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What Are You Reading? (February 2019)
- Thread starter ara
- Start date
- Status
Getting back into my history and currently half way through this. It's a absolute blinder so far.
I was on a soul-crushing marathon trough the depressing episodes of Black Mirror.
Then I decided to read one of the classics in literature inbetween..
..I chose 1984.
Then I decided to read one of the classics in literature inbetween..
..I chose 1984.
Finished reading The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Second book in a row that I have read with time travel or alternate universe themes and really enjoyed it. It really felt like I was reading a True Detective novel. Planning on reading a John Grisham novel next to break up the sci-fi steak.
Spiderman putting in w-
... never mind.
I don't really have any good suggestions but I feel like physics is really tough for this. Maybe people with other science backgrounds experience similar things, but actually learning physics involves a lot of higher level math and never felt intuitive to me so a lot of popular writing skips that and ends up being superficial. This is made worse by tons of physics concepts being interesting for "philosophical" reasons.
I might have to check out those Theoretical Minimum books though. They look interesting. Besides that I could only recommend my favorite textbooks and those would mostly stick to classical mechanics, going higher kinda requires knowing more calculus and statistics.
Yeah, there's a chance I'll just stick with textbooks, but I figured I might as well ask for other options. I'm studying biomedical engineering, so I have a pretty good knowledge of the basics. Since I'm specialising in a whole different area I figured something a bit more divulgative might be a better choice (as I'd be reading it in my spare time).
Maybe a bit more into the engineering physics aka mechanics but still i found it a lot more readable than the average book on mechanics:
The Variational Principles of Mechanics
Reading American Prison by Shane Bauer, and just got my library holds for The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and Bad Blood (that Theranos story).
Audiobooks count as reading to me. In fact, Audible is the only reason that I started reading at all. I went from reading nothing on a yearly basis to reading 12 books a year (that was my count for 2018). During that time frame, I have felt the benefits of what traditional readers would feel. The sense of relaxation of allowing yourself to get lost in new worlds. Opening my mind up to new ways of thinking either through fictitious characters emotions and beliefs or through nonfiction writing that is covering new or difficult subject matter. It's an amazing hobby and I would have never been a part of it if audiobooks didn't exist
Kind of struggling with the start of Abaddon's Gate, so I picked up Norwegian Wood.
Couple chapters in and I'm really liking it.
Couple chapters in and I'm really liking it.
Reading through Hiroshima right now, I just don't know how to find the time to be able to pick up a book and focus. Between classes and work, it feels like I have zero time to read.
Well in that case I'm midway through another audiobook called Unholy Night. Anyone heard of this book? It's about the three kings/magi who visit Jesus in the manger. It's not terrible. The three magi are thieves/killers on the run who get caught up in the story of Christ
I'm struggling with House of Leaves, y'all. It drops these little tidbits like (I'm kinda making these up partially due to not spoiling things and partially because I don't remember exactly what they say) "this doomed action" before talking about the action or "later these people are gone" before they've left and it's really annoying to me. Just tell me when it happens, I don't need every major detail blatantly referenced before I get there.....
and they tease this and then I hit 2-3 pages of footnotes, 90% of the time I feel like is a giant run-on paragraph of the narrator's stream of consciousness which I find both extremely boring and extremely hard to read and ughhhhhhhhhh I just can't. Completely disrupts the flow of what story there is.
and they tease this and then I hit 2-3 pages of footnotes, 90% of the time I feel like is a giant run-on paragraph of the narrator's stream of consciousness which I find both extremely boring and extremely hard to read and ughhhhhhhhhh I just can't. Completely disrupts the flow of what story there is.
I'm reading Tom Cox's Help The Witch, a collection of modern folk tales and folk-horror.
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Finished Sounds and Furies: Seven Faces of Darkness by Tanith Lee. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I usually am not that much into reading short stories in general, but most of these hooked me. I also love how vivid her best stories are. I'm going to return to another of her books in a little while.
I decided on a whim to read next The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in the Earthsea series. It's pretty short, and I enjoyed the first a lot. I want to read it while the first book is still fresh in my memory. After that I might move back into a bigger book (perhaps Fifth Season).
