The Gaming Den

To keep from de-railing the other thread:

ckafrica wrote: AS far as Clavell is concerned. Shogun and Taipan were pretty good but Gaijin and Whirlwind were fairly blah. Especially Gaijin

Yeah, Gaijin was published a year before he died, so it might not have been all that good. Shogun and Taipan are great b/c of their size, depth and breadth.

If you really like that kind of stuff, James A. Michener is vastly superior to Clavell.

Clavell's got this obession with writting about "big men" who "win", which is cool, but it's a bit too Tom Clancy (and holy fucking shit, Tom Clancy is "fun" but god is he ever annoying to read too much of).

I've seriously read every Michener book I can get my hands on, and have read his auto-biography (which is written in two very interesting parts; one, of his life as if he wasn't an author, the other of his life as an author).

My current count of Michener books includes:

-Poland (dark ages to the 80's)
-Space (from WW2 to the 70's or 80's)
-The Drifters (60's hippies and what they had to go through)
-Caravans (post WW2 Afghanistan)
-Hawaii
-Tales of the South Pacific (this was mostly accounts of real events)
-The Source (about a 'tell' in Israel, goes from neolithic to the 70's or so)
-The World is My Home (autobiography)

Are the ones I recalled off the top of my head; here's the rest that I had forgotten that I had read.

-Sayonara (semi-autobiographical account of his divorce of his 2nd wife and marriage to his third)
-Voice of Asia (fiction and non-fiction)
-Bridges at Toko-Ri (Korean War stuff)
-Mexico (I never finished it, it was sort of boring)
-Iberia (travelogue of spain)

I have a tendency to stick to an author that I like. I'm the same way with Frank Herbert, Bill Bryson, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlen, I can't help enjoying their stuff.

On the other hand I don't mind reading fiction, it's just that there's so much out there that I darent plunge in, lest I be overwhelmed.

[I have a tendency to stick to an author that I like. I'm the same way with Frank Herbert, Bill Bryson, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlen, I can't help enjoying their stuff. ]

I'm often the same.
Orson Scott Card has been pretty much my favorite author since I was a kid and had read nearly all his SciFi up til 6 years ago.
I still read Larry Niven books even though he's a right wing wacko.
Read a lot of David Brin's books which I liked, even though he can't finish a story to save his life.
Then there was David Gerrold's books which I liked though his try-anything-sexuals did get a little weird.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy started well but I had to fight to read the last half of the third. Years of Salt and Rice was a good alternative history of his.
Neil Gaimon has also picked up a spot on my shelf in the last few years, especially Neverwhere and Stardust.
Lately I've been reading Sharon Kay Penman's books. They are fat historical fictions of English medieval kings. The 2 I've read have been pretty good, and she is supposedly staying true to the historical chronicles and academia. Not much in detailed fight scenes though.

I've largely been blah about most of the Fantasy I've read in the past ten years. Other than G.R.R. Martin, and to a much less extent Scott Lynch, I've not been that impressed by the stuff I've read. I mean David Eddings wasn't bad but I completely forget them now. I loved the old Raymond Feist, but I'm not sure of any of his later work was worth reading. It all sort of became one and the same to me. Terry Goodkind can eat my shit after the book of his that I read. After that names just draw blanks, nothing much worth remembering.

While I like Heinlein's juveniles as much as any right-thinking person, I feel vaguely to extremely creeped out by his later work. To the point that I mercilessly and directly mocked Heinlein in the ELotH:TES wiki through the creation of Steppy Rayling.

-Username17

ckafrica wrote:Orson Scott Card has been pretty much my favorite author since I was a kid and had read nearly all his SciFi up til 6 years ago.
I still read Larry Niven books even though he's a right wing wacko.

Have you tried any of his fantasy. Hart's Hope kicked my ass pretty hard.

I've largely been blah about most of the Fantasy I've read in the past ten years. Other than G.R.R. Martin, and to a much less extent Scott Lynch, I've not been that impressed by the stuff I've read.

If you haven't yet, check out the Black Company stuff by Glen Cook. Very solid work.

The only "later" stuff of heinlen that I've read is: the cat that walks through walls, I will Fear no evil, and a copy of stranger in a strange land that had all of its previously edited out pages put back in.

I'm guessing that there's a lot of bullshit that he wrote as well.

Larry Niven alternates between really transparent right-wing BS, silly adventure-filled teen books full of puns and sometimes really weird stuff. I remember this one story involving people's mind or soul or something being added to competitors in a race.

There were only 3 races competing (one were these sun-light reflecting flowers, one were some animal-things with wierd stomachs or something, and the last were living bags of water that could actually fly). The "added" souls/people were pretty much all kinds of races; but no pairing up was made up of mixed genders.

Of course, the protagonists were a male water-creature and some female human's (or near human) mind. Story ensues, friends are made, and creatures get killed.

