(1) BOOKS PEOPLE BOUNCED OFF. On Bustle.com, Charlotte Ahlin takes a look at “The 15 Most Frequently Unfinished Reads, According To Goodreads’ ‘Popular Abandoned Books’ Shelf” and encourages at least a subset of people to try again. The list includes many genre works, but genre or not, Ahlin gives you a paragraph about each laying out why you might (or might not) enjoy the book more than you thought.
We’ve all left a book unfinished in our time. And honestly, I get it. Forcing yourself to slog through a book you don’t like is a pretty pointless endeavor. Reading should be fun, not a joyless exercise in seeming smart/trendy/interesting. But if you have it in your heart, some of these oft-abandoned books are actually worth giving a second (or third) chance:
1 The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling
2 Catch-22, Joseph Heller
3 A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
4 American Gods, Neil Gaiman
5 The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
6 Fifty Shades of Grey, E.L. James
7 Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
8 The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
9 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
10 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
11 Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
12 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Gregory Maguire
13 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
14 Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
15 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
(2) LEADERS WHO READ SFF. POLITICO reports that two European Commissioners are science fiction fans. Valdis Dombrovskis (Latvia) is reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman, while Pierre Moscovici (France) recommends George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven — “POLITICO Brussels Playbook: Death by a thousand cuts — What presidents are reading — Go full Orbán”.
(3) PUTTING A GOOD FACE ON IT. When Bill Oberst Jr. does his Bradbury show in 2019, this is the creator who will make the illusion convincing: “Jeff Farley Recreates Ray Bradbury for Touring Stage Portrayal of Sci-Fi Author” – Broadway World has the story.
Jeff Farley‘s love letter to Ray Bradbury will soon be on Bill Oberst Jr.‘s face. Special effects makeup artist and Primetime Emmy Award Nominee Farley has just completed the sculpt for Oberst’s prosthetic transformation into Bradbury in the authorized stage portrayal of the beloved author, Ray Bradbury Live (forever.)
“This project is the culmination of four decades of professional experience, and the most exciting of my career,” Farley said. “I am proud to help my friend bring his vision to life. Bill says I’m his Dick Smith and he’s my Hal Holbrook. We laugh, but that really is the level of illusion we’re aiming for.” Smith’s prosthetics for Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight broke new SFX ground in 1967. For his part, Oberst says he’s “ecstatic” about what Farley (whose resume stretches from BABYLON 5, WOLF and Demolition Man to Quarry, Pod and Imitation Girl) is creating. “Jeff is a bit of a recluse and he’s very selective,” said Oberst “so I’m over the moon to have him crafting this illusion.”
(4) SF BOOK QUIZ. The Sporcle challenge: “Can you name the 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime, according to Amazon?” You’ve got 16 minutes. And it’s not enough to know a good book by the authors – you have to get the ones that made the list. Filers have been playing all day since Giant Panda dropped the link in comments.
(5) ONCE MORE INTO THE LIFEBOAT DEAR FRIENDS. Slightly better than cancelled, not nearly as good as rescued or renewed — “NBC Sets ‘Timeless’ Two-Part Series Finale” reports Variety.
NBC will bring back “Timeless” for a special two-part series finale, the network confirmed Tuesday.
“We’re excited to tell one final chapter to this incredible story,” said Lisa Katz, co-president, scripted programming, NBC Entertainment. “A huge thank you to all — our cast, crew, producers and partners at Sony – who have worked so very hard, and to the fans who kept us on our toes and made sure we did our very best week after week.”
In June, NBC canceled the time travel drama from Sony Pictures Television and executive producers Shawn Ryan and Eric Kripke after two seasons. It was the second cancellation for “Timeless.” NBC had canceled the series after its first season, only to bring it back a few days later after Sony agreed to hand over a 50% stake in the show to NBC’s sister studio Universal Television.
(6) CURE FOR THE SUMMERTIME BLUES. Or at least a treatment for the symptoms. Jason, at Featured Futures, has condensed the month’s offerings down to a short list of cool stories in “Summation: July 2018”.