4 books read so far in 2019, so I'm off to a pretty good start.
I decided on a whim to read next The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in the Earthsea series. It's pretty short, and I enjoyed the first a lot. I want to read it while the first book is still fresh in my memory. After that I might move back into a bigger book (perhaps Fifth Season).
4 books read so far in 2019, so I'm off to a pretty good start.
How is it? Any thoughts?I'm reading Tom Cox's Help The Witch, a collecton of modern folk tales and folk-horror.
Quite good so far - it's definitely on the lighter side, andthe horror elements are more by hint or implication, but he has a real gift for describing landscape and mood.
I finished Mortal Engines today. I'm going to rant about it compared to the movie in spoiler tags here and will also probably post it in the movie thread but uh. Suffice to say I liked it a lot, it has issues but it's a solid YA book with a cool setting that I really liked. I'll probably read the like 30 sequels it has at some point.
All in all, I'm glad I went on this journey of reading the book after seeing and hating the movie. It was fun in its own weird way. I definitely enjoyed it more than being excited for an adaptation of a book I liked only for it to suck at least. That movie was bad but it led me to reading a good book so it did something of worth.
FOR NOW THOUGH. I'm finally reading Record of a Spaceborn few and i'm so excited to get into it. A Closed and Common Orbit is probably my favourite book that I've read over the past like 5 or so years.
OH GOD THIS MOVIE WAS SO TERRIBLE BUT THIS BOOK IS RATHER GOOD.
Warning: This will be nitpicky but I just...need to.
I'm a firm believer that a movie adaptation does not need to be faithful to the book it is based on to be a great movie. I love The Shining (I actually like the movie a lot more than the book but that's a rant for another day) however Mortal Engines manages to fail both at being a good movie and a good adaptation.
THE BEGINNING
The first like 30 minutes of the movie are almost shot for shot from the intro of the book and it's genuinely very good in both instances. London eats a small town, Hester boards, she tries to stab Valentine (in the movie she succeeds but he's fine. It's a change that I don't really understand because it doesn't actually change anything) and is chased off of London by Tom who is booted off by Valentine to cover his tracks. Tom and Hester group up because Hester is injured, they get picked up by another town who pretend to be nice and then are going to be sold as slaves.
I'm not going to go shot for shot through the changes the movie makes from the book because that'd be pointless. But I specifically wanted to recap this intro section because it's so close to the book and because where it diverges is mostly meaningless (and awful product placement.) However the part where it splits from the book is not just signposted, the script writer literally wrote into the script criticism of the book at this point in the movie. In the book, Hester and Tom remove a floor plating from their room and jump out, escaping before being sold as slaves. In the movie, they attempt this but Hester is too injured to make the jump out of the room and instead they are rescued by Anna Fang moments later. This makes sense and is a change that on the face of it I kinda like because yeah, it makes sense. Hester could barely walk at that point how did she make that jump? But the script in the film is so fucking bad that Hester may as well at this point go "I can't make the jump, i'm too injured" then turn to the camera and wink.
After this point the movie diverges in a lot of ways from the book, although it still follows mostly the same plot it just cuts out a bunch of stuff and ruins every single character then turns into Star Wars at the end because reasons.
SO
WHY THE MOVIE SUCKS
Okay, i'm going to get really nitpicky about specific changes that were for the worse that helped ruin this movie but to start with let me just summary and say. The movie sucks primarily because it's written terribly. Almost every character is reduced to shitty one liners after the intro, worst of all being Anna Fang, Valentine is reduced into generic villain, but even the characters who are similar to their book versions are just written so poorly that what worked in the book doesn't work on screen. Also Shrike's name sound so much like "Shrek" when being said out loud that it's hilarious. But overall it does stay surprisingly close to the book in plot up until the end, redacting a lot of stuff but rarely adding additional fluff. The way I'd break it down would be
First act: Most similar to the book, overall very good. If the whole movie as this good it'd be a great movie.
