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Assholes Finish First It is so wrong but so fucking hilarious. I should go to hell for laughing at this shit but I can't help it.

About to start The Kobayashi Maru a book I borrowed from a friend's fiancé when I leant him The Final Reflection

All I can think of is PAD's dedication in Stone & Anvil: "To the Brave passengers and crew of the Kobayashi Maru... sucks to be you."

"The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years," Bernard Lewis. It undermines everyone's claims, to everything. Fun stuff.

Ken Follett, The Man From St Petersburg. So far it's interesting, young Winston Churchill shows up early on.

Thinking about taking some books out from the library. Any suggestions? Looking for SF or Stephensonesque novels. Asimov maybe? Never read the Foundation series.

Dated as they are, I very much enjoyed the original Foundation trilogy. None of the subsequent books have particularly held my interest, though.

currently LOL/LMAOO re-reading "Good Omens"

"Shadow of the Scorpion"

I'm reading A Renegade History of the United States. It's fascinating - the first chapter was about sexuality and drinking in colonial and revolutionary America.

The AI War: The Big Boost, Daniel Keys Moran. Next book in the 'Continuing Time' series. Been forever.

The Good Soldier Svejk

It's always worth a re-read.

If you want Asimov, you can't go wrong with his robot short stories in "The Complete Robot".

Dalton wrote:Thinking about taking some books out from the library. Any suggestions? Looking for SF or Stephensonesque novels. Asimov maybe? Never read the Foundation series.

It's hard to find something exactly Stephensonesque (by which I assume you mean entertaining tangential infodumps, "everything is SF-awesome" attitude, and the most thrilling set pieces on pipe-organ repair you can find in print) but you could do a lot worse than Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Egan.

edit: in the less-SF-y realm, you might give Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon a try.

+1 on the Eco - reading Baudolino again and it just keeps getting more fun...

On spring break, and the only thing I could find in my library in Banks' Culture-verse was Matter. I also picked up a collection of short stories by Poul Anderson. Not bad.

Sriad wrote:

Dalton wrote:Thinking about taking some books out from the library. Any suggestions? Looking for SF or Stephensonesque novels. Asimov maybe? Never read the Foundation series.

It's hard to find something exactly Stephensonesque (by which I assume you mean entertaining tangential infodumps, "everything is SF-awesome" attitude, and the most thrilling set pieces on pipe-organ repair you can find in print) but you could do a lot worse than Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Egan.

edit: in the less-SF-y realm, you might give Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon a try.

Man, you hit the nail on the head Try as I might, I can't think of any authors that quite have the same style as Neal Stephenson. The man's an auteur - can't wait for REAMDE.

I'm working on David Pearl's The Dante Club. I'm really enjoying it.

Continuing on the Horus Heresy series and halfway trough "Decent of Angels", which is not a bad book per se but sadly it has fuck all to do with the Horus Heresy.

I recently watched Jurassic Park again, and it piqued my curiousity to the point where I read the novel all the way through again.

It's not as bad as I remember. Malcolm gets annoying and preachy, but you can chalk most of that up to him being seriously injured, on morphine, and degenerating into delirium. Emphasis on the word "most", since he's plenty arrogant before (one hilarious part is when he says that he "doesn't need evidence, because the theory is good enough").

The rest of it was fairly consistent, with the park being overly centralized, automated, and overly reliant on active systems because of Hammond's short-sighted cutting of corners on staffing (at one point he says that he did it because staffing is usually one of the biggest costs to zoos). I like how they point out that much of the difficult has come from trying to understand and take care of long-extinct animals, with all kinds of problems popping up (such as the stegosaurs getting some type of intestinal disorder causing diarrhea).

I still haven't gotten back to Pride and Prejudice, but I mean to do that. In the mean-time, I've got the updated Freakonomics, a bunch of Harry Turtledove short stories, and the novelization for Serenity.

Guardsman Bass wrote: It's not as bad as I remember. Malcolm gets annoying and preachy, but you can chalk most of that up to him being seriously injured, on morphine, and degenerating into delirium. Emphasis on the word "most", since he's plenty arrogant before (one hilarious part is when he says that he "doesn't need evidence, because the theory is good enough").

