Books!

[maninahat]

I've just finished a book (Under the Skin, actually) and I suddenly feel like the farmer in the David Mitchell sketch [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE]; Fucking books! You can read 'em!

Only in the last few months have I gotten back into reading regularly. There's been a lot of distractions, and videogames have most certainly been one, but getting back into the habit I've noticed two things:

1. Every artistic medium does at least one thing better than any other; in film its immediacy, in books its depth, in games its vicariousness. Book's thing is the best one of those. Books are so good now they blow every other medium out the water.
2. No one seems to bloody read anymore, and it feels like a dirty secret everyone is missing.

I'm not making that last part up either; an author told me (okay, so they might have made it up for all I know) that a third of British people will never buy a book in their life, and another third will only by an average of one book per year. I often ask my colleagues and friends what they are reading, and most can't answer. And it isn't because they are stupid; my wife has more degrees than hot dinners and she can't bring herself to read anything all the way through these days.

So what are you reading, and why the hell aren't you?!

 

[Thaluikhain]

I'd disagree on 1. Every medium has it's strengths and weaknesses.

In regards to 2, good stuff seems to be few and fair between at the moment. OTOH, there's lots of good stuff from wya back when available, and some of it has the advantage of being online and free.

Just read the most recent of the Rivers of London series the other day, and the series is dragging a bit.

 

[Saelune]

I dont see the need for books to facilitate reading. I experience stories in games, and I read alot, in games, on here, and I read wikipedia articles for fun.

Most of the books I read are in Elder Scrolls games. Alot of real good short stories in them by the way.

So unless DnD books count, Im not reading any books.

But...I have thought about trying to read more Kurt Vonnegut books. I read a few in High-School after having to read Cat's Cradle in summer school for english. (Summer School teachers seem to be ones who actually are passionate about teaching)

Last time I read a book was during Hurricane Sandy. Was a Redwall book but I dont remember which one. That was another series of books I enjoyed.

 

[maninahat]

I dont see the need for books to facilitate reading. I experience stories in games, and I read alot, in games, on here, and I read wikipedia articles for fun.

That's somewhat true. I've spent far more time reading wikipedia or opinion articles than any novel this last year. But they aren't the same thing as books.

Last time I read a book was during Hurricane Sandy. Was a Redwall book but I dont remember which one. That was another series of books I enjoyed.

Redwall is good but I got bored of the formula after a while. I couldn't see how this setting could keep getting so many new armies of rats, despite them being constantly steamrollered by the good guy animals every time. Is there a Star Wars battle droid factory for rats somewhere?

 

[Phasmal]

I want to buy more books. My library isn't very local and I like to keep books that I've read. Sadly we've been super broke for like the entirety of this year (2016 can suck it).

But still, I suppose the last book I read was The Outsiders a few months ago. I need to read more.
Before that I read Fight Club (and, to be honest, meh) and The Blind Assassin before that. I also read a few video game related books, such as 2 Dragon Age books and I'm still working on the book of the Warcraft movie.

... So I suppose I have read recently, but not as much as I used to.

I'm thinking of dipping into more Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
But as I'm an evil SJW I'd want a cool sci-fi/fantasy book with a female protagonist. I'll get around to it when I have more money.

 

[maninahat]

I'd disagree on 1. Every medium has it's strengths and weaknesses.

I apologize for the coming wall of text:

To go into detail about 1., I can compare games and books. Games can do visual and audio story telling, so they have far more immediacy, economy of story telling, and can tell its story through several senses. It also has the player figuratively embody someone within a story world, and makes them an agent in it. That lets the game explore things like personal responsibility, guilt, and fear for oneself in a way that books can't really copy. On top of that, there is the actual fun of a game element. All of that gives games a tremendous amount of potential.

Books, on the other hand, can afford to take as much time as it likes to tell a story. It can include lots of subtle detail that a game can't. Film has that same issue: Under The Skin as a film is a beautiful thing to look at and is its own thing, but it was unable to find any way to include the huge amount of social commentary, character development and sheer detail that the book has. That's because outside of sticking a narration onto a movie, there is no easy way for other mediums to include so much internal monologue or narrative description. This also means that what I learn from reading a book can outstrip anything I get from other mediums. Even the games that actively try to teach me things, such as Kerbal Space Program, even those essentially require me to go off and read about it elsewhere first to make use of it. That's not to say games can't teach me things, or that there are things that games can teach me in a way books can't; a book can't teach me the seductiveness of corruption anything like Papers, Please can, but the number of words, views and perspectives I can encounter via a book beats games on sheer quantity.

