What book are you reading right now?

general
367

Waiting for Andre by Steffan Piper. It’s a semi-fictional story that expands on the time playwright Samuel Beckett met Andre Roussimoff, whom the world would later know as Andre the Giant. I found out about this book when I caught part of the Showtime movie last month, so I know that some of the book and movie are about Beckett helping Andre see there’s more to life than staying on the family farm where he won’t be bullied because of his size. He was already six foot tall at age 12.

When I checked the Showtime schedule while writing this, I saw it was on FLIX again this morning at 6:50 a.m. I’ll have to flag it for recording or use on demand to watch it again.

The book is a print on demand book only available from Amazon so it adds a few days onto the delivery time. $13.50. Or, get the Kindle version for six bucks.

368

I borrowed that from our local library and absolutely loved reading it. The extras from the cast, crew, etc. are great.

2 Likes
369

A quick note about Waiting for Andre. It’s definitely a print-on-demand book and the weird thing is that it was like the text was fed into some kind of auto-arranging layout program because the paragraphs weren’t full justified like every other book I’ve read and it kept the 1.5 line spacing that you’d normally see in a book submission. And I think there were about a half dozen places where I spotted incorrect punctuation, like an opening quotation mark without the matching closing quotation mark.

I may give a review on it later because there was a lot less focus on Beckett guiding Andre into the famous person he’d become than the movie had. I’ll probably wait until I can see the movie again in full.

370

Here’s a good combination:

  1. Use IndieBound to help you find a local independent bookstore.
  2. Bookshop is a new sales platform independent bookstores can use to help increase sales. It’s geared to making sure the bookstores get the maximum amount of profit from the sale of the book and a separate 10% of items purchased through the site goes into a fund to help all independent bookstores, whether they’re a part of it or not.

More details on CNN: The indie book platform trying to take on Amazon.

2 Likes
371

Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World
(David Sheff, 1993)

This is, obviously, a historical work but his point as I’m well past 3/4 and we’re basically getting some talk about Nintendo’s plans for modem-based network features like checking your stocks, getting game tips, and online text-based chart that is totally safe for kids. The Play Station (which begat the Playstation) debacle is discussed in detail, but the ‘good parts’ tended to be the earlier history of Nintendo pre-video games and NES history. This isa generally ‘light’ book about the people and such. Fun read, but very dated. I think the author did a follow-up, but even that only gets us to a round 2000.

If you’re interested in a bit more technical, an earlier book I read that covers the technical wackiness of the NES is I am Error by Nathan Altice. It’s part of a ‘MIT Platform Studies’ series and was a really neat mix of tech talk (but at a level most people here could get, not Electrical Engineer grade tech talk) with some interesting trivia. More focused on the product line than anything else, but discusses the surrounding weirdness.

For those who are interested in the Platform Studies series, I am more critical of Dominic Arsenault’s Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware which covers the SNES era. It’s less technical and more business focused, and I felt like the central thesis of the book was, “Your fond memories of SNES games were a tissue of lies for a system that had a bunch of boring games that weren’t technically innovative.” Also, I’m seeing some disagreement between this and Game Over with the nineties book being pretty clear that Nintendo was pushing restrictions on licensees all through the NES era and if anything loosened up for the SNES era. (Licensees were only allowed to release a set number of titles a year, which was intended to help enforce quality requirements and seen as a way of preventing another bust in the video games market like the one that had just taken down Atari a couple years before the NES launched in the US. Nintendo themselves held to this restriction, in fact, which makes it more interesting where you realize that Nintendo’s generally only released a handful of first party games a year. Several big companies basically created subsidiaries tog et around this restriction.

Game Over has a lot about the legal wrangling and cultural/social impact of 80s games, which is its strong point. Quite a lot about Atari’s repeated efforts to screw ‘competition’ even after they’d exited the market and been sold off for parts.

Bonus is a chapter on Tetris including when the Nintendo big cheeses took the guy who invented Tetris out for sushi and they had to teach him how to eat. He was chided for nibbling and not eating a piece in one bite, which led to him taking in a ball of wasabi in one bite…

1 Like
372

Two Trains Leave Paris

It’s a book filled with math and word puzzles, but the discussion and situations described are hilarious.
It makes me feel clever, which I like.
"Two trains leave Paris, heading in different directions. Train A makes its first stop 60 kilometers due west. Train B makes its first stop 80 kilometers due north.
“At this point, two ex-lovers both look back toward the city of light and think, Every end is a new beginning, and breaking up was for the best. No turning back now, this train only goes one way. How far apart are Natalya and Andy at this moment?”

1 Like
373

It just arrived, so I’m about to start into the first of the five books about the history of The Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s notable for a mouse that roared.