And if you take the first novel as self-contained canon, Malcolm actually dies from his injuries. His pretentious, irritating diatribes about the follies of human science were silly, but he had a few words of wisdom about humanity's destruction of the current biosphere being more of a direct danger to the short-lived humans, rather than the 4.5 billion year old Earth at large.

The rest of it was fairly consistent, with the park being overly centralized, automated, and overly reliant on active systems because of Hammond's short-sighted cutting of corners on staffing (at one point he says that he did it because staffing is usually one of the biggest costs to zoos).

Book Hammond, unlike the cuddly movie Hammond with the variable Scottish accent, was a rather dishonest, callous and unlikable corporate slug who was going senile, only being moderately cantankerous about Lex and Tim being in mortal peril while casually slurping back ice cream. The park was a disaster mostly of his own making and when stalking about the ruined park after the dinosaur attacks, he slunk about blaming all the staff and guests for the park's failure, fell down a grassy hill, and then got devoured by chicken sized dinosaurs. Movie Hammond was even more opposite to book Hammond in The Lost World.

The park failed because Hammond put the operations of the automated park essentially in the hands of crooked software engineer Dennis Nedry who was on the payroll of another rival company and had the keys to the kingdom so to speak, but Dennis Nedry did not predict that tropical storm...

I like how they point out that much of the difficult has come from trying to understand and take care of long-extinct animals, with all kinds of problems popping up (such as the stegosaurs getting some type of intestinal disorder causing diarrhea).

InGen rushed forward way too quickly in turning the relatively alien and physically powerful creatures from the very distant past into vulgar attractions to make money as soon as possible, not cautiously researching their actual biology and behaviour patterns from the ground up, so that these dinosaurs could be sustained in a more secure artificial habitat. InGen did not even observe their dinosaurs at night and there were many narrow gaps in their island security systems, with the park's motion sensors not able to work correctly by large bodies of water that the dinosaurs could traverse across...

I'm now currently reading Iain M. Banks' Excession.

Big Orange wrote:Book Hammond, unlike the cuddly movie Hammond with the variable Scottish accent, was a rather dishonest, callous and unlikable corporate slug who was going senile, only being moderately cantankerous about Lex and Tim being in mortal peril while casually slurping back ice cream.

Book Hammond really struck me as being more of a stock character: The Corrupt CEO, moderated somewhat by the fact that he actually did do something visionary. That said, he's more consistent than Movie Hammond, where they tried to combine the Nice Old Man Who Loves Children with the corner-cutting and design issues that were a result of Book Hammond's ruthlessness and budget-control.

Not that the two can't co-exist. It's just that it felt dissonant when I watched the movie.

Big Orange wrote:The park failed because Hammond put the operations of the automated park essentially in the hands of crooked software engineer Dennis Nedry who was on the payroll of another rival company and had the keys to the kingdom so to speak, but Dennis Nedry did not predict that tropical storm...

That's true, and it's surprising that Hammond didn't bring in someone else who could do back-up in case something happened to Dennis Nedry. However, you can sort of sympathize with Nedry, since in the book he got screwed over by Ingen. At the last minute, they forced him to do a ton of re-writing of the programs but refused to pay him additional money for it, and then effectively black-mailed him into eating his own costs on it.

Of course the reader's opinion of Dennis Nedry from the book is distorted by the way Movie Nedry is depicted in a blatantly odious manner by Wayne Knight, with his money problems implied of being self-inflicted. Also Dennis Nedry did not intend to completely take down the island, he intended to only temporarily shut down the security for several minutes to get InGen's dinosaur embroyos out.

Big Orange wrote:Of course the reader's opinion of Dennis Nedry from the book is distorted by the way Movie Nedry is depicted in a blatantly odious manner by Wayne Knight, with his money problems implied of being self-inflicted. Also Dennis Nedry did not intend to completely take down the island, he intended to only temporarily shut down the security for several minutes to get InGen's dinosaur embroyos out.

Yeah, the book's characterization of Nedry is stronger than his movie counterpart.

Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus. One of the few fantasy stories to grab and maintain its hold on my interest.

yes that is a fun one.