9/24/16
- prelude:
PDEX: point of order. This guac is not as good as the guac at blah blah blah
- BI-ANNUAL LOL PT 2
- early interlude:
PDEX: point of order. Junkies next door are really getting to him. Now he's
talking shit about The Vorrh.
- jason: the vorrh. brian catling.
- verdict: +
- review:
A modern fable. Sorta fantasy, not high fantasy. "Are there magical creatures?"
Juxtaposition between the forest, and the city. Very lyrical. Is it dense? It
reads pretty easy. Not experimentalish. It's about the interactions between the
town and the forest. (ed: oh yeah?) Known vs the unknown. Now we're getting
into the Loverboy theory. He's essentially unknowable. Are we working for the
weekend? Sophie says this is a well-done review. It's kinda crazy. He wants to
know when the other ones are coming out.
- chris: the vorrh (parts). brian catling.
- verdict: ++
- review:
It's not that heavy. It's got real characters, with personalities. Chris says
he needs to give his review now, since by the next meeting he won't remember
anything. Extremely weird, dense, but also accessible. "Is it a page-turner?" He
says he's been working on it for 4 months (ed: only just started part 3). It
lends itself to that kinda reading though. It's not so much a robot as a
"mechanical being".
- jen: micro adventure #4 (time trap). gene m fabers. ('84)
- verdict: +
- review:
Kinda like Choose Your Own Adventure but also with BASIC code that you have to
go run on your PC, PC Junior, Apple II E, or Commodore 64. Something about
dinosaurs. Laffey actually read it. Jen says it was good. There are some sweet
charts & tables and stuff.
- jen: dating the undead. gena showalter & jill monroe.
- verdict: ++
- review:
A dating manual for sexing the vampires. Published by Harlequin!!! Sorta laid
out like a Cosmo mag. Pickup lines for your undead beau.
- nikko: harry potter & the cursed child. j k rowling.
- verdict: +
- review:
It's a play! She likes the original series more. This is like all dialogue.
Harry's kid is in this! The sorting hat didn't put him in the house he thought
it would. The cover has a nest and a kid in the nest or something. TOO much
cliche. "Oh.. like when *we* were at Hogwarts bleh". Kids are in the shadow of
the original story. Quick read (ed: it's a play!!). Lord Ege asks if she'd
recommend he finishes the original series. Burn.
- adam: none but lucifer. horace l gold. (1934)
- verdict: +
- review:
It was a pulp serial originally. Why would he read this? He saw it at a garage
sale. "It was ok." The story is about a vain vain man, who outsmarts the devil.
The devil is a businessman. Oh shit so it's like Devil's Advocate huh. How much
like Piers Anthony is this shit? So anyways the guy's plan backfires. DEVIL
WINS AGAIN. Pretty superficial huh. Little cartoons in there.
- adam: ringworld. larry niven.
- verdict: meh?
- review:
It was fine. Some alien races do stuff together and they get a signal from a
mysterious race. The crash land on the RINGWORLD. The puppeteer guys are the
elephant ones. Talkin about some Kzin now. He thought it was imaginative. Good
balance between hard scifi and pulpy sex-time. He liked how the ringworld was
abandoned. That's about it. Characterization was terrible. It was really
off-putting. Niven is #1 chauvinist in his opinion. The cat character was dumb
and one dimensional.
- interlude:
Chris is revealing the secrets of the Ringworld series now. Talking
about Niven's theories of how his ringworld physics was the shit and
how he got ambushed by the physics nerds. Man Adam really hates us for
recommending Ringworld to him.
- adam: watership down. richard adams.
- verdict: +++
- review:
Not sure about the first 20%, but after that he was hooked forever. Bunnies on
adventure. It's fantasy because the bunnies are so anthropomorphized. Fiver is
kinda mystical. Humans are causing the problems. The writing and story are pretty
straightforward, but it's interspersed with the mythology of the bunnies. It's
so awesome. Loved it forever.
- jason: queen of the tearling. erika johansen.
- verdict: +
- review:
YA book time. Supes violent. From plot setting perspective he can see where
they're coming from with YA, but not with so much violence I guess? There's
this girl who's been hiding out, and she's queen of the tearlings. But maybe
she's a vagrant? All three are gonna be real violent. Queen in the "bad
country" does a bunch of bad shit. Her bf was snoring so she had his tongue cut
out. War slavery murder and stuff.
- jen & chris: wildwood? Guy from the Decembrists hahhahaha. Real cute.
- sophie: miss peregrine's home for peculiar children, hollow city, library of souls. ransom riggs.
- verdict: +
- review:
The gimmick is they have the doctored old timey photos in there to make it
creepy. Told from the perspective of a 15 yo boy. Kinda offputting. But she got
over it. Kind of a mystery but the second and third book are page turners.
When she was gonna see a creepy photo at night she put it down till the next
day. It's YA, there's a little violence. It was suspenseful, but she liked it.
There were some twists! It's pretty good, there will be some movies! Big type.
The kids have magic powers, duh.
- chad: day of the oprichnik. vladimir sorokin.
- verdict: +
- review:
Jason also read this. Very drawn out explanation of how to spell the title.
Near-future russia, been turned into a tsarist monarchy again. Trump land!
Hologram phones, but it's no big deal. "back in the time of ivan the
terrible..." Day in the life of an Oprichnik. They're murderers, have a dog's
head on their car and kill noblemen. Organized crime, stealing from chinese
dudes. Lots of killing of noblemen. Something about goldfish swimming up into
brains and group hallucination of dragons. Kinda like clockwork orange, but not
really. Not hooligans - totalitarians. Genital glowing drug and "making a
caterpillar" with buttsex. Has a fetish for screwing women while burning their
houses.
Sophie: "That should've been a surprise, sweetie!"
Chad: "one of the top contemporary fiction guys."