Second act: Starts to diverge from the book to shorten it down for the length of a film. The writing is generally very very bad here, primarily because this section focusses on Shrike and Anna Fang. The former of which is reduced to saying "Kill Hester" over and over and the latter of whom is reduced to saying shitty one liners.
Third act: It's Star Wars but bad and has almost nothing to do with the book other than the location.
Also, I'm going to focus on story and characters here but keep in your mind that after the first act the cinematography gets terrible. Like genuinely it feels like a different movie also in terms of how poorly shot and edited the whole movie was after Act 1.
THADDEUS VALENTINE
Portrayed by Hugo Weaving in the film (doing his best Sean Bean impression) and uh yeah, the changes to him are central to the changes to the whole plot and basically what makes the movie so bad.
To begin with, Valentine is somewhat mysterious to start with. We know he's the Mayor's right hand man, he boots Tom off London after he hears Hester claim Valentine killed her parents but otherwise is charismatic and generally comes off as a very affable and likeable person. He is outspoken about the class divides in London having risen up from being a scavenger to the upper echelons of society himself. Both the movie and the book do this, it's great, he's a great character.
Valentine murdered Hester Shaw's parents long before the start of the book to take a piece of a weapon called MEDUSA back to London, which is used to rebuild the weapon which they intend to use to murder lots of people and basically make London an unstoppable monster. The big change the movie makes to Valentine's character is that this is his plan. Valentine does this in secret somehow, murders the mayor, stages a coup and takes London off course towards Asia to start firing off Medusa willy nilly and kill everyone and "save London" because they'll have so much to consume.
In the book this is the Mayor's plan and Valentine is being blackmailed into doing it because he wants his daughter to grow up in high society and have a better life. This is much better for a variety of reasons but the main one being that book doesn't reveal this until much later (in fact Valentine isn't even in most of the book) and it is foreshadowed by an earlier encounter with a bunch of pirates which didn't make it into the movie (which is fine because it's rather superfluous other than this foreshadowing.)
These changes aren't inherently bad but the way they are handled in the movie it basically just results in Valentine being an incredibly charismatic but evil villain the whole way through with absolutely no depth to his character outside of that. In the book what he did to get where he is puts strain on him and his daughter's relationship in a way that builds and results in his eventual suicide by refusing to escape with Hester and Tom, despite Hester's somewhat forgiveness of him seeing how hard he is trying to save his innocent daughter.
LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER
It's heavily implied in the book that Valentine is Hester's father and not her mother's husband. But this only comes up like once in a conversation between Valentine and his daughter, Hester never learns about it and it's kind of a non-thing. It's only really there to show that Valentine was willing to kill someone who might be his daughter in order to build this life for his definite daughter.
In the movie, this revelation is made during the climactic battle between Hester and Valentine on the back of a ship during a fucking dogfight and oh god everything about it is the worst. He literally picks her up and dangles her over the edge of the ship and almost line for line repeats the Darth Vader father revelation from Star Wars. It's insane and goddamn I hate it.
SPEAKING OF STAR WARS
The movie changes the whole final sequence so that instead of it being a struggle for survival for each of the characters and the big climactic defeat of the villain being caused by the fact he was literally meddling with powers he didn't understand (in this case, old tech than they haphazardly rebuilt and didn't know how to fix when it broke) to being a generic big budget action sequence that copies more and more stuff from Star Wars. There's literally a sequence where a bunch of fighters are taking out guns so that someone can do a trench run. The action cumulates in Tom flying into the heart of London and blowing up the engines. It's just bad and generic and literally just Star Wars. It's boring as hell. As mentioned earlier, it's also just not shot well at all and it's a mess. They do these weird awful zoom ins every time a scene takes place inside MEDUSA and it's hideous and I have no idea why it's the way it is.
Other stuff:
ANNA FANG
I've mentioned a few times in this rant that Anna Fang only speaks in one liners in the movie but I can't get across exactly how shitty it is. She's damn cool in the book and the way they translated that to the movie was basically "she has a snarky one liner for every situation."