Here are the fifteen noted stories (four recommended) from the 92 stories of 503 Kwds I read from the July issues along with links to all their reviews and the other July posts on Featured Futures. This month’s wombat was a remarkable number of mostly print SF honorable mentions while all the few other items (except an excellent F&SF dark fantasy) came from the web.
(7) 2019 WORLDCON PROGRAM. Dublin 2019 has a form online where people can “Request to be a Programme Participant”. There’s more than one good reason to fill it out.
Kevin Standlee pointed out on Facebook a few days ago:
European data protection rules severely restrict the amount of information that entities can share with others, even those that hosted the previous event. You should assume that the 2019 Worldcon is starting with zero information about program participants, even if you were on program in Helsinki in 2017 or will be on program in San Jose in 2018. Contact Dublin if you’re interested in being on programming, and don’t assume that “of course they’ll just start with last year’s list” or “with the last European Worldcon’s list,” because legally, they can’t do that.
(8) LOOK OUT BELOW! What happens to the International Space Station when it can’t be maintained in orbit any more? It crashes, just like every other piece of hardware in low Earth orbit. Popular Mechanics takes a look at the status of plans to do this safely (hint: the plans are not nearly as well-developed as they should be; “Death Star: The ISS Doesn’t Have a Way to Crash Safely”).
As the debate over what to do with the International Space Station heats up, with a new NASA report casting doubt over the plans to commercialize it by 2025, the ultimate outcome could be its intentional crash landing into the Earth. But even that contingency is lacking, according to NASA Inspector General.
“At some future date NASA will need to decommission and deorbit the ISS either in response to an emergency or at the end of its useful life,” the report says. “However, the Agency currently does not have the capability to ensure the ISS will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and land in a targeted location in the South Pacific Ocean.”
NASA, to its credit, has started the work. However, even the most preliminary steps are snarled up in diplomacy with the Russian space agency. The Inspector General says that in January 2017, NASA completed a draft plan but “this plan has not been finalized and is pending review by Roscosmos.”
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
- Born July 31 – France Nuyen, 79. In the original Outer Limits, Star Trek and Fantasy Island series, also Battle for the Planet of the Apes and The Six Million Dollar Man series.
- Born July 31 – Geraldine Chaplin, 74. Dinotopia and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Gulliver’s Travels and a vampire series called BloodRayne.
- Born July 31 – Michael Biehn, 62. Best known in films directed by James Cameron; as Sgt. Kyle Reese in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cpl. Dwayne Hicks in Aliens and Lt. Coffey in The Abyss; also in Logan’s Run, Timebomb, Asteroid, Clockstoppers and The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power.
- Born July 31 – Wesley Snipes, 56. Genre roles include Demolition Man, the original Blade films, as an alien abducting humans in The Recall film, and a Mayan God in The Chronicles of the Mayan Tunnel.
- Born July 31 – J. K. Rowling, 53. Harry Potter books and films, some other decidedly not genre work
- Born July 31 – Annie Parisse, 43. Regular cast on the Person Of Interest series, also The First, a Mars mission series and NYPD 2069.
- Born July 31 – Zelda Williams, 29. Daughter of Robin Williams, she’s been in genre work such as the Dark/Web series, plus voice work in the current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Legend of Korra, also roles in Stitchers and Teen Wolf.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Savage Chickens finds a good joke in the old series theme song – “Spider-Man vs The Rhino 4”.
(11) TOLKIEN AND LUCAS ON A DIET. Actor Topher Grace has taken to the editing suite and has taken a scalpel (or dwarven ax?) to the Hobbit trilogy—trimming the whole thing to a svelte two hours (IndieWire: “Topher Grace Recut ‘The Hobbit’ Trilogy as a 2-Hour Movie to Clear His Head After Playing David Duke”). Grace speaks of his reaction to playing David Duke in the upcoming BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee) and having his wife give birth during the production of that movie:
“I was so depressed.[…] I was probably a terrible husband at the time. It was so disturbing to go home and turn on the news to see how his ideology was affecting us at the moment.”
