Glad to see so many great female authors represented ... Oh... Wait
If you have good books to recommend, do.
YC’s Summer Reading
71–80 of 188 posts
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Books tend to fill my lengthy public transportation commutes. also I'm not opposed to borrowing some sleep time to get in a few more pages.
I regret reading before sleep. I think I've conditioned myself to sleep anytime I read now. I can rarely get more than a five or six pages before I start to drift off.
I regret reading before sleep. I think I've conditioned myself to think a lot any time I lie in bed now. I can rarely get to sleep within an hour of going to bed.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#73I'm really surprised to see Ready Player One on there. It relied way too heavily on the 80's nostalgia, to prop up the shallow story telling. But even that got old, it was like hanging around with someone that talks entirely in movie quotes, while fun at the right times, gets stale fast. You didn't care about the character, because there was nothing for him to really lose.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#74Just curious, what's everybody's pace around here? It took me about a month to casually get through "Ready Player One" (great book BTW), and that was for a book club. It seems like a lot of the people I respect get through about a book a week. Either they're lying or have such good focus to avoid distractions other than books. Maybe I could put down the HN for a bit.
Aiming for ~ a book a week, and have been holding steady around that mark for around the past 3 years (avg. 50 books / year). I got through Ready Player One in a weekend when I had nothing else to do, but it took me a good couple months to get through Infinite Jest this year…try to balance it out with a good mix of fiction / nonfiction and easy / hard books. I waste plenty of time online, too, but average something in the ballpark of an hour / day of book-reading.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#75I'm really surprised to see Ready Player One on there. It relied way too heavily on the 80's nostalgia, to prop up the shallow story telling. But even that got old, it was like hanging around with someone that talks entirely in movie quotes, while fun at the right times, gets stale fast. You didn't care about the character, because there was nothing for him to really lose.
Totally agree with you. I couldn't get past the first few chapters, because it was flat out boring.
Compared to something like Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey...Ready Player One is so....
boring.
There, I said it too.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#76Nice, 2 out of 20 authors are women. Nothing like a balanced reading experience.
Does anyone seriously believe that there where books that didn't make the list because of the gender of the author?
It's "Alan Kay's reading list" all over again. No one discard books based on the sex of the author, perhaps except extreme feminists. Books are picked because of their content.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#77The Magicians is a lovely book; I actually interviewed Grossman when the first one came out, in 2010: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/10/14/an-interview-with-lev-gro... . If you like it, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy too. Leviathan Wakes disappoints: its plot and political economy are interesting but on a sentence-by-sentence level one wishes for more. If you haven't read it yet try Peter Watts, Blinds…
I enjoyed The Magicians, but I found the two follow-ups lacking, when I expected them to keep up with the original.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#78I reread Cryptonomicon (the last Stephenson book to really draw me in enough to make me read it, although he frontloads a lot of the complexity, so maybe if I push through the opening to Anathem just one more time...) For those of you who read RP1 already, I would reccomend You , by Austin Grossman, which takes the concept of a treasure hunt through computing and gaming history in a radically different direction, one…
Anathem gets pretty amazing, just hold out to chapter 10,000.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#79I'm really surprised to see Ready Player One on there. It relied way too heavily on the 80's nostalgia, to prop up the shallow story telling. But even that got old, it was like hanging around with someone that talks entirely in movie quotes, while fun at the right times, gets stale fast. You didn't care about the character, because there was nothing for him to really lose.
People I've talked to about it tend to like it because it's vr-heavy dystopia with a persistent world.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#80The Magicians is a lovely book; I actually interviewed Grossman when the first one came out, in 2010: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/10/14/an-interview-with-lev-gro... . If you like it, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy too. Leviathan Wakes disappoints: its plot and political economy are interesting but on a sentence-by-sentence level one wishes for more. If you haven't read it yet try Peter Watts, Blinds…
Link to Blindsight: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm