Mostly reading sci-fi, fantasy, and comics/graphic novels, but occasionally some other stuff too.
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80% complete! Barbarius has read 32 of 40 books.
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
One of the most …
Reading this to the kids as their bedtime story.
A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the …
Excellent! I've been reading this to my son for quite a while now. It's a great bed time story!
vii, 192 pages ; 25 cm
You could say that boredom is an incubator for brilliance. It's the messy, uncomfortable, confusing, frustrating place one has to occupy for a while before finally coming up with the winning equation or formula. This narrative has been repeated many, many times. The Hobbit was conceived when J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, "got an enormous pile of exam papers there and was marking school examinations in the summer time, which was very laborious, and unfortunately also boring." When he came upon one exam page a student had left blank, he was overjoyed. "Glorious! Nothing to read," Tolkien told the BBC in 1968. "So I scribbled on it, I can't think why, 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.'" And so, the opening line of one of the most beloved works of fantasy fiction was born.
— Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi (Page 28)
The unlikely beginnings of Middle Earth was because marking sucks.
vii, 192 pages ; 25 cm
I've been meaning to read this since it was published (and the library is going to demand this copy back soon), so now's a good time to start it, I guess?
Also, it seems sloppy to me to have EVERYTHING originate within a single 30 year period: Atreides, Harkonnen, Suk doctors, the Tleilaxu, shield generators, suspensor lights, faster-than-light travel, discovering melange, the Freman, riding worms, the Bene Gesserit... It was almost like the authors had a checklist of references they wanted to make, and because it was set so much earlier they thought they all had to originate and none could be already established.
The best way I can describe this book is "aggressively 50%". It seems to me that its only purpose was to connect the first 700 page book to the third 700 page book, through its own 750 pages.
I'm annoyed that I've committed myself to this trilogy. I'm being told I should abandon it and read something else, but I don't think I can now (does anyone else feel that way mid-series?)
I'm going to read the third one, but unless it really pulls something out of the bag (which the last 1450 pages haven't convinced me it will) I don't think I'll be recommending any of the expanded Dune universe.
Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations. . . but only one is …
A fiendishly difficult puzzle? Count me in!
Science fiction and East Asian myth combine in this dazzling retelling of the rise of …
Just got recommended this by a colleague. One critic (Shelley Parker-Chan) describes it as "Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Pacific Rim and buckle up." and, honestly, that sounds great to me.
A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the …
Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
— Earthsea: The First Four Books by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 361)
¡Viva la revolución!
@futzle @dmk@ramblingreaders.org I've read the second one (Count Zero), but not the third (Mona Lisa Overdrive) yet. It was good, but different. It's set in the same universe but with none of the same characters. Still weird and funky though.
Apparently Gibson's script for Alien 3 is "one of the best screenplays never made". I haven't read it though. But BBC produced a radio play of it a few years back which I'm keen to check out!
@futzle @dmk@ramblingreaders.org I've also had this on my wishlist for years. I should get around to it someday... Did you read the other two Neuromancer novels?
A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the …
Reading this to my child at bed times. A GREAT choice!
