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The Green and Gold Rugby Book Club

yourmatesam

Desmond Connor (43)
Determinedly ploughing through "The Wheel of Time" series. But reading a 14 book series has left me with 4 other "to reads"in the pile as well.
I started reading this series when it first came out but couldn't keep up with it in the end. I gave up at book 12
 

ChargerWA

Mark Loane (55)
Funnily enough book 12 was the last one written principally by Robert Jordan. The last 2 were written by Brandon Sanderson, the aforementioned new poster boy for high fantasy working from a story outline Jordan had left knowing he wouldn't live to finish it. Sanderson is a significantly better author and the last 2 books are some of the best, even though he was constrained by having to remain faithful to Jordan's outline and it was edited by Jordan's widow.
 

Dismal Pillock

Simon Poidevin (60)
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Thought this would be just the ticket for a luddite git like me. Yeah this’ll help me get a handle on the bewildering speed at which all this smartphone shit is taking over, all these tech babble freaks and their Linux 2.0 wank. I imagine a futuristic freak like Pfitzy would either crap his drawers at this book or just think ehhhh, more crap from some old git who couldn’t keep up.

Book has some mind-bending wee computey techspeed vignettes, none of which I can remember offhand. But first 200 pages of book was 8/10 for a barnacle-browed c**t like me. Then author veers off and blabs on about Africa and the cameltoe jockeys for a boring eon then, inexplicably, he dunks the whole thing in marsipan molasses by spending the last 80 pages, 78.5 of which I skimmed over, trying to vinelessly tie it all up by linking all the techspeed disorientation back to… his oh so wonderful Minnesota upbringing in a wee town which had a phenomenal number of famous people, all of whom were salt of the earth types, wayyy more than in your town, or your country even, and if we could all just get back to being like his precious awesome childhood townsfolk, we’d have no more humiliated Ahkbar faceplant suicide bombers etc sure maybe but jeez get over yourself ffs 3/10 faceplanted the landing Friedman see me in my office
 

Dismal Pillock

Simon Poidevin (60)
started "The Secret River" by aussie author Kate Grenville, damn good so far, about some pom deported to Aus

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also now on Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5". Trying to pace myself with this one. Greatness. words at the fingertips of a perfectly liquid brain. a miracle of effortless prosaic motion. you know the guy is good when it reads as if he's just written it out in one sitting, as if its coming to you at the same speed that it came to him...
 

Dctarget

John Eales (66)
also now on Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5". Trying to pace myself with this one. Greatness. words at the fingertips of a perfectly liquid brain. a miracle of effortless prosaic motion. you know the guy is good when it reads as if he's just written it out in one sitting, as if its coming to you at the same speed that it came to him.


Was 2 years enough to pace it properly? Every 2nd sentence in that book makes you put it down and stare at the wall like a mute goat.
 

formerflanker

Ken Catchpole (46)
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Thought this would be just the ticket for a luddite git like me. Yeah this’ll help me get a handle on the bewildering speed at which all this smartphone shit is taking over, all these tech babble freaks and their Linux 2.0 wank. I imagine a futuristic freak like Pfitzy would either crap his drawers at this book or just think ehhhh, more crap from some old git who couldn’t keep up.

Book has some mind-bending wee computey techspeed vignettes, none of which I can remember offhand. But first 200 pages of book was 8/10 for a barnacle-browed c**t like me. Then author veers off and blabs on about Africa and the cameltoe jockeys for a boring eon then, inexplicably, he dunks the whole thing in marsipan molasses by spending the last 80 pages, 78.5 of which I skimmed over, trying to vinelessly tie it all up by linking all the techspeed disorientation back to… his oh so wonderful Minnesota upbringing in a wee town which had a phenomenal number of famous people, all of whom were salt of the earth types, wayyy more than in your town, or your country even, and if we could all just get back to being like his precious awesome childhood townsfolk, we’d have no more humiliated Ahkbar faceplant suicide bombers etc sure maybe but jeez get over yourself ffs 3/10 faceplanted the landing Friedman see me in my office
Saw the heading and thought it was directed at my very late arrival to this thread.
It probably was.
 

Dismal Pillock

Simon Poidevin (60)
Every hipster/twitteratitwat is a novelist.

"I am a novelist."
"I'm writing a novel."
"I wrote a novel last weekend."
"I'm trying to get my novel published."

Then you actually read some of this self-proclaimed novelist's writing and after 3 sentences your brain retreats from your eyes and your thoughts turn to wondering if the clothes on the line are dry yet.

Me, I write shitty satirical news stories and post them on the internet. I don't have a novel or a short story or basically any semblance of a laid-out, planned, fictional narrative plotline in me. Not one. That shit is WAY too fucken hard. Some people make it look easy. And when I say "some", I mean virtually fucking nobody.

I read some of Katherine Mansfield's short stories yesterday. Written in the 1910's. She was from Niew Zllnd. I can relate. "The equal of Chekhov" they say. Them's some big boots.

KM's stories;
  • No $20 words.
  • No sparkling dialogue.
  • No witty, engaging characters.
  • No impenetrably-prolix theoretical gymnastics duplicitously presented under the guise of a goddamn fucking "story" ffs.
You get a bit about how the area looked, bits about what unfolded, a couple of characters and their thoughts, then the end.

10 pages or so and it's done.

So what's the big deal?

I'm sure a lot of ink has been chundered out in regards to that over the last 110 years. Books, etc. Wordy word analysis books. Who cares. It's not like you can teach it. Such a finely-parsed gift that it exists in its own ether. You finish one of Mansfield's short stories and then sit back and think, holy shitballs, that was utterly goddamn masterly. Zero fat. The languid, poignant, evocative naturally-sanded craft of it. Fucking impossible to do well. All the "no's" listed above, and yet the sweet short thing is now seared into my brain, possibly indelibly.

The unreplicable secret of it, to me, is the barebones description of the scene. An utterly spartan economy of words yet it's so brilliantly, brilliantly illustrative that you just have to step back from it, take pause, marvel at it, wonder how the fuck did she just do that, then reread the thing again. That sets the table.

I'm sorry, twitter.
 

John S

Desmond Connor (43)
I'm starting to re-read the Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy. Finished the other week "Without Remorse" which is a prelude to the series.
 

dru

Tim Horan (67)
OK, I'll Give this thread a go.

https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

"The Dreams that STUFF is made of" Stephen Hawking.

It is a collection, of the unedited original, of peer reviewed science papers, across history, around the theme of Quantum Mechanics. They are grouped in time chunks, with Hawking giving an introduction as to why the papers were important.

Note - MANY of these papers resulted in Nobel prizes. Here's a quick review:

"God does not play dice with the universe." So said Albert Einstein in response to the first discoveries that launched quantum physics, as they suggested a random universe that seemed to violate the laws of common sense. This 20th-century scientific revolution completely shattered Newtonian laws, inciting a crisis of thought that challenged scientists to think differently about matter and subatomic particles.The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of compiles the essential works from the scientists who sparked the paradigm shift that changed the face of physics forever, pushing our understanding of the universe on to an entirely new level of comprehension. Gathered in this anthology is the scholarship that shocked and befuddled the scientific world, including works by Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, as well as an introduction by today's most celebrated scientist, Stephen Hawking.
 
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