It was pretty weird without being complete bullshit. I mean, I could turn every page of the book and still keep reading. Which is something that I can't do if I pick true bullshit, like say... a Mack Bolan pulp book, or when I tried to read the first page of Battlefield Earth (or whatever that tripe by Hubbard is called). I can't even finish one page of either of those types of printed garbage.

Uh yeah...

Farnham's Freehold Plot Summary wrote:As the novel develops, the family finds itself marooned in a distant future where a decadent but technologically advanced black Muslim culture keeps either uneducated or castrated whites as slaves. Each of the characters adapts to the sudden role reversal in different and sometimes shocking ways. In the end, Farnham and Barbara, his daughter's guest, fail to adjust to the new situation. They volunteer, though they speculate that if they didn't volunteer they would have been forced to anyway, for a time-travel experiment to send them back in time. They return just prior to the original nuclear attack, and flee in Barbara's car. As they drive, they realize that while Barbara had driven a car with an automatic transmission, this car - the same car in every respect but one - has a manual transmission, and Farnham deduces that the time-travel experiment worked, but sent them into an alternative universe. They survive the war, then spend the rest of their lives trying to make sure the future they experienced does not come to pass.

Plot Summary, Sixth Column wrote:A top secret research facility hidden in the Colorado mountains is the last remaining outpost of the United States Army after its defeat by the PanAsians. The conquerors had absorbed the Soviets after being attacked by them and had then gone on to absorb India as well. The invaders are depicted as ruthless and cruel—for example, they crush an abortive rebellion by killing 150,000 American civilians as punishment.

The laboratory is in turmoil as the novel begins. All but six of the personnel have died suddenly, due to unknown forces released by an experiment operating within the newly-discovered magneto-gravitic or electro-gravitic spectra. The surviving scientists soon learn that they can selectively kill people by releasing the internal pressure of their cell membranes. This makes for one of the story’s most controversial plot elements—a race-selective weapon which can kill members of one race while leaving those of others unharmed.

-Username17

I've read Sixth Column. The race-weapon is impossible, and would kill humans pretty indiscriminately. ... it's sort of a "americans can win over any bullshit" type of story more than anything else, peppered with a few interesting observations about how people will act when their guns are turned to gold, or when some fake priest keeps blessing you while your truncheon fails to knock him sideways.

Farnham's Freehold, I have never heard of. I think that the story is referenced in The Cat that Walks Through Walls, as in, the characters from that book meet with the protagonist and talk to him about time-travel and time-stream jumping. For some reason their original time-line is now always a blasted nuclear wasteland.

Also, Jubal Harshaw is a character in this book as well, but the book is set in the timeline where the Loonies won their rebellion against Earth, which never happened in Jubal Harshaw's timeline. This book is meant to be a cross-over of most of Heinlen's books, while also examining the fact that characters in a book are only able to do what they are allowed to do or be.

Robert Heinlein wrote:Some "Protocols of the Elders of the Nation of Islam" bullshit

Wow. Just wow.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:If you haven't yet, check out the Black Company stuff by Glen Cook. Very solid work.

The first three, at least, are some decent, unbowlderized war pulp. I couldn't hang with The Silver Spike or anything after that, though.

While you guys are naming terrible novels, I can only think of Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. I'm sure if it had marketing folks, it would have had a better title, things tend not to have very good working titles.

-Crissa

I was browsing in the library last week, and found a Lovecraft collection. I remembered I'd never read anything of his.

So in the past few days, I've been reading some pieces out of it.

I will now give you people who have not read Lovecraft some sage advice.

Don't read Whisperer in the Darkness in one sitting in the middle of the fucking night when you have never heard of the story before.

-Username17

http://washingtonindependent.com/32415/ ... s-shrugged

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit the rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

You know, I really fucking hate the Republican party sometimes.

I dunno Crissa, Michener is pretty good.

Anyway, I tend to remember random books that are related via one author than I do individual books. Looking at a section of bookshelf in my place there is....

