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[Jimmy]

Date: January 2nd, 2013
Title: Billy Budd, Sailor (An inside narrative)
Author: Herman Melville


Review:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Boat-porn at its finest. Really, when you decide to read Melville, what  else are you expecting?

This one was a shorty I decided to read in a few hours before I went to bed and ended up finishing slightly after midnight, so the date stamp might be misleading. Regarding the story itself, Melville takes a lot of the legwork out of setting up the scene by giving you a good description of the characters in the play, and a solid insight into the history behind the conflict. Don't skim over the section about the Nore Mutiny, it's essential to understanding the reasoning behind the core conflict and the result of the novella.

So, theme-wise, I got a really homosexual vibe from the whole interaction between Billy Budd and John Claggart. After I finished I looked at Wikipedia and sure enough there's several other works analyzing this subtext in the book. Really, when you introduce a sailor as your main character, go into intimate detail about how damn good looking he is, then set up your antagonist with the reason for hating him defined as a "depravity of nature," I'm gonna read it as a forbidden man-crush in an era and environment that absolutely doesn't tolerate such matters. A reading up on the USS Somers which has also been attributed to be an influencing part of the novel was similarly enlightening.

Overall it's a decent discussion on the aspects of capital punishment in the military. Certainly the killing was a deliberate act, and yet at the same time brought about in circumstances that would beg for a pardon. The discussion of Vere about Law versus Conscience was the strongest section of the story for me, and really portrayed the conflict of his situation. Frankly Vere was my favorite character in the whole story, with Billy being too one sided and naive and Claggart being a sociopath.

But yeah, this story is totes homo.

[Flying Dice]

Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
1/1/13

Redshirts
John Scalzi
2/1/13

I'll be keeping a running tally in my first post in the thread. I'm happy to talk about anything, but I don't want to exhaust my vital essence creative juices writing reviews when I've got mildly more serious things to write.

[Rose]

Question: if a story is published as an ongoing serial but the total thing is (so far) 16 chapters, with the first chapter being 17,000 words, and shorter than the rest, does it count?

All 16 'chapters' are the length of the first 6 harry potter books combined.

I'm gonna count them as individual books in a series.

[Flying Dice]

17,000 words is around the bottom edge of novella length, so I'd agree that that's justified.

[Rose]

they're 50,000 words on average.

[Flying Dice]

That'd go without question, then. 

[GreatJustice]

Reading Factotum, the last book in the Monster Blood Tattoo series. I can't believe I didn't get around to reading it earlier.

Only problem is that it's a really goddamn long book, but whatever.

[Yoink]

Okay, I have started re-reading Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde as my first book.
I haven't read it in a couple years or so, so it's allowed... Although when I first got it I loved it so much I read it three times or so in about as many days.
Not sure what I'll read next, though. I never did finish Billy Bathgate last year, it is an excellent book but I just didn't have the time to read it. Would it be permissible for me to start over and read it as my next book? I was less than halfway through.

If not, that's okay. I think I'll re-read Shantaram or something. I could read Don Quixote(for the first time), but that seems like a meaty sort of book, not something I'd chew through in a couple of days. I hope I still read as fast as I used to...

Anyway, gonna finish reading these comics I bought today and then I'll try and power through Shades of Grey(no relation to that horrible fanfiction thing with the kinky bondage etc). It's a great book.

[Realmfighter]

Alright, I think I'll try for 52 books.

If you don't hear anything else from me it's because Nietzsche fried my brain and I turned into some form of rutabaga.

[Lectorog]

You're reading Nietzsche for this? I hope you realize the three times you have to read it only counts as one book.

[ab00]

Currently about halfway through with Tubes. Very, very interesting and engaging, and I would recommend it to all of you.

[Jimmy]

Anyway, gonna finish reading these comics I bought today and then I'll try and power through Shades of Grey(no relation to that horrible fanfiction thing with the kinky bondage etc). It's a great book.

From the Kickstarter thread, you may be interested in this book afterwards:

99 Shades of Grey

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

99 Shades of Grey is exactly what it sounds like: a book filled with every available shade in the Greyscale range, excluding white and black.

Now you don’t have to guess at which shades of grey are being hidden from you, censored by publishers who think they know best. Now you can see, once and for all, in one place, the entire range of grey shades.

[Jimmy]

Date: January 2nd, 2013
Title: The Fox
Author: D. H. Lawrence

Review:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

An interesting short piece on a love/hate triangle and the ideas of feminism and masculinism. The concept of the power and ownership of a husband over his wife is explored but not really in a strong way, considering the brevity of the work. Overall I didn't much find this book a brilliant piece of exploration of the human condition, and I found this surprising given the fact it has many facets I could relate with personally. Well written enough, the language fairly simple and approachable, but maybe you'd have to be a woman to really get a good reading from the book. It mostly deals with the conflicts arising from the submission of freedom within a woman to the will of a man, and this is something I will never experience.

[Jimmy]

Mmm, got my next project started. Glad I can read the book before seeing the movie for once.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Edit: Les Miserables is five volumes, with somewhere between eight and fifteen books per volume, each book having as few as two or as many as twenty-four chapters. I don't know if I count the number of books or the number of volumes towards my total. I finished the first book tonight, but it took about as long as reading a regular novel, so I'll go with each book counting as a book for the purposes of the challenge. Means finishing this one will be worth 48 books. Since I finished three others that means I'll have one final book to read and I'll be done with this challenge. The version I'm reading is the Project Gutenberg version if anyone else wants to read it too.

[Caz]

Read the Hunger Games Trilogy then watched the movie. Really wasn't expecting it to be so good, especially how it's compared to Twilight (urk) and the such. I see it more of a Battle Royale/1984/D&D-style traps mesh. I loved how it broke the trope of action heroes going through several battles and being completely fine by the end. Not in Hunger Games. I don't think there was a character left by the end who wasn't dead or crippled by PTSD. I was also surprised as the quality of the latter two books, as I'd heard they were rushed out and that Collins didn't have a plan to go past a single book. Could've done with a bit more scope and chapters, but the mark of a good book is the desire for more after the last page is done, I think.

Spoiler:  3/100 (click to show/hide)

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins