I'm currently reading Spiral by Koji Suzuki, it's the second book in the Ring series, the books can be read as a standalone novel, but it takes place immediately after the first Ring book, I believe there are four or five books in this series, it's so good! It's not exactly like the movie, basically this medical examiner finds his long time friend from college on his table, and through an associate of the deceased friend, he gets sucked into the mysterious videotape story, the tape where you will die seven days after you view it, while the protagonist struggles with feelings of loss, you can really feel his apathy through the pages. Haven't finished this yet, currently chipping away at it.
Lately I finished The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. It's one of the few (and probably the most popular) dystopian novels I hadn't yet read. It was a great book I'd highly recommend to anybody interested in that sort of thing.
Lately I finished The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. It's one of the few (and probably the most popular) dystopian novels I hadn't yet read. It was a great book I'd highly recommend to anybody interested in that sort of thing. View attachment 58634
Death decides it want to become human and goes around doing human things, While death tries to adapt to countryside living an extermely old wizard turned undead tries to figure out why everything is coming to life again while being persecuted by the city wizards guild for being undead.
Read Houellebecq Anhilate no spoilers although I lay the pace of the book a bit
This is the last book from Houellebecq which came in 2022. There isn't an english translation yet, I've read the spanish one, which came in June 2022. I don't like reading in traditional spanish, couldn't get hooked until now.
It's situated in 2027 but the only reason for it is just to be set in the next France presidential election. The whole thing could be happening on 2013 and it feels just like it. There isn't any radical prophesizing on the future -like in Submission for example- other than a passing commentary about iphone versions and the normalization of euthanasia.
If you read this because you're a fan of Houllebecq, I can say, like most reviews, that this book doesn't follow that much the thread of his other novels, as in, suicidal depressing agitating stories about sex or the current times. You have the Elementary Particles for that which came in ~1998 and is one of the most prescient books to read today.
This one, instead, skews entirely the youth and society, in order to focus in a family holding themselves against senescence and death, and in the good people that remains in this day and age.
It might be his most "fuck you" book as evilness doesn't receive focus, even on the face of tragedy and pettiness. Even one of the main plots about some terrorist hacking shenanigans gets completely blurred out, just stops mattering. So it's not a "well rounded" story, but that's the point, as life usually isn't.
Mind you, it's too fucking long, and filled with boring dream sequences which add nothing except pointing out the mundaneity of dreaming. There were like 10 of these, taking 3 or 4 paragraphs each, never fun to read.
It might be a very hard book to read on your 20s. You have the whole collection of incel "suifuel" novels by the same author for that, and even those aren't recommended if you have it going. But if you have a diseased parent/grandparent and you yourself start feeling the ravages of time this is a nice book.
Houllebecq mentioned on interviews that this one might be his last novel and I hope so since it's a nice point to end his career. Maybe he could start doing fantasy, was going to say something "for kids" but one of his main points is that youth is too sanctified. He could do Isekai fanfiction.
The DMC manga and land of the lustrous/houseki no kuni. Currently houseki no kuni is a punch in the gut every new chapter cause every volume you just see phos lose themselves more and more until eventually they're not even themselves.
This work is a semi-autobiography by a highly-decorated WW1 trench soldier. He writes poetically about his experience. Junger was wounded several times over the course of the war and documents the horrors of war. He died at 102.
No relation to The Storm of Steel despite the title. Yukio Mishima is in my view the most important figure from post-War Japan. He was a renowned writer and playwright but this book is markedly different and is his manifesto. He documents how he found art through action and fashioning his body from "steel" (bodybuilding) and martial arts.
Unlike Lieutenant Junger, Mishima would die young at 45. He committed seppuku after a failed coup attempt.
Just finished all of the Mistborn and Wax and Wayne books including The Lost Metal which I read for the first time and pretty much read the entire book on Sunday. It was a comfy day. Now I'm going to reread all 4 Stormlight Archive books because I want to sure up my foundation of Cosmere knowledge. Wish me luck, bros, 5000+ pages await me.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I find it to be a total drag. I started reading the book last year and I'm still only halfway through. Might just drop it for now and read something else.
I don't particularly like Murakami, but I bought like 5 of his books and read all of them. All except TWUBC. I've got a creeping feeling that Murakami doesn't exactly plan much for his books, like he's a pantser through and through. The type that makes coffee, sits in front of his manuscript, and types away whatever comes to mind. (Don't quote me on that). While his works do evoke strong vibes and images, I find the plot to mostly meander without a clear direction and end anti-climactically, leaving some plot threads hanging loosely in the wind. It a all seems pointless to me. Maybe Murakami's books just aren't for me.
Still, the vibes. They are real. End of the World from Hard-Boiled Wonderland resonated with me to my very bones. I probably wouldn't mind visiting it for a couple hours. What's interesting is that despite looking utopic, where nothing dies and nobody suffers (or feels happy), the cracks begin to show. Showing that it never was a utopia in the first place. Like Adam and Eve in Heaven before they gained the Knowledge. I love this kind of stuff.