Some people might have sought catharsis in a long vacation. Grace found a more unconventional outlet: Reediting Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy into a single movie.
Grace had previously recut the three prequel Star Wars movies into a combined 85-minute version he called Star Wars: Episode III.5: The Editor Strikes Back that was “for industry insiders before it disappeared from the internet” (SYFY Wire: “The Hobbit trilogy gets a new two-hour cut thanks to actor Topher Grace”). The IndieWire story continues:
While hardly the first fan edit of “The Hobbit,” Grace’s version may be one of the most palatable. One widely circulated fan edit in 2015, “The Tolkien Edit,” ran four hours long. Grace said he managed to reduce the entire trilogy to two hours, and felt that it was “a lot tighter.” (A Reddit forum actually predicted that Grace would tackle this project years ago.) “I don’t know what other guys do. Go fishing? For me, this is just a great way to relax,” the actor said. “There’s something really zen about it.”
(12) OUT OF JOINT. An expert in the time travel industry has found his next job: “Steven Moffat Developing The Time Traveler’s Wife Television Series for HBO” – Tor.com has the story.
HBO has won the bidding war for a TV adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, from former Doctor Who showrunner and Sherlock creator Steven Moffat. Other outlets, including Amazon Studios, were in the running to acquire the series about Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire’s nonlinear love story, according to Deadline.
The official logline from HBO is slightly tongue-in-cheek for a novel about Henry, a time traveler and librarian whose Chrono-Displacement Disorder drops him in and out of time, and artist Clare, who first meets Henry as a child and who spends the rest of her life encountering him at different ages as she progresses through time linearly…
“I read Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife many years ago, and I fell in love with it,” Moffat said in the official announcement. “In fact, I wrote a Doctor Who episode called ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ as a direct response to it. When, in her next novel, Audrey had a character watching that very episode, I realised she was probably on to me. All these years later, the chance to adapt the novel itself, is a dream come true. The brave new world of long form television is now ready for this kind of depth and complexity. It’s a story of happy ever after?—?but not necessarily in that order.”
(13) OUTREACH. It’s not up to Gil Hamilton’s standard, but SingularityHub (“This Mind-Controlled Robotic Limb Lets You Multitask With Three Arms”) reports on a new brain-machine interface (BMI) that “only requires an electrode cap” and can control a third arm while you still use your biological two. The original paper (“BMI control of a third arm for multitasking”) is available at Science Robotics (a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) for AAAS members or those willing to pony up to get past their paywall. Meanwhile, at SingularityHub:
To crack the problem, [Shuichi] Nichio and colleague Christian Penaloza recruited 15 volunteers and outfitted them with a prosthetic arm and a brain-wave-reading cap.
…The participants were asked to sit in a chair mounted with a robotic arm, strategically placed in a location that makes them feel like it’s part of their body. To start off, each participant was asked to balance a ball on a board using their own arms while wearing an electrode cap, which picks up the electrical activity from the brain.
Next, the volunteers turned their attention to the robotic arm. Sitting in the same chair, they practiced imagining picking up a bottle using the prosthesis while having their brain activity patterns recorded. A nearby computer learned to decipher this intent, and instructed the robotic arm to act accordingly.Then came the fun part: the volunteers were asked to perform both actions simultaneously: balancing the ball with natural arms, and grasping the bottle with the robotic one. Eight out of the 15 participants successfully performed both actions; overall, the group managed cyborg multitasking roughly three quarters of the time.
(14) TIME AFTER TIME. Time for The Traveler at Galactic Journey to give John W. Campbell Jr. his monthly rap on the knuckles: “[July 30, 1963] Inoffensive Pact (August 1963 Analog)”.