VALENTINE'S DAUGHTER
Katherine I think is her name? I literally just finished this book an hour ago and I don't remember. One of my complaints about the movie at the time was that she is a nothing character who does basically nothing. In the book she is a nothing character who does basically nothing but she also has a pet wolf. She exists solely to give Valentine a reason for being blackmailed, which in the movie isn't even a thing so she may as well have been cut out of it entirely. She sucks in both though so whatever.
HESTER SHAW
She is constantly described as ugly and deformed after what Valentine did to her. In the movie she has a kinda cute scar but that's it. This sucks but again, whatever. It's a movie, that's how this shit rolls unfortunately. It's hard to market your movie when the protagonist looks like Two Face in TDK.
Warning: This will be nitpicky but I just...need to.
I'm a firm believer that a movie adaptation does not need to be faithful to the book it is based on to be a great movie. I love The Shining (I actually like the movie a lot more than the book but that's a rant for another day) however Mortal Engines manages to fail both at being a good movie and a good adaptation.
THE BEGINNING
The first like 30 minutes of the movie are almost shot for shot from the intro of the book and it's genuinely very good in both instances. London eats a small town, Hester boards, she tries to stab Valentine (in the movie she succeeds but he's fine. It's a change that I don't really understand because it doesn't actually change anything) and is chased off of London by Tom who is booted off by Valentine to cover his tracks. Tom and Hester group up because Hester is injured, they get picked up by another town who pretend to be nice and then are going to be sold as slaves.
I'm not going to go shot for shot through the changes the movie makes from the book because that'd be pointless. But I specifically wanted to recap this intro section because it's so close to the book and because where it diverges is mostly meaningless (and awful product placement.) However the part where it splits from the book is not just signposted, the script writer literally wrote into the script criticism of the book at this point in the movie. In the book, Hester and Tom remove a floor plating from their room and jump out, escaping before being sold as slaves. In the movie, they attempt this but Hester is too injured to make the jump out of the room and instead they are rescued by Anna Fang moments later. This makes sense and is a change that on the face of it I kinda like because yeah, it makes sense. Hester could barely walk at that point how did she make that jump? But the script in the film is so fucking bad that Hester may as well at this point go "I can't make the jump, i'm too injured" then turn to the camera and wink.
After this point the movie diverges in a lot of ways from the book, although it still follows mostly the same plot it just cuts out a bunch of stuff and ruins every single character then turns into Star Wars at the end because reasons.
SO
WHY THE MOVIE SUCKS
Okay, i'm going to get really nitpicky about specific changes that were for the worse that helped ruin this movie but to start with let me just summary and say. The movie sucks primarily because it's written terribly. Almost every character is reduced to shitty one liners after the intro, worst of all being Anna Fang, Valentine is reduced into generic villain, but even the characters who are similar to their book versions are just written so poorly that what worked in the book doesn't work on screen. Also Shrike's name sound so much like "Shrek" when being said out loud that it's hilarious. But overall it does stay surprisingly close to the book in plot up until the end, redacting a lot of stuff but rarely adding additional fluff. The way I'd break it down would be
First act: Most similar to the book, overall very good. If the whole movie as this good it'd be a great movie.
Second act: Starts to diverge from the book to shorten it down for the length of a film. The writing is generally very very bad here, primarily because this section focusses on Shrike and Anna Fang. The former of which is reduced to saying "Kill Hester" over and over and the latter of whom is reduced to saying shitty one liners.
Third act: It's Star Wars but bad and has almost nothing to do with the book other than the location.
Also, I'm going to focus on story and characters here but keep in your mind that after the first act the cinematography gets terrible. Like genuinely it feels like a different movie also in terms of how poorly shot and edited the whole movie was after Act 1.
THADDEUS VALENTINE
Portrayed by Hugo Weaving in the film (doing his best Sean Bean impression) and uh yeah, the changes to him are central to the changes to the whole plot and basically what makes the movie so bad.
To begin with, Valentine is somewhat mysterious to start with. We know he's the Mayor's right hand man, he boots Tom off London after he hears Hester claim Valentine killed her parents but otherwise is charismatic and generally comes off as a very affable and likeable person. He is outspoken about the class divides in London having risen up from being a scavenger to the upper echelons of society himself. Both the movie and the book do this, it's great, he's a great character.
