Topic: Nintendo Life Book Club

@Tyranexx ooh I've seen the movie. The novel might be a bit heavy 😬

@Eel Yep, I've seen the (excellent) movie, so I sorta know what happens going in. In my experience, books can give extra nuggets of info that movies tend to leave out though, no matter how faithful the adaptation. Conversely, I've never seen The Shining outside of a couple of clips, so for the most part I'll be going in blind. I like Stephen King's material, though I confess I haven't read too much of his library yet.

@Tyranexx I rewatched the Shining today now that I finished the novel. To be honest they’re not as radically different as some people might imply, I think they complement each other quite nicely, being just different enough to enjoy them as their own thing, but clearly two versions of the same story.

Personally, I found the climax in the book to be more satisfying than in the movie. And it sometimes felt like it relied on exposition to explain things set up in the book, when it bothered to explain things that is. So I think I liked the novel better overall.

I also watched the Simpsons parody for good measure. 😅 It’s surprisingly faithful to the movie.

@Rambler eh, the plot about Jack being a failed alcoholic author is basically the main thing that is identical about both versions. The novel goes into more detail about his background and inner thoughts, while the movie simply implies those smaller details, because there’s simply no time to explain that, it rushes enough as it is.

Yes I do appreciate the visuals and design of the hotel. It basically served as a nice background while I read the book.

I did love the idea of the weeping angel-hedge animals! Though I definitely understand why they decided to go with a more passive plant-based danger 😅

Would’ve been a lot harder to make the animals look convincing and menacing.

@Rambler absolutely

Even the version in my mind looked like bad cgi 😅

@Eel Supposedly, King originally didn't like the film adaptation of The Shining but became a little more receptive to its existence in later years. From what little I do know (didn't dive too deep to avoid spoilers), the film didn't have all that much character development for Jack and supposedly made him loopy way too quickly. The novel was more...subtle about it from what I understand? Eh, better stop there before I dive too deeply into a discussion that I'll be better equipped to have once I do read the novel (and finally watch the movie).

I have seen the entire Simpsons parody, The Shinning ("You mean 'shining'." "Do ya wanna get sued?"). I knew enough about the film offhand to follow it and found it pretty entertaining! XD It's arguably one of the best Treehouse of Horror pieces.

@Tyranexx Yes, in the movie he goes from pretending to be charming straight to hard cussing at his wife for what seems to be absolutely nothing in record time.

Having read the book, it’s now easier for me to infer what’s happening with him, but watching the movie alone, Jack just seems like a complete a-h.

Haha yeah, let’s leave it there. It’ll be fun to compare them on your own once you get to it.

@Eel The movie would then indicate that Jack hadn't really changed deep down, whereas I believe he had in the novel before The Overlook fiasco. That will definitely be an interesting perspective to have post-book...and post-movie.

I read some time ago Anne of Green Gables then skipped a book and read Anne of the Island.

I skipped the second because I had just finished the first book and I got Anne of the Island when we were cleaning out my uncle's house and I decided to read it. It was really neat to jump a few years and see characters I cared about grow up, and both books are all set around places I live near or have been which is awesome.

In short to sum up how I enjoyed each book.

Anne of Green Gables: Makes me feel warm and happy.

Anne of the Island: I laughed and cried, I had a good time.

(I should add these were prints from like the 60s, and I actually prefer the wording in those tbh)

I decided to continue reading The Exorcist, since I left that one started last October.

I’m at about 25%, and so far its been pretty much beat by beat (nearly) identical to the movie, and it seems like it’ll be relatively short, too. Which is not bad.

Going through Millennium's Rule Series by Trudy Canravan as the moment.
https://www.trudicanavan.com/books/millenniums-rule-series/

On to the fourth book, not quite sure where the story is going any more as they got rid of the main bad guy in one of the previous books, but its not a bad story. I like it how we only follow two characters Tyen and Rielle and it switches between them every 10 chapters or so.

