picked up the children of hurin and beren and luthien (I expect this one to put me to sleep but I will power through it).

Also grabbed Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler and African American Poetry: 250 years of struggle and song. I will have to read the poetry anthology in chunks as I suspect a great deal of it will make me cry.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and also reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. Who else are Toni Morrison fans?

look at all these book reading dorks!
even if i knew how to read i still wouldnt read books!

I started reading A Clash of Kings (George R.R. Martin) in July 2020. I’ve now finished like nine chapters. It is so unbelievably tough to read. Anyone feel this way or am I just compromising my reading?

@TheJGG Clash of clans

Hehe, I was on a book reading roll earlier this year, but just kinda… Stopped at random. My brother’s wife bought a new kindle paperwhite and was all happy about it, and that made me remember mine. Surprisingly it was still holding charge even though I left it with the wifi turned on all this time.

I’m still not done reading Bioshock Rapture, but I decided to look around the store for something new, and downloaded a trial version of Anaconda: The Writer’s Cut, basically a “novelization” of the movie made by the writer of the original screenplay, containing his own vision and ideas for the story. And it seems right up my alley! So I bought the full book (it was pretty cheap too).

So I’ll be putting Rapture on hold and read this one instead.

Update: basically I instead decided to instead read Rapture, Anaconda, and Jurassic Park all at the same time, trying to keep the percentages similar between all three. It’s been pretty fun because they kind of have a similar structure and progress at similar paces. I’m now halfway through them.

I also bought 1984 and The Shining for my brother, since he’s got a new found interest in reading and likes that sort of story. So I’ll read that at some point as well.

I’m also planing to buy Pet Sematary.

@Eel I need to re-read 1984, I read it as a kid and I want to go back to it to see if I actually understood it or not. I did the same thing with The X-Files as I thought I was a smart kid for watching it at the time but watching it as an adult I just realised The X-Files was silly nonsense instead.

I spotted this and it made me laugh;

I've never read it myself. My brother specifically asked for that one so I obliged. He now bought his own Kindle so I guess he now likes reading.

I might start it once I'm done with the three books I'm reading at the moment. I'm almost done with them!

Heh. I wonder what are the 30 (now 10) second sound bites that book is talking about... I guess they had tik tok back then, in sound form.

@Eel News programmes and newspapers changed in the 80's and 90's and gave greater and greater prominence to ever shorter hooks. I think it's really stark if you look back at news in the 50s and 60s and you'll see quite long speeches broadcast or transcribed in full. By the 90's politicians were giving interviews and speeches not to be heard in their entirety but as the delivery mechanism for a short 30 second burst - since that's all the news will broadcast or print.

Our news media is no longer a format for the dissemination or serious debate of big ideas in the way that it once was (at least in some ways).

@jump A short story I've always been partial to is "the great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. I think he had tremendous vision to see - in the 50's - what the internet and computers eventually did to creative writers & journalists and tremendous (but accurate) cynicism to see that the public would accept it willingly. The irony is that his own childrens literature is now crowded out in library's and book shops by "Daisy Meadows" stories that could be easily computer generated (if they aren't already).

@StuTwo Yeah, it largely comes from America in the 80s where Dick Cheeney and others turned over the FCC doctrine which meant news no longer had to be real news or fair leading to the rise of Fox News and idiots disguising bigotry as "being brave enough to ask the question" which has been copied around the world. The UK wasn't too bad until Boris made changes to the BBC which has resulted in it's current silliness and without having a great alternative.

I'm currently debating what to read next. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a career at a school who looks after clone kids growing up where they will be harvested for organs when they do or The One by John Marrs, a Black Mirror-esque story about a dating service which takes a DNA sample to match you up with your "soul mate".

@jump I don't want to get too deep into politics but - in this case - Johnson is not actually the issue.

Almost from the beginning news broadcasting has looked to reduce the time allocated to broadcasting what politicians actually have to say. Just a quick Google search shows that in 1968 the average "soundbite" broadcast of a politician speaking would be (unedited) 48 seconds. Today it's less than 9 seconds. The original speech might have been an hour long but all the majority of the public ever hears from it is that 9 seconds. This has happened in every Western country on commercial and non-commercial channels.

Since no-one gets to hear even 30 seconds of a speech politicians don't worry about substance in their speeches (relative to their predecessors 50 years ago). Today a 50 minute political speech is basically a delivery mechanism for a very short soundbite. There was an absurd interview with a Labour politician a few years ago (Miliband I think) where just about whatever the question he was replying with his 10 second soundbite. The footage was released to make him look like a laughing stock but what he was doing is actually pretty common practice and has been for many years.

As for the BBC news, that's been in a terminal decline for decades. Instead of critical analysis of the facts about a major complex issue - they'll often just conduct a "Vox Pop" from some awful high street where they ask any (completely un-informed) passers by what their opinion is and they'll get a 5-10 second answer. It's either a shameful abdication of duty by the journalists or the best efforts from people who are woefully unqualified to be in their job.

Ah Anaconda is officially finished. The first of the three books I’ve been reading concurrently.

It was a nice read, with things that make you go “this became that in the movie”, but almost entirely different from the movie at the same time.

It took its time setting things up, and sometimes it was a bit hard to keep a logical mental image of what was happening, specially in the final encounter with the last Anaconda (yes there’s multiple), but still, it had all the camp and action you’d expect from a disaster movie and was ultimately fun to read.

It tied up all the subplots nicely by the end, which is always good.

Started reading Catch 22. It really is quite good; the characters are authentic and the humour genuinely funny.

Finally finished vol 1 of my three-volume version of In Search of Lost Time / Rememberance of Things Past by Proust.
Very good, incredibly prolix, and wonderfully melancholy (and a bit saucy)
Only 3000 pages to go...

Should be able to finish off The Periodic Table by Primo Levy tomorrow, then onto a book by Baroness Warsi about Islam / Muslims in the UK (which in its first few pages references HHGTTG, and Matilda by Roald Dahl!)

Awright today I finished Bioshock: Rapture.

That was also fun, the beginning was a bit boring, but once Rapture started rupturing it got entertaining. I think it’s great as a companion piece to the first two games, detailing the story you get to hear in jumbled pieces via the audio tapes found through the games. It gives good context to Rapture.

Of course this also means the novel itself leaves a lot of threads without resolution, since those things get solved in the games themselves, but it does get a sense of finality.