!bookworms
To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers. (NON BOOK-CLUB RELATED ONLY).
Before starting Blood Meridian I forced myself to finish The Grass is Singing. So the depressed female protagonist's undoing started when her husband got ill with malaria, resulting in her running the farm and dealing with the kaffir laborers. She ends up whipping one of them in the face after he begs for water (she didn't know her husband gave them a few minutes rest every one hour 
) the native starts looking at her in a menacing way after that. Some point later her husband gets tired of her nonsense, he hires the whipped boy (he doesn't know she did that) as a house servant and she ends up being scared to heck of him, yet she refuses to tell her husband.
The servant boy begins to dominate her to the point he even dresses her and she says things like “thank you” with a terrified face. At some point their neighbor who wants to buy their farm visits them, gets horrified by how “insolent” their native is, tells the husband he'll buy the farm and that he should leave for a few months with his wife to the coast. They are pretty much broke and in poverty so he reluctantly accepts (rich neighbor is trying to help because of some code that whites in Rhodesia shouldn't sink lower than a BIPOC). Just a couple of day before they leave she dismisses the servant boy angrily and during the night before leaving he murders her. 
Is a bit more complex than that (she's afraid he'll come to kill her, but awakes in the middle of the night and goes outside where he's waiting for her), but I'm trying to summarize. Lessing writing becomes more engaging in the second part, at least for me, so if you're interested in a well written character study of a woman descent into madness that's the right book for you, and what's interesting is that Mary does it all to herself, she could have lived happily in town, but pressured herself to get married with the first man who proposed her after overhearing her mean “friends” calling her a spinster on party, even after he told her he was poor and lived in the middle of nowhere, there was something terribly wrong about her even before considering her enormous insecurity.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
I just finished Another Day in Paradise by Eddie Little. It was really good, but sad, and quite a bit different from the movie. I had a hard time finding an ebook version of it so I bought a used copy for $15 from Amazon and when it arrived it was missing the dust jacket and had a $4 goodwill price tag on it
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
I finished the first The Expanse book in a week and now I'm onto the second. It reads like it was made for TV and then converted into a book. It's not a criticism but it's interesting given it was turned into a TV show.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Are you enjoying it? Maybe is because the writers probably had something more “cinematic” in mind while writing the book.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Yeh I'm smashing through it, it's a good read. It's interfering with my Starfield experience though because they're both pretty similar.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Full of nothing?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
They're both based around human politics and set in a timeline where humans have colonised other planets.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
I cheered when that dumb campus communist gotbaited into visiting an actual communist country and getting tortured and shot by the Stasi
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
I am late
I am reading a book called Neighbors, which is about a pogrom by a small village of poles on the eve of the German occupation of Poland. From what I understand, the books claims mostly stand up.
It's an indepth and a fairly non-accusatory attempt to explain what motivates an ordinary group of people to just murder their neighboring community.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
So like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, but 100 times worse as it is done by neighbors.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Perhaps, I have yet to read that book.
Ordinary Men was written 8 years previous, so perhaps it inspired Neighbors
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I finished The Three Body Problem. I was really, really loving it until the end was a 40 page infodump setting up for the sequel. I think the
magic evil flying proton supercomputersophonWhen people say the writing is bad, I have no idea what they're talking about. There's a lot of similes and the characters don't talk like uneducated burgers?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Marooned: Jamestown, shipwrecked and a new American history.
It's solid. Dense at times and it jumps around a bit, but way easier of a read than Crucible of War and the author is really evocative with his writing.
Really enjoying it so far
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
I could beat you in a fight. Just saying. I'm also the most respected member of this site and could easily get you permabanned or stronghand aevann into giving me your IP address. Just saying. I'm taller and smarter and more attractive than you. Just saying. I can beat up your little girlfriend too. Just saying. I'm also a better writer than you. Just saying. I have a bigger vocabulary than you. Just saying. I'm a better guitarist than you. Just saying. I'm the funniest member of this site. Just saying.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context