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Kevin Klemme
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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What BOOK(s) are you reading?

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24 Jul 2019 01:31 - 24 Jul 2019 01:32 #299987 by Gary Sax
I'm reading a book from the early 90s called Prarie Erth and I'm not sure I've ever had a bigger 180 with a book. I really disliked it for the first 100 pages, thought it did a poor job of environmental and landscape stuff which is what it's known for.

Over the next couple hundred pages I realized that while it remains a, at best, average book about the environment and a really poor book about people who used to live on the land (i.e. indigenous folks), it is one of the best books I've ever read about rural and semi-rural America and its positives and contradictions. What's so good about it is that it wasn't written as a response to Trump's victory (an entire genre) but was written a long time ago and is supposed to be about the land and such. You're not intended to walk out of it with some simple message or anything. I'd recommend it before any of these genre books about rural Americans. It rang very true to my childhood in the Midwest and my wife's childhood in a very rural area of the Great Plains.
Last edit: 24 Jul 2019 01:32 by Gary Sax.
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24 Jul 2019 02:34 #299988 by Dr. Mabuse
THE THREE BODY PROBLEM and THE DARK FOREST - Liu Cixin
ROADSIDE PICNIC - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
SPECTACLE (THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OTA BENGA) Pamela Newkirk.

Currently reading HARD TO BE A GOD by the Strugatsky Brothers

It's been a couple of years since I've had the time to read non-script related works.
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24 Jul 2019 04:46 #299989 by mezike

Dr. Mabuse wrote: THE THREE BODY PROBLEM and THE DARK FOREST - Liu Cixin
ROADSIDE PICNIC - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
SPECTACLE (THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OTA BENGA) Pamela Newkirk.

Currently reading HARD TO BE A GOD by the Strugatsky Brothers

It's been a couple of years since I've had the time to read non-script related works.


I've been thinking about getting those two Strugatsky books for a while, they are still sat on my wishlist and could be a good summer read. Please can I ask your opinion on them?

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24 Jul 2019 13:33 #300003 by Turek
Replied by Turek on topic What BOOK(s) are you reading?
Picnic is one of the best sf books ever, Hard to be a god is very good too
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24 Jul 2019 22:35 #300015 by Dr. Mabuse
I really enjoyed Roadside, which was coincidentally the book I read after The Three Body Problem. Roadside is set after alien beings have left all their shit after invading earth. Three Body is set 300+ years before an impending alien invasion.

I saw the most recent cinematic offer of Hard to Be a God and loved the concept. So far I'm digging it.

I need to watch STALKER (Roadside Picnic film adaptation) at some point.
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31 Jul 2019 22:48 #300320 by DarthJoJo
Finished N.K. Jemisin's The Kingdom of the Gods, the final book in her Inheritance trilogy. Didn't like this one as much as its predecessors, probably because of the narrator. Ms. Jemisin set a challenge for herself. The first two narrators were, respectively, a noblewoman with blood from the most powerful family in the world and a blind street artist. This time she decided to tell the story from the perspective of a god. To be precise, Sieh's actually a godling. Not nearly as powerful as one of the Three, but the eldest of their children. There's a tendency in fiction, and life too I guess, to anthropomorphize deities, to treat them merely as superhumans. They're basically human and love and get angry but also immensely strong or really fast or can throw lightning. That lacks imagination to me. Divinity should be alien to humanity. How can you characterize something older than our species, with a power incomprehensible to it? Ms. Jemisin does touch on that, mentioning the times Sieh has murdered with little reason, but it doesn't feel in line with the character we're given, who could be just anyone. Maybe a divine narrator in line with my thoughts wouldn't make a great narrator either, but I think it would be more interesting that Sieh.

The pacing is off, too. The story basically restarts itself three times. You think you know what it's all about, but then that plot and those characters are abandoned for a new setting, and it turns out that those last two hundred pages didn't really matter that much. The villain doesn't really make himself known for almost half the book and does little until the last hundred pages.

Anyway, the first two are solid and very worth a read, but if you skip this one, you're not missing out on anything.