Last few nights I’ve reread Console Wars by Blake J Harris. It’s supposed to be the ultimate go to book for anything about Nintendo and Sega’s rivalry during the early 90s. It was just fine when I first read it five years ago but reading it again made me realise how aggressively mediocre the book can be at times.

The guy conducted 200 interviews with some of the best names in the business. Howard Lincoln, Tom Kalinske (portrayed as the protagonist of the story), Al Nilsen, Paul Rioux, Peter Main, et cetera. But he didn’t use any of their quotes. He recreated the whole thing using his “best jugement” and sacrificed the integrity of the book. Almost every line of dialogue in the book was made up, and it isn’t even good dialogue. It’s corny. There’s always a quip, or some snarky comments, or a long winded analogy. To quote Harrison Ford you can type this stuff but you sure as hell can’t say it.

The writing’s also like this. So many video game analogies it reads like a magazine article and not a 600 page book. He says that Nintendo dipped their “toe into this red, white and blue water” when trying their games in America, for example. Everything has to be a metaphor. Plus, exposition is delivered horribly. In an attempt to make it cohesive and avoid scene breaks (the *** triple star) the author does stuff like “suddenly Kalinske flashed back to how he started at Matchbox, wondering how he ended up here in the first place”. It’s such lazy writing and makes the tone inconsistent between a nonfiction book and a fiction book.

If any of you are writing a video game history book (like me), please don’t pull this nonsense. For the good of the genre.

Ah, as expected, The Exorcist was a shorter read, and very close to the movie. However, I’d say it’s almost like a… Director’s Cut Extended Edition of the movie… In book form… That is also the original source material. It gives really good context to the events and motivations of various characters, and as a result, story is very enjoyable- and also a lot sadder than in the movie.

Hm and that concludes the spooky novel trifecta I was stuck with… Well I do have another book I left started, a free one I got on kindle named Murder at Mile Maker 18. I suppose I’ll count that as part of the group and finish it while I still feel like reading.

Reminds me a bit of how I felt after playing Bury Me My Love, you might enjoy that game.

In terms of reading, I finished reading the Mile 18th murder novel, and decided to start reading Alan Wake. Its basically one of the first ebooks I bought with my first Kindle… but I simply never read it! Until now. Hopefully it will be less confusing than the game itself… Though I don’t remember a lot of that either.

currently re-reading Star Wars Force Heretic II

Damn, I’ve only read 12 of these. I must read more!

Out of that bunch, I've read:

• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Covered in high school)
• To Kill A Mockingbird (Also covered in high school, but I loved it so much I now own a copy)
• Harry Potter series
• The Lord of the Flies (Also in school)
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy

I'd like to get to some others on that list, such as The Giver, the Time Quintet (I recall reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet as a kid but didn't realize it was part of a series at the time), and 1984. Maybe some Steinbeck eventually too.

Thinking about I’ve probably read about 10.7 since I’ve read some but not all of the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings books.

Lord Of The Rings being banned seems odd, I can’t think of a reason why it would have been.

@jump People in the replies mention a reply by the lady that reposted it, apparently it's fake. Labelling it as an anti-woke list kinda didn't help. Could be wrong.

My primary school teacher read The Giver to us in fifth grade. It was one of the most amazing things. I don't get why it's banned at all. Guess people don't like to have their brains stimulated nowadays.

In eighth grade my English teacher read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Listened to some of the audiobook read by Sherman Alexie too. Again, why's that banned? Guess people don't like exploring other cultures.

Read Lord of the Flies a while ago. Serious existential crisis it gave me. The worst part is that this has every chance of happening. Humans are fickle creatures.

To Kill a Mockingbird was... dull. We psychoanalysed it in English and it did nothing for me. I see why it would be banned, especially by supremacists.

Harry Potter, banned?! I'll say this, Rowling did an exceptionally awful job of portraying non-English cultures, especially with names. Seamus Finnigan? Cho Chang? Parvati Patil? Anthony Goldstein?! Fleur Delacour? It's lame but not ban-worthy.

And I wonder why books are getting a bit dull lately. Nobody's daring to make books good enough to be banned.