Valentine murdered Hester Shaw's parents long before the start of the book to take a piece of a weapon called MEDUSA back to London, which is used to rebuild the weapon which they intend to use to murder lots of people and basically make London an unstoppable monster. The big change the movie makes to Valentine's character is that this is his plan. Valentine does this in secret somehow, murders the mayor, stages a coup and takes London off course towards Asia to start firing off Medusa willy nilly and kill everyone and "save London" because they'll have so much to consume.
In the book this is the Mayor's plan and Valentine is being blackmailed into doing it because he wants his daughter to grow up in high society and have a better life. This is much better for a variety of reasons but the main one being that book doesn't reveal this until much later (in fact Valentine isn't even in most of the book) and it is foreshadowed by an earlier encounter with a bunch of pirates which didn't make it into the movie (which is fine because it's rather superfluous other than this foreshadowing.)
These changes aren't inherently bad but the way they are handled in the movie it basically just results in Valentine being an incredibly charismatic but evil villain the whole way through with absolutely no depth to his character outside of that. In the book what he did to get where he is puts strain on him and his daughter's relationship in a way that builds and results in his eventual suicide by refusing to escape with Hester and Tom, despite Hester's somewhat forgiveness of him seeing how hard he is trying to save his innocent daughter.
LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER
It's heavily implied in the book that Valentine is Hester's father and not her mother's husband. But this only comes up like once in a conversation between Valentine and his daughter, Hester never learns about it and it's kind of a non-thing. It's only really there to show that Valentine was willing to kill someone who might be his daughter in order to build this life for his definite daughter.
In the movie, this revelation is made during the climactic battle between Hester and Valentine on the back of a ship during a fucking dogfight and oh god everything about it is the worst. He literally picks her up and dangles her over the edge of the ship and almost line for line repeats the Darth Vader father revelation from Star Wars. It's insane and goddamn I hate it.
SPEAKING OF STAR WARS
The movie changes the whole final sequence so that instead of it being a struggle for survival for each of the characters and the big climactic defeat of the villain being caused by the fact he was literally meddling with powers he didn't understand (in this case, old tech than they haphazardly rebuilt and didn't know how to fix when it broke) to being a generic big budget action sequence that copies more and more stuff from Star Wars. There's literally a sequence where a bunch of fighters are taking out guns so that someone can do a trench run. The action cumulates in Tom flying into the heart of London and blowing up the engines. It's just bad and generic and literally just Star Wars. It's boring as hell. As mentioned earlier, it's also just not shot well at all and it's a mess. They do these weird awful zoom ins every time a scene takes place inside MEDUSA and it's hideous and I have no idea why it's the way it is.
Other stuff:
ANNA FANG
I've mentioned a few times in this rant that Anna Fang only speaks in one liners in the movie but I can't get across exactly how shitty it is. She's damn cool in the book and the way they translated that to the movie was basically "she has a snarky one liner for every situation."
VALENTINE'S DAUGHTER
Katherine I think is her name? I literally just finished this book an hour ago and I don't remember. One of my complaints about the movie at the time was that she is a nothing character who does basically nothing. In the book she is a nothing character who does basically nothing but she also has a pet wolf. She exists solely to give Valentine a reason for being blackmailed, which in the movie isn't even a thing so she may as well have been cut out of it entirely. She sucks in both though so whatever.
HESTER SHAW
She is constantly described as ugly and deformed after what Valentine did to her. In the movie she has a kinda cute scar but that's it. This sucks but again, whatever. It's a movie, that's how this shit rolls unfortunately. It's hard to market your movie when the protagonist looks like Two Face in TDK.
All in all, I'm glad I went on this journey of reading the book after seeing and hating the movie. It was fun in its own weird way. I definitely enjoyed it more than being excited for an adaptation of a book I liked only for it to suck at least. That movie was bad but it led me to reading a good book so it did something of worth.