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01 Aug 2019 07:05 #300325 by ThirstyMan
Started to read Len Deighton's Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match which is the first Samson Trilogy (there are nine novels in total). Can highly recommend these cold war novels. Very dystopian and revealing of the bungling attempts by UK and US security services to penetrate the Soviet Union's spy apparatus.

Just started the second trilogy Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker set in 1988. Good stuff so far.

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01 Aug 2019 10:23 #300342 by barrowdown
I finished Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, which is very good read. The chapters describing the horrors of the famine are a very tough read as she pulls from first-hand accounts. Applebaum tries to include some photos in the book, but due to Soviet control there was very little photographic evidence of the famine as they prevented or destroyed most of it. She carefully goes through the evidence that it was a human-caused famine and had an intended purpose (annihilating the rural Ukrainians), which was then followed up by an organized campaign to expunge it from history.

I am currently onto The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I've never read any of her work and it is definitely a very breezy read. I am up through the "Plans" section that runs through four of the major powers' (Germany, Great Britain, France, and Russia) plans and preparations for war prior to August 1914. I also have The Proud Tower on my shelf, which I will move onto once I finish this one.
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01 Aug 2019 12:10 #300351 by ThirstyMan
A really good Barbara Tuchman book is A Distant Mirror which is all about 'normal' life in the 14th Century contrasting it with social life and morals now. Absolutely fascinating.
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01 Aug 2019 12:28 #300353 by barrowdown
I've heard good things about that one. I really like her writing style so I will definitely check it out at some point. It will probably be fifth on my list of her books after the two I mentioned, then Zimmerman Telegram and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45.

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01 Aug 2019 13:05 #300358 by engineer Al
I have been rereading The Ivory and the Horn by Charles de Lint. It's been many years since I read it the first time, but it is much as I remembered it to be; fun, exciting, filled with great characters and somehow strangely uplifting. Masterful short stories based on modern fantasy and urban myth.
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01 Aug 2019 22:28 - 01 Aug 2019 22:30 #300382 by Sagrilarus
Tuchman -- for Americans I think The First Salute is a good read as well. Shorter and a little lighter (last book before her death) it covers some of the economic aspects of why England more or less let us win our independence. It also describes the lunacy of the British Navy of the era, which is quite entertaining.
Last edit: 01 Aug 2019 22:30 by Sagrilarus.
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09 Sep 2019 11:30 #301563 by barrowdown
Since last posting I have finished The Guns of August, which I thought was excellent. It's one weakness is that the maps could stand some improvement, especially regarding von Kluck's wheel leading up to the First Battle of the Marne. I understand she is not a military historian (and she mentions that in her intro), but having a few maps covering this instead of one multipurpose map would have been an improvement.

After that, I read Night by Elie Wiesel, which was excellent and depressing as expected. The writing is very clean and crisp packing a ton of content into its tiny page count. This was not one that I had read throughout my education, but my wife said it had been assigned in high school. I highly recommend it.

My brother gave me two light reading books for my birthday: The Power of the Dark Crystal, Volume 1 and The United States of Absurdity: Untold Stories from American History. The first one is the first book of the sequel graphic novel series and I enjoyed it, but it did not blow my mind. It felt similar enough to the original movie where it has cool world building and an archetypal story. I might pick up the others to read, but it would not be a priority. The second book was by the creators of the podcast, The Dollop, which my brother loves and I have never listened to. The book was humorous and went over outlandish real events. It was very light and would be what I would call a "bathroom" book in that it was series of three-page stories that were not deep, but interesting enough to fill five minutes.

I am now reading The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by John Toland. I am through the first section of the book and am so far quite impressed with the amount of detail and research he has done. I hope the rest of the book lives up to my first impressions.
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09 Sep 2019 11:42 #301564 by Gary Sax
I remember liking Guns of August but feeling it was very dry compared to the best histories. A very "overview" sort of history that's vital but doesn't electrify.

By contrast, I am reading The Last Mughal and it is brilliant, brilliant stuff. You can almost feel Delhi and the swirling cultural melange of the city in the middle of this firestorm.

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09 Sep 2019 11:52 #301567 by Sagrilarus
I'm rereading Dune and getting reminded of how damn well Herbert can paint his characters.
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