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Whats everyone reading?

Started by Paul faplad Finch, 30 March, 2009, 10:04:36 PM

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Apestrife

Quote from: Smith on 26 September, 2017, 06:21:47 AM
I didnt like Multiversity,honestly.Its just a patchwork of ideas from better stories peppered with Grant stealing from himself.Look,Im doing the same thing Flash did in JLA #24!Thats so meta.  :-\

Heard that the Darkseid thing in seven soldiers and Final crisis also showed prior in his JLA. Well, theres more to it than that in it. Least in my opinion :)

But you like final crisis? Like flickin through the news during a super hero crisis. I like things being told a bit different like that :)

Smith

I didnt say I liked it.It had problems.Like an important tie-in being published after the event.It reads better collected,however.

Smith

I finished Part 5 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.So far,its my least favorite.Its not terrible,its just bland.

MacabreMagpie

I finished reading 'Jerusalem' last week. Enjoyed it and I'm so glad it didn't take me as long to read as I expected as I was worried I'd be stuck with it for ages but it only took around 9-10 weeks... there is a certain chapter that's infamously ball-breaking but, once I cracked the best approach to reading it, it was probably as close to a psychedelic experience as I've ever had reading a book.

TordelBack

Yep, the Lucia Joyce chapter took me an entire week (or even two - I forget) - but well worth the effort, despite my fellow commuters being subjected to my sounding out each line under my breath. Fascinating companion to one of my favourite GNs, the Talbots' superb Dotter of Her Father's Eyes.

Strangely I found the Exhibition chapter one of the hardest to get through- each painting had me flicking back to compare details, and it took ages.

Just an amazing read, and a perfect capstone to the great man's perennial themes and interests. Between this and Voice of the Fire I feel I know so much about Northampton that I could take it as my specialist subject on Mastermind.

MacabreMagpie

Ha, yeah, Northampton and it's landmarks are as much a character as it's characters.... one of his daughters, Amber, sent me a "Jerusalem treasure map" a month or so ago and I went around looking at some of the locations. The first time I've ever done a "set visit" for a book. ;p

With the Joyce chapter, I saw a recommendation to read it along with the audiobook so I tried that and - although it may be cheating a little - I was able to follow along much more than I had been and also notice all of the additional words and linguistic tricks he was throwing in. The language was unfurling and expanding very much like what happens when you "find your lucy lips", so to speak.

Colin YNWA

So as Love and Rockets enters the 20s we hit almost perfect comics at last. Since and 'American in Palomar' I've been loving, and I do mean loving Gilbert's work. Its clear I'm a Beto boy at heart. His art while not as immediate as Jamie's Beto's is more expressive and the characters so real and vital. His stories just bury into you.

So now I had Gilbert and I gneuinley went from struggling with the whole comics to absolutely loving half but still not getting on with the other. I mean its clear from letters and my knowledge of the comic (and the limited issues I read at the time WHICH I'm sure had me as a Jamie boy) that you love one brother but still reall like the other.

Jamie still sucked. He sucked less and the art was clean and appealing and slowly he was getting better. I started to like the odd story, then I really like one. Then the band hit the road and I wanted to follow the bands adventures but found as much as I thought I wanted that I was pulled back to Maggie and co back home.

Then, hold on what was happening. around 19 and 20 I was loving Beto's stories still and really liking Jamie... then issues 21-23 and the previously mentioned Death of Speedy and I was loving Beto AND I was absolutely loving Jamie too.

I've made it, I get it. Now I know what all the fuss is about and bloody hell that was, as I say at the top, almost perfect comics. Now I just want to magic the time back and see if my stuggles with the early issues was just me getting up to speed(y) or the characters and creators finding their feet?

Bolt-01


Smith

I dusted off Sonic The Comic.So many memories.  :)

Keef Monkey

I've been reading the Ghost In The Shell graphic novels for the first time on Comixology, have got through volume 1 and 1.5 and now on 2. Aside from the plot completely escaping me this time around and the artwork being quite a horrible mix of pencils and CG, it's so absolutely chock-full of massive, lovingly detailed leery crotch and arse shots and weird huge pointy lemon shaped boobs (I'm not sure the artist has ever seen real ones before on this evidence) that for the first time in years of reading comics on my commute I'm geuinely ashamed to have it out on the train and might just give up on it and move onto the Standalone Complex stuff.

Just not enjoying it, and got about another 150 pages of it to get through if I commit.

I, Cosh

Been dipping in and out of Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries. Short stories linked by a laconic narrator who is forever finding himself in unlikely situations. Proper sci-fi in the way there is no interest in or attempt to explain any of the technological aspects, that's all just scene-setting for the social satire. Some of this is a bit on the nose for me (our man's experiences as Earth's deputy to the United Planets is fairly predictable, for example) but there's enough invention and deadpan Polish wit in each story to keep me going.

I'm also about a third of the way through Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. Fuck me, this is astonishing. The vivid writing, the clear sense of the increasingly deranged voice of the narrator, the sheer effort that must have been needed to make the structure work. The book is written in the form of a critical commentary on the eponymous poem but very quickly becomes about the preoccupations, misinterpretations and delusions of the commentator. The footnotes, cross-referencing and foreshadowing involved in both even serve to make the e-book format the perfect way to experience the book. I've never read anything quite like it.

You couldn't really say the same about The Gunslinger. For various reasons (I'm a massive snob, I shy away from overlong books and I wouldn't willingly read a horror novel) I'd never read a Stephen King book but the brouhaha over the film piqued my interest. My first reaction was pleasant surprise to find this is a sci-fi/fantasy  novel conceived in the correct fashion. Which is to say, cobbled together from short stories originally published separately in magazines. Although points off for having a clear narrative arc through the stories.

Quite liked the indeterminate Mad Max with No Name set up and the first couple of stories build a nice kind of atmosphere which the third then tries to turn on its head. There are a couple of things that always put me off a book. One is characters with portentous titles rather than names. Stuff like the "The Boy" or the "The Man in Black." I mean, this is just about okay in a short story when the writer has been listening to too much Johnny Cash but really grates over the long run. The other is tedious prophecy/tarot/psychoanalysis/dream sequences. Basically anything where the writer wants to shoehorn in some obnoxious foreshadowing or leftover metaphors that he couldn't fit into the actual story. This has both.

Overall, fairly slight but the whole thing did slip down in an afternoon so I'll maybe try the next one at some point.

Just to prove that it's not only my childhood comics heroes that I'm happy to disrespect on the internet, I read the first chapter of 2023 by the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu. Utter dogshit.
We never really die.

Mardroid

The Gunslinger does have a strange dreamlike quality. I liked it, but the sequels are an improvement, to my mind. The world is really developed. Johnny Cash does get a mention by name, in the third book, though.  :lol:

Rara Avis

What's the Stephen King book with the wolf type thing that wears OshKosh B'Gosh dungarees?

Keef Monkey

Quote from: I, Cosh on 24 October, 2017, 05:37:40 PM
Overall, fairly slight but the whole thing did slip down in an afternoon so I'll maybe try the next one at some point.

You've probably heard people say this a million times (it seems to be the mantra of the Dark Tower fan) but it's really worth pushing on because book two is where that series really gets going. I do very much like The Gunslinger mind you, it just doesn't really offer much hint at what's lying in store.

Mardroid

Quote from: Rara Avis on 24 October, 2017, 07:46:02 PM
What's the Stephen King book with the wolf type thing that wears OshKosh B'Gosh dungarees?

I believe that's The Talisman, co-written with Peter Straub. The character is actually called Wolf, too. As are all his species, if I remember correctly (wolfs. Not wolves. They're basically werewolves though.)