Wed Reading Meme...
Dec. 16th, 2015 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatWith the move of my workplace and other work related issues, I've been in a bit of a brain-fog lately and as a result, am a bit behind in my television watching. Also after Cloud Atlas, been reading what amounts to fluff. Entertaining fluff, but fluff. Hard to review effectively review fluff. But I do it any way, because it's a means of keeping track of what I've read. The Downside of fluff - is it tends to meld together over time -- to the extent that I'm hard pressed to tell you what I've actually read.
Speaking of reviews - got another positive review on Amazon - this one picked up on how my book, Doing Time on Planet Earth, is about the far-reaching consequences of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and how it affects so many people in a derogatory manner. Not everyone has caught that tid-bit. (My anti-hero protagonist embezzles money from corporations in the midst of merging and laying off employees. She steals money from the corporation and gives a percentage of it to all the employees who lost their pensions. Sees herself as Bugs Bunny or a modern day Robin Hood. And to cover her tracks, she takes on the identity of dead people or rather steals dead people's identities.)
As I told a couple of co-workers - who can identify - I've been the victim of one too many mergers and acquisitions and seen the devastation they've wrought. So I sort of wrote my experiences with businesses, the job market, and corporations into the book -- although fictionalized of course.
If you've been reading my posts since 2002, on fanboards and lj, you already know some of it.
Oh, a word on self-published books. The world has changed or rather publishing has. When my Dad started self-publishing his novels in the 1990s, there was still a stigma attached to it. Now - well, everyone's doing it. Andy Weir self-published The Martian -- which was later made into a movie and won various awards. JA Corey self-published the Expanse series - made into a television series and nominated for Hugo in previous years. Still Alice was self-published. Some of the most innovative and best novels I've read in recent years are self-published.
Wed Reading Meme
1. What I just finished reading?
Cloud Atlas - review is in an earlier post. I had mixed feelings about it. Book club loved it however. I was the only one with mixed feelings. I have yet to find anyone else who felt the same way about it.
X-men: Battle of the Atom -- the problem with the X-men comics is all the bloody cross-overs and sub-comics, which you have to hunt down to follow the frigging story -- often ending up with duplicate comics, because it's easy to get confused. Or issues you don't want. This in a nutshell was why I gave up on the series in 2002.
I enjoyed aspects of this series. The best bits were associated with Cyclops, those were hilarious. The adult Cyclops has not only become an interesting character, he's acquired a dry sardonic wit.
The writers are clearly trying to paint him as a bit of an anti-hero, but they are sucking at it -- he's coming across as more logical, caring, and empathetic than anyone else in the comics. And I do mean anyone else. Everyone else is coming across as terribly self-righteous and self-involved. But it appears the writers want me to view this the opposite way, which is disturbing.
Wolverine has become a self-righteous, hypocritical, asshole, who does some really dumb things. Most of the plot-holes and OCC moments are associated with Wolverine and his team. (I'm not sure why people liked Wolverine and the X-men -- it's laughable and somewhat ridiculous in places.) Also Wolverine's insane hero-worship of Charles Xavier - to the point in which he's made the man into a Saint and Cyclops into a villain for killing him...is also difficult to believe. Particularly considering the issues Wolverine had with Xavier the past few years.
While I'm enjoying them and Cyclops' arc makes sense, Wolverine's doesn't --and is sort of has to in order for my sympathy to be with the character and for me to understand the Schism. But I agree with the "so-called" villains, that the Schism was stupid and Wolverine created more harm than good.
(He goes on and on about kids not being trained to fight and not being in the field and how this isn't what Xavier wanted - when he is basically taking the kids into the field, having them fight, and even comes face to face with Xavier's original teen X-men, 12-16, who have just come off of fighting Magneto in the distant past...and yet, he still rages at Cyclops for having kids in the field? Dude. Look in the frigging mirror. Can you really be that unself-aware?)
My favorite line in X-men - Battle of the Atom is Cyclops to Wolverine:
Maybe I should go back in time, bring your younger self forward, so he can look you in the face and tell you what a complete hypocrite you've become.
or
Do you really want to go there? Compare how many people we've killed? Because your tally is in the hundreds...you out-do me by a landslide.
Wolverine's response? You killed Xavier, the only one who matter.
Oh please. Xavier has died or allegedly died five times now. And he was irrelevant long before he died and had been revealed as a manipulative asshole on numerous occassions.
I keep wondering if the writers are being deliberately ironic. At any rate they've managed to ruine Wolverine. I used to love the character, now I'm rooting for him to get kicked. No wonder they attempted to kill him off.
