finally got this in the mail: the book of the game
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been on a reading kick this week.
read all of Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal and now a decent chunk into Dennis Cooper’s God Jr.
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soooooooooooold
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no idea what it’s about but lovely title
slowly working my way through a big tome of the collected fictions of Borges, just started Brodie’s Report so around the last third. all pretty great all told, though i tend to prefer his more fantastical/sci-fi-ish ones to the more grounded stories of the country
in the bg also re-reading all the Discworld novels including the ones i had not checked out the first time around (back when Pratchett was still alive so it’s been a bit) so i’m like a third through Moving Pictures — which is good if not stellar, if you’ve read any of the series it’s patterned on the canvas of “some concept from Earth gets transposed into the disc and hijinks ensue”
think i’ll probably go on to read another Delany novel after this, since he’s been consistently amazing since i started reading his books
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I ordered this paperback copy of vol 1 of Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology because it was cheap and when it got here began to suspect I’d given a modest amount of money to a crypto-nazi:
I don’t know what your average folkish heathen is going to get out of this thing. It’s about 30% untranslated fragments of Old High German (the Victorian English translator figured a general German audience wouldn’t understand them either, so why translate them for a general English one?) A philologist trying to use language to work back through/systematize mythology. Meandering speculation based on vague cross-disciplinary groping. It’s not Bulfinch’s Mythology. You’re not setting in for a good story. It’s at least pretty funny to imagine the unprepared nazi tucking into this “must read” and immediately regretting their words and deeds.
(the publisher’s website no longer exists; I did find a blog post about one of their titles–a children’s book about runes–on a literal nazi blog)
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What the heck, you’re like the third different person reading through Moving Pictures in this thread in the past few weeks, did we all subconsciously start a book club and tell no one about it?
I’ve done the exact wrong thing and have been reading through Discworld in chronological order at the pace of about one of them a year (except for Monstrous Regiment, which was the first I read) and I kinda think Moving Pictures was the weakest of the bunch so far. It has its moments but it feels a bit more of rote parody than things usually get.
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yeah what the fuck though. incredibly imbalancing, i feel seasick. poor eleanor, poor eleanor.
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okay i need to read this
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if the name is appealing, it’s probably worth checking out. manages to balance itself as a sort of coming of age narrative and consideration of art really well.
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that is a bit strange especially for such a minor novel even in an otherwise well-known franchise…
and i agree with you so far on the rote parody part, it feels very on the nose and almost like Pratchett struggled to meaningfully integrate the parody elements into the universe of the discworld, which is a bit strange since he’s usually so good at it. it feels a bit too blunt, even though so far it’s pretty fun. it’s also starting to structurally resemble a retread of the previous novels in the series that have featured the creatures from the dungeon dimensions wanting to invade the disc as a central plot point
nice, i didn’t know the author either but i read up on the book a little bit and it seems like an unusual blend of styles/topics
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Moving Pictures is certainly middling for a discworld novel but even a middling discworld has many good points to it
it is the first of the ‘concept from Earth gets transposed to Discworld’ novels so I’m more forgiving of it as the ‘formula’ for that story was established in Moving Pictures, rather than it just being a repeat of that formula like some of the later novels
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some familiar complaints from Lyndon Johnson @Father.Torque
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You, my friend, are not Lyndon Johnson.
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honestly after 4000 pages I’m not so sure, he’s just like me fr
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you can’t post this and not tell us what you named your dong
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“lyndon johnson”
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I’m having a funny experience picking up Don Quixote again after 6 months. I’m around page 300, in the middle of a a framed story with no idea why it’s being told. Pretty great
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Are you reading in Spanish? That seems like it would be really cool
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the English translation of Don Quixote is great anyhow
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