/h/lit House Racist
nuclearshill gau/cho :marseypinochet: aweonao  19d ago (image post) Edited 19d ago 281 thread views #323715 earned 320 coins from votes

Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #77

Unable to load image

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

I'm reading The Metamorphosis :marseybug:

!bookworms

@Merryvann :marseypin2: pls

39
New Old Top Bottom Controversial Random
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

View entire discussion

I finished reading Roadside Picnic this week. It's a Russian sci-fi book written in the 70s that would go on to be the inspiration for the Stalker movie and game series. The premise is that aliens landed at six locations on Earth (later called Zones), hung out for a bit, and then left, leaving a lot of strange phenomena, items, and trinkets behind. It is now 20 years since the Visit and the story takes place in a small town bordering one of the Zones, implied to be in Canada. The protagonist, Redrick "Red" Schuhart, is a stalker, one of the brave people who illegally break into the Zone, which by this point is walled off and guarded by various military/mercenary forces, and retrieve items that they later sell for high profit.

Overall, it was solid. Relatively short and brought up some interesting concepts but there weren't enough scenes that actually took place in the Zone. Translation was a little rough in some areas too.

3.5/5

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There's the 1977 translation and one from 2012, which supposedly improves some things and is longer/ based on the uncensored original. I'm not sure, but I may have read the newer one and found it fine.

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The 2012 retranslation is one of my favourite books. Such a wonderful sense of melancholy throughout and it had quite a lot of input from the original authors, it also had an afterword by one of them detailing the lengths they had to go to get past the Soviet censor which was fun.

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Oh yeah I definitely read the new one. I forgot one of the authors lived until 2012.

Did you read the original? How do they compare?

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Link copied to clipboard
Action successful!
Error, please refresh the page and try again.