At last we come to what you all will probably (as I did) turn to first: the conclusion to the second novel in the Deathworld series. When last we left Jason dinAlt, interstellar gambler and lately resident of the dangerous world of Pyrrus, he had been enslaved by the D’sertanoj of a nearby primitive planet. These desert-dwellers know how to mine petroleum, which they trade to the people of the country, Appsala, in exchange for caroj — steam powered battle wagons. When dinAlt reveals that he can produce caroj himself, he is promoted to “employee” status and given run of the place. He eventually escapes with his native companion, Ijale, as well as the obnoxiously moralistic Micah, who kidnapped dinAlt in the first place. Adventures ensue.
The original Deathworld was a minor masterpiece, a parable about letting go of destructive hatred, suffused with a message on the importance of environmentalism. It was also a cracking good read. This new piece is just a yarn, one almost as clunky as the caroj dinAlt works on. The theme is that universal morality is anything but, and ethics must be tailored to the society for which they are developed.
(15) SOLAR PROBE. NPR studies how NASA’s probe will keep from being burnt to a crisp: “Building A Probe That Will Survive A Trip To The Sun” — lightweight video with little discussion of the topic, but cool pictures of the probe being fitted out.
This summer, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will embark on a mission to “touch the sun.”
“Touch” might be a bit of an overstatement — the probe will actually pass 3.8 million miles from the sun’s surface. Its primary job is to learn more about the outer atmosphere of the sun, called the corona. Many things about the corona remain a mystery. For example, scientists still aren’t sure why the corona of the sun is hotter than its surface. The probe will take a series of images and measurements to figure out how energy and heat move through the corona.
(16) CASE OF THE UNKNOWN CON. Trae Dorn at Nerd and Tie found the explanation is simple — “The Reason You Didn’t Hear About SBC Anime Festival Is Because Apparently No One Did”.
It’s been a week and a half since AVC Coventions‘s Bossier City, LA based SBC Anime Festival closed its doors for 2018, and you’d be forgiven for not even knowing it happened. The reason for this is that apparently no one knew it was.
Okay, so maybe that’s an exaggeration, but very few knew about it at least.
Needless to say, vendors and artists present weren’t exactly happy about spending their weekend in an empty hall. One of those vendors was artist K.F. Golden, who decided to detail their experience on Tumblr.
You should read the post in its entirety, but the gist of it is that very few people attended the convention. K.F. Golden took some pictures of the empty dealer hall, and it seems like no one knew the con was happening.
…The point is that when your event doesn’t do well, you still need to be able to talk to a vendor politely. This is basic customer service, and do not mistake me — when you are running a convention, vendors and artist are customers. If what K.F. Golden alleges is true, I would be hesitant to vend at any of AVC Conventions‘s other events.
(17) MY GENERATION. Phoebe Wagner delivers “Musings on The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang” at Nerds of a Feather.
While I love fantasy novels like The Poppy War, Kuang’s story has taken a special slot on my shelf because, as a millennial, I connected to the novel on a generational level. No, Kuang did not include avocado toast. From the voice to history to worldbuilding, the novel captured how I so often feel as a millennial. While the USA school testing systems are vastly different than Chinese systems, I remember the pressure of the SATs and GREs–and the relief at performing well. Like Rin, millennials grew up in the shadow of a terrorist attack and hearing the propaganda surrounding a war. Due to income inequality, those millennials that made it into “the good schools” found a cultural gap caused by wealth. Like Kuang’s worldbuilding around opium and other hallucinogens, so many millennials have watched their hometowns and families destroyed by opioids while simultaneously voting for the legalization of marijuana. These issues have marked the millennial generation, and Kuang captures them on the page.
(18) LET ROVER COME OVER. Here’s a curiosity: You can build your own open-source rover using JPL’s design.
I shall call her Mini-Me. Build your own robot with these open source rover plans from @NASAJPL ???? https://t.co/IDduG0OjPF pic.twitter.com/8oZXS7iva3
— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) July 31, 2018
(19) DISNEYLAND ICONS FOR SALE. Rachael Leone Shawfelt, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “Rare Trove of Disneyland memorabilia Going Up For Auction–Here’s Your Sneak Peek” says RIchard Kraft is putting his collection of Disneyland memorabilia up for auction, including original rides from Dumbo the Flying Elephant and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride as well as a Swiss Family Treehouse organ.