That's another problem with comics - no one stays dead. If there's a way to bring a character back these writers will find it. Soap operas have a similar problem. It's very hard to care about a character being killed off when you know the stupid writers will eventually bring them back. Sort of takes away the whole permanence of it. Note to writers - death is not meant to be temporary.
Characters the writers have temporarily killed off, some multiple times:
* Nightcrawler
* Colussus
* Magick
* Kitty Pryde
* Charles Xavier
* Magneto
* Cyclops
* Wolverine
* Jean Grey
* Beast
* Emma Frost
* Cable
* Rachel Summers/Grey
* Apocalypse
* Sinister
* Quicksilver
And yes, that's most of the major cast.
Overall not a bad read, if you ignore the plot-holes, out of character moments, and how horribly they've written Wolverine.
2) What I'm reading now>
Falling in Bed with the Duke by Lorraine Heath - not bad. Want to smack the heroine upside the head. Am a bit in love with the male character, who has discalcia, and is a photographer. His parents died in a train crash. Do like the gender subversions. Modern writers do a good job of subverting gender tropes. Minerva the heroine - is good at math, logical, and great at cards. With great business sense. While the hero, Ashe, is an artist, good visually, can't do math to save his life, and horrible at cards. She's bold and states her mind. My difficulty with her is she's too analytical for her own good and can't see past her own nose long enough to realize that the hero is hopelessly in love with her.
It's a romance, it ends well. Which is why I'm reading it.
Uncanny X-men Vol #3 and All-New X-men Vol4... - the original five X-men are now, along with their teacher, Kitty Pryde, setting up shop with Cyclops group. Which is interesting - for multiple reasons. Cynical, world-weary, ruthless Cyclops gets to deal with his younger self, wet-behind the ears, self-righteous, boy-scout Cyclops. He also gets to deal with a teenage version of his first love, Jean Grey. So does his ex-lover, Emma Frost, who is a trained telepath, while Jean isn't.
Much chaos should ensue.
Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - still reading this book. I've been reading it for three years now. In snippets. I refuse to give up.
3) What I'm reading next?
Possibly Uprooted by the author whose name I can never remember but everyone on flist rec'd.
Or something else.
Maybe another Lorraine Heath or one of the multitude of other books I've bought own, and have yet to read. I tend to accumulate books. The Kindle has made it worse. Oh, and now that I've discovered two bookstores near my workplace - I'm in danger of accumulating even more. Old workplace had no bookstores near it...new workplace is practically within shooting distance of the Center for Fiction and Barnes and Nobel.
Speaking of reviews - got another positive review on Amazon - this one picked up on how my book, Doing Time on Planet Earth, is about the far-reaching consequences of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and how it affects so many people in a derogatory manner. Not everyone has caught that tid-bit. (My anti-hero protagonist embezzles money from corporations in the midst of merging and laying off employees. She steals money from the corporation and gives a percentage of it to all the employees who lost their pensions. Sees herself as Bugs Bunny or a modern day Robin Hood. And to cover her tracks, she takes on the identity of dead people or rather steals dead people's identities.)
As I told a couple of co-workers - who can identify - I've been the victim of one too many mergers and acquisitions and seen the devastation they've wrought. So I sort of wrote my experiences with businesses, the job market, and corporations into the book -- although fictionalized of course.
If you've been reading my posts since 2002, on fanboards and lj, you already know some of it.
Oh, a word on self-published books. The world has changed or rather publishing has. When my Dad started self-publishing his novels in the 1990s, there was still a stigma attached to it. Now - well, everyone's doing it. Andy Weir self-published The Martian -- which was later made into a movie and won various awards. JA Corey self-published the Expanse series - made into a television series and nominated for Hugo in previous years. Still Alice was self-published. Some of the most innovative and best novels I've read in recent years are self-published.
Wed Reading Meme
1. What I just finished reading?
Cloud Atlas - review is in an earlier post. I had mixed feelings about it. Book club loved it however. I was the only one with mixed feelings. I have yet to find anyone else who felt the same way about it.
X-men: Battle of the Atom -- the problem with the X-men comics is all the bloody cross-overs and sub-comics, which you have to hunt down to follow the frigging story -- often ending up with duplicate comics, because it's easy to get confused. Or issues you don't want. This in a nutshell was why I gave up on the series in 2002.
I enjoyed aspects of this series. The best bits were associated with Cyclops, those were hilarious. The adult Cyclops has not only become an interesting character, he's acquired a dry sardonic wit.