FOR NOW THOUGH. I'm finally reading Record of a Spaceborn few and i'm so excited to get into it. A Closed and Common Orbit is probably my favourite book that I've read over the past like 5 or so years.
I finished Mortal Engines today. I'm going to rant about it compared to the movie in spoiler tags here and will also probably post it in the movie thread but uh. Suffice to say I liked it a lot, it has issues but it's a solid YA book with a cool setting that I really liked. I'll probably read the like 30 sequels it has at some point.
OH GOD THIS MOVIE WAS SO TERRIBLE BUT THIS BOOK IS RATHER GOOD.
Warning: This will be nitpicky but I just...need to.
I'm a firm believer that a movie adaptation does not need to be faithful to the book it is based on to be a great movie. I love The Shining (I actually like the movie a lot more than the book but that's a rant for another day) however Mortal Engines manages to fail both at being a good movie and a good adaptation.
THE BEGINNING
The first like 30 minutes of the movie are almost shot for shot from the intro of the book and it's genuinely very good in both instances. London eats a small town, Hester boards, she tries to stab Valentine (in the movie she succeeds but he's fine. It's a change that I don't really understand because it doesn't actually change anything) and is chased off of London by Tom who is booted off by Valentine to cover his tracks. Tom and Hester group up because Hester is injured, they get picked up by another town who pretend to be nice and then are going to be sold as slaves.
I'm not going to go shot for shot through the changes the movie makes from the book because that'd be pointless. But I specifically wanted to recap this intro section because it's so close to the book and because where it diverges is mostly meaningless (and awful product placement.) However the part where it splits from the book is not just signposted, the script writer literally wrote into the script criticism of the book at this point in the movie. In the book, Hester and Tom remove a floor plating from their room and jump out, escaping before being sold as slaves. In the movie, they attempt this but Hester is too injured to make the jump out of the room and instead they are rescued by Anna Fang moments later. This makes sense and is a change that on the face of it I kinda like because yeah, it makes sense. Hester could barely walk at that point how did she make that jump? But the script in the film is so fucking bad that Hester may as well at this point go "I can't make the jump, i'm too injured" then turn to the camera and wink.
After this point the movie diverges in a lot of ways from the book, although it still follows mostly the same plot it just cuts out a bunch of stuff and ruins every single character then turns into Star Wars at the end because reasons.
SO
WHY THE MOVIE SUCKS
Okay, i'm going to get really nitpicky about specific changes that were for the worse that helped ruin this movie but to start with let me just summary and say. The movie sucks primarily because it's written terribly. Almost every character is reduced to shitty one liners after the intro, worst of all being Anna Fang, Valentine is reduced into generic villain, but even the characters who are similar to their book versions are just written so poorly that what worked in the book doesn't work on screen. Also Shrike's name sound so much like "Shrek" when being said out loud that it's hilarious. But overall it does stay surprisingly close to the book in plot up until the end, redacting a lot of stuff but rarely adding additional fluff. The way I'd break it down would be
First act: Most similar to the book, overall very good. If the whole movie as this good it'd be a great movie.
Second act: Starts to diverge from the book to shorten it down for the length of a film. The writing is generally very very bad here, primarily because this section focusses on Shrike and Anna Fang. The former of which is reduced to saying "Kill Hester" over and over and the latter of whom is reduced to saying shitty one liners.
Third act: It's Star Wars but bad and has almost nothing to do with the book other than the location.
Also, I'm going to focus on story and characters here but keep in your mind that after the first act the cinematography gets terrible. Like genuinely it feels like a different movie also in terms of how poorly shot and edited the whole movie was after Act 1.
THADDEUS VALENTINE
Portrayed by Hugo Weaving in the film (doing his best Sean Bean impression) and uh yeah, the changes to him are central to the changes to the whole plot and basically what makes the movie so bad.
To begin with, Valentine is somewhat mysterious to start with. We know he's the Mayor's right hand man, he boots Tom off London after he hears Hester claim Valentine killed her parents but otherwise is charismatic and generally comes off as a very affable and likeable person. He is outspoken about the class divides in London having risen up from being a scavenger to the upper echelons of society himself. Both the movie and the book do this, it's great, he's a great character.