Kraft’s treasures will be on display for the public in a free exhibition called “That’s From Disneyland!,” from Aug. 1 to Aug. 26, in Sherman Oaks, Calif. The items are arranged according to their former location in the park; for example, a piece of the Dumbo ride is close to rare Snow White dolls. Original maps of the park hang on the wall above a miniature re-creation of the park.
(20) MANIFEST. Trailer for the new series —
An airplane disappeared, and its passengers were presumed dead until they returned, unscathed, five years later. Manifest is coming to NBC on Mondays this fall.
[Thanks to Giant Panda, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Iphinome, Nicholas Whyte, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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First to welcome our new Rover overlords.
(1) I finished four of those … really liked two of them. And here I thought I was queen of the halfway-read novel. Looks like there are lots of people even more easily distracted than myself.
1) I have started and completed six of these. I started Infinite Jest, and gave up after 50 pages, when I was suddenly struck by the suspicion that DFW was a colossal wanker.
(1) It seems to me that a very high-selling book is also going to be a highly unfinished book, just based on random distribution of taste-match. In fact, a book that is touted as a “must read” is likely to have a higher percentage of DNF due to people starting it simply because everyone else is reading it. So I’m not sure that this list provides any useful information about reading habits.
Hanging on. Barely. Need a car with working AC.
Listening to Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi. If you haven’t, do.
Jack Lint: Love the Scroll title. Big Kirsty fan, mourn her loss every time I play her music (I.e. frequently). (And your way would make just as good a song.)
Books on that list I’ve finished:
Liked them all, and have read 4 and 9 multiple times.
Books I’ve started but haven’t finished:
It read fine, but I just wasn’t in the mood. I’ll go back to it someday.
kdb
Started & finished 3 of them.
4 American Gods, Neil Gaiman
9 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
13 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
I may get to some of the others.
1) Read Catch 22, American Gods, Game of Thrones and Wicked, enjoyed them all. DNF JS&MN because I wasnt enjoying it in the least.
(1) I’ve read Catch-22, American Gods, JS&MN, and Wicked—that last being unexpectedly much darker than the musical version I had seen previously. I’ve got a paperback of A Game of Thrones lying around that I’ll get to eventually, although I’m not prioritizing it until ASoIaF finishes.
I also very seldom DNF books, though. I find it a lot easier to get distracted between books in a series than in the middle of an individual book unless I aggressively don’t care about both the characters and the setting.
(1) I’ve finished four of them, and have two more in my to-read pile, but I haven’t started any without finishing them. I will say I despised Wicked (which I read because my husband is a huge Wizard of Oz fan and I met Maguire and thought he was nice and didn’t realize what a depressing read it would be for me).
The others I read, American Gods, Game of Thrones and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo were fine, although I felt no urge to pick up any more of Stieg Larsson’s work after reading the first book.
(12) How on earth can you make that concept work? It was difficult enough to follow in book format. This will definitely be one to see, if only to find out if it can be pulled off.
(1) I’ve read 7 of those!
1) I’ve had American Gods on my TBR stack for… a very long time, and have just never mustered the interest to start it. So I recently bought the graphic-novel version, in hopes that perhaps the different format will get past my reluctance. If I like that, I then may try the novel… or maybe not, it depends.
11) I’d be interested in seeing that.
13) That could be great! There are several things that I end up doing while making jewelry for which it would be very useful to have a third hand — and a couple of tools which allow me to simulate having one.
16) Yeesh! I don’t think I’ve EVER seen a dealer room that devoid of customers, and I’ve been to several hundred cons. Hell, I’ve seen more customers in the room at a little local gaming-con that ran fewer than 100 attendees counting concom. For an anime-con, that’s beyond pathetic — and I agree with everything said about the attitude of the conrunners.
20) Interesting. Depending on just which 5-year period they choose, that could be a real culture shock. Imagine what it would be like if you had disappeared in 1962 and returned in 1967 — or 1999 and 2004 — or 2013 and 2018. I wonder how much exploring of that concept they’re going to do in the show.