It seems like I always have the opposite opinion of whatever >reddit tells me. I was told Tsukuru Tazaki was one of his weaker works. I ended up loving it. It had a sort of forward momentum that I don't feel from his other works, and at the time, I was listening to these songs. Added to the vibes somewhat, with the airports and fancy dates at fancy restaurants and all. View: https://youtu.be/SBS8Ok6LIdM
>reddit told me TWUBC was one of his better works, but it seems even more directionless. At some point, the protagonist just straight up sits at the bottom of the well. Pretty friggin stellar. The Mongolian war story was high grade kino though, won't deny that.
Right now I'm on the lookout for After Dark. Hoping this one will be better.
I know this isn't exactly the most relevant, since the average death is at about 80 years old in the west... but 45 is young? I would consider 45 middle-aged?
This is my current read. This book is primarily about the struggles of how guys can also have body image issues like women. I really relate to it since I was the fat kid in school and FUCKING HATED IT MAN... so it gives me comfort knowing that it's not just me that can struggle with body image issues.
Ignore how cringe the subtitle sounds. According to this book, Putin is really going ham trying to subvert American society and infrastructure, like inciting division and violence and gaining access to the electrical grid, among other things. Real eye opener.
A couple a years ago I used to lurk a frogtwitter twitter account of a guy named Logo Daedalus. Apparently he got some infamy by his pseud way of tweeting and by his association to another more infamous Kantbot which was another character turned lolcow.
Having said this I've enjoyed from time to time to check them, as they are interesting eclectic people with a lot of interesting tastes and takes. I would guess it was moreoever the antagonistical way they interacted in the site which draw their bad attention, which to be honest might be the entertaining way of using Twitter in the first place.
Still Logo was usually recommending books in his tweets and out of some I've tried to follow his advice and reading some stuff above my current mental concentration. So I've read "Inferno" and "Purgatory" from The Divine Comedy, some chapters from Plato's Republic, Borges Fictions tales.
Needless to say I forget everything as I read it except maybe some bits and pieces. It's the Londonfrog experience of reading where you're just obesely gulping words, out of completionism or some need of pseud cred. You know that these are the most important works of literature so you somehow need to see them, like a cat needs to look past the bathroom door, some hope that the words will save you or stay with you.
One of the works he recommended was The Book Of The New Sun, a tetralogy of sci-fi books written by Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer that invented the machine to produce and pack Pringles tubes.
"The SF novel of the 20th century" as endorsed on the cover by Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman...I've tried to read Sandman .cbr scans like 10 times and got bored so you know what you're in for).
I've read the 1st book The Shadow Of The Torturer, during the pandemic while I still had a job and internet. I struggled with it and completely forgot it. On May 6th, I don't know why, I downloaded it again...I still struggle...
It's May 30th and I got up to the 2nd book, "The Claw Of The Conciliator"...I'm two chapters left and I can't finish it. You would imagine a book will become climactic at the end but no...this one instead has a 24 page theater screenplay in the middle of it, which I skimmed it. I'm angry it's too fucking slow. I know it's good. It's better than fucking Lord Of The Rings.
Apparently as it's being told, Gene Wolfe made these books to be "reread multiple times and the picture of it to slowly come in details through the readings" which is too much to ask in this information overload age, although it may be the only way of reading and "digesting" something now.
Maybe I've should have grown having read this. At this moment it feels like walking to a closed portal. I can't transmute myself into fantasy and maybe I shouldn't.
In case you want to check it, I can at least recommend the 1st half of the 1st book The Shadow Of The Torturer. It's very good at some times. At others it feels like reading a yellow paged scifi pulp John From Mars thing but the passages and reflections of Severian make it worth it.
One Man's Wilderness by Sam Keith. The book is largely a stylized version of Dick Proenneke's journal from the time when he built a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness by hand, primarily using locally foraged materials, and lived in it for a year while photographing the experience and natural habitat. Incredibly fascinating, and the ultimate proof that most people are capable of way more than they realize. I've been very drawn to nature-related non-fiction in recent years and this has been one of my favorites.
I'm about halfway through The Wolf of Wall Street, god Jordan Belfort was just making endless cash it blows my mind. Gonna watch the movie again once I finish the book. I also just started the book "Tell Me An Ending" because the concept sounded pretty cool. It's about if society had created the ability to remove memories in the late 90's and then found a way to restore them in modern times. It leaves a lot of people who got memories removed wondering if they should get theirs back, idk so far all the characters are just being set up so I don't know how well the topic will get tackled but I have hope.
this^ sentence. (teds manifesto. holy moly, those predictions are something. he scratched surface, but some things didnt happened (yet))
since i cant find the talk about AI, it should belong there
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human
race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more
intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
- woah... this is (our times?)
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tells me. I was told Tsukuru Tazaki was one of his weaker works. I ended up loving it. It had a sort of forward momentum that I don't feel from his other works, and at the time, I was listening to these songs. Added to the vibes somewhat, with the airports and fancy dates at fancy restaurants and all.