Then there is also a lack of anxiety to explore troubling or uncommon perspectives in books; I've read books in which the protagonist is a woodworm on Noah's Ark, or a protagonist who's mind is shared between a hivemind of clones and a spaceship. For games, telling the story of a black person or an old lady is currently seen as risky, and pushing the envelope. I have to look to the fringes at indy developers like Robert Yang, just to see things like gay relationships be explored in any particularly interesting way. Similarly, I can read a story in which a business man stuffs a woman's vagina with bits of cheese for the rats to eat - and that book still be considered a classic - whereas a film or game version of a similar story could never hope to be that vivid in this current climate.

As a means of telling story, books are far more sophisticated despite having far fewer methods through which to present a story. I put it down to the fact that books have had centuries to get it right whilst games have only had decades. I also put it down to the fact that the term game can describe anything from Her Story to Snake; the former is equivalent to a cosy murder mystery, but the latter is equivalent to a crossword puzzle (which is by no means a fiction book); when people talk about games as a story, they are inclined to talk about the former and have to distance themselves from the latter, though they are both on a continuous spectrum of what counts as a game.

 

[Hawki]

Going over my 2016 book list, I've read about 50 books/novellas this year.

As to what I'm reading now, I'm joint reading 'The Alloy of Law' (the fourth Mistborn novel) and 'The Dry', which is a crime story set in the Australian outback.

 

[Ogoid]

I've been on an early weird fiction kick lately, so I've recently finished Hans Heinz Ewers' Alraune (which I can't recommend enough) and am currently getting started with Arthur Machen's The White People and Other Weird Stories.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Spoiler: snip

I apologize for the coming wall of text:

To go into detail about 1., I can compare games and books. Games can do visual and audio story telling, so they have far more immediacy, economy of story telling, and can tell its story through several senses. It also has the player figuratively embody someone within a story world, and makes them an agent in it. That lets the game explore things like personal responsibility, guilt, and fear for oneself in a way that books can't really copy. On top of that, there is the actual fun of a game element. All of that gives games a tremendous amount of potential.

Books, on the other hand, can afford to take as much time as it likes to tell a story. It can include lots of subtle detail that a game can't. Film has that same issue: Under The Skin as a film is a beautiful thing to look at and is its own thing, but it was unable to find any way to include the huge amount of social commentary, character development and sheer detail that the book has. That's because outside of sticking a narration onto a movie, there is no easy way for other mediums to include so much internal monologue or narrative description. This also means that what I learn from reading a book can outstrip anything I get from other mediums. Even the games that actively try to teach me things, such as Kerbal Space Program, even those essentially require me to go off and read about it elsewhere first to make use of it. That's not to say games can't teach me things, or that there are things that games can teach me in a way books can't; a book can't teach me the seductiveness of corruption anything like Papers, Please can, but the number of words, views and perspectives I can encounter via a book beats games on sheer quantity.

Then there is also a lack of anxiety to explore troubling or uncommon perspectives in books; I've read books in which the protagonist is a woodworm on Noah's Ark, or a protagonist who's mind is shared between a hivemind of clones and a spaceship. For games, telling the story of a black person or an old lady is currently seen as risky, and pushing the envelope. I have to look to the fringes at indy developers like Robert Yang, just to see things like gay relationships be explored in any particularly interesting way. Similarly, I can read a story in which a business man stuffs a woman's vagina with bits of cheese for the rats to eat - and that book still be considered a classic - whereas a film or game version of a similar story could never hope to be that vivid in this current climate.

As a means of telling story, books are far more sophisticated despite having far fewer methods through which to present a story. I put it down to the fact that books have had centuries to get it right whilst games have only had decades. I also put it down to the fact that the term game can describe anything from Her Story to Snake; the former is equivalent to a cosy murder mystery, but the latter is equivalent to a crossword puzzle (which is by no means a fiction book); when people talk about games as a story, they are inclined to talk about the former and have to distance themselves from the latter, though they are both on a continuous spectrum of what counts as a game.

Hmmm....so is that mostly the current book industry is generally better than the current game industry, rather than books being inherently better than games?

Personally, I'd argue that there's nothing a book can do that a game cannot. If nothing else, there are plenty of games that involve massive slabs of text and work like a novel.

 

[maninahat]

Spoiler: snip

I apologize for the coming wall of text:

To go into detail about 1., I can compare games and books. Games can do visual and audio story telling, so they have far more immediacy, economy of story telling, and can tell its story through several senses. It also has the player figuratively embody someone within a story world, and makes them an agent in it. That lets the game explore things like personal responsibility, guilt, and fear for oneself in a way that books can't really copy. On top of that, there is the actual fun of a game element. All of that gives games a tremendous amount of potential.

