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POPULAR: What Did You Read Today?

Tried to start 'The Lord of the Flies' yet again, since I've got to read it for college. No luck for now, I find the start pretty boring and can't go on for some reason.

I am so with you on 'The Lord of the Flies'. I've tried to start that book myself, but the opening is so mind-numbingly slow. It's just talking and no one doing anything. And I get that's the point; "doing nothing" is probably not a good idea when you're in a life-or-death survival situation. But reading it is just so dry. There needs to be something, maybe a B-plot, or some comedy during the boring bits, or a snarky narrator, or something. Yeah, maybe it'll be annoying or distracting, but that'd at least be something, some kind of hook to grab attention until the good stuff kicks in.

Huh. Guess I had a Lord of the Flies rant in me. Well, that's out of my system. Thank you for the opportunity.

Anyways, I've finished Plato and a Platypus. There was a quiz at the end, to make sure you weren't skimming. Got me hung up for a long while. The authors knew exactly where to throw their one egg, and now it's all over my face. They're smarter than me, I'll give them that. Probably should read books from front to back now.
 
Tried to start 'The Lord of the Flies' yet again, since I've got to read it for college. No luck for now, I find the start pretty boring and can't go on for some reason.

Ugh! I was forced to read that in high school and I hated it. It was super boring and many of the characters were really annoying! Trust me, you're not gonna like it. Barely anything happens until much later, and the book seems to think it's smarter and more philosophical than it actually is, so it winds up coming off as pretentious at times.
 
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R Tolkien, and The Slave Trade: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870, Hugh Thomas. Not quite sure what I expected from this one. It's an absolute door-stopper and not really 1440-1870, either. I'm 55 pages in (Out of about 900, according to Goodreads), and most of it has been setting the context of slavery in Europe prior to 1440. Not without reason, certainly, but it's the densest history I've read in years.
 
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R Tolkien, and The Slave Trade: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870, Hugh Thomas. Not quite sure what I expected from this one. It's an absolute door-stopper and not really 1440-1870, either. I'm 55 pages in (Out of about 900, according to Goodreads), and most of it has been setting the context of slavery in Europe prior to 1440. Not without reason, certainly, but it's the densest history I've read in years.
That seems like my kind of book, I'll check it out.

Been reading articles on writing characters to flesh out my OCs. Also some Poke-articles because I haven't played all the games at all.
 
I finished up a really good book called "Station Eleven". Didn't read it, though. I listened to it, over a couple of long car trips. I think I would have enjoyed it even more if I had read it myself.
 
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories. A 27-page essay in defense of the fantasy genre. And I'm not sure what to make of it.

"On Fairy Stories" said:
This, however, is the modern and special (or accidental) 'escapist' aspect of fairy-stories, which they share with romances, and other stories out of or about the past. Many stories out of the past have only become “escapist" in their appeal through surviving from a time when men were as a rule delighted with the work of their hands into our time, when many men feel disgust with man-made things.

But also...
"On Fairy Stories" said:
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

I'm reading this with baggage attached. I've never liked Tolkien, partly because of the verbose writing style which is definitely a matter of personal taste, but also because his idea of fantasy wasn't very appealing. I would not want to live in Middle-Earth; it seems like a messed-up place full of death and violence and irredeemable monsters. And as a Pokémon fan, I like my violence carefully regulated, my death as distant as possible, and my irredeemable monsters to be redeemed. Plus, I'm not sure 'stories out of or about the past' are all that escapist, because the past sucks. I mean, the present has its problems, the future might suck even more, but I don't believe most "modern problems" are uniquely modern.

Still, the idea that good fantasy is rooted in scientific reasoning is absolutely true. I might disagree with Tolkien on his reasoning, but at least we agree we should be using reason. So...I guess Tolkien's defense works? In a "good theory, bad examples" type of way? It was worth the read, but I'm not sure I support its arguments. At least, not in full. And that feels weird.
 
Been reading articles on writing characters to flesh out my OCs. Also some Poke-articles because I haven't played all the games at all.

I know a good writing website called Springhole.net that has a lot of great articles, like world building, character development, cliches, what works and what doesn't, how to write about marginalized groups sensitively, etc.
 
We recently finished The Secret Garden, which was charming.

Now we're on to The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which was the very first Pratchett work I read as a kid and haven't touched in about a decade.
 
We recently finished The Secret Garden, which was charming.

I've read that a few times and liked it myself, though I personally like A Little Princess better.

I just finished re-reading Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls for probably the 20th time. Seriously, I absolutely love this book and it absolutely deserves to be called a classic. More people need to read this!
 
I'm currently reading Circe by Madeline Miller. It's an okay book, but I feel like the author is trying WAY too hard to make Circe into a sweet widdle woobie who's always being treated badly by everyone, even her own child and the brother she raised. Circe needs to catch a break. Plus, all the other characters are really bland and shallow and too mean-spirited for their own good.
 
Software Quality at Top Speed by Steve McConnell. For fun. I'm weird.

Did you know developing rushed software causes you to spend more time fixing bugs post-release than you saved by rushing? In the long run, it's far more time efficient to just get a reliable codebase to build from before adding needed bells and whistles. Or, as McConnell puts in his summary:
Steve McConnell said:
“If you don’t have time to do the job right,” the old chestnut goes, “where will you find the time to do it over?”

As someone who just sunk hours completely restructuring the BBCode of their poetry collection, only to end up with BBCode template .txt that lets me format entire poems in just a couple minutes, I understand completely. I wonder if this can be expanded to other parts of the writing process...
 
So, I recently read about 60% of Tangle's Game, which I got a proof copy of via my local bookstore as part of a sort of book club event they've thought up.

The premise is that a woman gets sent a USB drive containing malware and everyone is now after her. And the Russians are doing cyberwarfare. And Britain has a social credit system like the one China started recently.

Honestly very disappointed. It reads more like a blog than a novel at times, the 2040s technology barely matters outside what the author needs to write to show how clever and knowledgeable he is, the main conflict is almost completely abstract and it's even pointed out that the protagonist has no idea what the villainous Russians are actually doing, and so on. Character rant at total strangers in detail about their demographic background and their political opinions. Every argument is a woke-ness contest. It's exhausting.

These issues, combined with fairly basic prose, mean there's not much for me to enjoy. Don't know if I'll finish it, honestly. Only thing tempting me is the promise of development of a minor AI character.
 
"HIM" by @canisaries and "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov. Stories don't share DNA in any way, but HIM provoked a knee-jerk reaction I'm trying to clense before giving a review. Also, I've been unusually active on these forums for not having any ongoing fics and I'm trying to keep my literary grey matter engaged.

Oh, and "In Memoriam, Private D. Sutherland, killed in action in the German trench 16 May 1916, and the others who died." by Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh MC (4 March 1893 – KIA November 21st 1917). It's a poem. It's not very happy. Everything I've been reading lately hasn't been very happy, come to think of it. I'm going to have great nightmares tonight.
 
The Last Question is good!

I recently read the Homestuck epilogues, which came out this month. 200k words over a span of about 48 hours. Blimey. Sent me flying back to circa 2012. Well written, interesting, and deeply uncomfortable writing.
 
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