1. -A recent translation by Lattimore of the Iliad
2. -Greek Tragedies Vol 1 (Agammemnon, Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone, Hippoclytys)
3. -Gulliver's Travels, Swift
4. -How to study better and get higher marks, Ehrlich
5. -The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettleheim (discusses the origins of fairy tales)
6. -Babbit, Sinclair Lewis
7. -Man and his world, Margaret Kurilecz (a small ESL textbook from 1969)
8. -The Sexual Wilderness, Vance Packard
9. -Seagull Reader: Essay, (35 essays, from Lincon's 1st inaugural address, to swift's "proposal" to Martin Luther King Jr's letter from Birmingham Jail to Amy Tan talking about her mother's command of a second language)
10. -John Gray's book about men being martians and women being venusians; which is good, until you realize that it's glossing over the fact that it's discussing social constructs and that people are acting in socially accepted manners, not any fundamental differences between the two
11. -Maigret in Vichy, Simenon
12. -30 short stories to remember, Costain & Beecroft
13. -The street lawyer, John Grisham
14. -New Anaylitic Geometry Rev. Ed; Smith, Gale & Neeley
15. -20,000 leagues under the sea
16. -How to avoid stress before it kills you, Culligan and Sedalecek
17. -Julius Ceasar, John Gunther
18. -The World was Wide, Tait (The Story of Great Discoverers and Explorers; U of Toronto, sort of a novel-sized textbook, from '59)
19. -Grow your child a super mind
20. -Chariots of the Gods, Erich Von Dainikan (fun read, and raises questions, but he's a bit of a crackpot)
21. -Foundation Trilogy, Asimov
22. -Optical Illusion, Tolansky
23. -Atoms in the family, Laura Fermi (she basically chronicles her husband's and her own life, while talking about atomic threoy and the reasearch that led to the atom bomb)
24. -Gold and Gods of Peru, Hans Baumann
25. -Of Men and Numbers, Jane Muir (lives of mathematicans)
26. -El Principito, A. de SaintExupery (spanish translation, not original french)
27. -Dio e il computer, Roberto Vacca (italian Sci-Fi, something about somone making an AI that is modelled on pope Giovanni XXI who died in 1277)

there's about... 13-15 times more on shelves in this room; then about 30-ish years of national geographic, and a shelf of dictionaries, thesaurii, verb dictionaries, reference dictionaries (dictionaries that use lots of images, we have 3 and well, they hardly overlap at all in terms of what they cover) and translational dictionaries both normal and then engineering/techincal.

My father has a very broad range of topics that interest him when it comes to buying books.

I'd also say that .... about 60% of the books that are currently on bookshelves were bought by my parents in the years before I was born and they were married.

Of that above list of I've only added the book on fairy tales, the copy of the iliad that I got for a class (my dad's got a few other translations of the iliad around the apartment) and the book of essays. Even the foundation trilogy compilation book my dad got (it's a more recent addition, I orignally read the trilogy as 3 paperbacks in high school, but my dad has quite a lot of asimov's fiction and non-fictional books).

I'm also trying to look for a specific book, a copy of "Life in Norman England" for someone, but as you can imagine, books organized like the above list make finding specific things hard to find.

I went around the shelf space and measured it all out, I got about 1887 inches all told.

Into feet that's 157 feet and 3 inches of bookshelf space in use in this place. Which seems like a lot more, but most of the shelf-space is often using the same floor space since it comes down to 7-8 sets of bookshelves.

I don't think that I've even read half of what we have here, but on the other hand, I've read a lot of stuff that we will never own.

I've been listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is available on the author's website. It's really nothing like I'd expected or been explained to before.

It's very fascinating. A character from my mother's life, maybe; back when she was driving across the country on a motorcycle and backpacking with my father or her previous husband. A teacher trying to determine how students learn a subject that isn't taught via prescriptive learning. A father trying to get his son to open up to him, dealing with inherited troubles. A man living a life knowing that he is literally not the person he once was; without continuity in dreams, desires, or memories. And an ongoing creation and discussion about thinking beyond the dichotomy of beauty and technology, before we conceived of Singularity.

-Crissa

The Eagle's Gift.

Now there's an interesting book.

The question for me now is, how do I organize a weird collection of books? Does Chariots of the Gods belong in fiction or non-fiction? Should all non-fiction before a set time be thrown out/recycled if it's info is now out of date?

Damaged books aren't a concern, since there's a bookbinder that fixed some of my dad's books, but what do you do when the pages are crumbling?

Sorry, just rambling questions that this thread is making me think about. We (as in, my family) need to get our home collection of books organized. Over 100 feet of shelf space is too cumbersome to sift through every time a specific book is sought out.


Okay, so I did some looking, didn't take long, I just needed to you know, look for the info.

Is your collection of books starting to take over your home? While books provide attractive and interesting detail in any home, if you’re beginning to resent living among the stacks, it is probably time to take control of your collection of books. Follow these simple steps to organizing your home library in an attractive and functional way.

