It is bad!
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please read it and report back, I’ve been curious but I don’t want to subject myself to it!
gimme the shrug truth
For the sake of anyone else who might be curious about it based on this discussion (too late for me as I just finished the book), does anyone know what the best electronic version of A Voyage to Arcturus might be? The first couple I came across were barely readable with all the bad formatting and errors.
I ended up finding a decent copy at Feedbooks.net, since they tend to clean up public domain books nicely, but even that copy had a fair number of imperfections.
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I read inherent vice and, because of the dnd podcast, kept hearing doc sportello in @km’s voice
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Ok looks like we need to modify Ven just slightly
I almost just put this in the Movies thread where the current Annihilation convo is happening, but then I remembered this exists
Just finished Authority last night–I liked it but not nearly as much as Annihilation. I’m excited to finish the trilogy, but man that book drags a lot in the middle. I fully support the general approach to the novel, I think another book set entirely within Area X would have been bad, it’s more the details of how it’s written that I found irritating.
I get that all of the “red herrings” are there (presumably?) to reflect the protag’s paranoid state, but it just feels like filler that doesn’t go anywhere, and then the last 50 pages are just overstuffed with plot and character development. The pacing is so weird.
Okay so, as a pleb, what’s a good book to introduce me to US History? I have a really bad grasp on, uh, everything history-related.
Also should I read Pride and Prejudice?
A people’s history of the united states dot pdf
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parallel to that i’ve heard only great things about roxanne dunbar-ortiz’ s an indigenous peoples’ history of the united states
A history teacher in high school had us read xeroxed chapters from Zinn alongside the regular text so I guess they’re right educators really are indoctrinating our youth with radical leftist propaganda!!!
Thank heavens.
That was just one AP US History teacher circa 1998 though I’m sure she’s retired by now.
my high school us history was taught straight from zinn’s book, also an AP teacher
Oxford History of the United States
Although I have only read Battle Cry of Freedom tbh
Yeah, I think you’re best served reading something traditional alongside perspectives that challenge it, like Zinn and the Indigenous Peoples’ History. I found that learning to read history is about reading things that you have no context for but plowing forward anyway; by going over it enough and exploring small branches you begin to put character to names and make meaningful connections that allow you to think about it.
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Absolutely. First you realize how good it is relative to its cultural cachet, then you read Middlemarch and find yourself in awe about how much better is than that
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Also realize going in that Austen is not entirely fond of the people she is writing about.
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I just got through the third one of these and… it’s good! It took me a while to suss out the significance of various events, but overall I’m satisfied that the series functions as something more than an elaborate puzzle box, and even though I’m not sure I’ll ever piece all the details together to figure out what “really happened” or whatever I have really enjoyed the atmosphere and tone of the entire series, barring that one part of Authority that really drags.
One of my favorite parts of these books is how they have such a great sense of place, while also being so geographically indistinct. I’m pretty sure there are no references to any specific place names (beyond the town near the Southern Reach offices being called Hedley), and everything is instead referred to through vague cardinal directions and environments (the West, the North, the coast, etc).
Apparently there’s gonna be a fourth?
Anyway this has taught me that I’m able to read for leisure now so I have a huge backlog of things I have wanted to read for awhile to get through. Starting with The Dying Earth. The one I have is the original 1950 one, are the other related books worth reading too?
VANCE
IS
BAE
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the original book is the best one, the later dying earth books are more mixed quality but I still liked reading them. Be prepared for not liking the main characters of the later ones, that’s on purpose!
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I picked up Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed the other day. I’m trying to decide which to read first. I’ll probably pick Dune just because it has such intense cultural cachet… I’ll suddenly get every reference. But I’m way more excited about reading The Dispossessed.