Seriously? 50 shades? Eat pray love?
I finished three of that list, Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones and The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo which is not a hard read but which I profoundly loathed. I speed-read Outlander in a bookshop. I did not finish JS&MN although I loved the BBC adaptation.
Trendy books the reader finds out that they don’t like, I’d guess, rather than difficult reads.
(I’ve finished 6 of the books, and haven’t started any of the others, though I plan to read Infinite Jest one of these decades.)
1) Read (and finished) 2, 3, 4, 9, 10 and 15. Haven’t yet started on the others. Will probably give at least one of them a miss. (Come to think of it, I’ve not just read JS&MrN, I’ve read it aloud – so, that one, I definitely finished.)
5) Ending the second season of Timeless on a cliffhanger was a cheap play, just like ending the first revival season of The X-Files on one was. When your series gets a second chance, the smart move is not to assume it will get a third. Sure, leave room for another season; that’s just common sense… but trying to leverage your fans again is just asking for trouble.
Don’t get me wrong; I fully intend to watch the two-hour finale special… but it was crass of the writers to make it necessary.
8) It’s like Skylab all over again!
20) It’s like Lost all over again (but inverted)!
1) I’ve started, finished, and loved two of those books. There are a couple more I think I’d like, and a couple more I might try.
@Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag: Before Wicked, Maguire wrote a real good short YA novel called Oasis. I liked it a lot and never read anything else by him.
Now, the kid and the kid’s mom–especially the kid’s mom–are fans. The kid’s mom was the first person I knew who loved Wicked. (So Maguire augmented Kate Wilhelm as the likely gift for the kid’s mom.) The kid prefers the musical–the kid is really into musicals just now–but the whole idea of it all is something they both get into.
1) I’ve finished A Game of Thrones, Catch-22, American Gods and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I found the last one meh. It was just too slow for me and I thought about quitting a few times. The others I liked, but I’m quitting Martin. Too much time since the last book which wasn’t very good.
(1) I’ve read 3, 4, 9 and 10. I dearly wish I’d DNF’d 10. I want to read Catch-22 but just haven’t gotten around to it. The rest of the list: Meh, don’t care enough to pick them up in the first place.
… no edit button. I have a copy of 100 Years of Solitude, which I will also read at some point. But aside from it and Catch-22 I have very little interest in the rest of the list.
I have read 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, and 15, but I have failed to get very far in One Hundred Years of Solitude a couple of times. I’ll try it again one of these days. I also didn’t care for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but I did finish it,
I usually finish books I pick up, so I was surprised that list had so many of my DNFs. I got some distance into _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_ and _Wolf Hall_, got distracted by something, and wasn’t interested enough to resume. I might try picking up Jonathan Strange again; I don’t know if I’ll bother with Wolf Hall.
I didn’t finish _The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo_ because based on the portion I’d read and what I’d heard from others, I wasn’t going to enjoy reading to the end.
I might have picked up _The Book Thief_ and _Infinite Jest_ (we own both) but if so didn’t get very far, and I don’t really remember either. I might try the first one (again?) at some point.
I finished _Wicked_ but didn’t like it much, though I could see what the author was doing and how others might like it. I finished _Eat, Pray, Love_ but wish I hadn’t.
I’ve finished and enjoyed _American Gods_ and _One Hundred Years of Solitude_, and finished, loved, and reread _Catch-22_ multiple times. (Heller’s book is sufficiently nonlinear and dark that I can see why many might not finish it. If the main thing making you put it down is that it’s hard to follow, though, I’d suggest sticking with it for a while even if you’re not sure what’s going on. Eventually that will become clearer, and you can use cues like the number of missions people have to fly to figure out when the narrative is jumping backward or forward in time.)
Manifest? I suppose it would be too “on the nose” for NBC to entitle it Found.
1) My, my, my…Gravity’s Rainbow did not crack the top 15?
I thought it worked as a movie, not sure about a series. Reading the book first may have helped though.
