Baby-Faced Jan 2018 Edition!!

[Blue]

I liked 'Snowcrash', but my favorite novels by Neal Stephenson are other titles: 'Cryptonomicon', 'Anathema', and 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' a.k.a. 'Diamond Age' (in that order).

I think when we both like an author and are just discussing how to rank their books, we're on the same page already.

I loved both Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Anathem started too slow for me to love it, and that's coming from someone who loved Cryptonomicon. The Baroque Cycle was the same - I only read the first book and it didn't seem to go anywhere. Zodiac and Reamde are also among ones of his I really like.

 

[Nellisir]

A kind offer indeed!

Perchance, were you around when Vanguard Games on the Commons was open?

I came here in the fall of 2008. Vanguard Games doesn't ring a bell, though there was briefly a comic store (card store?) on the west end of the Commons that I didn't really investigate. The games store was around the corner from Aurora Street (its moved and closed since then)

 

[Nellisir]

I think when we both like an author and are just discussing how to rank their books, we're on the same page already.

I loved both Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Anathem started too slow for me to love it, and that's coming from someone who loved Cryptonomicon. The Baroque Cycle was the same - I only read the first book and it didn't seem to go anywhere. Zodiac and Reamde are also among ones of his I really like.

I liked Diamond Age. Cryptonomicon was a slow stroll of a plot; I like a bit of a faster pace. I've skipped Baroque Cycle & most of his more recent works for the same reasons (although I read Seveneves....I think that was him...and was underwhelmed).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Vanguard Games closed back in the early 90s, so that's more than a bit before then.

I came here in the fall of 2008. Vanguard Games doesn't ring a bell, though there was briefly a comic store (card store?) on the west end of the Commons that I didn't really investigate. The games store was around the corner from Aurora Street (its moved and closed since then)

 

[Blue]

I liked Diamond Age. Cryptonomicon was a slow stroll of a plot; I like a bit of a faster pace. I've skipped Baroque Cycle & most of his more recent works for the same reasons (although I read Seveneves....I think that was him...and was underwhelmed).

I haven't read Seveneves yet, but yeah, I think we both see how he can bog down. Reamde wasn't like that, but it had it's own unique pacing. If you wrote a trilogy of novellas and published them in the same binding, you could have the same pacing as Reamde. For all that I liked it better then other of his recent works.

Has anyone read Agents of D.O.D.O.?

 

[Jhaelen]

The Baroque Cycle was the same - I only read the first book and it didn't seem to go anywhere.

Same here After reading the first book I didn't really look forward to slog through another 2000 pages.

I haven't read Seveneves yet, but yeah, I think we both see how he can bog down. Reamde wasn't like that, but it had it's own unique pacing.

Seveneves is one of the titles I bought in my last batch, but I haven't read it, yet. Reamde was just okay, imho.

Has anyone read Agents of D.O.D.O.?

In fact, I hadn't even heard about it until now! The abstract sounds pretty weird... Might be good, might be terrible.

 

[Nellisir]

Finished A War in Crimson Embers; Persepolis Rising; Kings of the North; and The Murders of Molly Southbourne (by Tade Thompson). They're all excellent, but I really recommend checking out The Murders of Molly Southbourne. It's a slight little book that's got a great & novel concept & pulls it off really well (not perfect, but worth reading).

Going to visit a friend for the weekend; bringing Fools Quest (Robin Hobb); Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England; and probably something else in case neither of those strike my fancy. Looking forward to Thirty-Eight; that hurricane notably affected my town and the part of it I grew up in, so it's very very local history to me.

 

[trappedslider]

On my reading list are the following:
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg

Soon I will be Invincible and Crooked both by Austin Grossman

 

[Blue]

So I'm about a fifth of the way into Andy Weir's new book Artemis. Enjoying it quite a lot. It's written first person, but with asides to the reader - not quite directly breaking the fourth wall, but snarky exposition about technical/background details the protagonist knows so that the reader will be on the same page. If you read The Martian I'm sure you can make the educated guess that there's a lot of solid technical details in it, and this delivers them without interrupting the flow.

I hope it keeps up, this is really shaping up to be a good book.

 

[Mallus]

Finally got around to Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy. I'm just starting the 2nd book, Authority.

Annihilation was was amazing, in ways I can't quite articulate yet, despite to say the whatever else the book is, it works as a page-turning thriller.

"Environmentalist cosmic horror"? "Eco-Kafka?" "Sad story of the breakdown of a marriage"? Regardless, the writing was exceptional.