Book Nerd’s Comments (group member since Dec 20, 2018)

Book Nerd’s comments from the Never too Late to Read Classics group.

Good story. The creatures reminded me of Lovecraft's deep ones. Also I wonder if James Cameron has read this.
There was a lot of explanation of the mechanism that made the sphere sink but I couldn't really picture it. Somehow cables made it sink and then it reeled them in?

Beagle, Peter S. The Last Unicorn
Hodgson, William Hope The Night Land
Stoker, Bram Dracula
Tolkien, JRR The Hobbit
Tolkien, JRR The Fellowship of the Ring
Tolkien, JRR The Two Towers
Tolkien, JRR The Return of the King
Tolkien, JRR The Silmarillion
Twain, Mark A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Wow, my list is too short lol.
I hope to read the Conan Chronicles in the next year or two. That's about it for classic fantasy. Fantasy is such a big genre right now.

Asimov, Isaac Foundation #1(All of Asimov's robots-empire-foundations stuff)
Asimov, Isaac Foundation and Empire #2
Asimov, Isaac Second Foundation #3
Asimov, Isaac I, Robot
Asimov, Isaac The Caves of Steel
Bradbury, Ray Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray The Martian Chronicles
Capek, Karel R.U.R.
Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey(so much bettrer than the movie!!!)
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle
Heinlein, Robert A. Red Planet
Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers
Heinlein, Robert A. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Herbert, Frank Dune
Herbert, Frank Dune Messiah
Herbert, Frank Destination Void
Herbert, Frank Under Pressure
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
Jackson, Shirley The Lottery
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness
Lovecraft, HP At the Mountains of Madness
Lovecraft, HP The Call of Cthulhu
Lovecraft, HP Herbert West—Reanimator
Lovecraft, HP The Colour out of Space
Lovecraft, HP The Doom That Came to Sarnath
Lovecraft, HP The Dunwich Horror
Lovecraft, HP The Horror at Red Hook
Lovecraft, HP The Rats in the Walls
Matheson, Richard I Am Legend
Orwell, George 1984
Orwell, George Animal Farm (this is sci-fi?)
Shelley, Mary Frankenstein
Stapledon, Olaf Star Maker
Stoker, Bram Dracula(also this is sci-fi?)
Verne, Jules Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Verne, Jules Journey to the Center of the Earth
Wells, HG The Time Machine
Wells, HG The War of the Worlds

I've been reading Heinlein. Starship Troopers was okay but I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I want to read Stranger in a Strange Land soon.
Will read Jules Verne - Round the Moon and a few others with the group read.

So many great lines in this book I've been highlighting. Here's one amusing one:

Main character: "Got an empty memory bank?"
Self-aware computer: "Yes, Man. Ten-to-the-eight-bits-capacity."

Lol, can store a large image file.

Rafael wrote: "There's food at the bottom of the ocean. There's no food inside melted rocks. And at these vents the most higher temperature is 407 ºC or 765 °F, This temperature is reached at the depth 13 km."
Okay, I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass so I'll stop arguing after this but I'm saying there could be life deep in the crust, not 13 km down. An ecosystem would have to start with microorganisms and chemosynthesis same as the ocean vents and larger life would have to gradually filter down and adapt to survive there just like I assumed happened at the vents.

If there WAS life down in the mantle it would have to be silicon based and that's just wild theorizing but fun to imagine.

Amber wrote: "O. Can't live without? Chocolate & Cheese (not together)"
Everything goes with chocolate!

less likely than the thermal vent ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean?

Rafael wrote: "Verne was a great author, but this one is not scientific stories at all that he had created. This book takes the idea from the hollow Earth, the idea that the earth has no core. The mere existence ..."
Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought they were just in really deep and big caves. The earths crust is up to five miles thick so it's possible that there are some relatively big empty spaces down there. Of course pressure is a major problem for surface life but there could be exotic life down there.

I'm really enjoying this one. It'll come in handy when I finally get around to overthrowing the government.

Maybe it's just because I grew up with the movie but I love the first half, which is just like the movie, I can take or leave the second half.

One thing, my sense of scale was all messed up. I got the impression that the Rock Biter was huge and the Nighthob and Snail Rider were more or less human sized. In the book the snail rider is clearly tiny.

This is a great story but they don't actually get anywhere near the center of the earth.

Lesle wrote: "The acronym TANSTAAFL (for "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch") appears in Robert Heinlein's 1966 sci-fi novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, as the slogan of a revolt by lunar colonists against their earthly overlords."

That ain't not a double negative. Implies there IS a free lunch.

More than half way through. Really enjoying it. I lost a day of reading trying to draw cell diagrams. :p

It seems to me they're putting a whole lot of trust in Mike. Mannie was saying it's stupid to have one computer controlling so much but their whole revolution depends on him. He's young and naive really. He could turn on them or be tricked.

.


COMEDIES
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure
✔Merchant of Venice
✔Merry Wives of Windsor
✔Midsummer Night's Dream
✔Much Ado about Nothing
Taming of the Shrew
✔Tempest
✔Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Winter's Tale

HISTORIES
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VIII
King John
Richard II
Richard III

TRAGEDIES
✔✅Antony and Cleopatra
✔✅Coriolanus
✔Cymbeline
✔Hamlet
✔Julius Caesar
✔King Lear
✔Macbeth
✔Othello
✔Pericles
✔Romeo and Juliet
✔Timon of Athens
✔Titus Andronicus
✔Troilus and Cressida


✔ read
✅ Watched

Heather wrote: "As if I needed an excuse to read this for the millionth time! Do you guys know which translation(s) emphasize(s) the possible bisexual subtext the most?"
Hm, I guess there was bisexual subtext. I read this version: Gilgamesh: A New English Version. That didn't emphasize it much.

I mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_...
The negative mass part.

It is kind of unrealistic. I guess the substance could be exotic matter.

Me too but it's Poe.

This was the first Poe story I read a long time ago. Don't remember how old I was but it was before high school.

Canavan wrote: "Lesle said (in part):


Was the person already insane?


Yes, I believe this is exactly what Poe wants us to think."
I don't know. I think he was asking if obsessing on something like that eye could really drive someone insane.

Oh cool, I've been pretty busy and just noticed this. Yeah, I love this book. I really identify with the alienated narrator.

The incident with the officer is just one part of the story. It's filled with the inner thoughts and ranting and raving of someone who "thinks too much". I think most people could stand to think a lot more but whatever.

Here are some of my favorite quotes(in English):

I tell you solemnly I have tried many times to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real through-going illness.

I will explain, the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you could never become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left to you to change into something different, you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps to reality there was nothing for you to change into.

but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position

Merciful Heavens! What do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

And what if it so happens that a man’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist to his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not advantageous?

that is that man everywhere and at all time, who ever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea).

I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action.

Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest reality. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud - there was nothing between.

which is better-cheap happiness or exalted suffering?

Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the sphere of our activity, relax the control and we…yes, I assure you…we should be begging to be under control again.