374

Astronomy Australia 2021 (Various)
Night Sky Photography (Adam Woodworth)

375

Win, by Harlan Coven

Just finished:
Double Jeopardy by Stuart Woods
The Bounty by Janet Evanovich

Up next:
The Other Emily by Dean Koontz

I had several days off this week. :star_struck:

376

Just finished like 9 Discworld novels last month, plus a few other odds and ends. We have a lot of time here and not a lot to do.

Edit: right now I’m reading LikeWar, which is quite disturbing coming on the heels of a white paper on Russian hybrid warfare doctrine.

2 Likes
377

I’m trying to read Le Morte d’Arhur but it’s a tough read. Written in Middle English and honestly I think it’s just not well written to modern eyes. I seriously may bail for The Once and Future King as I hear that’s the more modern version of the story that a lot of King Arthur stuff is based on. Or I’ll just watch the Monty Python version.

I’m also reading Victory’s Price which is a Star Wars novel and third in a trilogy. The series is interesting as it started as kind of a riff on the ‘ace squadron’ trope common in the franchise but veered into a complex discussion on loyalty and the ability to forgive after a major war like the original SW trilogy.

1 Like
378

BURN THE HERETIC!

379

I finished Victory’s Price today and it’s interesting, the trilogy it finishes (Alphabet Squadron) starts off with the somewhat expected ‘Space Top Gun’ Book, albeit with a few twists (The title squadron is formed due to an intel officer grabbing available ships and pilots said and making a small unit with the unlikely mix of a bunch of the ‘letter named’ fighters of the current canon: an X-Wing, A-Wing, B-Wing, Y-Wing, and U-Wing.

The first book is the expected cliches of “forming a team of people who don’t get along” but the second book blows that up: pilots find new reasons to hate each other and go their separate ways.

The third book has a lot of discussion about the practicality of the post-Endor political situation. The old canon has tons of characters as former Imperial troops including Han Solo among others. Where do you draw the line and how do you minimize (total prevention is a pipe dream) a circle of ugliness with former Imperials as either persecuted sub-citizens who are then driven to terrorism as their best course of action.

It’s surprisingly deep. Not high art, perhaps, but deeper than I expected.

Now to decide between rereads of Equal Rites or Nightwatch.

1 Like
380

I just finished re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites and realized I had forgotten how it’s a sort of early draft of a lot of the Witches/Wizards material from alter Discworld.

  • Granny Weatherwax is moving towards her later characterization, but seems much less powerful and self-assured.
  • The Wizards are in the interregnum between the early books (where they’re almost all based off ‘evil wizard’ tropes and all trying to kill each other when not going after RIncewind) and the later books (where they’re a bunch of jovial rounded academics who rarely actually use magic).
  • More specifically, Granny has a strangely similar plot where she finds out the Archchancelor (Cutangle, who presumably preceded Ridcully) is from a neighboring region to Granny’s home and there’s tentative hints of a romantic plot line being rejected. Granny would later have a similar plot line with Ridcully, who if I remember correctly merely spent some time in the Lancre region.
  • Granny’s home here is the valley/village of Bad Ass. I don’t think this book mentions Lancre, which becomes Granny’s traditional home and I think is intended to be the larger ‘small nation’ of which Bad Ass is merely a tiny village. Despite Lancre being quite tiny all by itself.
  • Granny is a lot less… intimidating. She gets a bit more by the end as she is still not someone you should challenge, but I think in later ebooks the thought of local kids exploring her house and the local smith standing up to her seems like something that would never happen.

Not a bad book, just an interesting look at how things have changed over the course of a series. The early Discworld books are much more ‘excuses to string spoofs together’ which gel into a long middle-section that some subdivide by tastes as the level of frustration at the world ebbed and flowed.

1 Like
381

I just downloaded all of the Dragonriders of Pern e-books. I’d only ever read the first 3, so I’ll re-read those and then it’s only another 21 books that follow.

382

I’ve read like 15 or 20 Discworld novels since April, generally trying to hit earlier ones before later ones, but not able to do things in any kind of serious order because I get them as they get returned to the library system. I’ve noticed similar shifts in characterization.

1 Like
383

I’m almost done with the Black Jewels series by Anne Bishop. The old roommate loved the series and kept trying to get me to read them and the Terre D’Ange seriies by Jacqueline Carey. I tried the Terre D’Ange series, but couldn’t get in to them. He did get me hooked on Anne Bishop with The Others series, and I’m enjoying the Black Jewels series. I’ll probably pick up her other books after I finish this last one.

384

@sig You may hit a weird run where it gets really weird as there’s 2-3 Death books that I felt had some weird overlap of the ‘Death is unavailable’ theme, but all very different… Mort, Soul Music, and Reaper Man as I remember.

I have Night Watch in my queue to re-read. It’s one of my favorites as I remember.

385

I’m getting ready to re-read Dune in anticipation of the upcoming movie.

1 Like
386

The original Dune is a pretty quick read as I remember. The sequels are where it bogs down… Then the son’s sequels where the ‘Fantasy Trilogy Syndrome’ kicked in.

2 Likes