* Gather all of your books from various rooms around the house into one space. Check bedside drawers, kids' rooms, the coffee table, kitchen cupboards and even the bathroom for escaped members of your collection. Although you may decide to move parts of your home library to other parts of the home after they are sorted, bringing them all into one space is the best way to ensure your collection is well managed.
* Sort the books. Begin by separating children's books from adult books, then fiction from non-fiction.
* You may decide that simple keeping children's books separate from adult books is enough, as alphabetizing children's books can be a fruitless undertaking. If this is the case, move your kids' books to a bookcase in their playroom or bedrooms.
* Turning back to the adult books in the house, begin by arranging fictional books alphabetically. If you have literally hundreds of books, begin by piling the books in "rough" alphabetical order, for example, by piling those authored by writers whose names begin with A through E, F through J, and so on, together. Later, go back and refine the alphabetical sorting. If you have more than one book written by the same author, sort first by the author's last name, then by the title.
* Organize non-fiction books by topic, then by author or title. Either method is equally efficient, provided you are consistent, ensuring you will be able to find a specific book when you need it. Alternatively, organize non-fiction books according to the Dewey Decimal System. In short, the categories of the Dewey Decimal System are:

* 000 Generalities
* 100 Philosophy & Psychology
* 200 Religion
* 300 Social Sciences
* 400 Language
* 500 Natural Sciences & Mathematics
* 600 Technology (Applied Sciences)
* 700 The Arts
* 800 Literature & Rhetoric
* 900 Geography & History

The scary thing is that every one of those sections is going to have quite a lot of books.

Philosophy/psych books that include: Erich Fromm, Nietzsche, Kant, Stuart Mill (? I guess his stuff is Phil)

Religion: ehh, not so much, lots of stuff in slovenian and spanish, the bulk of the english religion-related stuff is artbooks from famous religious buildings or sculptures.

Social Sciences: textbooks, and some stuff by vance packard (that I can immediately think of)

Language: Uh, some? I'm guessing books on how to learn languages go here, but dictionaries and translation dictionaries wouldn't (those go in the reference section)

Natural Sciences and Math: Yeah, lots, there's a set of mini encyclopedias (it's spelled with an "s"... apparently) just about about math. Several used textbooks that were bought "just because" (seriously, I was learning about genetic heredity when I was in elementary school out of a big biology textbook that had a close up of bees on its front cover). Most of the Asimov non-fiction would go here.

Technology: Everything from techniques of arc welding, to "how to repair" car manuals or drafting goes here

The Arts: There's a lot of stuff just about artists and art; I mean, my mom's got a series of large textbook size leather bound books that has each one discussing a specific impressionist artist. Plus stuff covering more traditional fare like ancient greece, or native Canadian art/sculpture

Literature/Rhetoric: Does philosophy overlap with rhetoric? I can think of a few books that go in this section. Oh shit, nevermind, all the books that discuss any kind of literature go here. @_@

Geography/History: Bunch of stuff for here too. In looking for one specific book about the middle ages, I found 6 others. I didn't find the book I was looking for though.



[Edit]

Here's an other book:

Ivanhoe.

Seriously, this book simply handwaves the boring parts with descriptions that essentially boil down to:

"And so Ivanhoe went from Place A to Place B, in order to pay off the ransom for King Richard. While his estranged father rallied up some troops to go meet with Robin of Lockesly and then go besiege a castle that his ward was being kept prisoner."

Then the chapter were stuff happens begins. The exposition basically ties one chapter to the next, with each chapter pretty much being important dialogue, a big fight or characters RPing with each other.

Ivanhoe reads like most D&D games are played. I'll see if I can find it when I get home tonight and write down an example of what I'm talking about.

I've been reading more Lovecraft. Last night I plowed through At the Mountains of Madness. I was impressed by the attitude of the narrator, who's supposed to be a geologist.

Biologist: Dude, look at this ripply pattern in this slate!
Geologist: That happens all the time. It's just a riverbed which was compressed into a rock. Naturally there'd be some of the original pattern left.

That is a very geologist reaction right there.

Anyway, I found it a decent read, although the "History of the World and Then Some" took me a while to get through. Lovecraft built up Danforth's reaction so much that when It happened, it was pretty anticlimactic.

Not sure if you know this or not, but you can find online versions of Lovecraft's stories here: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lo ... index.html

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Not sure if you know this or not, but you can find online versions of Lovecraft's stories here: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lo ... index.html

Yeah, I found it.

For some reason, though, I prefer the Dead Tree editions. I guess I'm a tactile sort of person, and it helps that the library's copies are all slightly beat up. A Lovecraft collection should not be shiny.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Neil Gaiman reads The Graveyard Book.

That's pretty sweet. I'm read Neverwhere outloud to my fiancee right now. I can never decide how to do Croup and Vandemar's voices though. Anyone watched the mini series btw?

Actually, yes, I have.

-Username17

Thanks Frank, I've "aquired' a copy, I was wondering more on the quality and whether it did the book justice. Though that clip is not how I envision Croup and Vandemar. Somewhat lie the creepy gentlemen demons in the Buffy episode "Hush" (iv.10) was more how I imagined them.

I'm glad we're not the only ones noting this bullshit Ayn Rand Crap.

Personally, I can't wait for those assholes to go galt on us. The sooner people realize that any profitable enterprise of any size can in fact be run as a worker's collective or as a bureaucratic institution the better.

-Username17

Buenos Aries looks like it may be the final destination of the Galt Movement!