Valentine murdered Hester Shaw's parents long before the start of the book to take a piece of a weapon called MEDUSA back to London, which is used to rebuild the weapon which they intend to use to murder lots of people and basically make London an unstoppable monster. The big change the movie makes to Valentine's character is that this is his plan. Valentine does this in secret somehow, murders the mayor, stages a coup and takes London off course towards Asia to start firing off Medusa willy nilly and kill everyone and "save London" because they'll have so much to consume.
In the book this is the Mayor's plan and Valentine is being blackmailed into doing it because he wants his daughter to grow up in high society and have a better life. This is much better for a variety of reasons but the main one being that book doesn't reveal this until much later (in fact Valentine isn't even in most of the book) and it is foreshadowed by an earlier encounter with a bunch of pirates which didn't make it into the movie (which is fine because it's rather superfluous other than this foreshadowing.)
These changes aren't inherently bad but the way they are handled in the movie it basically just results in Valentine being an incredibly charismatic but evil villain the whole way through with absolutely no depth to his character outside of that. In the book what he did to get where he is puts strain on him and his daughter's relationship in a way that builds and results in his eventual suicide by refusing to escape with Hester and Tom, despite Hester's somewhat forgiveness of him seeing how hard he is trying to save his innocent daughter.
LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER
It's heavily implied in the book that Valentine is Hester's father and not her mother's husband. But this only comes up like once in a conversation between Valentine and his daughter, Hester never learns about it and it's kind of a non-thing. It's only really there to show that Valentine was willing to kill someone who might be his daughter in order to build this life for his definite daughter.
In the movie, this revelation is made during the climactic battle between Hester and Valentine on the back of a ship during a fucking dogfight and oh god everything about it is the worst. He literally picks her up and dangles her over the edge of the ship and almost line for line repeats the Darth Vader father revelation from Star Wars. It's insane and goddamn I hate it.
SPEAKING OF STAR WARS
The movie changes the whole final sequence so that instead of it being a struggle for survival for each of the characters and the big climactic defeat of the villain being caused by the fact he was literally meddling with powers he didn't understand (in this case, old tech than they haphazardly rebuilt and didn't know how to fix when it broke) to being a generic big budget action sequence that copies more and more stuff from Star Wars. There's literally a sequence where a bunch of fighters are taking out guns so that someone can do a trench run. The action cumulates in Tom flying into the heart of London and blowing up the engines. It's just bad and generic and literally just Star Wars. It's boring as hell. As mentioned earlier, it's also just not shot well at all and it's a mess. They do these weird awful zoom ins every time a scene takes place inside MEDUSA and it's hideous and I have no idea why it's the way it is.
Other stuff:
ANNA FANG
I've mentioned a few times in this rant that Anna Fang only speaks in one liners in the movie but I can't get across exactly how shitty it is. She's damn cool in the book and the way they translated that to the movie was basically "she has a snarky one liner for every situation."
VALENTINE'S DAUGHTER
Katherine I think is her name? I literally just finished this book an hour ago and I don't remember. One of my complaints about the movie at the time was that she is a nothing character who does basically nothing. In the book she is a nothing character who does basically nothing but she also has a pet wolf. She exists solely to give Valentine a reason for being blackmailed, which in the movie isn't even a thing so she may as well have been cut out of it entirely. She sucks in both though so whatever.
HESTER SHAW
She is constantly described as ugly and deformed after what Valentine did to her. In the movie she has a kinda cute scar but that's it. This sucks but again, whatever. It's a movie, that's how this shit rolls unfortunately. It's hard to market your movie when the protagonist looks like Two Face in TDK.
All in all, I'm glad I went on this journey of reading the book after seeing and hating the movie. It was fun in its own weird way. I definitely enjoyed it more than being excited for an adaptation of a book I liked only for it to suck at least. That movie was bad but it led me to reading a good book so it did something of worth.