(5) Happy to see that there will be a finale for this
(20) There was an online anthology of stories with a similar premise last year https://seat14c.com/
(1) I read three of these (two of them I had to take a second run at after starting and not finishing them – but I enjoyed them a lot when I did finish them)
Remember, remember, the tickbox of the File.
12) Well given the River Song/Doctor tangled timelines, this is probably a good potential fit.
I still need to be better about DNFing books. Life IS too short
I’ve read (& finished) four on the list:
Game of Thrones
American Gods
Jonathan Strange
Wicked
Haven’t read Wolf Hall but did enjoy the miniseries, after which I started fantasizing about Mark Rylance starring as the title character in an adaptation of Camber of Culdi.
I’m surprised DHALGREN and Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND aren’t listed. I also tried to read a few of Tolkien’s posthumous works. Never got to page 50
When I was a kid most people who read at all read Catch-22 in high school. Or that’s how I remember it.
I did read the Night Land, although it took a couple of attempts to get all the way through it. Never read Dhalgren; not sure if I ever actually started it & abandoned it or not.
Per the article, it’s a list of books people have shelved as “abandoned” sorted by frequency, so I’m assuming those two might be further down the list?
@ Steve: I believe the title is a reference to the passenger manifest of the flight.
Only tried three, and finished all three. Of those, Infinite Jest and Catch-22 are firm favourites. 100 Years Of Solitude didn’t really click with me, but I was still young enough to think I had to read everything to the end.
I’ve read all of Catch-22 and American Gods, and the first chapter or so of One Hundred Years of Solitude.. I think Catch-22 was assigned reading in high school, but I enjoyed it–then again, I enjoyed a fair amount of what we were assigned in English class, and read quickly enough that if not, something else would be along soon. (Spending between 1.5 and 2 hours on the subway, five days a week, adds up to a lot of reading time. One unexpected adjustment of going away to college was that I had to actively make time for the assigned reading, not just put the book in my bag before I left the house and read it on the train.)
The rest of that list I haven’t tried; there are a few I might read sometime, and a couple I’m sure I won’t.
I’ve read CATCH 22 three times. It is a maze of plot threads. And it has layers of puns and jokes concealed in it.
1) Finished:
Catch-22 and One Hundred Years of Solitude were okay, but not my favourites. The Heller reminded me that I basically just hate mid-century American prose (unless it’s by a southerner). It always reads as being super flat to me, especially if it’s from the Northeast (see also: Salinger, Pynchon). Before is okay, after is okay, but I just don’t really connect with that period.
Also, I don’t DNF. I think I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve picked up and never finished. It may take me years of poking at it sporadically (I’m looking at you, Witches of Eastwick), but I will eventually finish.
5) Well, I’m glad they are giving it an ending, but agree w/ Rev. Bob that ending your grace season on a cliffhanger was bad form.
20) I am really, really, really, really, really, really, really sick of the “a bunch of people go missing and then come back, what a mystery!” plots. Like, really. The 4400 was the last one of those I needed.
@1: slight ~superset of others’ lists: 1,2,3,4,9,12 finished, none of the others even started. (I have …Tattoo because it was very cheap; I saw the Swedish movie but have heard the writing is offensively sexist in ways the movie left out, so I’m not sure I believe the reviewer’s claim that it is a critique of violent misogyny.) I’m not surprised there are genre works on the list; I can imagine a lot of people who’d read some of the mundane works picking up due to raves (or TV) and being impatient with the need to learn a new world. I’m especially unsurprised at A Casual Vacancy; it is distinctly bleak and present-day British, versus the rose-colored ~timelessness of the Potterverse. (Yes, there’s pain in the Potterverse — but almost everything comes out right in the end. I recall Cheryl Morgan dripping on them as just another set of boarding-school books; they’re not quite as slight as (e.g.) Enid Blyton’s St. Clare’s books, but they’re not close to the world-as-it-is — or even was.) If anything the review understates this — ISTM that it was indicting Thatcherism as a whole, not just the small-town instantiation of it; also ISTM that it has become more relevant to the US under Trump (big surprise there). I’ve subsequently read a couple of other Maguires to try to figure out why people rave over them, with no luck; I found his latest (Hiddensee, the life of the maker of the Nutcracker) vaguely plausible/interesting, but still somewhat bleak-for-bleakness’s-sake (vs the Rowling, which AFAICT is see-what-your-hatefulness-is-doing realism). No DNFs, and not likely to be any, as the raves I’ve heard for the others have been offputting.