The writers are clearly trying to paint him as a bit of an anti-hero, but they are sucking at it -- he's coming across as more logical, caring, and empathetic than anyone else in the comics. And I do mean anyone else. Everyone else is coming across as terribly self-righteous and self-involved. But it appears the writers want me to view this the opposite way, which is disturbing.
Wolverine has become a self-righteous, hypocritical, asshole, who does some really dumb things. Most of the plot-holes and OCC moments are associated with Wolverine and his team. (I'm not sure why people liked Wolverine and the X-men -- it's laughable and somewhat ridiculous in places.) Also Wolverine's insane hero-worship of Charles Xavier - to the point in which he's made the man into a Saint and Cyclops into a villain for killing him...is also difficult to believe. Particularly considering the issues Wolverine had with Xavier the past few years.
While I'm enjoying them and Cyclops' arc makes sense, Wolverine's doesn't --and is sort of has to in order for my sympathy to be with the character and for me to understand the Schism. But I agree with the "so-called" villains, that the Schism was stupid and Wolverine created more harm than good.
(He goes on and on about kids not being trained to fight and not being in the field and how this isn't what Xavier wanted - when he is basically taking the kids into the field, having them fight, and even comes face to face with Xavier's original teen X-men, 12-16, who have just come off of fighting Magneto in the distant past...and yet, he still rages at Cyclops for having kids in the field? Dude. Look in the frigging mirror. Can you really be that unself-aware?)
My favorite line in X-men - Battle of the Atom is Cyclops to Wolverine:
Maybe I should go back in time, bring your younger self forward, so he can look you in the face and tell you what a complete hypocrite you've become.
or
Do you really want to go there? Compare how many people we've killed? Because your tally is in the hundreds...you out-do me by a landslide.
Wolverine's response? You killed Xavier, the only one who matter.
Oh please. Xavier has died or allegedly died five times now. And he was irrelevant long before he died and had been revealed as a manipulative asshole on numerous occassions.
I keep wondering if the writers are being deliberately ironic. At any rate they've managed to ruine Wolverine. I used to love the character, now I'm rooting for him to get kicked. No wonder they attempted to kill him off.
That's another problem with comics - no one stays dead. If there's a way to bring a character back these writers will find it. Soap operas have a similar problem. It's very hard to care about a character being killed off when you know the stupid writers will eventually bring them back. Sort of takes away the whole permanence of it. Note to writers - death is not meant to be temporary.
Characters the writers have temporarily killed off, some multiple times:
* Nightcrawler
* Colussus
* Magick
* Kitty Pryde
* Charles Xavier
* Magneto
* Cyclops
* Wolverine
* Jean Grey
* Beast
* Emma Frost
* Cable
* Rachel Summers/Grey
* Apocalypse
* Sinister
* Quicksilver
And yes, that's most of the major cast.
Overall not a bad read, if you ignore the plot-holes, out of character moments, and how horribly they've written Wolverine.
2) What I'm reading now>
Falling in Bed with the Duke by Lorraine Heath - not bad. Want to smack the heroine upside the head. Am a bit in love with the male character, who has discalcia, and is a photographer. His parents died in a train crash. Do like the gender subversions. Modern writers do a good job of subverting gender tropes. Minerva the heroine - is good at math, logical, and great at cards. With great business sense. While the hero, Ashe, is an artist, good visually, can't do math to save his life, and horrible at cards. She's bold and states her mind. My difficulty with her is she's too analytical for her own good and can't see past her own nose long enough to realize that the hero is hopelessly in love with her.
It's a romance, it ends well. Which is why I'm reading it.
Uncanny X-men Vol #3 and All-New X-men Vol4... - the original five X-men are now, along with their teacher, Kitty Pryde, setting up shop with Cyclops group. Which is interesting - for multiple reasons. Cynical, world-weary, ruthless Cyclops gets to deal with his younger self, wet-behind the ears, self-righteous, boy-scout Cyclops. He also gets to deal with a teenage version of his first love, Jean Grey. So does his ex-lover, Emma Frost, who is a trained telepath, while Jean isn't.
Much chaos should ensue.
Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - still reading this book. I've been reading it for three years now. In snippets. I refuse to give up.
3) What I'm reading next?
Possibly Uprooted by the author whose name I can never remember but everyone on flist rec'd.
Or something else.
Maybe another Lorraine Heath or one of the multitude of other books I've bought own, and have yet to read. I tend to accumulate books. The Kindle has made it worse. Oh, and now that I've discovered two bookstores near my workplace - I'm in danger of accumulating even more. Old workplace had no bookstores near it...new workplace is practically within shooting distance of the Center for Fiction and Barnes and Nobel.
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Date: 2015-12-17 02:23 am (UTC)