FOR NOW THOUGH. I'm finally reading Record of a Spaceborn few and i'm so excited to get into it. A Closed and Common Orbit is probably my favourite book that I've read over the past like 5 or so years.
I've just very recently finished reading all four ME books, and the sequels are great, I'd definitely recommend reading them whenever you can.
I didn't know Tor.com was giving out free ebooks for people signed up for their mailing list. It seems they give out one a month? That's pretty crazy if so. Well, I signed up and got Witchmark by C.L. Polk.
I decided to start reading it instead of what I had planned, and it's pretty good so far. I'm definitely down for getting free books, lol.
I decided to start reading it instead of what I had planned, and it's pretty good so far. I'm definitely down for getting free books, lol.
I'm reading Sabbath's Theater for the 3rd time.
In Brazil Philip Roth not well known like in North America, so I was late to the party and only heard of him on my early 20s, but now I love him so much.
I'm always in awe of how grotesque Mickey Sabbath can be. He's such a good character to hate.
In Brazil Philip Roth not well known like in North America, so I was late to the party and only heard of him on my early 20s, but now I love him so much.
I'm always in awe of how grotesque Mickey Sabbath can be. He's such a good character to hate.
Written by the guy who wrote Mindhunter. Continues to explore the application of psychological profiling on various serial killers in America and Canada. Very enthralling read.
Just started getting into Rothfuss's work. Am really enjoying The Name of the Wind. I find Kvothe to be a very likeable, albeit cocky, teenager. Rothfuss also knows how to make a compelling villain without having him say much (Ambrose). Quality read so far.
Started on Livy. Really interesting, although I'm only at book 2 so still in the mythical past of Rome.
Yo this looks interesting what is it like?Jumping between Circe by Madeline Miller
And Tom Holland's translation of Herodotus
So I put down Journey to the west for a bit (it's a hard read I gotta read the glossery every 5 seconds and make notes on religious philosophy frequently) and I picked up and finished Neil Gaimans "Norse Mythology" book.
It's a modern interpretation of some classic Norse stories and I gotta say I loved my read of it! It isn't hard reading and Gaiman does a great job with his take on the gods. You can tell this was a passion project for him. If you want a fun light read or you wanna get a book for a middle school age kid that wants something fun to read. This is the perfect way to spend your time or money.
I finished The October Country and 20th Century Ghosts, two short story collections. Both were really good.
Finished reading Star Wars: Lost Stars, on Tuesday, and Star Wars: Bloodlines, on Wednesday. Will read Battlefront: Twilight Company today.
Probably Doctor Who: Scratchman on Friday.
Probably Doctor Who: Scratchman on Friday.
I also loved reading this book, I believe I finished it in a day. I found his writing to be extremely fluid, I should check out some other stuff by him.
Honestly I almost plowed through this thing in a day haha. If it weren't for life getting in the way I would have done it to! Anyway if you are looking for more work by Gaiman I highly recommend American Gods. Great story about what would happen if worshipping/believing in gods gave birth to them. And what happens if they are forgotten/abandoned.
Thanks for the recommendation, I have read many good things about it so I'll definitely put it on the list.
I didn't know Tor.com was giving out free ebooks for people signed up for their mailing list. It seems they give out one a month? That's pretty crazy if so. Well, I signed up and got Witchmark by C.L. Polk.
I decided to start reading it instead of what I had planned, and it's pretty good so far. I'm definitely down for getting free books, lol.
This is a wonderful cover! Let us know how the book is
Found the entire The Murderbot Diaries series at my semi-local library. Hopefully I can grind those out this weekend.
Just started getting into Rothfuss's work. Am really enjoying The Name of the Wind. I find Kvothe to be a very likeable, albeit cocky, teenager. Rothfuss also knows how to make a compelling villain without having him say much (Ambrose). Quality read so far.
take your time reading Rothfuss, because nobody knows when he's releasing the third book.
It is listed on amazon.de for a July 2021 release though :) :
https://www.amazon.de/Doors-Stone-K...1550148275&sr=1-3&refinements=p_82:B001DAHXZQ
That's a lot of reading in one week! I am interested to hear how Scratchman is.
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