@Heather Rose Jones: a good point on DNF’ing “must read”s. And that’s just the list of books people actually started; Hawking spoke of A Brief History of Time as having huge numbers of copies sold but unread.
@Robert Whitaker Sirignano: I’m not surprised Dhalgren is not on the list; it was widely mocked within the SF community, and I never saw it getting much love — or even notice — outside, so I wouldn’t have expected that many people to have started it. As Joe H. notes, it might be well down the list — depending on how far into memory Goodreads posters dig (do people post anything other than what they’ve just done?), as I’m not seeing any current attention to Delany.
@Chris Barkley: Gravity’s Rainbow was probably finished by more people than Dhalgren, but I’d guess it’s even more a phenomenon of its time, i.e. not likely to show up on current lists. Think of how many people probably read Stranger in a Strange Land in the 60’s; how much is it read now?
I’m actually reading Gravity’s Rainbow right now, and Dhalgren is on my list, if not for this year then hopefully next. (GR is weird; it’s 50 pages of brilliance followed by 50 pages of utter crap, rinse and repeat for ~750 pages.)
1 from the list I’ve read 5, The Casual Vacancy was the one I truly hated.
A Game of Thrones was the book I was so angry somewhere in it, that I did nearly put it down. (Have read the whole ASOIAF since then)
One I am not interesting in reading.
Many Scrolls and Files knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Pixels that day, I can tell you!
And yet somehow it had 19 printings at Bantam and sold sold over a million copies.
To my mind, Gravity’s Rainbow is *way* more readable than Dhalgren. Rainbow is a difficult book, for sure, but very rewarding. I think I’ve read it three times now. I couldn’t get through Dhalgren. I disagree that Rainbow is merely a work of its time. As I understand it, Pynchon’s work is often considered pioneering.
1
I’ve read one of those books (Catch-22). Looked at some of the others, and decided they weren’t for me before getting out of the first couple of pages.
For them as may be interested: Julie Dillon’s book is currently [fully] funded at $27,850, with 22 days left in the kickstarter.
“And yet somehow it had 19 printings at Bantam and sold sold over a million copies.”
And Pohl (who bought “Dhalgren” for Bantam) got carte blanche at the publisher, due to Dhalgren’s enormous success – at least until Pohl quit.
Per Pohl “And right about then Marc Jaffe, the man who had hired me in the first place, strolled into my office. “I just wanted to tell you, Fred,” he said, “that right now, with Dhalgren, your credibility is very high with us. Is there anything you need?” http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2011/01/
In re: discussion of Dhalgren:
Interestingly enough, Dhalgren is listed as part of the Kindle sale for August at $1.99. I’m one of the million/19 printings group, I read the book and found it hard sledding. I literally only finished it because I started counting the number of times this or that character sucked their teeth. It was almost a drinking game. There was even a mention of Dhalgren in an F&SF game, as a Jeopardy-style answer/question. It wasn’t kind. IIRC, it was, “The speed of light, the end of the universe and page 30 of Dhalgren”. Ans-What are three things mankind will never reach?
Just because something sells well, that doesn’t mean that it’s widely liked or enjoyed by the purchasers.
It definitely is, and he’s been influential across genre boundaries. I’ve heard Gravity’s Rainbow called “the American Ulysses” on the one hand, where it has had a huge, if now diminished, impact on litfic, while on the other hand Bruce Sterling has called it “the best cyberpunk novel ever written,” and Gibson and others also call it a “proto-cyberpunk novel” and list it as a big influence on their writing. I think The Crying of Lot 49 is one of the most-assigned texts in college/university level American literature courses, too.