Books, on the other hand, can afford to take as much time as it likes to tell a story. It can include lots of subtle detail that a game can't. Film has that same issue: Under The Skin as a film is a beautiful thing to look at and is its own thing, but it was unable to find any way to include the huge amount of social commentary, character development and sheer detail that the book has. That's because outside of sticking a narration onto a movie, there is no easy way for other mediums to include so much internal monologue or narrative description. This also means that what I learn from reading a book can outstrip anything I get from other mediums. Even the games that actively try to teach me things, such as Kerbal Space Program, even those essentially require me to go off and read about it elsewhere first to make use of it. That's not to say games can't teach me things, or that there are things that games can teach me in a way books can't; a book can't teach me the seductiveness of corruption anything like Papers, Please can, but the number of words, views and perspectives I can encounter via a book beats games on sheer quantity.

Then there is also a lack of anxiety to explore troubling or uncommon perspectives in books; I've read books in which the protagonist is a woodworm on Noah's Ark, or a protagonist who's mind is shared between a hivemind of clones and a spaceship. For games, telling the story of a black person or an old lady is currently seen as risky, and pushing the envelope. I have to look to the fringes at indy developers like Robert Yang, just to see things like gay relationships be explored in any particularly interesting way. Similarly, I can read a story in which a business man stuffs a woman's vagina with bits of cheese for the rats to eat - and that book still be considered a classic - whereas a film or game version of a similar story could never hope to be that vivid in this current climate.

As a means of telling story, books are far more sophisticated despite having far fewer methods through which to present a story. I put it down to the fact that books have had centuries to get it right whilst games have only had decades. I also put it down to the fact that the term game can describe anything from Her Story to Snake; the former is equivalent to a cosy murder mystery, but the latter is equivalent to a crossword puzzle (which is by no means a fiction book); when people talk about games as a story, they are inclined to talk about the former and have to distance themselves from the latter, though they are both on a continuous spectrum of what counts as a game.

Hmmm....so is that mostly the current book industry is generally better than the current game industry, rather than books being inherently better than games?

Personally, I'd argue that there's nothing a book can do that a game cannot. If nothing else, there are plenty of games that involve massive slabs of text and work like a novel.

Basically yes. I think games have a lot of untapped potential, but right now people and the technology haven't quite got it figured. Film is well on its way to being its own thing, but still has its format problems - tv shows are improving fast though and coming in to help with that. In spite of all the daft things that Ebert said about games, I agree with him when he said games haven't had a Citizen Kane yet. The thing about that is the movie industry had to wait sixty years to get theirs.

 

[Fox12]

1. I think books have produced higher quality art then cinema thus far, but I don't think it will always be that way. Cinema still has a lot of untapped potential. Books have been around much longer. The main potential of books is their ability to capture the mindset of a character. Their stream of consciousness quality is very hard, though not impossible, to capture in film. Films have to get into abstract visual language in order to achieve the same goal. The only film I've seen that does it effectively is End of Evangellion. I suspect other movies have done it as well, but I haven't seen any yet. I will say this about depth, though. It's a mistake to think that something has more depth due to longer length. In my experience the deepest stories are extremely short, because everything is concentrated, and there are several layers of meaning to the story. Just look at Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

2. I used to love reading, but I barely read anymore. I think, funnily enough, it's because I want to be a writer. I can't stop analyzing everything I read, so I've started to rather hate it. I love reading poetry, though, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of Lord of the Flies.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Yay reading! I do a collage of all the books I read every year.

My advice to people looking to read more: don't just read whatever comes out this year, move out of your comfort zone (series, tie-ins, anything derivative) and look into the classics (as recent as the 20th century). There's no shortage of good literature if you look for it. Anybody who tells you otherwise isn't even bothering.

 

[09philj]

I'm getting sick of literary fiction. I still read a lot of none fiction, but a lot of the current fiction being produced is just so turgid and dull I can't be bothered to slog through it. Comics, however, are in their element at the moment. There's so many different things, and so much wit and invention, and I don't have to get trapped in layers and layers of boring descriptive prose. The last book I really remember enjoying was Christopher Brookmyre's Bedlam.

 

[LostCrusader]

Just finished the last Wheel of Time book last month and now I'm in a bit of a slog looking for a new series to start.

Side note, I stopped reading physical books a few years ago and now just do audio books.

