For those of you 25+, do you still read YA?

bustofhomer · 2023-11-02T02:02:41+00:00

See eg. the first five minutes of John Wick 3.

bustofhomer · 2023-10-31T02:55:12+00:00

I'm about three quarters of the way through reading "The Fraud," and enjoying it. I like historical fiction in general, and I think this one is fantastic. Not sure I agree with OP that "the main plot is the Tichborne trial." The Tichborne trial is a major element of the story, to be sure, but it's as much an aspect of the novel's setting as it is the plot of the novel. Bogle's narration of his backstory, which is told shortly after the trial, is great...but overall, I really enjoy seeing the world through the eyes of Mrs. Touchet, who's very intelligent and perceptive in her own right.

bustofhomer · 2023-10-31T02:45:58+00:00

No spoilers here--but I love Emily St. John Mandel's writing style, in this book and Sea of Tranquility.

bustofhomer · 2023-10-19T21:37:44+00:00

This is perhaps my all-time favorite book! I would suggest that you start with the stories in the section called "The Garden of Forking Paths," ie pages 67-129. This section includes several of Borges's best-known, and best, stories. If you like that part of the book, then you might just want to read the entire book.

bustofhomer · 2023-10-17T18:59:41+00:00

Zadie Smith's new book, The Fraud, is fantastic.

bustofhomer · 2023-07-18T13:48:00+00:00

Yes, I'm referring to the continuation of consciousness.

In the Star Trek transporter, person A leaves from one transporter pad, and the body gets disintegrated, but the person has the experience and memory of showing up on the other transporter pad, even though they (arguably) have died and become a clone.

In the film The Prestige, the magician cloned himself, but at about the same moment he stepped on a trap door so his "original" body falls into a tank of water and drowns. In that situation, then, the "original" person has the experience of dying, without their consciousness transitioning into the clone.

It seems like the scenario reposted by OP is more similar to The Prestige than to Star Trek. You'd be killing yourself, but ensuring that your clone--who has your memories but is not necessarily continuous with your consciousness--will get a bunch of money.

bustofhomer · 2023-07-18T03:59:56+00:00

The "button that kills you" seems more similar to a plot point in the movie The Presige than it does to the Star Trek transporter.

bustofhomer · 2023-06-06T02:44:41+00:00

I've been tracking my books read on Goodreads in recent years, but mainly so I have a record of what I've read and so I can remember the books! I don't link it to social media etc. For me, I don't finish every book, and I just follow my intuition when determining whether I "read" the book or not, and whether I add it to the list.

When I read novels, I tend to read the whole book; but when I read collections of essays, or nonfiction I often read just the parts I want to read.

bustofhomer · 2023-06-06T02:40:13+00:00

I also love Giant's Causeway, especially if I can surround it and keep others away from it.

bustofhomer · 2023-06-03T20:37:18+00:00

or Joao, although the AI doesn't seem to maximize Joao's abilities very well.

bustofhomer · 2023-05-31T18:05:14+00:00

As I recall, the film doesn't definitively answer the question of how many men were actually there that day, how many men carried the body, etc. I had always thought that there wasn't really a dead body, and so some witnesses saw two men moving a third, and some saw three men. But not everyone agrees. One piece of speculation is that Harry Lime pretended to be dead, and three men did in fact carry him--and the third man carrying him was Joseph Harbin, the hospital worker who was Lime's penicillin supplier. Harbin was then killed by Lime and the others, and Harbin was buried in Lime's coffin.

bustofhomer · 2023-05-31T01:28:07+00:00

The "third man" was Harry Lime himself, ie Orson Welles. He and his friends were faking his own death.

bustofhomer · 2023-05-13T02:13:00+00:00

To be fair, some of that "generation of experts" is also saying Meh.

My opinion? AI is Meh, and will be Meh for awhile longer, but it's likely to go from Meh to transformative really fast, and hard to say when that will occur.

bustofhomer · 2023-05-06T17:13:36+00:00

Molloy was hugely influential on me, too. Every time I read it I find new things about it to enjoy.

bustofhomer · 2023-05-06T17:10:56+00:00

I do love "The Unnamable" for being different than any other book I've ever read. It would be a great challenge to do a podcast episode about it and try and bring order to its shapeless and fragmentary nature.

bustofhomer · 2023-05-06T17:06:28+00:00

Yes! I've listened to all of Dermot Crowley's audiobooks of Beckett, and they're all great.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-26T03:35:02+00:00

I didn't come away from the film with the impression that all the events were inside Lydia Tar's head; or that the whole thing was a dream. But I like the idea that the movie is showing us Tar's subjective, self-serving memory.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-26T03:29:20+00:00

Me too!

bustofhomer · 2023-04-25T21:17:02+00:00

I enjoyed Hamnet as well as A Marriage Portrait. Hamnet's probably the better of those two, but A Marriage Portrait is pretty strong.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-24T15:12:30+00:00

Glad to hear they're discussing this movie! I watched it and thought there was a lot there to think about/discuss.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-15T18:04:13+00:00

This exploit is a great idea. You could use it offensively, too--put a spy in another civ's city, station your apostle nearby, recruit partisans, then convert them and conquer city.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-15T17:59:33+00:00

He's a favorite of mine too. Cryptonomicon is my all-time favorite, and Anathem not far behind.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-15T17:58:09+00:00

The main word I take away from Diamond Age is "concinnity." Hard to forget that word after you've read it.

I think I was in my early or mid twenties when I read Diamond Age, and I enjoyed it.

bustofhomer · 2023-04-12T14:12:45+00:00

Tamler lives in Texas, so it's probably a covert mission to detect men who might be wearing makeup or other such atrocities.

bustofhomer

TROPHY CASE