 

[Barbas]

I mostly read lewd graphic novels or other stuff I can get through quickly and conveniently between other PC-related activities. Have to say, though, the Locke Lamora series of books - two of which I've gotten through so far - are great fantasy romps. And I found the first one in a public library! I thought they only stocked complete crap in there!

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I did not like reading when I was little. Found it boring. And then, I made an amazing discovery.

Star Wars.

Did you know that they made Star Wars books? And did you know they were set after the movies? Because my little nine-year-old self had no idea. But once I found them, you could not stop me. I literally grew up with Jacen and Jaina through their books, and I read everything that I could get my hands on.
Sadly, with Disney now in charge and thus all of my old universe wiped away, I've sort of lost the desire to read Star Wars books now. Read the Battlefront book, which I enjoyed, but really that's been the only one I've picked up and read. I own Bloodlines, but knowing that it's different from what I grew up with makes it really hard for me to start it.

That's not to say I don't read other stuff now. Mostly light novels, such as 'A Certain Magical Index' and 'Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon?', but I do still very much enjoy reading.

Oh, and it has to be an actual book, with paper, for me to really read it and enjoy it. It's just not the same reading something on a screen.

 

[MerlinCross]

I'm thinking of dipping into more Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
But as I'm an evil SJW I'd want a cool sci-fi/fantasy book with a female protagonist. I'll get around to it when I have more money.

I think young adult books tend to have more female protagonists. Granted that could be chasing after Hunger Games and Twilight fans. For better or worse and it's a maybe.

Myself I keep picking up books but never get around to reading them. I'm so bad at that.

 

[09philj]

I'm thinking of dipping into more Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
But as I'm an evil SJW I'd want a cool sci-fi/fantasy book with a female protagonist. I'll get around to it when I have more money.

Jim C Hines's Princess series looks rather good. I've not read that series in particular, but his Magic Ex Libris books are excellent. I assume they'll contain the same combination of loving homage and ludicrous genre deconstruction. (IE One of the main characters in Magic Ex Libris was pulled from the pages of a trashy fantasy romance into the real world. She is still a sex obsessed, ass kicking dryad, but is suffering from being unable to integrate with normal human society as a result)

 

[Recusant]

I'm not making that last part up either; an author told me (okay, so they might have made it up for all I know) that a third of British people will never buy a book in their life, and another third will only by an average of one book per year.

Man, that's a depressing thought (if true). I suppose it's not so bad if they're relying on libraries, but I kinda doubt it. The last time I was in the UK, I discovered that the hotel lobby had vending machines that dispensed books, and immediately felt an intense stab of jealousy. Granted, that was fifteen years ago, and a hotel lobby, but still.

Anyway, I've just finished a biography of Frank Zappa, and have now begun another reading of Finnegans Wake, which is always difficult to talk about. Hey, you try finding a way to say "it's one of the greatest books ever written, and you should probably never read it" that doesn't sound insulting.

 

[Hawki]

And now for the point where I comment on stuff:

Is there a Star Wars battle droid factory for rats somewhere?

Do rats need an excuse for large numbers?

I want to buy more books. My library isn't very local and I like to keep books that I've read.

Heh, poor sod. Benefit of working at a library is that I'm not exactly spoiled for choice. ^_^

But still, I suppose the last book I read was The Outsiders a few months ago.

Huh. Read that in high school. Good book.

and I'm still working on the book of the Warcraft movie.

Read the prequel novel Warcraft: Durotan if you get the chance. The movie novelization is okay, IMO - a bit better than the movie if only for including some extra character scenes. Durotan is a far more solid work though IMO.

I'm thinking of dipping into more Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
But as I'm an evil SJW I'd want a cool sci-fi/fantasy book with a female protagonist. I'll get around to it when I have more money.

A SJW? Eh. I'm more a social justice cleric. We need to form our own party.

As for female protagonists, well, there's a lot of YA stuff in that genre. Apart from that, maybe Imperial Radch? I don't like it myself, but I am in the minority in that area. Mistborn is another option that comes to mind, specifically the original trilogy.

I agree with him when he said games haven't had a Citizen Kane yet. The thing about that is the movie industry had to wait sixty years to get theirs.

Wasn't Citizen Kane recognised as a masterpiece well after it was released?

Anyway, I'm not too fussed. There's plenty of games with solid stories, they don't have to be masterpieces to be good.

And for the record, I do consider Citizen Kane to be an excellent film, albiet mainly for its style of cinematography.

and I don't think I'll ever get tired of Lord of the Flies.

You have good taste sir.

Yay reading! I do a collage of all the books I read every year.

Ah, the Ice Dragon. Prequel to A Song of Ice and Fire (shut up, that's what my head canon says).